When Rudolf Arnheim heard what his father had done, he kicked the leg of a table that his mother had brought to Malo as part of her dowry. It had been in her family for two hundred years, and had once stood in the palace of King Radomir IV of Sylvania. The leg broke and the table top fell, scattering bits of inlaid wood and ivory over the stone floor.

“Damn!” he said. And then, “Damn him!” as though trying to assign blame elsewhere, although he knew well enough what his mother would say, both about her table and about his father’s decision.

“What are you going to do?” asked Karl, when the three of them were sitting in leather armchairs in the Café Kroner.

Rudolf, who was almost but not quite drunk, said, “I’ll refuse to see her.”

“You’ll refuse to obey your father’s orders?” said Gustav.

They had been at the university together. Gustav Malev had come to the city from the forests near Gretz. His father’s father had been a farmer who, by hoarding his wealth, had purchased enough land to marry the daughter of a local brewer and send his son to the university. The brewing operation had flourished; glasses of dark, bitter Malev beer were drunk from the Caucasus to the Adriatic. Gustav, two generations removed from tilling the soil, still looked like the farmer his grandfather had been. He was large and slow, with red hair that stood up on his head like a boar-bristle brush. In contrast, Karl Reiner was small, thin, with black hair that hung down to his shoulders in the latest Aesthetic fashion. He knew the best places to drink absinthe in Karelstad. His father was a government official, like his father and his father’s father before him. Most likely, Karl would be a government official as well.

Rudolf looked at his friends affectionately. How he liked Karl and Gustav. Of course, he would not want to be either of them. I may not have Karl’s brains, he thought, but I would not be such a weasely-looking fellow for all the prizes and honors of the university, none of which, incidentally, had come to Rudolf. And while Gustav is as rich as Croesus, and a very good sort of fellow to boot, what was his grandfather? And he remembered with pride that his grandfather had been a Baron, as his father was a Baron. His father, the Baron. He could not understand his father’s preposterous–preposterous–he could not remember the word. Yes, Gustav and Karl were his best friends.

He stood up and stumbled, almost falling on Karl. “Really, you know, I think I’m going to throw up.”

Karl paid the bill, while Gustav held him under the arms as they wound their way around the small tables to the front entrance.

“The Pearl,” said Karl later, when they were sitting in their rooms. They shared an apartment near the university, on Ordony Street. “I wonder what she’s like, after all these years. No one has seen her since before the war. She must be forty, at least.”

Rudolf put his head in his hands. He had thrown up twice on his way home, and his head ached.

“Surely your father won’t expect you to–take her as a mistress,” said Gustav, with the delicacy of a country boy. He still blushed when the women on the street corners called and whistled at him.

“I don’t know what he expects,” said Rudolf, although his father had made it relatively clear.

“As far as I can tell, Rudi, your entire university education has been a waste of money,” his father had said. Rudolf hated to be called Rudi. His father was sitting behind a large mahogany desk and he was standing in front of it, which put him, he felt, in a particularly disadvantageous position. “You have shown absolutely no intellectual aptitude, and no preference for any profession other than that of drunkard. You have made no valuable connections. And now I hear that you have formed a liaison with a young woman who works in a hat shop. You will argue that you are only acting like the men with whom you associate,” although Rudolf had been about to do nothing of the sort. “Well, they can afford to waste their time drinking and forming inappropriate alliances. Karl Reiner has already been promised a position at the Ministry of Justice, and Gustav Malev will return home to work in his family’s business. But we are not rich, although our family is as old as Sylvania, and on your mother’s side descended from King Radomir IV himself.” Rudolf thought of all the things he would rather do than listen once again to the history of his family, including being branded with a hot iron and drowned in a horse pond. “I have paid for what has proven to be a very expensive university education, in part because of the dissolute life you have led with your friends. You sicken me, you and your generation. You don’t understand the sacrifices we made. When I was in the trenches, all I could think of was Malo, how I was fighting for her and for Sylvania. However, now that you have completed your studies, I expect you to take your place in society. Your future, and the future of Malo, depends on the position you obtain, and on whom you marry. You will immediately give up any relationship you have with this young woman.” And then his father had told him about The Pearl.

“I will pay for her apartment and expenses. It will be a heavy burden on my purse, but you must be taken in hand. You must be made to attend to your responsibilities. I would do it myself, but I cannot leave Malo until I know how the wheat is performing. If you paid any attention, you would know how precarious a position we are in, how important it is that you begin to consider more than yourself. She will introduce you to the men you need to know to advance your career, and keep you from forming any unfortunate ties.”

The Pearl. She had been one of what a Sylvanian writer of the previous generation had referred to as the grandes coquettes, mistresses of great men who had moved through society almost as easily as respectable women because of their beauty and wit. She had been called The Pearl because she had shone so brightly, first in the theater and then in the social world of Karelstad, when Rudolf was still learning to toddle on his nurse’s strings. She had been famous for her luminescent beauty, adored by the leading noblemen and government officials of her day and tolerated by their wives. Until, one day, she had disappeared.

Rudolf’s relationship with Kati, who did indeed work in a hat shop, was less serious than his father suspected. She had allowed him to go so far and no further, in the hope that someday she would be offered a more legitimate role and become a Baroness. He would have been eager, if somewhat apprehensive, at the thought of having an official, paid mistress. But not one who must be at least twice his age, and certainly not one chosen by his father.

“How in the world did your father find her?” asked Gustav, but Rudolf had no idea.

They had been walking for at least an hour, farther and farther away from what Rudolf called civilization, meaning Dobromir, the town closest to Malo, the estate that had been in his father’s family for generations. When the roads had ended, they had walked on paths marked by cartwheels, and finally over fields where there were no paths. Now they stopped at the edge of a wood. Rudolf looked down with distaste at the mud on his boots.

“There,” said his father.

Rudolf looked up and saw a cottage built of stone, like the cottages of farm laborers but without their neat orderliness or the geraniums that always seemed to grow in pots on their windowsills. This cottage seemed almost deserted, with moss growing on the stones and over the thatched roof. It was surrounded by what was probably supposed to be a garden, but was overrun by weeds, and although it was late summer, the apples on the ancient apple trees by the fence were small and hard. In the garden, a woman was working with a spade. As they approached, she stood up and looked at them. She had a straw hat on her head.

“Wait here,” said his father. He opened a gate that was leaning on its hinges and walked into the garden. When he reached the woman, he bowed. Rudolf was astonished. Who, in this godforsaken place, would his father bow to?

Rudolf heard them speaking in low voices. To pass the time, he tried to wipe the mud off his boots on the grass.

His father and the woman both turned and looked at him. Then, his father walked back to where Rudolf stood waiting. “Come,” he said, “and keep your mouth shut. I don’t want her to think that my son is a fool.”

She looked thin, almost malnourished, in a dress that was too large for her and had faded from too many washings. When she lifted her head to look at him and Rudolf could see under the brim of her hat, he saw that her skin was freckled by the sun, with lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth. Her eyes were a strange, light green, almost grey, and they stared at him until he felt compelled to look down. Despite the sunlight in the clearing, he shivered.

“This is your son,” she said. “He looks like you, twenty years ago.”

“It would, as I have said, be a great favor to me, and I would of course make certain that you had only the finest…”

“I have no wish to return to Karelstad, Morek. If I do as you ask, it will not be because I want to live in a fine apartment or wear costly jewels. It will be because once, long ago, when I needed kindness, you were kind. Kinder than you knew.”

“And the boy is acceptable?”

“He could be lame and a hunchback, and it would make no difference.”

Rudolf felt his face grow hot. He opened his mouth.

“Excellent,” said his father. “The keys to the apartment will be waiting for you. Send for him when you’re ready.”

The woman nodded, then turned back to her weeding.

Rudolf trudged over the fields and along the country roads behind his father, wondering what had just happened.

The summons came two weeks later. Meet me at 2:00 p.m. at Agneta’s, said the note. It was written on thick paper, soft, heavy, the color of cream, scented with something not even Karl, who considered himself a connoisseur of women’s perfumes, could identify. “It’s not jasmine,” he said. “Sort of like jasmine mixed with lily, but with something else…”

“What do you think she wants?” asked Gustav.

“She’s his mistress,” said Karl. “What do you think she wants?”

“I don’t know,” said Rudolf. What would he say to her? He imagined her in a straw hat and a faded dress in the middle of Agneta’s, with its small tables at which students, artists, and women in the latest fashions from Paris sipped cups of Turkish coffee or ate Hungarian pastries. Suddenly, he felt sorry for her. Karelstad had changed so much since she had last seen it. It had been impoverished but not damaged during the war, and since the divisions of Trianon, it had become one of the most fashionable capitals in Europe. She would look, would be, so out of place. He would be kind to her, would not mind his own embarrassment. Perhaps they could come to some sort of agreement. She could live in her apartment and do, well, whatever she wanted, and he would be free of any obligations to her.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked rather fine, if he did say so himself. He practiced an expression of sympathy and solicitousness.

By the time he was sitting at one of the small tables, he was feeling less sympathetic. How like his father, to embarrass him in front of all these people. He did not know most of them, of course, but sitting next to the door–surely that was General Schrader, whom he had seen once in a parade commemorating Sylvanian liberation from the Turks, and he was almost certain that the woman with the ridiculously long feathers in her hat was the wife of someone important. Hadn’t he seen her sitting on the platform at his graduation?

General Schrader had risen. There was a woman joining him, a woman so striking that Rudolf could not help staring at her. She was wearing a green dress, a dress of almost poisonous green. A green cowl of the same material framed her face, a pale face with a bright red mouth, so vivid that Rudolf thought, I’ve never seen anything so alive.

But she did not stop at the general’s table. Instead, she walked across the room in his direction. At every second or third table she stopped. Men rose and bowed, women either turned their heads, refusing to look at her, or kissed her on both cheeks. In her wake, she left whispers, until the café sounded like a forest of falling leaves.

“So nice to see you again, Countess,” Rudolf heard her say, and the woman with the feathered hat responded, “Good God! Can it really be you, come back from the dead to steal our husbands? Where did I leave mine? Oh my, I’m going to have a heart attack any minute. My dear, where have you been?”

A long, lean man sitting in a corner rose, kissed her hands, and said, “You’ll sit for me again, won’t you?”

“That’s Friedrich, the painter,” said Karl. “I’ve never seen him talk to anyone since I started coming here four years ago. I’ll bet you twenty kroners that she’s a film actress from Germany.”

“I don’t think so,” said Gustav. “I think–”

And then she was at their table.

“You must be Rudolf’s friends,” she said. “It was so nice to meet you. Must you be leaving so soon?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Gustav, hastily rising. “Come on, Karl. I’m sure Rudolf wants some privacy.”

And then he was alone with her, or as alone as one can be in Agneta’s, with a roomful of people trying, surreptitious, to see with whom she was speaking.

“Hello, Rudolf,” she said. “Thank you for being prompt. Could you order me some coffee? And light me a cigarette. I haven’t had a cigarette in–it must be twenty years now. I’ve made a list of the people you’ll need to meet. You can tell me which ones you’ve met already.” She waited, looking at him from beneath long black lashes. Her eyes were still green, but somehow they had acquired depth, like a forest pool. “My coffee?”

“Yes, of course,” said Rudolf. He gestured for the waiter and suddenly realized that his palms were damp.

The party had lasted long past midnight. The Crown Prince himself had been there. The guest list had also included the Prime Minister; General Schrader; the countess of the feathered hat, this time in a tiara; the painter Friedrich; the French ambassador; Anita Dak, the principal dancer from the Ballet Russes, which was staging Copélia in Karelstad; a professor of mathematics in a shabby coat, invited because he had just been inducted into the National Academy; young men in the government who talked, between dances, about the situation in Germany; young men in finance who talked about whether the kroner was going up or down, seeming not to care which as long as they were buying or selling at the right times; mothers dragging girls who danced with the young men, awkwardly aware of their newly upswept hair and bare shoulders, then went back to giggling in corners of the ballroom. At first Rudolf had felt out of place, intimidated although as the future Baron Arnheim he certainly had a right to be there, should probably have been there all along rather than smoking in cafés with Karl and Gustav. But it did not matter. He was escorting The Pearl.

She walked beside him down the darkened street, her white furs clasped around her. She had not wanted to take a cab. “It’s not far,” she had said. “I want to see the night, and the moon.” It shone above the housetops, swimming among the clouds.

“Here it is,” she said. It had been three weeks since he had met her at Agneta’s, and he had never yet seen where she lived, the apartment that his father was paying for. He had wanted to, but had not, somehow, wanted to ask. He still did not know, exactly, how to talk to her.

“Could I–could I come up?” he asked.

For a moment, she did not answer. Then, “All right,” she said.

Her apartment was larger than the one he shared with Karl and Gustav, and luxuriously furnished. He recognized a table, a sofa, even some paintings from Malo, and suddenly realized that his mother must have sent them. His father might have paid for an apartment, but he could never have furnished one.

She turned on a lamp, but the corners of the room remained in shadow. She shone in the darkness like a pale moon.

“You made me dance with every girl at the party, but you wouldn’t dance with me,” he said.

“That wasn’t the point,” she said. “How did you like the French ambassador’s daughter? Charlotte De Grasse–she’s nineteen, charming, and an heiress.”

“I want to dance with you,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment. He could not tell what she was thinking. Then she went to the gramophone and put on a record: a waltz.

Nervously, he took her in his arms. She was wearing something grey, like cobwebs, and her eyes had become grey as well. A scent enveloped him, the perfume that Karl had been unable to place.

“You’re exquisite,” he said, then realized how stupid that had sounded.

“Don’t fall for me,” she said. And then, almost as though he did not know what he was doing, he started to dance with her in his arms, around and around and around.

She sat on the edge of the bed. In the morning light coming through the windows, her robe was the color of milk. She had washed her face. Once again she looked like the woman that Rudolf had seen near Malo: thin, but now paler and more tired, with blue shadows under her eyes. Older than she had looked last night. It was just after dawn; the birds in the park had been singing for an hour.

“This is who I am, Rudolf,” she said. “Beneath the evening gowns and cosmetics. Do you understand?”

He pulled her to him by the lapel of her robe, then slipped it off her shoulder. He kissed her skin there, then on her collarbone and her neck. The scent still clung around her, as though it were not a perfume but an exhalation of her flesh. “I don’t care,” he said.

“No,” she said, sounding sad. “I didn’t think you would.”

Last night, he had touched her carefully, hungrily. At times he had thought, She is delicate, I must be very gentle. At times he had thought, I would like to devour her. Her fingers had traveled over him, and he had thought they were like feathers, so soft. At times he had shuddered, thinking, They are like spiders. She is the one who will devour me. He had looked down into her eyes and wondered if he would drown, and wanted to drown, and had at times felt, with terror and ecstasy, as though he were drowning and could no longer breathe. Finally, when he lay spent and she kissed him on the mouth, he had thought, It is like being kissed by a flower.

He pulled her down beside him and kissed her, insistently.

“Rudolf,” she said. “The French ambassador’s daughter–”

“Can go to hell,” he said. And a part of him noticed, gratified, that this time she touched him as hungrily as he had touched her. Afterward, he lay with his head just beneath her breasts, moving as she breathed, his fingers stroking the skin of her stomach.

“I can’t stay,” she said. “Soon, I’ll have to return to Dobromir. Once you have a position and are engaged, you won’t need me anymore, and then I’ll go.”

He raised himself up on his elbow. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would you want to go back there, to that hovel? And why should I marry anyone? I want to be with you.”

“I told you not to fall for me.” She sighed. “The first time I came to Karelstad, all I wanted was to dress in silk, wear high heels, smoke cigarettes. Motorcars! Champagne! The lights of the city at night, so much more exciting than the moon and stars. The theater, playing a part. It allowed me to be something other than myself. And then the men bringing me flowers, white fox furs, diamonds to wear around my neck, like drops of water turned to stone. Many, many men, Rudolf.”

Frowning, he turned his head. “I don’t want to hear about them.”

She stroked his hair. “But I became sick. Very, very sick. I had to go back, live among the trees, drink water from the stream. If I stay here much longer, I’ll become sick again.”

“How can you know that?” he said.

He turned to look at her and saw a tear slide from the corner of her eye. He pulled himself up until he lay beside her and kissed it away. “All right then, I’ll come to Malo. I’ll live in that hovel of yours, or if you don’t want me to, I’ll visit every day. At least we can see each other.”

She smiled, although her eyes still had the brightness of unshed tears. “Now you’re being ridiculous. Don’t you realize what Malo is? It’s been there, the forest and the fields, for a thousand years. The Barons of Malo have cared for that land, and you must care for it, as your son must care for it after you. If I thought you would abandon Malo, I would leave today, knowing that my time here in Karelstad, with you, had served no purpose. Tell me now, Rudolf. Will you abandon Malo?”

Her smile frightened him. She seemed, suddenly, kind and sad and implacable. “If I don’t, how long do we have?”

“I promised your father that I would stay until your wedding day. But you must not delay it, you must not put off taking the position I’ve found for you. You must not try for more than I can give.”

“Damn my father,” he said. “All right, then. I’ll do as I’m told, like a good boy. And if I’m good, what do I get, now? Today?”

She wrapped her arms around him, and suddenly he felt a constriction in his chest, a sudden stopping of the heart he had felt only when seeing a serpent in his path or listening to Brahms. He could not breathe. He wondered why anyone had thought breathing was important.

“You know,” said Karl, “I would probably kill you if it would make her look at me.”

They were sitting in the park. Karl and Rudolf were smoking cigarettes. Gustav was smoking a pipe.

“How you can stand that foul stench…” said Rudolf.

“It’s no worse than Karl’s French cigarettes,” said Gustav. “Good Turkish tobacco, that’s what this is.”

Rudolf knocked ash off the tip of his cigarette. “Well, it smells like you’re smoking manure.”

“He doesn’t want to stink for The Pearl,” said Karl. “Rudolf, I hope you enjoyed my announcement of your probable demise.”

“If she would look at you, but she won’t,” said Rudolf. He had spent the night with her. He spent every night with her now, knowing and yet refusing to believe that his time with her was coming to an end. Several months ago, he had shared with Karl and Gustav every detail of his frustratingly slow and not at all certain conquest of Kati. But he had told them nothing about the nights he had spent with The Pearl. Karl had hinted several times that he would like to know more. Gustav had stayed silent.

“Why is that, do you think?” asked Karl. “While your face is pleasant enough, you’re not exactly the Crown Prince, and my uncle is a Minister. Hell, I may even be a minister myself someday.”

“Because she’s a Fair Lady,” said Gustav.

“A what?” asked Karl.

“My grandmother told me about them, once when I had the measles and had to stay home from school. You really don’t know about the Fair Ladies?”

Karl blew cigarette smoke through his nose in a contemptuous sort of way. “Why should I?”

“Because they’re dangerous,” said Gustav. “They live in the forest, inside trees or at the bottom of pools, and when they see a woodsman or a hunter, maybe, they beckon to him, and he goes to dance with them. He dances with the Fair Ladies until he’s skin and bone, or maybe a hundred years have passed and all his friends and relatives are dead, or he promises to give the Fair Ladies anything they want, even the heart out of his chest or his first male child. I tell you, Fair Ladies are dangerous.”

“And imaginary,” said Karl.

“Ask my grandmother. One of her nephews was taken away by a Fair Lady. She had him for three days, and when she returned him, there were things missing from his house. All of his mother’s clothes, some jewelry that had been sitting on her dresser, phonograph records. He said that had been the price of his return–he had promised them to the Fair Lady.”

“Sounds like a thief, not a fairy,” said Karl.

“Fairies are imaginary. Fair Ladies are real. How else do you explain the fact that when she comes into the room, you actually, unbelievably, shut up?” Gustav put his pipe to his mouth, inhaled, and blew out a smoke ring. “I think she’s getting ready to steal our Rudi away. What do you think she’ll want, Rudi? The heart out of your chest?”

“Well, Rudi, what do you think? Is she a Fair Lady?” asked Karl. “You haven’t said anything for a while.”

“She’s found me a job,” said Rudolf. “I’m going to be secretary to the Prime Minister.”

“Hell!” said Karl. And then, “Bloody hell!”

“And I’m supposed to marry someone named Charlotte. She’s the French ambassador’s daughter. As soon as I’m married, she says, she’s going to go back to Malo.” He threw his cigarette on the path and ground it out, savagely, with his boot heel.

He wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t going to marry Charlotte.

He had to tell her. Go to her and say, “Come away with me. If you don’t want to stay in Karelstad, we’ll go to Berlin or Vienna. I’ll work to support us, and if you do get sick–why should you get sick when you’re with me? But if you do–I’ll find the best doctors to treat you. At Vienna they have the best medical school in Europe. Don’t you see that I can’t live without you?”

What had Gustav said? That Fair Ladies were dangerous. Well, she had taken the heart out of his chest, all right.

“Be happy, Rudolf,” she had said to him. And, “Tomorrow is your wedding day. I will not see you again, after tonight.” He had made love to her fiercely, angrily. And when he stood for the last time in the hallway, she had cupped his cheek with her hand, kissed him as tenderly as a mother kisses a child, and said, “Goodbye.” Then, she had closed the door.

But here he was, standing in the street across from her apartment building. He would cross the street, go up the stairs to her apartment, knock on her door, bang on it if she refused to open, and tell her that he wasn’t going to go through with it.

“What are you doing here, young Arnheim?” He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to see the painter Friedrich standing beside him. “I passed Szent Benedek’s on my way here and saw the wedding guests going in. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you? If you run, you can be there in ten minutes. So go already.” He waved his hand, as though shooing a fly.

“I can’t,” said Rudolf. “I have to see her, talk to her.”

“To say what, exactly? That you’re in love with her, that you want to spend the rest of your life with her? Don’t you think she’s heard it all before?”

“I don’t care. This is different. She loves me too, I know she does.”

The painter put his hands in his pockets. He looked down at the pavement, then spoke slowly. “It’s possible. She’s capable of love, although you wouldn’t know it from the stories people tell, sitting around their fires in the winter, in places like Lilafurod and Gretz. I’m going to tell you a story of my own. It will take five minutes, which will give you ten minutes to get there, just in time for the wedding.

“Once upon a time, there were three young men as stupid, if that is possible, as you and your friends. Their names were Péter Andrassyi, Morek Arnheim, and Herman Schrader. Andrassyi was a Count, and he was rich enough to buy himself a mistress, the fabulous Pearl of great price, who had just finished a successful run as Juliet at the National Theater. The famously irascible theater critic Mor Benjamin wrote that no other actress could die as convincingly as she could. She had been sitting for me–I had painted the posters for the play, and I asked her to sit for another project of mine, a small painting of a sylph standing naked by a stream, reflected in the water. Twice a week she would come to my studio, and I would paint her–naked, as I said. Have you ever seen a case of tuberculosis? No? Well, that’s what it was like. She just started wasting away. I asked her what was wrong, what she was eating. She said she was well enough, that she didn’t want to talk about it. But when she started coughing up blood, or whatever she has in those veins of hers, she told me. Her kind–they don’t belong here, and if they stay too long, they sicken and then die. I went to Andrassyi’s apartment. I told him about her condition, about what I had seen and what he must have noticed himself. Do you know what he said to me? That I shouldn’t stick my nose into what was not my business, that I had always been jealous of him and simply wanted her for my own. He would not let her go, and as long as he wanted her, as long as he told her that he could not live without her, she would not leave Karelstad. I argued with her! How I argued. But she said, “He loves me. You know what I am, Friedrich. My nature binds me to him, more strongly than any of your legal ties. It isn’t in the stories, is it, that we can be so caught?”

“I thought Gustav was joking,” said Rudolf. “Do you mean that she’s really–”

“Quiet, pup,” said Friedrich. “I only have three more minutes to finish my story. So, I challenged him to a duel. It was stupid–he was an excellent shot and I was a poor one, but I was young and in love with her myself, although in a different way than he was. Artists aren’t quite human either, you know. They also love differently. Schrader was his second. Arnheim, your father, was mine. I had no friend of my own to second me, and I knew that your father was an honorable, if intolerably boring, man. We met in the park at dawn, when there would be no observers. Andrassyi should have shot me–I should have died that day, but the luck that rewards all fools was with me, and he missed. I, who had never before hit a target, shot him dead. I was brought before a judge, but what could he do? There were two witnesses to swear that we had agreed on the place, the time, the weapons–Andrassyi had even shot first.

“When I told her, she screamed at me and beat me with her fists. Then, she wept for a long time. And then she went back to Malo. I asked your father to take her–there was no train back then, they went in a carriage and the journey took two days. She wrote to me, once. The letter said only, Thank you. I am better now. And there I thought she would stay, until your father decided that his ambitions for you were more important than her life. Why she would agree to come back for a pup like you–”

“Not for me,” said Rudolf. “For Malo. She cares about Malo–” He felt as though he had been hit, by something he could neither understand nor name. The street seemed to be reeling around him.

“Why do you think I’m here?” asked Friedrich. “To take her back. I don’t know if she feels about you as she felt about Andrassyi, but I’m fairly certain that if you walk into that apartment, if you tell her that you want her, she will not leave. She values her life, and knows that staying will kill her. But that’s what it means, to be what she is–she would stay for you and die.”

“I–I love her. I would never hurt her.”

“Then let her go. Do you know what love is, young Arnheim? Ordinary, human love. It’s when you see another person–see her as she is, not as you would like her to be. Have you seen her?”

Her pallor, these last few days. The dark circles under her eyes. The sharpness of her ribcage under his hands. Rudolf looked up at her window. What was she doing now? Packing, no doubt. She had accomplished what she came for. He thought, I hope she weeps for me, a little.

Then, he turned in the direction of Szent Benedek’s and began to run.

Gustav caught him just as he was about to step through the door to the courtyard.

“Where are you going, so early?”

“Hunting,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. He wore his flannel hunting coat and carried a rifle.

“I think I’ll go with you,” said Gustav.

“You’ll ruin your shoes.”

“They’re more appropriate than boots, for a funeral.”

The grass was still wet from the night’s rains. They walked over the lawn, away from the house that had stood there for fifteen generations, looking, with its battlements and turrets, like a miniature medieval fortress. They passed the privet maze and rose garden, then the herb garden where bees were already at work among the lavender, and followed the road that led to the old chapel.

“Once,” said Gustav, “this forest used to stretch across Sylvania. That’s why the Romans called it Sylvania–The Forest. There was plenty of room, then.”

“For what?” asked Rudolf.

“For whatever you’re hunting.”

They walked in silence. The sky was growing brighter, and the birds in the trees were filling the air with a cacophony of song.

“Mary, mother of God!” said Gustav suddenly. He surveyed one of his shoes, which was covered with mud. He had stepped into a puddle.

“I told you,” said Rudolf.

“You know what that reminds me of?” asked Gustav. “Karl. He always insisted on wearing his city clothes in the country. You should have seen him when he visited me last year, at Gretz! But I knew that if I stopped to change, you would leave without me. Have you talked to him lately?”

“Karl? We don’t talk anymore. He believes in the Reich. He thinks it will unite all of Europe. There will be no more war, he says, when Europe is united. He says we must all be international–under a German flag, of course. I don’t believe in peace at that price.”

“Well, perhaps he is a realist and we are the romantics, clinging to our old ways, our country houses and the lands our parents have farmed for generations. Perhaps in his new world order there will be no place for us.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Rudolf. “Any German who comes to Malo will get a bullet through the head, until I run out of bullets. And then they can shoot me. There are worse things than dying as a Sylvanian. My father said that to me before he died. He could barely speak after the stroke–but he was right.”

“What about Lotta and the baby?”

“They leave for France next week. My mother will take them. If there’s going to be a war, I want them out of it.”

They stopped. They had come to the chapel. It had been built of the same grey stone as the house, but was now covered with ivy that was starting to obscure even some of the windows, with their pictures of saints and martyrs. It was surrounded by a graveyard.

“We used to come here on Sunday mornings,” said Rudolf. “The family and all the laborers on the estate, worshiping together. Karl would call it positively feudal. But now everyone goes to the church in Dobromir. No one comes here anymore.”

Nevertheless, among the gravestones stood a priest, beside a fresh grave, reading the burial rites. Around him stood the mourners, their heads bowed.

“So she died,” said Gustav.

“She died,” said Rudolf. “I would have taken her to a doctor, but she sent me away. And when I heard that she was sick, here at Malo–I wrote to her twice, but she never answered. I could not go to her without her permission–she would not have wanted that.”

“What could a doctor have done?” asked Gustav. “Given her medicine? Who knows what it would have done–to her. Or cut her open, and found–what? Would she have had a heart, like a woman? Or would she have had–what a tree has?”

“He could have done something,” said Rudolf.

“I doubt it. How do you save a fairytale?”

“And so we commit her body to the ground, as ashes return to ashes and dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her, the Lord give her peace. Amen,” said the priest. The funeral was over.

The mourners lifted their heads and looked at the two men. Later, when Gustav described it to his wife, sitting by their fire at home in Gretz, he shivered. “It was as though someone had thrown cold water at me. A shock, and then a sensation like water trickling down my back, as long as they continued to look at me. So many of them at once.” Girls from the cafés and dance halls of Karelstad, some in silk stockings and fur stoles and hats that perched on their heads like birds that had landed at rakish angles, some in mended gloves and threadbare coats. Girls who acted in films, or modeled for artists, or waited tables until a gentleman friend came along. Slim, pale, glamorous, with dark circles under their eyes.

They walked out of the graveyard, passing the two men. Several nodded at Rudolf as they passed and one of them stopped for a moment, put her hand on his lapel, and said, “You were good to her.” Then they walked away along the muddy road in their high heels, whispering together like leaves in a forest.

“Good morning, Baron,” said the priest. “Would you like to see the stone? It’s exactly as you ordered.” They walked over and looked. There was no name on the stone, only the word:

“I’m surprised, Father,” said Gustav.

“Why, because she lies in holy ground? God created the forests before He created Adam. She is His creature, just as you are, my son.”

“Then you believe she had a soul?” asked Gustav.

“I wouldn’t say that. But I’ve worked with these–young ladies for many years. We have a mission for them in the city. They go there, like moths to a flame. They can’t help themselves. It’s something in their nature. The priest that served here before me–your father knew him, Baron, old Father Dominik–told me that once, when the forest was larger than it is now and the cities were smaller, it was not so dangerous for them. A farmer would come upon them and they would force him to dance all night. He would find his way home the next morning, with his shoes worn out and no great harm done, although his wife or sweetheart might be angry. But now the forest is logged by the timber companies, and the cities glow all night with electric lights. They go to Karelstad and the theater managers hire them, or the film directors, and eventually they become sick. It’s as though a cancer eats them up inside, draws the life, the brightness, out of them. They die young.”

“Did I kill her?” asked Rudolf. It was the first thing he had said since entering the graveyard. “Did going back a second time make her sick again?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said the priest.

“But I loved her,” he said, as though to himself. “I wonder if that matters.”

“It mattered to her,” said the priest.

“Father,” said Gustav, “what will happen to those girls, if the war comes?”

The priest looked at the gravestone for a moment. “I don’t know. But you must remember that they’ve survived. The Romans wrote of the puellae albae who lived in the forests of Sylvania. A thousand years ago, they were here. We’re no good for them, with our motor cars, phonographs, electric lights. Tanks won’t be any better. Father Dominik thought there were fewer of them, after the last war. But as long as the forest remains, they’ll be here. Or so I prefer to believe. And as long as they’re here, Sylvania will be here, in some fashion.”

The two men walked back along the path, without speaking. Then, “What will you do now?” asked Gustav.

“Have breakfast. Send my wife and son to France. Fight the Germans.”

“Sausage and eggs?”

“Do you ever think of anything other than immediate pleasures?”

“Frequently, and I always regret it.”

Rudolf Arnheim laughed. A flock of wood doves, startled, flew up into the air, their wings flashing in the light of the risen sun.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. Her short stories and poems have won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.

She wasn’t my grandma, but grandpa junior’s eighteenth or nineteenth wife, and I couldn’t help her. “Your computer belongs to the Internet now, Grandma,” I said, as I removed my hands from the seething slit of rotting sweetmeats and quivering nerves she kept on what used to be a nice oak side table. The computer wheezed and shuddered with all the viruses she had downloaded, and then there were the eyebuds; even as I tried to explain to grandma that she’d just need to go down to the butcher and get a new computer, a few of the buds grew into fully prehensile eyestalks and started looking around. Spyware, malware (it was growing claws now), lolware, diseased pustules blooming into firm tits with suckling mouths for nipples, and now the whole mass jerked back and forth as competing scripts demanded that it jump off the desk and kill me, and stay where it was and kill itself. Really squalid and moving, this computer was, because grandma had opened every letter she ever got from her spammy correspondent, the lifelike Percocet G. Viagra. (An ancient name that brings to mind quaint taffy pulls and cellular phones and dying of old age.) I reached back to signal grandma to hand me the rifle–”You’ll need to store pictures of Quint on a whiteskin rug somewhere else,” I told her–but grandma was already dead, probably from some horrible and entirely fictional disorder she’d read about. I had to burn the whole house down, but the computer would crawl forth from the wreckage and haunt me for the rest of my near-infinity of days as the least famous member of the most famous family in the whole wide world.

Little girls in wonderful little dresses loved to follow me around, whistling and squeaking in tones only members of my family could hear thanks to the same set of mutations that make us all perfectly irresistible and lucky and virtually immortal besides. When I made my first billion at age sixteen I was only aiming for one hundred million, and was doomed to pay through the nose–literally, the feds wanted the precious fluids of my pineal gland–in taxes, but then Sergeant X, my IV-great grandson, recently hatched and ready to rule, toppled the government. That, plus the fact that my name was Ivy and he was my IV, made him a favorite. Today he marched across the planet in his mighty Ideological State Apparatus, with its octopus legs and blazing death-ray cannons. The only thing he couldn’t kill or tame was that damned computer, which haunted me in the nights like the disease of delirium. The girls he could mow down with impunity and with the greatest of compassion; there were always more where they came from. And indeed that was the locus of my great4grandbaby’s compassion–Make room! Make room!

One of the girls, whose brainpan suggested a bit more development than the usual, came up to me to squee one early evening. “Squee squee,” she said, as they do, but then she looked up at me with her brown eyes and asked if we couldn’t begin a life-changing correspondence that spanned generations and would allow her to fully understand existence before she grew old enough to simply accept her lot.

“Why me?” I asked her. “And not someone closer to your own age, like my grandson Se–”

“Sex, no,” she said, “lolol.” Lolol because she got the double-meaning of the boy’s name. “He never struck me as very intelligent. Once, he threw a bottle of whiskey through my auntie’s window. The window was open, mind you, which made the action a total waste. There was no flaming rag, no explosion, nothing. Does that sound very intelligent to you?” I had to admit that it did not. “You’re the smart one of your multigenerational litter,” she told me, “which is why you are not as well-liked as either your ancestors or your descendants.”

“What about Non?” I asked. X’s father, Non, had been stuffed full of quantum explosives and sent on a European vacation to end the menace of socialism forever. It worked too, but solely against the benign sort of socialism that allowed children to drink themselves to death in a Parisian McDonald’s only to be sparked back to life during the next lightning storm.

“He’s a martyr,” she told me. “A hero. Wiped utterly from existence–a real negation of the negation. Who couldn’t get behind that, except for everybody, amirite?”

“Lol,” I said.

“Lol,” she said, and the deal was struck. Little did I know that she, too, was a tool of the menacing Percocet G. Viagra, but in fairness neither did she. That was how the world worked: in one corner there was fourth-generation me and my family, in the other, ol’ Viagra. The planet and everything in it were only so many tiddlywinks for us to flick at one another. Her betrayal and Viagra’s master plan took years to come to fruition, but in those years our correspondence was fruitful and tearful. The little girl was a genius beyond measure, like a pocket full of antimatter. I found her terribly cold and would cheer and strut for days whenever I managed to get an enthusiastic, rather than formal, “squeeeeee!” out of her. And she’d squee like a born fangirl, loud enough and long enough to make my teeth melt on those rare occasions, and in my heart I would swear to remember her forever.

We were in Japan, Sergeant X and I. There were holdouts in the mountains of the snowy north–sensuous and compelling robot schoolgirls with magic wands and kneesocks who muttlaughed with their shoulders and covered their glowing pink mouths when they did. And worse, when they did laugh, their vocal circuits articulated an entirely different onomatopœiac phoneme from the kind we liked–“JISMJISMJISM” instead, “SHNEESHNEESHNEE.” I mean, what the hell? We had to melt their cities to sand and then fuse the sand into a sea of glass and then sculpt the glass into the glorious and translucent image of my father Tripp posing with the decanter from which I had sprung, his arms stretched toward heaven. X’s Ideological State Apparatus was good at the melting and fusing and sculpting; I was mostly there to issue press releases and win hearts and minds. Generally at cards, which I still played with cards because I enjoyed being fanciful.

Percocet G. Viagra had nothing in his hand and I was pleased to tell him once again to “Go fist,” and he did. His wrists and fingers were stained with all sorts of terrible fluids; his knuckles were rubbed raw. Lolol. He told me to keep laughing, and then he called me laughing boy. I told him I fully planned to keep laughing. Then he mentioned that he had killed Seppie and Octo, my great and great-great grandsons. Lololol. Bored, I stuck out my tongue–an appendage of startling length–and offered him a glorious tribute to the world he and I had worked so hard to make.

“That reminds me,” Percocet G. Viagra said, “when I skipped over here from the States, I found a smoldering island full of your fans. Tiny animals, every one of them. I’m amazed you haven’t had them all melted into fertilizer. They squeed at me endlessly, like hungry mice, and one passed me a letter to give to you.”

“That’s how you killed my grandma,” I reminded him. “Surely you don’t expect the same trick to work twice.” One of the hydraulic legs of the Ideological State Apparatus smashed through the ceiling and slammed to a stop mere feet away from us like a period, only to bring down much of the rest of the roof as it withdrew to take another step, much like an ellipsis.

“Oh,” Percocet said, “this is a real letter. Like these are real cards resting in real orifices. She said she wanted to be fancy like you, so she’d arranged for a bit of deforestation.” And he slid me a piece of paper in an actual paper envelope across the back of the people we were using for a table. I gave Percocet G. Viagra all my money and power for a moment in the hopes that he’d gorge himself and choke on a wayward if carefully placed bananafish bone, and read the letter.

17, ———— CRATER

SMOLDERING ISLAND, PACIFICA

DEAR IVY (MAY I CALL YOU IVY, OR DO YOU TRULY PREFER IV?)

I hope you will forgive this resolute and expeditious betrayal of our correspondence, but I have been extremely busy, having undergone streptococcus of the throat and nearly perishing, which of course led to me being saddled with all sorts of responsibilities among my people, girlkind. While I do have fond memories of the time we spent together and the many words that have passed between us like self-destructive ideas (i.e., alcoholism, capitalism, religion, and individualism), I am compelled by my new responsibilities to stop bleating and whistling like some sort of simpleton and finally take an action. Indeed, I have taken two actions.

Please find enclosed a lock of my hair, which I remember from the era in which hair was a precious and finite resource to be the sort of gift a young woman might offer to an older man on the eve of a lengthy separation so that he might be able to reproduce her body from the hair’s genetic material and create some sort of doll for the release of certain physiological tensions. That is my first action.

My second action is to hand over my pen and this piece of paper to the shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary vaginal slits forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light that has born down upon me here in my refuge and has expressed its wish to add a few words. In addition it claims to have known your grandmother, which suggests to me that this letter will not end well, and it told me that it would find a man who could actually deliver this missive to you, and would even offer Mr. Viagra its back as a faithful mount. Anyhoo, here it is:

HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES SHOGOT

It was a long time before I was able to set aside the note, and indeed by the time I had, Percocet G. Viagra had died of old age, as had my little great-great-great-great grandbaby, the brave and merciless Sergeant X. The Ideological State Apparatus lay in ruins and squatting atop it, pseudopodia writhing and whipping at the dirt, was grandma’s old computer, which belonged to the Internet, was of the Internet, and thus had always been beyond my reach. What else could I do, a miserable creature stripped of power, name, and even my number–what good is it to be IV if there are no V through Xs to lord over?–but hold my hand to my eye and with my forefinger and thumb pretend to crush the monster’s gelatinous form into the crevasses of my very fingertips? And that I did. Then I fled into the mountains I had so thoroughly ruined, with no possessions save a lock of my favorite girl’s hair, which I thought I might one day train to squee again. The computer lifted itself up into a city-high cone that occluded the sun and I was suddenly, ecstatically happy. Everything I had was gone, which meant that I had a world to win again without friends or allies, one conveniently sized hole at a time. This time I’d take New Hampshire. Ta!

You take a really happy man–lolol–and he always stands a chance of becoming an ambitious and bloodthirsty man again. A man who can make you chirp and dance and flush red and expire just by being li’l ol’ me. And that’s spelled es kew ewe ee ee.

Nick Mamatas is the author of three novels, including the forthcoming Sensation (PM Press, Jan 2011), and dozens of short stories, many of which were collected in You Might Sleep… (Prime Books, April 2009). With Ellen Datlow, he co-edited the anthology of retold regional ghost stories, Haunted Legends (Tor, Sept 2010) and five days a week he edits Japanese science fiction and fantasy in translation for the new imprint Haikasoru (www.haikasoru.com). A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area. His website is the cleverly named http://www.nick-mamatas.com

Legion

A vision of the building from on high: five glittering floors surrounded by a dull concrete parking lot. To the west lay a forest. To the east, the glint of a shopping mall, substantial as a mirage. To the north, highways and fast-food restaurants. To the south, a perpetual gloom through which could be seen only more shadow.

The building housed hundreds of people. They worked day and night, as relentless and constant as the seasons. The first four stories lay open to all, but no one could visit the fifth floor without a special key. Few had ever seen the roof.

The stairs were used for emergencies only. Some of the elevators clanked and groaned. Some of the elevators, quiet and smooth as ghosts, rose and fell with limitless grace.

Most inhabitants of the building, even the janitors in the basement, it was rumored, preferred the noisy elevators. When the quiet elevators reached the first floor, a scream could sometimes be heard, as of an animal trapped and then crushed beneath their feet. The screams might continue for several minutes. No one knew what kind of animal it was, or how it came to be trapped there.

Here Be Dragons

Over time, the inhabitants of the third floor grew to despise the inhabitants of the second floor. “They cannot see what we see,” the people of the third floor would say to themselves. Sometimes, they would put an ear to the carpet and listen to the people on the second floor as they performed their empty rituals.

“They are no more intelligent than bees or ants,” the people of the third floor would say, and smile. Yet they still visited the second floor, often for no particular reason, and would talk to the blank-eyed people they found there. After all, they too had once lived on the second floor, before the growth of the company.

Over time, language fell away from the people of the second floor, as if words had been something gifted to them by those on the third floor. Over time, the words of those on the second floor came to seem like the hum of busy wasps, or the sound wind makes through corn not yet ready to be harvested. Over time, the people of the third floor grew afraid, for reasons they did not understand.

The Pen

How did it get there, he wondered as he stared at it. The pen held in his manager’s right hand had, only an hour ago, been on his desk. With that pen—extinct, no longer made, refills imported from a foreign land—he had signed important documents, written condolences, drafted memos. The pen had a black obsidian exoskeleton, a fine, sleek body. Strange symbols had been carved into its surface. The point rode across the page as effortlessly as his fingers rubbing his wife’s back.

Might the pen be as responsible for his success as any other factor?

The manager walked across his field of vision again. Behind the manager, conveyed by a film projector, images flashed across a screen: of badgers killing moles, of men in trench coats, of complex diagrams, of open briefcases like wings. The manager continued his singsong chanting of the training mission as the twenty-five trainees, one penless, watched him.

Could he be certain a signed contract was binding without that pen? Could he be certain his good fortune would continue? And did his manager know what he had done by taking the pen? Looking at the smooth smiling face of the manager, he realized he could not be certain of anything. Images of falling bombs painted the manager’s face gray and black. Anger began to glimmer inside the man, like moonlight reflected in a dark pool. He began to sweat, to fidget. His hand was empty; he could feel the phantom presence of the pen as if he had lost a finger.

The manager continued to pace and smile as he talked, sometimes pointing with the pen for emphasis. Behind him, the bombs had stopped falling and a man in a raincoat was walking slowly up the side of a barren hill, above him an observatory. Could the manager have taken the pen by mistake? No. Everyone knew what the pen meant to him. No one could take it from him “accidentally.”

Sweat flecked the man’s forehead. He could not keep still.

The pen had been a birthday gift from his wife five years ago. She had given him the pen by hiding it between her breasts. She had made him hunt for it with his mouth, his tongue. After he had found it, they had made love for hours, urgently. He could not think of the pen without thinking of her soft, hot skin. He could not think of the pen without remembering her nakedness, shining in the dark room.

Overcome, he rose.

The manager stopped pacing.

“Is there a problem?” the manager asked, his eyes cold. Steam seemed to rise off the top of his head, but it was only the screen behind him.

“Is there a problem?” he repeated when the man said nothing, all of the man’s will focused on the pen.

With a shudder, a sigh, the man shook his head and sat down.

The manager gave him a sharp look, then resumed his lecture.

Behind the manager, the walker had reached the observatory, which had turned into a museum, which had become a library, and then was gone, replaced by the V of geese migrating across thin, light-blue air… and the time between the manager’s curt words and the man’s realization that he was capable of killing the manager yawned across that expanse of sky like the slow curve of his own signature.

Sometimes

Sometimes, sitting in the basement, staring at dim green light through a murky portal, the janitor-in-training had a strange longing for another life, a life he received an inkling of in the small hours of the night, in a stray sentence of conversation curling away from him around a corner of the office. A chance meeting on a crowded elevator. A life he knew he would never find, too enraptured by or entangled in the life he had already chosen. Each day he eyed the back of his trainer with suspicion and found less logic in the speeches of the Head Janitor.

Conquest

At dusk one day, the company that had colonized the second and third floors conquered the first and fourth floors as well. For months, they had sent their employees to work on one or four. For months, these new employees had infiltrated the first and fourth floors. The liquidation, when it came, was swift and brutal. Cruel smiles. Locked doors. Blood sprayed across walls, carpet, ceiling. No one on the outside heard the shouts and screams. No one came to help. The janitors in the basement, balanced teetering on their chairs as they watched television screens filled with snow, paid no heed, even to the muffled echoes that descended to them from the air ducts.

For a time, all was still. All was quiet. The outside of the building glimmered with patchwork lights. The sounds of traffic dulled into silence. A wind came up and the nearby forest rustled with the music of leaves. To the east, the shopping mall lost the glister of its neon signs. To the north, the highways slowed to a sometimes car, flaring like the tip of a cigarette. To the south, the sudden stars cut off abruptly, victims of the gloom that hid the south from all but the most piercing gaze.

The moon, like a cross section of rounded bone, rose into a deep blue-black sky. Crickets broke into song. The quick brown shadows of nighthawks began to glide over the building. Then, faintly, quiet and yet so clear, a sound came from the top of the building. A knife against a glass. A pen against a coffee mug. An exhalation of breath. A softly muttered curse. The scuffle of feet—a lunge, a thrust.

On the roof, the owners of the victorious and vanquished companies met in hand-to-hand combat: two identical fat men in dark suits. They sweated as they swore and swung at each other. Grappled. Gouged. Bit. Their ever-more-numerous wounds did not seem a part of them—caused by the other and thus somehow part of the other, each wound hurting the giver.

The morning would find them huddled together on the roof, as peaceful as if they had died in their sleep, conquest finally complete.

Interlude 1

The company that occupies the first through fourth floors of the building has a secret name. This name is never spoken aloud and almost never written down. A few people have seen its syllables, at night, in confidence. The name glows a fiery gold when looked upon. Those who see it are said to be changed forever. Some leave the building immediately. Others rise so fast in the company that they ascend to the fifth floor and few ever see them again. The secret name of the company is older than the company itself. It will remain long after the company is gone.

The Vine

The office building was a long rectangular box with miserly vents and faulty air conditioning. The inhabitants of the building breathed air that their predecessors had breathed years ago. Some argued that breathing this air perpetuated a sense of tradition in all employees. Most said it made them ill.

One day a woman on the fourth floor began to grow a vine in her office. At first, she feared the cutting, taken from a patch of soil near the great gloom of the south, would not grow for her. But she so hated the austere look of her office—the gray-white ceiling tiles, the brown, worn carpet, the pale gray desk and old brown chair. The instant she placed the vine in a corner, on top of a filing cabinet, she felt better, as if she could breathe again.

Her boyfriend laughed when he saw the vine. “Like a pig with pockets,” he said, looking around her office.

They were having lunch. He worked across the street as the assistant manager at a bookstore. He always smelled of lighter fluid for some reason. She liked his looks but not his manner.

“I think it’s a breath of fresh air,” she said, determined to fight cliché with cliché.

In the silence that followed, they ate their sandwiches and stared at one another. She thought about the shopping she had to do after work.

Something mournful had entered the room.

At first, the vine blanched and would not bloom. Even with the support of a trellis, even with enough potted soil and the direct light filtered through the murky glass of her window. She felt guilty, gave it more soil, added fertilizer, bought shades for the window so she could regulate the sunlight that fell upon its leaves.

For months the vine refused to grow, or die. The woman forgot about the vine. She watered it automatically, in much the same way she stapled papers together or answered the telephone or had lunch with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend ignored the vine, his disregard a palpable presence in the room.

But one day, in the spring, she entered her office to a new smell, a fragrance unfamiliar to her. Perfume? Air freshener? No. It smelled vaguely of honeysuckle, of fresh berries, of vanilla, but wilder, more pungent.

She turned toward the window—and gasped, almost dropped her purse. The vine had turned a dark, healthy green, racing up the trellis, muscular and thick. It had blossomed: large, fluted flowers, a bright yellow that had transformed it into a fountain of color.

The plant brought her great happiness after that. People complimented her on it. She felt better because the air smelled like a garden all the time. The vine outgrew her small trellis. It outgrew the medium-sized trellis she brought in to replace the old one. At first, she had clipped its offshoots, but found she did not have the heart to prune it. It was too beautiful to contain.

Oddly enough, her boyfriend now liked the vine. This change of heart irritated her and she soon stopped seeing him.

When the vine outgrew even the large trellis, she faced a decision: cut it back or give it some new outlet. The flowers were huge now, as large as any she had ever seen, and a pure yellow that gleamed like gold even in the gloom. The vine was taking over the office, but she still could not bring herself to cut into such a healthy plant.

So one morning, she shut her office door, pulled her chair over to the vine, and carefully climbed up onto the seat. Using a ruler, she pried up a ceiling tile. The top of the vine unfurled itself and sprang upward as if it had been waiting for just that moment. It disappeared into the space she had created between the tiles.

From then on, her problem was solved and she did not think about the vine for many months. The curl of vines as they reached the ceiling concealed the gap in the tiles. No one noticed. Her vine had become such a part of the office décor that few visitors ever commented on the tangled explosion of green and gold in the corner.

Home

They found the manager after many years, finally. He had not quit without notice. He had not gotten trapped on the forbidden fifth floor without a key and died of starvation. Neither had he flung himself off the roof and landed in a drainage sluice. Nor had the large billboard visible from his office, the one advertising island holidays, been too great a temptation.

No, they found him inside his own desk. A night janitor had triggered the secret latch under the right-hand filing cabinet, revealing the secret compartment, revealing the manager.

He lay curled up inside, a man in a business suit, the skull now buried in the jacket, the leg bones loose in the slacks. He lay upon a simple bed, a pillow at one end, a tiny television at the other, a bottle of good brandy tucked into the corner.

They found a peephole in the front of the desk. They found a toothbrush. Floss. Towels. A jug of water. Snacks. Cans of tuna fish. A can opener. Several people wondered if he had ever left the office. The night janitor remembered him staying late to compile reports or edit the next training film. Some said that the images from those films had affected him, had seared themselves onto his skin, these ghostly tattoos only seen when the lights were off. In all ways, he had made his own coffin.

It seemed only incidental when the company coroner discovered that someone had broken the manager’s neck and shoved a very cheap ballpoint pen between the manager’s teeth. No one knew why this should be so. Nor could anyone recall a moment when the manager had ever been truly happy.

Interlude 2

Some say that more people travel up to the fifth floor than ever come down. Others, that more come down than go up. Those on the first floor say the fifth floor is empty, while those on the fourth floor say it is full, but will not say full of what. A few have speculated that a vast ossuary fills up the space—a plateau of bones and skulls receding off into the distance. That no manager is ever buried outside the building. That this field of bones, if measured, is longer than the building could logically contain. The janitors laugh at such speculation. They like to say, “Wiser to ask: What is in the basement?” But this only the janitors know.

“Down There”

“We rule from the bottom up,” the janitors say from their basement stronghold, knowing in their hearts that they could as well survive without the floors above as a turtle can survive without its shell.

There exist two types of janitor in the office building: night janitors and day janitors. They can be distinguished by how they manifest themselves. The night janitors rest in closets during the day, among the brooms and mops, and do not emerge until dusk. The day janitors leave the building at twilight in large, unsmiling groups. The two types of janitor never meet—know each other only by their handiwork, the signs left in the patterns of swept floors, polished hallway lamps, changed light bulbs. They are as ghosts to one another. Each has created a mythology for the other—an act of faith. On the rare occasions when they by accident meet, they stare at each other as if seeing a stranger in the mirror, and to as much effect.

Only one janitor travels between the two worlds of night and day: the Head Janitor, he who works during both light and dark and rarely sleeps. It is the Head Janitor, bulked and bulky, tall and thick, who growls out orders in a gravelly baritone from between moistened lips, as much despot as cleaning agent. They listen as if to a force of nature; during the day, he comes to the night janitors in their closets as a premonition of darkness and they smile in their twisted sleep, dancing through the halls with mop and broom.

He it is who gives voice to their thoughts, their desires, as he paces up and down the basement hallway, neither cleaned nor cleaner.

“You shall not think of them as your masters,” he says to them. “You shall not think of them at all. Your work exists independent of them, without them. They are as wraiths to you. Our faith has to do with honest labor, with the purification of the inanimate. This is how we pray and how we do our jobs. Remember that. They are nothing: a scrap of cloud, a hint of a breeze.”

“We empty their trash,” the janitors intone. “We straighten up their messes. We complete their very thoughts. They can as well survive without us as without the very air.”

Their philosophy has descended to them through long years from the floors above—from crumpled pages saved, from the backs of notepads casually scribbled upon and tossed aside. They are as likely to divine wisdom from a discarded sentence passed down from generation to generation as from any reputable source. Theirs is a philosophy of scraps and fragments, the punctured code of incomplete memos and torn note cards. What words were meant as flotsam, they regain as compost for their ways.

The Head Janitor cannot remember a time when he was not alive. He looks out sometimes through the ground-floor window that faces the south and grumbles about the gray, the gloom. “Clean,” he mumbles. “Cleaner.” His bloodshot eyes widen and he trembles, in the grip of some secret emotion.

Infiltration

…and the vine continued to grow, twisting its way across the inside of the ceiling tiles, winding its way past layers of insulation, found the air ducts, and began to colonize the building’s arteries, harming no one, so that even the strange people of the second floor, with their clicking beetle speech, noticed that the air had become fresher, while in the basement the janitors grumbled and jabbed their mops into the air, for they had grown to like the stifling mustiness above the basement, the vine still crawling and pushing its way through the building, filling every hidden corner, allowing mice to crawl over it and chew on its blossoms, their droppings over time creating a thin layer of soil from which it grew stronger still, the infiltration continuing…

The Shadow Cabinet

Every second week of the month, on a Thursday, the Shadow Cabinet meets, all twelve men and women in black suits rising frictionless and fast via the glistening silver elevator.

On the fifth floor, the doors open with precision and out walks: the Shadow Cabinet. Eyes hidden by black shades. Faces unsmiling. Smoke-gray briefcases caught in vicelike grips at their side. Silver cufflinks. Black shoes so shiny the ceiling reflects in them.

As they pass through the sliding glass doors to the receptionist’s outpost, the Shadow Cabinet seems to flow or glide, their steps so smooth and controlled that they might as well be moving forward on an escalator.

In neat rows of two, they wordlessly pass by the receptionist—she scrunched low in her chair, making herself as small as possible; mouse to their collective snake—and ripple into the fifth-floor conference room: a wide space without windows. The last two in line always stare back at her, nod once, and close the door.

Outside the conference room an hour passes. No one knows how much time passes inside. No one has ever discovered the purpose of these meetings. No sound comes from behind the closed doors. Ever.

The receptionist’s part in the ritual is, by tradition, limited. After an hour, she will enter the now-empty room, gather up the twelve empty, open briefcases—resembling the discarded exoskeletons of thick gray beetles—and toss them into the incinerator at the end of the hall. The briefcases feel hot to the touch long before she reaches the incinerator. Any curiosity this phenomenon might arouse in her, she quells immediately. It is not her job she fears for.

One week, she entered the room as usual and was gathering up the briefcases when she felt an odd prickle on her neck. Turning, she looked up—and screamed, dropping the briefcases. There, on the ceiling, clung a man in a black business suit. His pale hands were splayed flat against the ceiling tiles. His eyes were large and luminous. When he saw the receptionist staring at him, he let out a soft moan, a shuddering shiver. Then he scuttled across the ceiling in a series of quick-darting movements, crossed over to the sidewall, and disappeared out the door, taking a route as far away from the incinerator as possible.

Since that moment, there has been no curiosity so great the receptionist could not ignore it.

Unexpected…

A green tendril of vine curled out from under one of the ceiling tiles. The janitor-in-training was certain it had not been there a moment before. It seemed to form a finger, beckoning to him.

For a minute or two, he did nothing, dark eyebrows scrunched together. He looked around. Was this, perhaps, a test of his integrity concocted by the Head Janitor? Should he investigate or not? He put down his pencil. The Head Janitor had assigned him the dull duty of requisitioning supplies. He had been writing down numbers in columns and then crossing them out, a scowling smile on his face. His parents had been artists. His grandparents had been circus acrobats. Yet he sat in the basement of an office building and created strings of numbers. If only he could lose the ability to write them—if only the numbers would, like leaves carried by the breeze, fly off the page and fall to the floor…

The young man contemplated the curling tendril above him. It was not in his nature to ignore it. He could not ignore it. So he stood on top of his desk and peeled aside the ceiling tile, revealing insulation, the hollow area between the tile and the next floor—and a tangled welter of green vines and giant yellow blossoms. The sweet, sweet smell of the flowers overwhelmed him; he almost fell, just from the memories they brought back to him. They smelled like the perfume worn by his first lover. They smelled of even earlier memories, too, like firewood burning in the fireplace of his childhood home, or the spices his father had used to season the pot roast for Sunday dinner.

The young man breathed in deeply and saw new numbers in his head: the chances of the Head Janitor noticing his absence; the chances of finding the source of the vine; the chances he might die of boredom while sorting through the inventory. Nothing added up. Nothing made complete sense.

An image floated into his mind: him, at the same desk for another fifty years, his lithe, muscular body, seemingly made for climbing in tunnels, slowly turned to fat and defeat. He leapt off the chair, found some sticky notes and a pen in a desk drawer, then took a big bag of change over to the vending machines and bought as many bottled waters and snacks as he could shove into his pockets.

Standing again beneath the tendril, he hesitated, staring up at it for a long time.

Interlude 3

The smell on the third floor did not come from someone’s rotted lunch, but from an executive vice president who, having lost a spoon behind the lunchroom refrigerator late one night, fell during his efforts to retrieve it, was knocked unconscious, and died without a murmur in that small space, victim of the diet that had allowed him to fit, not found for three weeks, the whole episode distasteful to his wife and four children, not to mention the day janitor who found the body and almost left it there, hopeful that at some later date the white of picked-at bones might be more easily cleaned up.

…Beauty

It was a form of release, an escape, for the janitor-in-training to pull himself up into the air ducts using the vine for support. As soon as he replaced the tile behind him, the young man felt lighter and happier. He almost laughed aloud. In the darkness ahead, the yellow blossoms glowed a friendly phosphorescent yellow, giving him enough light to see by. Like a lithe and clever lizard, he crawled forward, first through one corridor and then the next, always leaving a trail of sticky notes behind him.

The tendrils of the vine brushed against his face. The flowers bumped against his nose. His eyelashes became dusted with pollen. I’m a bee, he thought to himself, not unhappily. I’m a hummingbird. Below his hummingbird self, through minute openings, he could hear the buzz of conversation, the reverberation of people walking just a few feet below him. Something about the secret life he had entered gave him a deep sense of satisfaction.

Hours later, the young man had still not found the source of the vine. With astonishment, as he rested, the water bottles weighing him down, he realized that the vines had taken over every secret part of every floor. It might take a day or more to find the source. He could either turn back now or continue the search until he was successful. It did not seem like a true choice to him.

Minutes passed or days, hours or months—he could not tell. As he gave himself up to the search, he also gave up time. There was only the vine, the blossoms, his need. When hungry, he ate the sweet fruit of the vine, with its lingering aftertaste of regret. When thirsty, he licked moisture off the vines or sucked water from the blossoms. After a while, he could hear the vine—a soft undercurrent of sound, a hum that matched its glow of good health. He would fall asleep entangled in the vines, wake refreshed, and continue on. Below him, at times, he thought he could hear the janitors grumbling among themselves in their own language, and he would laugh silently because now he knew more than even the Head Janitor.

The vines, the floors, the confined labyrinthine ecosystem that had come to life in the air ducts amidst the insulation, had its own rhythms and patterns. At regular intervals, for example, which he somehow equated with morning, a phalanx of mice would stampede down the vine—running right over him, their feet cold and tiny, their speech a deep chittering that he could swear sometimes held hints of human language. At other times, biting flies would assail him. Dragonflies and frogs. Dust and rivulets of water. Once, at the end of a long passageway, an animal with pale eyes stared at him before vanishing into darkness.

He felt himself twisting into the vine itself, so surrounded by leaves and flowers that surely they must sprout from him. At some point, his clothing fell away from him, no longer necessary. He did not pine for the sun or for any other living thing. Once, following a stray tendril of the vine, he burst from darkness into light—the vine having found its way out through a crack in the side of the building—and looked out into blue sky and gulls wheeling over the parking lot, four or five stories up. The light disturbed him. To the new senses he had developed, the light felt wrong. True light could only come from the source of the vine. He dove back into the darkness without regret.

Finally, when he had reached a place that suggested there might be no separation between himself and the vine, he found the source. It started as a sudden stubbornness on the vine’s part—a thickening that resisted his progress. He had to suck in his breath and flatten his stomach to wriggle forward. The vine grew bigger still, muscular and gnarled. It cut into his skin, bruised him. He would have stopped and turned back, but a mote of light in the semidarkness ahead caught his eye. As he grunted and groaned his way toward the light, the mote became a gash, and the gash turned into a gap in the tiles, smothered with leaves.

His breath caught in his throat. Somehow he had forgotten that his journey might have an ending. What if this was the source? What would he do?

Slowly, heart pounding, he wriggled into position and pried the tile open. Light flooded the space around him. He stared down. Below, the vine burrowed down into a large pot. To the right of the pot, a woman sat at a desk. She had brown hair, and small hands that found their way over the keyboard of her computer by degrees—hunting for each key as if for the first time. Her face, as her gaze shifted from the computer screen to her window and back again, became now young, now older, sometimes tired, sometimes lively, but always anchored by the deep eyes, the stare neither stern nor gentle.

The smell of blossoms in his nostrils, the young man could not separate the vine from the woman. A feeling the young man had never before experienced flooded over him. He did not know what he had expected of the source—salvation? revelation?—but she seemed as miraculous as anything in his imagination. A vision formed in his head of the two of them covered in the vines, making love, their limbs rapturous with blossom and with root, the imprint of her hands burning into his skin.

As if awakening from dream, the young man pulled aside two tiles and lowered his head and chest down into the room below.

The woman looked up, gasped, pulled back in her chair.

“Oh!” she said, her voice surprised but melodious.

“So you—” he said, in a cracking voice unused to speech, and grinned. “So you’re the source,” he said.

And wept, for the face she turned up toward him was the most beautiful he had ever seen.

A Confusion of Tongues

Once, through a glitch in the system, an employee on the fifth floor was forgotten but remained on the payroll. She had only one task: to stamp APPROVED on various documents. Several years before, this job had required a full-time employee because so many documents had to be approved. However, that time had passed long ago. Now, in an office on the opposite side of the building, another employee rushed to stamp REJECTED on a mountain of documents. The order of such things might again reverse itself, but for now the woman spent her days in languid anticipation of the next document, which might not arrive for several hours.

The woman did not even have a window to distract her. A rare storm from the south had broken the window and the janitors had replaced it with planks of wood. Sometimes, she would peer through the cracks of light in the wood, but all that lay beyond was the sky. Had she expected anything different? Yes. Yes, she had.

Mostly, the woman read or listened to the radio. Late in the day, she might dance or even drink whiskey from a flask. She did these things at home in her tiny apartment, too, but they felt more daring at work.

Tiny gray mice that poked their heads out of cracks at the base of the wall near her desk provided the only break in the monotony of her routine. The first time she saw a mouse, she gasped and lifted the receiver of her telephone. The janitorial staff did not like mice. But as the mouse wrinkled its nose, scenting, and sidled out into the office, she put the receiver down. There was no reason to call—she had been acting out the role of someone who was not her.

Instead, she took out the whiskey and poured herself a shot. It tasted crisp and burned her throat. Nothing this exciting had happened to her all day. As a child, she had spent summers on her grandparents’ farm. She used to sleep outside, smelling clover, grass, and the thick earth as she stared up at the sky. She would ride her horse for hours over the lush green countryside. Much to her grandfather’s bewilderment, she had also tried to save mice from the half-feral farm cats.

The next day, the woman began to bring breadcrumbs, seeds, and other scraps from her apartment. She even went to the store to buy cheese. As many as ten scruffy, nervous mice feasted on what she had brought in with her. Their quick, hesitant movements amused her. Their psychic abilities impressed her as well; they always disappeared at least fifteen minutes before the courier arrived with the latest document to enjoy the stamp of approval.

She found herself trying out names for the mice on a pad of paper: Charles, Leisa, Paul, Zeb, Gwen, Jonathan, Diana, Bob…

After a while, as she sat in her office without windows, waiting for the next document, she found herself listening to the chirping language of the mice as they bickered over a biscuit or a rind of cheese. The more she watched them as they spoke to each other, the more she began to understand the nuances of their speech. Once or twice, she lay on the floor and covered her arms with bits of cracker and seeds. The bristly feel of their whiskers, the softness of their noses, the delicate touch of their paws—all of this helped her to understand them.

Several years passed. The woman’s hair became flecked with gray. Her father and mother both died within a year of each other. The number of documents to be stamped never increased or decreased. Her entwined states of being friendless and alone were broken by all-too-infrequent periods of happiness that only made her feel worse when they ended, abruptly.

But she did learn the language of the mice. So well did she learn their language that she was able to teach them elements of her own language. This happened slowly and steadily, so that she almost did not notice the change, how the mice became her eyes and ears in other parts of the building. How they reported back to her on events and people that fascinated her. And because the viewpoint of a mouse is rather like that of a child—different and new and sparkling around the edges—their accounts were all the more entertaining and insightful.

The woman let her hair grow long and did not bother to dye the gray out of it. She wore long patchwork skirts and slippers. She stopped drinking whiskey. She no longer even bothered to say hello to the infrequent courier.

Instead, she found herself speaking more and more often through her mice, the voices of the mice become her voice. They spoke out in rustles and murmurs and chirps from the air ducts and the little holes in the vents and pipes: a dusty whisper that filled the building little by little until the janitors would look up from their jaded contemplation of the newspaper, struck by what seemed like a tongue of air in a place where no breeze ever blew.

At least, this is the story some inhabitants of the building tell to explain why, at odd times—on elevators, in an empty hallway—voices can be heard, speaking through the walls.

The Mimic

Dressed in a black business suit, a mimic appeared among the office workers on the third floor. He set up his computer in a just-abandoned cubicle. The dull hiss of his gray-spackled monitor reflected ghoulishly off his chalky face. He had an odd way of staring at the monitor, with his head cocked to the side. He had wrists and hands pale as the underbelly of a toad. He did not talk much.

“He is not natural to this place,” some said.

“None of us are,” others said.

If there had been fewer employees, perhaps the mimic would have been found out sooner. But the inhabitants of the third floor now numbered in the hundreds. They pressed down into the emergency stairwells, where middle managers sat in bewildered little groups, laptops balanced on their crossed legs. Everyone had to take lunch in shifts, for otherwise the elevators would groan with the weight for hours. Even a half-desk of space was coveted as a promotion.

Perhaps it was strange enough for the mimic to have taken a cubicle for himself, but stranger things soon occurred on the third floor. When the mimic began to pluck bugs from the stalks of his neighbor’s hydrangea—the long, pink tongue erupting from the pale, calm face—everyone pretended not to notice. His neighbor told herself that it was nothing really, nothing important; after all, hadn’t they acclimated themselves to the strange customs of the people who lived on the second floor?

Gradually, they noticed several other strange things about their new coworker. For example, despite the dress code, he did not actually wear shoes; his feet just resembled shoes. And when he ate his open-faced sandwiches of thick green paste, he swallowed in such a way that his large eyes receded into the back of his head, as if pushing his food down like a frog. He wept almost continuously as well, which was disconcerting if poignant, although one coworker remarked in a whisper that since the new employee’s face never changed expression, it might just have been rheum, not tears at all.

The mimic smelled of cardamom and mango, sometimes of pears, sometimes of fresh rain on newly tilled soil. Sometimes he smelled like a thunderstorm come up from the south.

The mimic had violet eyes. “Violet, sad, soulful eyes,” as someone said, sarcastically.

Anyone who looked into those eyes found themselves falling. They would remember events or people they had not thought of in years. They would feel a sudden compulsion to leave the building. They would feel an ache, a yearning for something they could not quite name.

For this reason, most people avoided looking at the mimic directly. Shaking hands was also not recommended because his oddly curled fingers were always damp. The pads of both his hands and his feet were sticky, and festooned with natural suction cups, although they did not learn this until later.

At meetings, the mimic would imitate the chatter around him, but afterward no one could remember exactly what he might have said, if anything. They just remembered it had sounded good at the time.

The woman who shared the cubicle to his left often defended him. “He’s quiet,” she would say. “His lunch doesn’t smell. He’s polite. He’s considerate of other people’s privacy.”

For long hours, the mimic stared out the window toward the south, and wept the tears that might not be tears at all.

It was not until the night the mimic was discovered scuttling across the ceiling tiles in a twitching frenzy of movement, sucking insects and spiders into his mouth, that the people of the third floor turned against him. The sight was too strange for them. It did not mimic them at all.

He mewled as they bound his limbs. He made a soundless scream as they kicked him. He mumbled to himself as they hauled him into the elevator.

By the time the elevator doors opened on the second floor, he had gone limp, staring hopelessly off into the distance as they roughly dropped him in the second floor lobby and brushed at their clothes in distaste.

The mimic stared at them as they left. As the doors slid over their solemn, disgusted faces, they distinctly heard him speak to them. But each heard something different—reassurance, admonishment, joy, grief.

When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, they had all become very different people.

Interlude 4

As for the darkness to the south, it never advanced or retreated, but, like a perpetual thunder cloud threatening rain, remained in position: a wall of gray to block all traffic, all commerce, all thought. There were those who had passed on into the south, but no one ever saw them again. Some nights, lights would be seen in the southern darkness and in the morning strange creatures found dead at its perimeter. But over time it became as much a part of the landscape as the shopping mall and the fast-food restaurants. No one remarked upon it. No one cared. No one spared it a second thought.

Liberation

From floor to floor, the vine began to know its own deep green strength. The woman who had brought it to the building had left long ago with the young janitor, but it no longer needed her. Tendrils of an advance guard of triumphant yellow blossoms had found the outside of the building and begun to discreetly colonize cracks and indentations. Water coolers had been suborned to feed it. Any plant on any floor rooted in any kind of soil found a sly invader in its midst: a little curling vine exploring that soil with it.

The plant began to thicken and mature within its hidden passageways. The blossoms hardened into fruit, blackened, and fell off. The seeds sprouted in the most unexpected places, rattling through filters and vents to fall on desks and floors. The plant grew brown and tough. It could feel the sun all around it but not upon it, except in that niggling place where it had reached the outside. That tiny scout sent back the most pleasurable of sensations. The vine flexed and pulled and writhed. Ceiling tiles popped in remote corridors. Walls bulged. The Head Janitor muttered darkly to himself about the end of the world.

The people of the second floor embraced the change. They opened up their air system by order of their new leader, a pale man dressed in a black business suit who liked to climb across the ceiling. Great draping vines fell out of the ceiling, trailed across the floor. Soon a dense forest covered the second floor, and the people of the second floor lived among it in solitude and peace.

The vine grew stronger still.

Until one day, it filled every crack, every crevice, every secret area of the building. It had reached as far as it could go. And still the sun maddened and teased it.

The building began to crumble from the pressure, the stone and metal subverted, infiltrated, by vegetation, compromised beyond repair. The cascade of ruin moved inward and outward, everywhere revealing the miracle of green: a slow avalanche that took many weeks.

First to leave were the people of the second floor. The vine rent a gaping hole in the side of the building, the vine feeling for the earth. They crawled down the vine, still buzzing their fey speech, their possessions strapped to their backs. Led by the mimic, they disappeared into the southern gloom, never to be seen again. It is said that when they reached the perimeter of that melancholy place, the mimic gave out a great cry, raised his arms, smiled widely.

Others tried to fight back, enlisting the help of the janitors, but it was no use: cracks had appeared in the very foundation, and the sweet nectar smell of the vine was everywhere. The edifice began to crumble. The fifth floor, long since abandoned except by the Shadow Cabinet, fell to the street in an almost silent collapse in the middle of a cloudless day. Empty briefcases shattered on the pavement below. Now the building wore a cascading green fountain of vines down its sides.

After a while, all was still. The company was no longer really a company anymore. Half had fled. Most of the rest had been drawn back by the sheer rote power of routine, but this did not hold them for long. In pairs and packs, they drifted away. Gradually, the parking lot became empty in the middle of the day. The offices nearby became abandoned, bereft.

The vine kept growing—under the pavement, under the topsoil, coming up in odd and unexpected places, always seeking the light.

Soon, even the strip mall lay abandoned. Birds flew overhead in thick flocks. The fruit of the vine fell where it would and took root everywhere. Stone and vine and steel, the slumped ruins of the building stood guard over squirrels and trees.

Beneath the ground, the Head Janitor railed and shouted at his staff. They had successfully sealed off the basement from the vine, but now found their philosophy as useless as a basement without a building.

Lighthouse

One woman remained in the building, even after silence had fallen over it, even after the janitors had given up their struggle. Every afternoon she would walk from her apartment and climb through the rubble to her office with its ever-empty APPROVED box. The mice had long since left. She didn’t mind—she was happy for them. They would send her words throughout the world and one day they would come back and tell her tales of where they had been.

She had long gray hair now, but her stance remained straight as she stood by the cracked window, framed by the hissing half-light of tentative fluorescent lamps powered by a failing emergency generator.

The woman neither lamented nor welcomed the death of the building. It was unimportant to her. She came back because there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Her check, issued by some central location, was hiccupped out to her at irregular intervals by some bureaucracy that had not heard of the building’s fate.

Nothing ever changed.

In a way, she found it peaceful looking out across the green, watching the way the clouds sped across the sky. Through the broken glass, the wind sometimes leapt into her office and she would close her eyes and enjoy the sensation of it against her face. She had lost her voice, but felt she did not need it anymore.

Sometimes she would walk through the crumpled passageways, the corridors that led to unexpected light, and wonder about her coworkers. She had never really known them before. Now, though, by the things they had left behind, she knew them well. She had found love letters buried in the rubble once. Another time, a wrapped present. Fingerprints on a windowpane had caused her to stop and examine them, wondering who they had belonged to, why they had felt the need to place their entire hand against the glass…

Every night she would let the emergency generator sleep, turning out the lights on her floor. The stars would come out all at once, soft and glistening. The world would be reduced to a shadow, a coolness. At such times, she would wrap her shawl more tightly around her and look back over her life—at the spaces in her life, the gaps—and she would be only a little sad.

After a while, she would take out her flashlight and shine it into the darkness, slowly turning and turning. The darkness ate the light. She couldn’t really see anything clearly—just the outlines of shapes, of the vine, of the dull, reflective chrome of a distant car, approaching the gloom of the southern border.

She did this for many nights. She didn’t know what she expected to find, or why she had decided to shine the light. She only knew that the ruination of the building had released something within her. So she held the light and flashed it out into the darkness.

Then one night, from the deepest part of the southern gloom, a light shone back at her: a violet light, small but intense.

She almost dropped her flashlight in surprise.

Some say it was only the mimic, mimicking her from the safety of the southern gloom. Others, that it was just a reflection in a pool of water. Still others say it was her one true love, created from need and darkness.

“Is it you?” she might have said. “Are you the one?” she might have said. She might have said nothing at all.

But come morning, she was gone, never to return, her flashlight dropped on the floor of the office, and all across the world there were only the sounds of the vine: the bees upon its blossoms, the ants collecting drops of moisture from its leaves, and its own distant hum, vibrating against the earth.

The Third Bear

World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer has had novels published in fifteen languages and made the best-of-year lists of Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the LA Weekly, and many others. His short fiction has been featured on Wired.com’s GeekDad and Tor.com, as well as in many anthologies and magazines, including Conjunctions, Black Clock, and in American Fantastic Tales (Library of America). He writes for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. His latest collection is The Third Bear. “Secret Life” was the title story of his previous collection, and is the (relatively) Happy version of events at a company he used to work for. “The Situation,” collected in The Third Bear, is the (incredibly) Sad version of subsequent events at a company he used to work for.

All the men I might have loved
Have gone to Sirius

Sirius, the Dogstar
The Dreadstar of Summer
That Cranberry Bog, that Red Lamp District
Promising Scarlet Women, Scarlet Waves of Grain
A Wine-Stained Sea

My lovely men are gone
Leaving their braids behind them

They have left their braids
But have taken the veins of their wrists
Their bony faces and transparent fingers
Their cigarettes
Even the moist taunt of their throats
They have stolen away
Forsaking everything
To be happy on Sirius

O Sirius, your houses are made
Of bougainvillea leaves
Your rain is pink and balsamic
There is bloodsoup to eat, and dragons
And everyone is a surgeon

Like Magellan before them
My men have circumnavigated mystery
Without me

C.S.E. Cooney lives in a garret like a real writer, only she calls it an “aerie” because she mostly writes fantasy. Her stories and poems have been published by Subterranean Press, Ideomancer, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, and Clockwork Phoenix 3 . Occasionally, a brave theatre company in Chicago or St. Louis (and once, Taiwan) will produce one of her plays, which serves her right for moonlighting as a critic for Centerstage Chicago. Ms. Cooney has work forthcoming in issues of Black Gate Magazine, Strange Horizons and Pseudopod.

The hover bucked. Davis staggered. The propulsion fans roared. He swore.

He cut power to the fans and looked out the back window of the cabin. The towlines had gone slack and the skimmer tilted, half sunk in the viscous orange lake. “Shit,” he said.

Davis had been harvesting for twenty-five years. The lake was too thick for the mollusks to surface in the coldest months, and the summer winds whipped the lake’s sludge into a toxic foam, so harvesters like him made the most of the fall and spring.

He pulled his hood over his brow, leaving the mask dan-gling, tugged his gloves up over his sleeves and stepped out onto the rear deck. The hover floated, its impellers turning the lake into a pale orange ring around its air cushion, opaque like pulled taffy. The sun had tugged itself above the horizon, and the air stung his cheeks and eyes.

The skimmer was a basic design: a floating bin with a grilled front. When open, the grill angled down, forming a ramp that rode the mollusks up into its bin as the hover pulled it across the lake. He fired up the winch. The torque motor whined as it reeled in the skimmer. Something had fouled it badly.

Davis reached out with the gaff-pole to hook the skimmer. The backwash from the impellers blew up between the vessels, catching him in the face with fumes. He stepped down and ba-lanced his way around the skimmer’s rim.

The bin was half-full of sludge. He stirred the orange goop with the end of the gaff. Only a few flat mollusks had been collected so far. Then he saw it: black and round, a fat object, the size of a large buoy, almost submerged. Beads of orange slipped across it, leaving its surface pristine.

An hour after turning back, he saw the headland that marked the eastern end of the span. He had closed the grill, and now the skimmer tugged behind the hover like salvage. The propulsion fans thudded in an interference rhythm.

The radio beeped. Time for the call, he thought. He grabbed the headset from its hook.

“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Reeda said.

“No problem, hon.” Davis had started cleaning up in the kitchen at the onset of Reeda’s morning sickness. Nowadays, it seemed just as important to continue. “Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. How’s the lake?”

“I’m coming back early. What are you doing?”

“Laundry’s on. I’ll need to run the generator.”

“Could you have a look at the cold-house?” he said. He had forgotten to check it on his way out that morning. “Its cells probably need changing too.”

“Sure, I could use the walk,” she said.

“Great,” Davis said, uncertain. It was rare for Reeda to want to do something so active these days. “I’ll be back early afternoon,” he told her.

“See you then.” She clicked off.

He checked his heading and adjusted the fans. Ahead, a pack of skaters ran across the glistening orange swells, their long lizard tails leaving a fading mesh on the viscous surface.

Davis got his rig onto the wide flats of the shore, a safe distance from the lip of the lake, and deflated the hover’s cushions. Behind it, the skimmer was pitched to one side, its back right corner had scored a groove across the packed black sand.

He yanked open the skimmer’s chute and stepped back as the sludge drained. He reached in and scooped the ooze along with his gloved hand. When the bin was empty, he climbed up to get a look at the offending object. It sat tilted in a corner and looked like a fat, squashed, oversized child’s top. It was unmarked but obviously manufactured.

Goddamn Mirfac, he thought. I am going to sue their corporate ass.

“I’ve navigated my whole life by the tower out of Bremi,” Davis had told Rass the night before. “Hell, I know the shape of every headland along this shore.”

“It’s not about that!” Rass said. “And you know it.”

Their conversation had been working toward this since the two friends had sat down with their tea. Rass sighed, and Davis followed his gaze to the sitting room where Reeda leaned over the coffee table, sketching.

“She’s designing her dream home,” he explained.

Rass said nothing.

Davis’ eyes returned to the kitchen, to the cupboards he had painted himself and the unmatched plates draining beside the sink. “She says she still lives in a bachelor’s shack.”

“Losing the baby hit her hard,” Rass said. He had said this often in the last months.

“I know,” Davis said, impatience creeping in. “But she won’t get over it obsessing over a house that’ll never get built!”

Rass cleared his throat, but Reeda made no sign she had heard.

“Toby saw two fliers over the lake last week,” Rass said. “They’ll be moving up the span next.”

The mollusks Rass and Davis harvested were sold for the blue-white ingots of antimony inside, a by-product of their digestion. Last year, the moon’s biggest processor had announced plans to mine the bottom of the lake instead of buying from the harvesters. Mirfac’s drones were a common sight now, surveying for antimony concentrations deposited on the lake bottom by decaying mollusks.

The harvesters in Bremi all talked about blocking the company, but no one really expected success. A lawyer had advised them to save the logs from their navigation systems. Laying claim to the patch where you harvested might let you sell your stake for an early retirement.

“Look, Rass, everyone knows my patch. Who’s going to dispute it? Not anyone from here to Bremi, least of all some shoe-wearing lawyer from Mirfac.”

Reeda came up to the table.

“Rass, would you like some meringues?” she offered. She went to the cupboard.

“Sure,” Rass said. He looked at Davis.

“Thanks, hon,” Davis said. Her short dark hair was growing out. She had always worn it long, and only now was she starting to look the way he remembered. He missed her. He missed the way she used to smile and tell him not to be so loud when he laughed. “Have a cup of tea,” he said.

She had laid the plate of sweets between them and shook her head.

Davis clambered into the bin and kicked the few flat gray mollusks out of the way. He needed to shift the object to right the skimmer. He squatted with a grunt and reached underneath, laying his hands flat against its underside. A tingling sensation danced across his palms. He pulled away. Spots floated in his vision. “God in hell!”

He looked at it again. It was featureless, smooth, black, but giving no reflection. He touched it. Starbursts danced across his eyes.

He stood again. The lights in his eyes–what had first appeared as fireworks–had resolved into geometries. He lay his palm against the black surface and closed his eyes. Circles, triangles, and rectangles–retinal negatives–ordered themselves, searching according to some logic. A pattern of circles and dots hit on a childish outline of a face: a loop enclosing two bright specks and an oval mouth. The mouth flattened and turned up its corners in a smile.

Startled, he lifted his hand and looked out to the lake. A wind was coming off it, and the horizon was pale gray. A squall was building, summer storm.

He squatted again, his suit pinching behind the knees, and positioned himself, wiggling his back against the metal wall of the bin. Reeda would have warned him against what he was about to do. In one sure motion, he got both hands behind it, leaned in, and shoved.

His whole body buzzed–his hands, his chest, his chin where it pressed the top of the object–a chemical feeling. Lights danced under his eyelids. The object was far heavier than it had any right to be. With one gasp, he scraped it across the skimmer’s bin. The tingling surged up his arms. The moment the skimmer righted, he let go and stepped back, panting.

He could still see the image that had written itself on his eyes. The childish face had gained detail, strings of light joining, curving, searching their way into a clear portrait of Reeda.

The wind tugged the steering as Davis drove the four-wheeled runabout across the black sand, the device stretch-cabled into the basket behind his seat. He steered past the long, squat cold-house where he stored his harvests, then turned and headed up the rocky crest that marked the limit of the flats. The runabout struggled, its servos whining until he crested. His home stood in the distance across his half-cleared rock-scrabbled lot.

The tingling reached out to him. He felt it behind his ears as if he were clenching his jaws. His skull itched under the skin. Images visited him. He fought them, like a dream he couldn’t put aside. He saw the dials on his hover’s dash, the lake’s undulating horizon, a clattering of mollusks, their fan shapes tumbling into the cold-house’s hopper. It was an inventory of his daily life, sorting the pieces. An intelligence was behind it, voracious, collecting every scrap. He saw Reeda bringing him tea. Reeda sitting in the dark when he went to bed.

He parked the runabout at the house, hurried up the back steps, and released the memory he had been refusing to think, fighting to keep it safe. It was Reeda, exhaustion and joy written in her smile, beaming up at him with Sally in her arms. The saddest and happiest memory of his life. He sealed the door behind him and called Reeda’s name.

“I’m in here,” she answered.

She was in Sally’s room. He couldn’t help it. The utility closet opened off the back hall, and he stepped to it in his boots. He slid the plastic door open. Wet clothes were clumped unattended in the washing machine.

In the baby’s room, Reeda was sitting beside the empty crib.

“The laundry’s not done,” he said.

“I’m sorry, hon.”

“I guess you didn’t do the fuel cells either?”

“Please.”

His body filled the doorway, his hands on either jamb. Angry. “Reeda…”

“Not here, Davis.”

“Where else am I going to tell you? This is where you spend all your time.”

“Please, I said.” Her voice went quiet.

“I’m fucking tired…” he started, and then relented. His hands fell. “Get the laundry into the dryer. I won’t do everything.”

She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were red.

“Look. You can have the runabout tomorrow,” he said. “Go see your mom. I’m going to set the generators.”

Davis scrubbed down and changed out of his work clothes. In the utility closet, he switched the cells and started the generator. The laundry sat untouched in the washer. He put on a light suit, stepped out the back door and tightened its seals. The house’s filters had blown out last summer, and he hadn’t got them running again yet. If the season was over now, he’d have to get to that.

The back of the house faced away from the lake, across the rocky plain. Windblown dust smudged the flat horizon. The runabout was parked where he had left it, next to a pile of prefab sections he had bought last winter for an addition he had yet to build. The black object was still cabled behind the runabout’s seat.

There was time before dinner, he decided. He was going to walk out to the cold-house. He descended the steps and followed the runabout’s worn tracks around the corner of the house.

When he and Reeda had been dating, she had always wanted a stroll after dinner. He had lived in town then, working one of the large harvesters that sailed from the pier. “There’s not that much to see in Bremi,” he’d tell her. After you walked the main road and the lake-edge, there wasn’t much else. The depot took up most of the shore, and with its cold-houses, hangers, and hovers, it was too industrial to be picturesque.

But Reeda was from Citadel and didn’t care. “I like walks,” she would say. “And you need to learn what I like.” It was kind of a joke.

Whenever anybody asked Davis and Reeda how they met, they always described their second date. On the phone, Davis had joked that he didn’t really know her yet, so at the coffee shop, she had pulled out a box of photos. Baby pictures, family holidays, photos from nursing college. “I want you to really know me,” she had explained.

He had loved that in her, her fearless openness.

Whenever Davis told the story, Reeda always brought up that the picture he liked best showed her in her high-school uniform. She had played on the slide-ball team, and in the picture her arms were around two teammates in blue shorts and jerseys with large blue numbers. Reeda was number fourteen. “That’s the picture he went for straight away,” she would tease. “The man cannot resist a girl with a bit of leg.”

At the cold-house, he checked the seals on the door and climbed to the roof to check the hopper’s seals as well. The wind whipped across the flats and burned his nostrils. He climbed down, rotated the cells in the generator, set the timer, and headed back.

Gusts scoured the ground, and the mounds of cleared rock reached toward him with late afternoon shadows.

He found Reeda in the kitchen chopping apples and liver for dinner.

“What’s that thing?” she asked. She scraped the peels and end bits into the compacter.

He sat at the table and stretched his feet. “On the runabout? I don’t know,” he said. “Some kind of Mirfac probe. Tomorrow I need to check how much it damaged the skimmer.” A yellow notepad lay on the table. It showed a floor plan, the windows and doors carefully marked, the rooms labeled. One featured French windows opening to a rock garden. It was marked “Sally’s Room.”

“Did you deal with the laundry?” he asked.

She banged her knife and plate in the sink.

“I’m going to call Rass,” Davis said, getting up. “I’ll get it out of the runabout in the morning. Best not to touch it.”

The winds bit viciously. Flecks whisked off the lake, and pellets of foam stung Davis’ suit. It was miserable work sorting the skimmer out. One wheel had knifed under and been dragged across the hard mud. He had to take it apart and straighten its hub to get it to roll clean.

Rass had been mystified on the phone the night before. “It’s not enough their flyers are scanning the lake,” his friend had said. “Now Mirfac’s dropping probes to screw up our gear.”

Davis had avoided mentioning the visions. They felt like a violation. Wearing gloves had made no difference when he had wrestled the probe from the back of the runabout that morning. A gallery of faces had cascaded before him–Rass, Reeda, his parents and brother, Tam from college, Sally’s big hazel eyes–and then somehow, in a single voice, they asked, “You are Davis?”

“No!” He had been surprised by the hollow in his gut, as if he were about to cry. He repeated it in his mind: “No, no, no, no!”

It had seemed lighter. But that wasn’t right. It was still obscenely dense, but when he fought to lift it, it had lightened just enough to get over the basket’s lip. It dropped and stuck solidly in the ground. He had left it there in the corner by the back steps.

Davis tested the skimmer’s wheel, returned his tools to the cold-house, parked the runabout there, and walked back to the hover against the growing wind. The lake was pushing up the flats. A thin, orange tentacle reached into the groove scratched by the skimmer. He winched the skimmer onto the hover’s deck, fired up the fans, and drove it up to the cold-house where he closed it down for the season.

When he pulled up at the house in the runabout, Reeda was at the back door, staring at the probe.

“You should leave that alone,” he said, unzipping his hood.

Reeda turned and smiled. “It knows me,” she said. She kneeled down and rested her hand on the black convex shape.

He moved fast. “Reeda! Don’t!” He grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “It’s not safe.”

“Davis, this can’t be from Mirfac. It’s something else.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want you touching it.”

“It showed me Sally.”

“No, Reeda. It’s not real. I saw all sorts of things too.”

“You don’t understand. It’s communicating,” she said.

“It plays with your mind.”

“It… it let me talk to her. It said I can visit her.”

Davis held her by the shoulders. “Stop it! Stop it! Sally’s gone!”

He saw her eyes measuring his cruelty.

“Come inside,” he said. He slid his hands down to her wrists. “I’m going to call Rass to help get rid of it.”

“No,” she said. She shook her hands free.

“It’s not right to obsess. It doesn’t help. It hurts me to watch you suffer–”

Her whole physical self burst. “Why don’t you suffer!” She slammed his chest. “It makes me hate you. You don’t cry. It’s not fair. You don’t cry.”

“Reeda…” He hated this. They were going to fight. He was going to yell. “Reeda, Reeda!” He breathed. “I cried, you know I cried. You were there. I cried–”

“I’m suffering! I’m doing it all!” Her voice broke.

It shocked him–how the anguish inside her was endless. “I am not doing this,” he said. “I am not!” He pulled her hands off his chest and went up the steps.

In the morning, Davis woke to the alarm clock’s intermit-tent trill. He recalled rolling over and finding Reeda’s side of the bed cold. She had come in some time after dark, and he had called out to remind her to seal the doors.

He pulled a T-shirt over his shoulders and walked to the kitchen in his shorts. “Reeda?” he asked.

The room was empty. The kitchen had an outside door that faced the lake. It hung open a crack, and a track of mud led across the floor to the sitting room. “For God’s sake,” he said.

The baby’s room was closed. “How long have you been up, hon?” he asked through the door. “Reeda?” He knocked.

He heard her voice and leaned forward, turning his ear. She was crying. No, it was more coherent than that. Talking.

“Reeda!” he called again. This pushed his patience. He wanted to pound the door open and start yelling.

At the tea maker, he found his pouch from last night and held his mug under the spout. Then he pulled some dishtowels from a bottom drawer. The house was silent except for the wind outside.

Davis got on his knees and started mopping the muddy tracks, working his way from the sitting room to the kitchen door. She needs help, he thought. She needs… he didn’t know. He had held her before; he had comforted her once. Those days seemed so far away.

Maybe Rass was right, maybe she needed a doctor. It was so unreasonable–everybody wants to help Reeda because she’s not coping, and what help does he get? He gets to crawl on the kitchen floor mopping up dirt. That’s what he gets.

He reached the door and pushed the towels up against the metal seal. A foot-wide dent flattened the strips into which fit the door’s high-density seal.

“Shit!” He stood and looked back through the kitchen. Reeda had rolled the black object around the house from the back steps to the kitchen door, which was level with the outside. She had pushed it across the threshold, through the kitchen and sitting room, and into the baby’s room. He pulled the door shut and turned the seal. It wouldn’t go.

He headed back to the baby’s room. It must have taken her all night to get the probe in there. “Reeda!” He banged on the bedroom door. There was no answer. “Come on, Reeda.” He shook the handle. She had locked it.

Davis stood outside in the growing storm. The lake was an angry orange froth, the horizon lost in swirling clouds of gas. The air tasted of burnt plastic. He hadn’t bothered to suit up. Time was short.

The kitchen door was off, and he was pulling apart its outside seal, bolt by bolt. He had left Rass a message to come and help and then found a door section in the pile of prefab sheets behind the house. The wind had caught the flat aluminum, pulling his shoulder. He was going to cannibalize it to replace the kitchen door.

He attacked the next bolt, putting his whole weight on the wrench. It didn’t move. He picked up the crowbar and swung his anger at the wrench handle. The bolt jerked loose.

His eyes burned and the wind stung the back of his neck. It would leave scars. He pulled on the wrench, and the nut came loose enough to finish with his fingers. He would have to put on his suit if he wanted to continue.

A pale orange foam was spreading into the house, coating the kitchen floor and pebbling the furniture. Where the froth had melted, rivulets gouged veins in the floor.

Wooziness unsteadied him. He looked at the untouched door section behind him, its ring of sharp clean nuts still in place. There was no way he was going to get this door in place before the storm suffocated them both.

He stepped through the wound in the side of his house and hurried to the closed bedroom. The air in the house was heavy, still. Fumes sank past the back of his throat.

“Reeda,” he called, but didn’t wait for a response. Holding his elbows, he launched his shoulder against the door. And again. The hollow plastic buckled.

Reeda was on her knees. Her shoulders slumped over the slim mattress of the crib. Resting in her curled arms was the black object. Panic choked him. He linked his hands across her chest and pulled her off, dragging her into the sitting room. He fell, sitting behind her.

He breathed. “Reeda, we have to get out. The house isn’t safe.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Davis? Your face!”

He stood, grabbing her wrist, and pulled her up. “Come on.”

She looked back to the shape on the crib. Her weight shifted forward, and he pulled her around.

“Let me go,” she said. “It knows Sally.”

“Sally is dead. She died as a baby.”

Her eyes snapped into focus. “No, no. It knows her older. She’s talking. She drew a picture of a house and a bunny. She told me she wants a bunny.”

“Stop!” Davis yelled. “She was a baby. She died in the crib. You got up to feed her. You got up and she was dead!”

“I know! I know!” She turned calm. “Davis, listen. Don’t you want it to be true? It makes things from our memory. It’s why it came. It told me it can bring her back. It can take us to her. We can live with her.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“You’re not listening. You don’t know. You closed your-self to it.”

“Of course I did! Listen to yourself.”

She looked back at the crib. “Why don’t you want her back? She’s our baby.”

He followed her look. The black shape tilted itself upright.

Davis didn’t wait. He dragged Reeda through the kitchen. She stumbled against a chair, and then they were outside.

The wind tore at them. He held his collar over his mouth; his chin burned where it touched. Reeda put her sleeve to her face, burying her nose in the crook of her elbow. His eyes watered. The air was orange. At the limit of visibility, gusts curled over the crest down at the flats. The storm would have pushed the lake right up to the cold-house, but even there, in the teeth of the fury, it was their best refuge. Sealed tight.

They passed the prefab door and Davis found the tracks that led out to the cold-house.

He fell to one knee and retched violently. His throat and lungs hurt. She crouched beside him.

“Shallow breaths,” he said.

“We won’t make it,” she said.

“We have to. We’re almost… We’re halfway there.”

He lifted her to her feet, struggling. He stepped forward, but she stayed. “It can help us,” she said. “I believe it. We can live with Sally.”

Davis looked back. Near the house, the storm warped around the squat black cone, which hovered a foot above the ground. The shape moved through the gale like an equal force of nature.

Reeda saw it too. “See. It can take us away.”

“No!” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her into the wind. Her hands went immediately to her face. “Reeda, I need you! You have to get to the cold-house.”

She looked at him. He turned her again. “Go!” he said.

Davis turned back. The whine and scrape of the wind filled his ears. The thing moved toward him, the shape of the storm changing around it. He let the wind throw him forward. His hair was slick and burned his neck and forehead.

The dark solid slowed as he neared it.

He felt it touch his mind. “You are Davis,” it said. The voice cut out the storm. Reeda’s face flashed, just as he had seen it a moment before. Livid and raw, her earlobes half eaten away.

“Leave her alone!” he yelled, and opened his eyes. He didn’t realize he had closed them. It floated inches before his thighs.

It tilted as if to go around. He threw himself onto it. It filled his gut; his shoulders fitted around it. He wrapped his arms under, holding desperately. His face, his hands–he could feel nothing but the dizzying vibrations.

“Leave her,” he said.

Like a burst dam, he remembered it all. Taking Sally into his arms in the hospital. The sweet sour smell of her skin, the wispy hair on her pink scalp. Reeda’s tears of joy. He could still feel Sally’s weight in his arms, and his heart ached. “Take me,” he cried.

A convulsion grabbed. Every sensation froze. Something flowed in his mind, in his head, dripping, winding like a worm, a coursing voltage.

“Reeda,” he gasped. “Go!”

A shock of cold. Like a drain suddenly pulled, everything rushed out. Himself.

My wife, Reeda, will tell you I’m a complainer. She thinks I’m stuck in my ways and can’t accept anything new, but my host looks after me, and, honest truth, I don’t complain. I’ve been here… . . . I don’t know how long. The house is nice. I like this bright room with the bay window and the rock garden outside. Sally’s crib is here.

The other thing I don’t understand. I miss her. I miss her so much.

Peter Atwood is a writer and editor who lives and works in Ottawa, Canada, where he once grew up and to where he returned after living in Toronto, Seoul, and Cairo. He is an alumni of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and his story “All In” (Weird Tales, 2008) was nominated for an Aurora (Canada’s SF awards).

I am you, and you are me. We haven’t met, but we will, in some months. Then again in a year. More frequently after that for a stretch, though it doesn’t last. Or perhaps we never meet. Or just that single time, which was (will be) both meteoric and ephemeral.

Except I remember that weekend and you don’t.

I remember them all. All the moments. Even the ones you forgot, and those which never happened. They are all here, in this one place in my mind (in your mind).

Our time together was (will be) catharsis for you, but I will fall in love, like a spaniel. The world cracked open the day we met (or another day, in another place), and we became one. We have always been (will always be) one. We stand in two places at once, two times, two dimensions. We are separate. But I am in your head, in my head.

We grew up on either end of the same street. We both had grapevines growing in our yards. (Have you heard?) Yours in front by the mailbox, ours hidden like a naughty secret next to the fence out back. We only had three blocks between us, go figure, but the road stretched all the way from Antioch to San Juan, spanning a continent, spanning the ocean, spanning a million, million miles. Or only a millimeter.

It took too long for us to find each other. (Sometimes we never do. Sometimes it is too soon.) Once we had, we were inseparable. Except when we fought. Or never meet.

You always walked the difference between our houses, even though the hill between us was almost too steep to climb. I rode horseback (or drove a car) even though going to you is always downhill. Maybe it wasn’t laziness. Maybe it was precognitive thought–(Photons in two places at once, two times, two different dimensions, two heads, two minds, two hearts. Twins, inseparable even apart.)–the truth already, so subtle, so soon, so obvious.

Maybe it’s only common sense, the knowledge that once I’d gone downhill to find you, I’d have to return the way I’d come, and that hill was always too steep to climb.

Sometimes we met (will meet) in the middle. Halfway up the hill for you, halfway down for me. We’ll sit in the gutter next to the mailbox with the ugly plastic flowers zip-tied to its flag. (I stole one of those flowers, sun-yellowed and cracking, once when you were gone. Maybe you never noticed, or maybe the flowers were bright and new when you looked at them. Maybe you stole one, too.)

Did you know, growing up, we went to the same school? I don’t think you ever saw me. I watched you in the hallways. We passed each other every day at 11:25 and again in the break between Chorus and Ancient Greek Sexuality. I sat in the back of the class, three seats behind you. Sometimes, if I strained my eyes hard enough, I could just make out what you were writing on your lapscreen.

It usually wasn’t notes for class. Sometimes it was porn. Sometimes it was poetry. Or a suicide note.

Once, I came to class stoned on a cocktail of weed and microdots and Corona Extra (with a twist of lime). No one seemed to notice, but you gave me a cock-eyed glance as I shuffled past your desk. I let myself trail fingertips across your papers, and you didn’t think I saw you blush. Paper feels like velvet when you’re stoned.

One day you will ask me to tell you what it’s like to find your future (faith/destiny) in tarot cards or chemicals or the variations of oscillation in ceiling fans. Jesus loves you as much as your light fixture.

Of course, back then neither of us knew what I was seeing (would see/never saw). Neither of us understood. Those were daydreams or flights of fancy. (Nightmares.) Maybe. When everything happens at once, when everything could happen, when everything will happen, everything becomes equal. Potentials are realized. Negated. Equated.

I don’t like to think on it too much. Better to dwell on the happy moments, for they are infinitely equal to the unhappy ones. Infinitely better. (Infinitely worse.)

The first time I kissed you, we were in front of our old house. The house at the bottom of the hill. (Uphill in both directions back then. Now. Tomorrow.) I remember tonguing over your braces and worrying that we might get stuck together.

We only kissed. I didn’t want to share my bed with you. (Or my head with you.)

Much later (or on some other visit), you made a pallet on the floor beside me and spent the night. I dreamed I caused the apocalypse, gave birth to the antichrist, or learned to split photons with my mind (Option D: All of the above?), and you held me while I told you what I’d seen in those dreams. You said you never dreamed. I tried to open your eyes, but you couldn’t put yourself in my place. I wish I could make you understand.

There’s so much you don’t see (won’t ever see/haven’t seen yet). How is it that we are the same, but so different? Sometimes we can’t even speak the same language.

And yet, we talk for hours when we finally meet, filling up the space with words. You drive us to the lake (the caldera on top of the volcano/the dollar theatre double-feature/your house). Just off the edge of the lake is a small island, hardly more than a sandbar really. The water between the two shores comes halfway up my thighs. I hold my skirt up to keep it dry and you carry my shoes. Your pants are soaked through all the way to the crotch, but you don’t complain. There’s a wide plank-swing on the island, hanging between two trees. I thought we’d sit on it together to talk but, instead, I sit on it and you push me. We say only two words during the entire night.

“Higher?”

“No.” (Or “Yes.”)

We don’t kiss that night because I am so intimidated by you. You take me home when it’s too dark to see the stars. And then I’m with you two years later (last week). We are making out in your basement. When we come up for air, you take me to look at your paintings, and I accidentally kick over a cup of dirty mineral spirits, ruining the rug. For many years, the stain will look like spilled blood.

Our relationship dissolved after that (except sometimes it fermented, cemented, or otherwise improved). I apologized, but it was too late. By that point, I’d already broken your lamp (knocked it over with my head when I rose up from kissing you) or backed your car into the security-light post in the parking lot at Swif-T-Mart.

“Don’t drive when you’re high (drunk/splitting photons/in a hypnotic trance). Just don’t.” I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I’m a straight-edge. It’s true.

That was the year I discovered how to be everything and nothing. You were the one who showed me how to alter my consciousness. You got me drunk on a bucket of frozen margaritas, then helped me outside when I couldn’t stop coughing from all the pot smoke. You showed me transcendental meditation. You showed me the power of prayer.

You showed me how to be in two places at once, two times, two minds. How to be here and there.

You showed me Jesus (Krishna/Buddha/The Invisible Pink Unicorn). You tripped me and I hit my head. Or I tripped you and you hit your head. Or we were both dreaming. (I thought you said you never dreamed.) All our life (lives/past lives) passed in the flash that occurred during the moment right before our death.

One of us looked into a scrying mirror. One of us learned time travel (quantum mechanics/psychomancy/telepathy). One of us learned that photons exist in two places at once, or two times at once, and we learned to split them and share them with you, with me, with each other. One of us fell into a black hole.

Do you remember? So much happened between us in no time at all. Time did not exist for us. It’s overwhelming.

I say, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“That’s okay. You’re in the bathtub. It’ll wash down the drain.”

It didn’t.

“You’ll see,” you said, “Chemicals don’t change people.” (Or maybe you said, “Time travel is impossible.” Or “I can control your mind with my psychic powers.”)

But it wasn’t true.

Chemicals changed you. We both had psychic powers. You invented a time machine, and I used it.

In school I sat beside you, one row closer to the door. You smelled like watermelon lip gloss. We were fifteen and sixteen, and I still wanted to kiss you but wasn’t brave enough. Besides, you had a boyfriend who wore heavy metal T-shirts and smoked cigarettes.

The second time I kissed you (the first time) we were at Caitlín’s pool party just after we’d graduated from high school (elementary school/rehab). My very first kiss with anyone, ever. You had a different boyfriend every week, back then. Someone discovered how easy it was to play Spin the Bottle in a swimming pool with a plastic two-liter bottle half-filled with water. We held our breath and kissed where no one could see us.

When I am everywhere and nowhere, I revisit that moment. I hold you under the water. My eyes were open; yours are closed. Air bubbles cling to your lashes, and you put your hand on my breast. I taste your wintergreen breath-spray and the chlorine in the pool.

I once tried to tell you about that kiss. A hundred million times I’ve tried to tell you about that kiss in the pool, but you never remember, and you never believe me. I don’t know why I keep trying to remind you.

It’s okay. I remember. I remember you rescuing me. I remember calling you to come over to my apartment and sit with me when I couldn’t stand reality. How many times did you let me stay with you when I had no other place to go? (Where can you run to when you are everywhere and nowhere?)

When you moved away, I thought my heart would break forever. I never wrote you letters, but you wrote back anyway. You wrote me replies to questions I never asked you. When the Internet was invented we had secret liaisons on GEnie. You sent me poetry.

Once, you showed me my letters. I did not remember writing them. Once, I showed you a poem you sent me. You said you’d never seen it, hadn’t sent it. Both were only echoes, slipping across reality.

Sometimes, we never met at all. Sometimes we meet while you are away at college. I fly out to see you. We make love in the airport, and the world ignites in apocalypse while we bring each other to orgasm in a bathroom stall. We are frantic, as if we know with certainty that we only have a few moments left together.

“I love you,” I whisper. It echoes off the bathroom walls, and old women powdering their noses can hear us in the stall. I can smell their rosewater perfume even over the cleaning chemicals and urine.

“I love you more,” you say. “I love you a hundred times more.”

“That’s impossible. I love you to infinity.”

We are silent, both pondering the possibilities inherent in that statement. (“I hate you.”/”Don’t know you.”)

You ask the impossible question, the question that begins and ends everything.

“What does that mean? What is love to the infinite power?”

“I think it’s like a wavefunction. An uncollapsed wavefunction,” I say, but I don’t even know what that means, really. I was never any good at theoretical physics. (In another instance/timeline/universe, I don’t reply.)

“You don’t love me at all.”

“Don’t you believe in God? (Allah?/Zeus?/The Flying Spaghetti Monster?)” I say. I’m crouched with my feet up on the commode, in case airport security comes through. Men can be arrested for sharing a bathroom stall in an airport. “God is infinite. God is in everything, even a ceiling fan. God loves you.” (Or maybe, I talked about physics, instead–and the practical applications of the infinite.)

“I don’t believe in God. I’m an existentialist. I am God.” (Or maybe, we discuss alchemy, or paradoxes.)

“Then I am you,” I say, “and you are me, and I love you infinitely.”

“And you do not love me at all.”

I couldn’t argue.

What is infinity? Surely it is more than nothing? Isn’t it? I rest my cheek on your cheek. You kiss me again for the first time, and there is paper (a pill/a microchip) on your tongue (or a love note in your hand), but now it is on my tongue (in my hand).

I love you, like a puppy, and you don’t love me at all. But you are me, and I am you. We love each other just enough, and not too much. We are strangers, and we are the same person. We are crazy more than we are sane. Again and again, or only once, (or never) we make the wrong choice/the right choice. When every moment in our life is singular, there is no choice.

We are Love, infinite.

Terra was born on top of a volcano (in Hawaii) and since then has crammed a lot of unusual experiences into a relatively short number of years. She tamed a wild mustang before she turned sixteen. Before twenty-five, she traveled throughout the U.S. and to parts of Europe and Mexico. She has also held some unusual jobs, like training llamas and modeling high-heeled shoes (though not at the same time!) At her current day job she pokes holes in people for a small fee, in a tattoo studio north of Atlanta.

“Shrödinger’s Pussy” is her first published short story. You can find her online at www.terralemay.com.

Download in MP3 format.

Click to listen.

Download audio file (MultipleChoice.mp3)

Miker drove our fire engine through the dark neighborhood, the red emergency lights flash-synching to the deep bass of the rumbler siren. Parked cars and flower gardens and mailboxes flashed by, illuminated for seconds before sliding back to night. We used to turn the siren off on quiet streets like these to avoid disturbing the peaceful, sleeping taxpayers. Not anymore. Now we wanted everyone to know there were still those who braved the darkness.

But bravery didn’t mean we were stupid. While Miker steered, the rest of us aimed spotlights all around, jumping burn-deep shadows off everything we passed. As we entered one intersection Karl, the probie four months out of the fire academy, yelled, “Ripper!” For a moment we saw it–a black line reaching with stick arms. But then the ripper shifted and we realized it was only a tree’s shadow, cast by a front porch spotlight.

Karl muttered, “My bad.” While everyone had made the same mistake at some point, Miker grumbled, “Rookie,” from the front seat and we laughed.

The laughing stopped when we reached the fire.

“It’s fully involved,” Miker said. We stared out the engine’s large windows. Only three months ago, we rarely encountered fully involved house fires because someone would call 911 at the first sight or smell of fire. Now no one went out at night, and fires too often grew massive before people noticed.

“A guy’s hanging out the third floor window,” Karl said. “He has a kid in his arms.”

I cursed. Karl reached for the door handle.

“Do not open that door!” our squad leader, Lt. Helen Stivers, ordered.

Karl looked like he wanted to argue–hell, we all did–but we knew she was right. Helen had that weird mix of caring and kick-ass attitude found in all great leaders. During her three decades with the division, a few macho-cocky firefighters had defied her orders, but never twice. She’d once smashed a disobedient firefighter across the face with a tire iron. None of us would go against her.

“Forty-five seconds, boys,” Helen said calmly, stating how long it took our engine’s booms and remote spotlights to properly deploy. Once arrayed, the lights made it difficult for shadows to exist in our field of operation. “Keep a good watch,” she ordered.

So we searched for rippers. Our spotlights star-brighted the neighborhood until the fire receded to a dull glow, as if cowering before our power. Lights also shone in the houses around us, showcasing people peeking from behind the security blankets of curtains and blinds. In the house across the street, a picture window framed a pink-robed woman kneeling in prayer.

“The guy’s screaming,” Karl whispered, stating the obvious as all rookies did. I looked at the dying man, sickness gagging my throat. Helen counted the seconds out loud–fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–steeling our nerves and hers–as the superheated air boiling out the window cooked the man alive.

To the man’s credit, he didn’t let go of the little girl, holding her clear so the heat and smoke couldn’t reach her. After a final pleading glance at us, the man’s strangled face disappeared completely into the smoke. Only his arms hung down from the spewing clouds, like an unknown god debating whether to spare the girl’s life.

“Twenty-nine, thirty, damn it, we can’t wait,” Helen yelled. “Go!”

Karl opened the door and we sprinted toward the house. The man’s grip had weakened so he barely held the screaming girl. She was small, a toddler, and Karl and I held out our hands to catch her. But, as she fell, the tall blackness of a ripper rose from the ground beside us, protected from our spotlights by the barest sliver of a tree’s shadow. The damn thing had been waiting, hoping the man would drop the girl through its dark rip in space.

Trusting Karl to catch the girl, I flipped on my portable spotlight and illuminated the ripper. For a split second I saw another world through the ripper’s body–a surreal scene of darkness upon darkness, of shadow creatures slipping here and there screaming unknown obscenities and begging for my soul. Then the combined illumination from my spotlight and the engine’s lights overwhelmed the ripper and it singled out to nothing.

When I turned to Karl, he held the crying girl in his arms. She pushed away from his face, more afraid of his protective gear than the fire or ripper. I glanced up at the man’s down-slung body as Helen and Miker grabbed a ladder to try and save him.

He was dead by the time we reached him.

After we’d extinguished the fire and sent the girl to the hospital, Helen told Karl he’d done good. Karl kept glancing at the dead man’s sheet-covered body. Helen slugged the rookie in the arm to distract him.

“Least he didn’t get sucked into that ripper’s hell,” Karl muttered. “That’s gotta be worse than burning alive.”

As the wind shifted and blew across the sheeted man, carrying the greasy whiff of cooker-burnt meat, I prayed Karl was right.

After my shift, I arrived home to discover my sixteen-year-old daughter Sammy slumped on the sofa, watching the news on her reader. I leaned over to hug her, but she shot a scowl which stopped my arms in mid reach.

She held up her reader with a disdainful flick of her wrist, showing me the video of the fire and ripper. Obviously one of the neighbors had filmed us last night.

“The man’s name was Aaron Wills,” Sammy said in the word-flattening voice she’d adopted since her mother was taken. “His wife was staying across town helping a sick relative. Their daughter’s in Children’s Hospital. Expected to recover.”

“He was a brave man,” I said. “You have to honor courage like that.”

Sammy snorted, like she did anytime I mentioned an emotion or ideal not grounded in pure cynicism. For a moment I stared at her and didn’t see her close-cropped hair–sheared off in the bathroom by her own hand–or the black ripper tattoo on her cheek–reaching for her right eye as if to pull her sight into another dimension. Instead, I saw Sammy as she’d been at nine, the girl with flowing red hair whom I’d tickle until she laughed tears from her eyes. The girl who hugged me in a tight python grip before each shift, and always kissed my cheek as she whispered to be careful.

Now such love seemed beyond her. As if to taunt me, Sammy muttered how I should have let the ripper take the girl.

I couldn’t believe she’d say that. “Why?”

“She’d have ended up doing something worthwhile with her life.”

“And you know this…”

“A friend told me.”

I groaned. If Sammy had spent the night talking to a ripper, I was going to get an earful from my mother-in-law.

I got an earful.

Turned out my mother-in-law had caught Sammy talking to the ripper outside her bedroom window. Scared Arlene silly, seeing that monster in the backyard, Sammy grinning at it from the window like some idiot-struck firebug.

I tried telling Arlene not to worry. The ripper had appeared in our backyard for the last two weeks, but I’d installed spotlights outside Sammy’s windows, which kept the damn thing several yards from the house. However, Arlene had no patience with my ideas of safety. “Never your fault, is it?” she asked, tired razor-eyes slicing my words to ribbons. “What’s your plan? Let the damn things take your whole family?”

I tensed, the exhausted part of me screaming to beat the crap out of her. But instead of giving in to anger, I took a deep breath as I looked at Arlene’s tired face and saw my wife’s. Or, I saw what Carie would have looked like in another two decades if we’d been allowed to grow old together. Red hair turned grey. Thin bones and muscles etched with strength and determination.

Arlene and I both knew Sammy’s morbid fascination with the rippers resulted from her mother being killed by one. Well, not killed. Disappeared. Transformed. Whatever you called the painful things those creatures did to those they took.

When Sammy had first talked to the ripper outside her window, I feared she’d let it in. For some reason, rippers only appeared when there was no light, and they wouldn’t cross the simplest of barriers, whether a shut door, a closed glass window, or even a tent’s fabric. They wouldn’t follow ventilation shafts or bends and curves inside buildings, almost as if they were truly shadows which couldn’t leave the path of whatever blocked their invisible light.

Some people said rippers didn’t enter our houses out of a minor respect for humanity. Others searched for a scientific reason. But in the end, all that mattered was if you left a door open at night, or a window cracked more than a hair, a ripper might reach in and steal you away.

With such devils outside our homes, it’s a wonder anyone slept at all. Even during the day, everyone looked numb and scared. Few worked their jobs anymore. Instead, people rushed out by day to find food and supplies, and rushed back home before night fell.

I thanked Arlene for watching Sammy. Arlene sniffed and apologized for being so angry–”It’s just the tired speaking,” she said–and walked to her car.

“My fault,” Sammy droned from the sofa after Arlene had driven away. “You said not to act weird while Gramie was here. ‘Act weird.’ Your words.”

I winced at the accusation. Instead of taking her bait, I told Sammy not to worry about her grandmother. “She simply misses your mom.”

If I expected Sammy to say she also missed her mother, that was expecting too much from my emotionally disconnected teenage daughter. Sammy stared at me blankly before returning to her reader.

Unable to handle any more drama, I walked to my room, closed the door, and fell into bed to cry.

I’d met my wife two decades back. Carie was a successful artist who painted beautiful illustrations for children’s books. She also spent her weekends volunteering as a rural firefighter. Her tiny department responded to car crashes and brush fires thirty minutes outside the city.

One night my department was called to assist Carie’s. We arrived at a full-gone warehouse fire to see Carie dragging a fellow firefighter overcome by heat. I’ll never forget the sight of that determined woman–red hair crowding her facemask as she dragged a man twice her size to the ambulance.

After we beat down the fire, Carie and I talked. Carie said when she wasn’t volunteering with her department, she worked as a freelance artist. “My last book was Boo Boo Gets a Choo Choo,” she’d said, wiping sweat and black soot from her face.

How could you not love someone like that?

Because of Carie’s experience, she understood the dangers and stresses of my job. Where another spouse might have worried about my safety, Carie waved it off. In fact, I worried far more about her volunteer work than she ever did about me.

The rippers stole her on the night they’d first appeared. She’d been on a routine medical call, walking toward a house where a child had broken his arm, when a ripper appeared. Carie vanished before her squad could react. All they heard were her screams echoing from nothingness as the ripper tore and twisted her body and soul into things they were never meant to be.

I still wonder about the hell she was stolen away to.

I pray it’s a nice place.

I cried until I fell asleep, and woke in the late afternoon. To my surprise, Sammy wasn’t in her room or the backyard. Instead, I found her in the basement studio, painting on my wife’s smart canvas. I almost yelled to get away from the canvas, but caught myself. Carie didn’t need the computerized art system anymore, and if Sammy was still interested in painting, I should encourage her.

I walked over to see what she was painting, but Sammy raised her hand to stop. All through Sammy’s youth, Carie had spent hours each week painting with our daughter. Sammy had always kept her paintings a secret until they were finished, at which point she’d reveal her work with a dramatic flourish of her hands. I smiled at the memory, and assumed she was about to do this again.

Instead, I heard a computerized click, followed by the stylized swish of the canvas’ trash being deleted. Sammy yanked the memory sliver from the canvas’ control board and threw it to the floor, crushing its crystal shape beneath her right boot.

I screamed, and shoved her away from the canvas. Part of me heard Sammy hit the basement wall, but I didn’t care. I touched the smart canvas with my finger, pulling up the memory. Where before there had been hundreds of paintings created by Carie and my daughter, now there were none.

“What did you do?” I asked, my body shaking. That’s when I noticed Sammy’s nose bleeding from hitting the wall. Ever my daughter, she stood up as if she didn’t hurt, smirking at my anger.

“It’ll be over soon,” she said nonchalantly, wiping her bloody nose with the back of her hand. Her blood sparkled starry highlights in the smart canvas’ blue light.

“What’ll be over? Your painting?”

“The rippers. They’ll only be here a few more weeks.”

I remembered my daughter’s talks with the ripper outside her window. I chuckled nervously.

Sammy walked up the stairs, leaving me with the blank canvas. I tapped the controls and accessed the recovery program Carie had installed after a crash had deleted one of her paintings. The canvas began rebuilding what was left of its remaining memory as I climbed the stairs to tell Sammy dinner would be ready in a half hour.

Our department ran on modified Kelly schedule, meaning I worked forty-eight hours straight with four days off. Even though I always slept soundly in a noisy firehouse, at home I couldn’t rest. Every few hours I’d obsessively pace the house, making sure the windows and doors were closed tight.

Some time well after midnight I passed Sammy’s door and heard her whispering. I didn’t wish to disturb her privacy. But I also needed to apologize for what had happened in the basement.

I knocked on the door, which creaked open. “Sammy, I wanted to…” I stopped, fear slamming the words from my mind. The spotlights I’d rigged outside Sammy’s room were off, and her window stood wide open with a ripper filling half her room. Its flat body hovered like a shadow swollen on pain.

I grabbed Sammy, hoping to throw her into the hallway before the ripper took her. But instead of taking my daughter, the ripper inhaled deeply–for lack of a better word–and sucked its shadow back out the window. For a fleeting moment I saw the ripper’s portal. Saw its light-gone world, where shadow nightmares flickered and howled–creatures which my body felt more than saw. Then the ripper was gone.

I slammed the window and latched it shut. Sammy turned the bedroom lights on as the worst shakes since Carie’s abduction hit me.

Fury ran Sammy’s face. “You dumb asshole,” she screamed, kicking me hard. “That was mom.”

“Carie?” I stammered. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Sammy looked at me like I was slow, and maybe I was. “That ripper is mom,” she said. “Or what’s left of mom, after the rippers changed her.”

“Sammy, it’s trying to trick you. It wants to snatch you away.”

Sammy kicked her bedroom wall, leaving a dent in the plaster. She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Do you know why rippers take people?”

I waited for Sammy to say what she knew. After all, why rippers kidnapped people was the only question worth asking in today’s world.

“Well?” I finally asked.

“Well, what?”

“Why do they take people?”

Sammy giggled. “You’ll just have to find out.”

That made no sense, like so many of my conversations with Sammy since her mother had disappeared. In my mind I laughed, I cried, I screamed. I wanted to embrace her in a massive hug until some sense entered her mind–to tell her it wasn’t her fault or mine that her mother was gone. But I also knew that to Sammy, everything she said made perfect sense, which only frustrated me even more.

I looked out the window. The ripper had disappeared back into the dark. I also noticed both outside spotlights lying on the ground. Sammy must have knocked them down after opening her window.

I told Sammy to leave the bedroom light on until morning so the ripper wouldn’t return. Sammy bit her lower lip. “I suppose you’re mad,” she said.

“You suppose?”

Sammy sighed. “Mom wouldn’t hurt me. She simply misses me.”
I hugged her gently and told her to go to bed. As I walked down the hall to my bedroom, I heard Sammy say in her soft, low voice, “I can’t be here forever, you know.”

I didn’t know if she was still talking to me, or if she was muttering at the ripper again. But I didn’t stop to find out.

By the start of my next shift, Arlene had gotten a few good nights sleep and was in a better mood. “It’s not the lack of sleeping that burns me,” Arlene said. “It’s the stress of knowing those things are out there–and that Sammy doesn’t realize how dangerous they are.”

I thanked her for all she’d done for me and Sammy, and showed her the key locks I’d installed on all the windows so Sammy couldn’t open them. Arlene seemed satisfied by that, and said she’d see me when my shift was over.

At the fire station, Miker, Karl, and Helen sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee. I told them about the ripper, and how Sammy had opened a window for it. The only thing I left out was that Sammy believed the ripper was Carie.

“Sammy’s lucky,” Helen said. “Most rippers, they get a shot at someone, they take it.”

“I know. But I keep thinking about what Sammy said, that this ripper wouldn’t hurt her. You ever hear of a ripper taking a special interest in someone? I mean, Sammy’s been talking to the damn thing for weeks.”

Helen lowered her voice. “One of my friends is high up in the FBI. She told me there have been quite a few cases of rippers talking with people. The problem is: these people eventually jump into the ripper. So while most rippers are content to simply steal people, a few want to talk you into doing the deed.”

Miker and Karl nodded knowingly, as if the two idiots hadn’t been as clueless as me. From the limited interactions scientists had with rippers, we knew they were intelligent. But actually conversing with them was difficult. Most rippers wouldn’t speak, and those few who did rarely made sense, sometimes claiming to be friends and family, sometimes spinning lies as easily as truth. Sort of like when Sammy and I talked about anything deeper than what I was cooking for supper. Half the time we didn’t understand what the other was truly saying.

Karl, being a typical probie and needing to be the center of attention, mentioned a neighbor who’d been taken a few days back. “People heard his screams up and down the block. What makes a person scream like that?”

We all shrugged. Whatever the rippers did to people, it hurt like hell.

“I think rippers have been here before,” Helen said. “That’s why our religions have so many depictions of devils and hells.”

“Nonsense,” Miker said. “Hell’s a place of fire, not darkness.”

This was too much for me to ponder. “Maybe I should put more spotlights in my backyard.”

“False security,” Helen said. “There’s always going to be shadows those things can hide in.”

“But why are they doing this?” Karl asked.

Helen muttered how better people than us had failed to understand the rippers’ motives. Before she could say more, the fire bell rang, pushing our minds onto nothing but work.

During the day, the runs felt like old times. Car accidents. Heart attacks. False alarms at the few schools still open. But as the sun sank and the civilians rushed home, the fire station lost its timelessness and became a great smoldering stack of now. We closed the front doors. Flipped on the spotlights. The station beamed like the heart of the sun, illuminating several city blocks in our false security of hope.

I think if people could, we’d light the whole world so there’d no longer be night. But light can’t remove every shadow.

There were no calls during the next few hours. Feeling daring, I opened the station’s side door and stepped outside. As my eyes adjusted to the spotlights, I noticed a tiny sliver of shadow between two parked cars on the street. Holding my hand before my eyes like a shield, I walked toward the cars. Sure enough, the shadow there squirmed and quaked as a ripper tried in vain to reach me. The ripper smelled of musk and sandalwood, like the incense my wife used to burn while painting.

“Carie?” I asked.

The ripper floated around its box of shadow as the word Yes caressed my mind, a word mixed with the sensation of Carie hugging me tight. I wanted so badly to reach in and touch the ripper, to find out if it was really her. But I knew the ripper was merely trying to trick me.

“Why don’t you like the light?” I asked, leaning over for a closer look. “Why don’t you enter our homes?”

The ripper merely stared–if a faceless shadow can stare–before opening the portal to its world. As always, the ripper world was pure darkness but, while my eyes couldn’t see anything, my mind saw all too clearly. I watched helplessly as a woman fell through the ripped dark–red hair blowing, her screams building louder and louder as a thousand cutting shadows sliced in and out of her skin, twisting and tearing her to pieces. As a vomit taste slicked my mouth, I realized this was Carie. This was what had happened to the woman I loved when the rippers stole her away.

But Carie wasn’t dead. As the ripper caressed my mind, I felt my wife’s lips on my own. Why don’t you and Sammy join me? she asked softly, her thoughts merging with mine. I miss you something bad.

I stumbled back, falling to the sidewalk as the ripper squirmed to escape its shadow prison. My legs wouldn’t work–except to run toward Carie, to join her in darkness. Ignoring my wife’s haunting needs, I crawled away, each inch and foot a battle to reach as Carie begged me to join her–the imagined smell and feel of her body beside mine smothering my every rational thought. Finally, I reached the firehouse door and crawled inside, slamming it shut as I shook and cursed.

Unfortunately, Helen happened upon me a few moments later and instantly knew I’d had a close call with a ripper. After letting me move past my shakes, she blessed me out, yelling that I’d better not be on some suicide trip. “You will not put this squad in danger,” she warned.

“I won’t,” I said. “I was just curious about the damn things.”

“And did you learn anything?” she asked sarcastically. I remembered her comment about better people than us not knowing what the rippers wanted. When I didn’t answer–not daring to mention that my wife might now be a ripper–Helen walked away shaking her head, obviously irritated.

Once I was alone, I called Arlene to check on Sammy. Arlene said Sammy had already gone to bed, even though it was barely ten o’clock. I thanked my mother-in-law, and told her I’d swing by the house in the morning. While I didn’t mention it to Arlene, I wanted to talk with Sammy about this ripper. About whether or not it might truly be Carie.

The entire squad felt squirrelly that night, so around midnight we boarded our engine and drove the traffic-emptied streets, the only vehicles we passed, an occasional police car or ambulance. We responded to a heart attack call shortly after 2 a.m., but otherwise the night was quiet.

We were driving back to the station when Sammy called my cell phone. It was strange for Sammy to call in the middle of the night; more so when she didn’t speak. I listened to the silent phone and heard crickets chirping and the wind blowing. Then my mother-in-law screamed, “Get away from her!”

They were outside. I knew from the shiver which ran along my nerves that Sammy had gone outside to talk to that damn ripper.

Helen asked what was wrong. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say what I knew. “My house,” I gagged. Helen motioned for Miker to crank the lights and sirens as we raced to my neighborhood.

“Don’t be mad, Dad,” Sammy whispered over the receiver. Her phone hit the ground. I heard my little girl scream in horrible pain, a sound which echoed far longer than any parent should ever be forced to hear it.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, even though Sammy was no longer listening. “I’m on my way.”

We arrived to find my mother-in-law crying on the front lawn, oblivious to the dangers around her. We lit the scene and I asked where Sammy was. Arlene pointed to the grass beside my boots.

There lay Sammy’s cell, the line still open and connected to my phone.

How do you grieve for those who might be dead, or might be alive? Who might return, or might never be seen again?

Helen told me to take all the family leave I needed, but there was nothing for me at home but tears for a daughter and a wife whom I prayed still lived on the ripper’s dark-hell world.

Arlene told me she’d checked on Sammy in the middle of the night and found her asleep. She’d then gone to the bathroom, at which point Sammy ran outside to talk to the ripper. Arlene chased her, but the ripper only wanted Sammy.

I told Arlene it wasn’t her fault, but she didn’t believe me. After she’d gone home, I wandered my empty house, feeling Sammy’s lingering presence. Her bed covers turned down. The slight indention from her head on the pillow.

In the basement art studio, the smart canvas glowed its usual blue light. A message said the retrieval system had recovered the last painting viewed, probably whatever Sammy had been looking at before she’d deleted and destroyed everything else.

My finger hovered over the ‘view’ button, but I couldn’t handle the past right now. I told the canvas to save the painting and walked back upstairs.

At the start of the next shift I returned to the fire station, grateful to be around my only remaining family.

The next two weeks passed with numbing speed. Helen kept a close watch on me, afraid I’d go suicidal, and to my shock I considered it. On night-time runs, I obsessively watched the rippers flickering just beyond our spotlights. I found myself edging toward the damn things, wondering if I had the guts to follow my family. Wondering if Carie and Sammy were among the rippers prowling around us.

To keep me safe, Helen stuck me with routine tasks like manning the apparatus controls. She and the squad also refused to leave me alone for even a few minutes.

Then came the shelter fire.

The fire broke out in an abandoned megastore converted to a shelter for people with nowhere to escape the rippers. Because it was night, the people inside were afraid to leave the building, even with the fire beating down on them. They stampeded to rooms not filled with smoke and flames and waited for us to save them.

We were the second engine to arrive. After setting up our spotlights, Helen ordered Miker and Karl to enter an emergency door and do a quick check. Less than a minute later, they dragged two young men out.

“We heard more people yelling,” Karl said as the EMTs began working on the victims.

Helen glanced at me, trying to decide if I was together enough to risk going into the building. “Okay, we four go in, find as many people as we can, get them out.”

Karl and Miker nodded and walked back in. Helen checked my air supply and facemask and muttered, “Don’t screw us up.” I breathed a cool swallow of bottled air and followed her in.

The billowing smoke was so thick I couldn’t see. I heard myself breathing, always breathing, and heard the roar of the fire, a raspy Sammy, Sammy which boomed louder and louder the deeper we walked. Just when I thought we wouldn’t find anyone, a faint cry echoed across me. I grabbed Helen and pulled her toward the sound. We entered a new room to find five people huddled beside an emergency exit. They crouched against the tile floor, breathing what little good air was left.

Helen reached for the emergency door release, but one of the women stopped her. “Rippers,” the woman yelled. “Just outside. They already got one of us.”

Helen waved me closer as she radioed in our position and situation. The smoke was building, the heat rising. This spot wouldn’t be safe much longer. “We can’t take them back through all that smoke,” Helen yelled.

I pushed against the door release to test it, opening it slightly and closing it again. “We wait,” I yelled. “Let them bring spotlights to this side of the building.”

But waiting is hard with hell screaming over your shoulder. We passed our facemasks around, letting the men and women take turns breathing clean air. But the smoke built up more and more, and the fire burned nearer and nearer. The spotlights still hadn’t reached our door when an explosion knocked us to our feet. A flash of flame washed over us, and smoke filled the entire room.

“We go now!” Helen yelled as she grabbed a woman beside her. One of the men screamed that he’d take his chances here, but I pulled him to his feet and aimed my spotlight at the door. Helen kicked the door open and we pushed the five people out as we shone our lights around, looking for rippers.

“Stay close,” I yelled as we coughed in the chilled outside air. Each tree and bush and blade of grass cast a flickering sliver of dark. An engine’s spotlights sliced the smoke from around the corner of the building, barely a hundred feet away.

“Go!” Helen yelled. We ran for the light, Helen in the lead, me bringing up the rear and pushing the scared people along. A tall woman ran next to Helen and, as we neared the spotlights, I saw she had red hair. But even as such a worthless detail registered in my mind, the woman disappeared, the barest shimmer of a ripper standing in her place. Her screams echoed across the dark empty all around.

“Get away,” one of the men yelled. He panicked, slamming me against the side of the building, my helmet hitting hard on the cinderblock wall. I collapsed–dazed–as the man bolted across the shadowed night and fell into another ripper. I again saw a glimpse of that dark world as the man begged for mercy. Then Helen stood before my face and pulled me up.

The other two men and one woman we’d been trying to rescue stayed with us, and Helen placed them between us and our spotlights. She talked the civilians through their fear–”Just keep going, we’ve got you”–until her light crashed to the ground, a ripper vanishing from where Helen had stood. As I would have expected of Helen, she didn’t scream at whatever the ripper did to her. Only a single, pained groan floated through the air, followed by silence.

I threw my spotlight at the vanishing ripper. “Go ahead,” I yelled. “Take me.”

A greater dark rose before my face, ripping space and time into whispers and tastes–the roar of the fire becoming Carie’s body beside my own, the fire engines’ comforting flashing lights becoming Sammy’s final cry as the ripper stole her away. As my world disappeared into the ripper’s darkness, my arms and legs tore into base strings of muscle. My throat spasmed once before being pulled through my mouth even as it refused to stop screaming. The ripper giggled, and I suddenly knew the worst was yet to come. It would merge our souls. Me into it, and it into me. Worse, the bastard would never stop laughing at what it’d done to me.

And then, just like that, the pain disappeared.

I remained partly inside the ripper, it in me, but the perverted amusement I’d felt moments before was gone. Instead, my daughter’s monotone voice whispered, “It’s okay, Dad.”

The ripper seemed irritated at this interruption and tried to dispose of Sammy. But Sammy merely flicked herself from wherever she was and appeared alongside me in the ripper. For a moment the ripper’s consciousness screamed before it was absorbed by Sammy–just like the ripper had been trying to do to me.

I fell to my knees, unable to understand what was going on. I was split between two worlds. I distantly felt the three people I’d been trying to save, who huddled around my body back on earth. But I also floated in a world I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Darkness surrounded me. My eyes were worthless, even as I saw millions of shadows circling and laughing and tearing into one another with wild abandon.

“I’m one of them,” Sammy said, both of us sharing the ripper’s body. “Mom promised I’d be with her if I came here.”

And just like that, my wife’s consciousness appeared in the ripper with me and Sammy. Carie hugged me, if I could say she still had arms to touch with. Instead, she and Sammy were ghosts, haunting the strange emptiness which was the ripper’s body.

Seeing I didn’t understand, they opened themselves to me.

I saw the rippers–ancient, powerful, their way of life completely alien to humanity. They traded consciousness the way we communicated words. Their shadow bodies were merely containers to hold an eternal parade of souls–souls which continually merged and changed with each interaction among the rippers. A strong consciousness might absorb a weaker, only to be enveloped by an even stronger soul moments later, and split into two new rippers the next second. But nothing was ever truly lost as the rippers merged and split and merged again.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Imagine we’re talking,” Sammy said. “Imagine human souls as simple words. Each time you spoke, your consciousness would go out, mixing with each person who heard you speak. As people repeated what you said, you’d continually be turned into something new. But you’d also remain. Changed. Different. But still partly you.”

I shook my head, vertigo shoving my mind as I felt a renewed vision of Carie and Sammy holding me. But this wasn’t the Carie and Sammy I remembered. I felt the hundreds of rippers which had already merged with them. While Carie and Sammy still loved me, they were also quite capable of tearing my soul to shreds for their own needs.

“You make it sound bad,” Carie whispered in her dream of a voice. “But it’s so simple: The rippers need an occasional infusion of new consciousness. This time they chose earth. It’s a true honor for humanity.”

“Honor?” I asked, shocked at these creatures which were no longer my wife and daughter. “Rippers steal people. Tear them to pieces. And you call that honor? It’s wrong! No other word. Wrong!”

Sammy giggled. “Wrong’s a human creation. Rippers don’t understand the concept.”

I screamed as Carie and Sammy dug into my soul, each licking different pieces of me, each tasting and deciding which parts to take into their own beings. I knew I should simply give in. That this would let me live with them forever. But instead, a familiar anger built in me. I kicked and bit and hit and yelled, a ghost fighting ghosts. Unable to tell if this was truly my body or merely an illusion, but still refusing to give in.

Carie and Sammy paused.

“You don’t want to be with us?” Carie asked, hurt by my decision. The anguish of tears formed in my eyes, but I knew that wasn’t my emotion. It was hers. Theirs.

“No,” I said. “I won’t live like this.”

I thought Carie would be angry with me, but she only laughed. She danced her mind through the air like her fingers used to fly across her magical canvases. But instead of creating colors and pictures, this time the rippers swirled to her motions, each oblivious to the changes the humans they’d stolen were making to their world. Carie dipped her being into a passing ripper. An echo of her soul lodged in the creature, which had been about to snag the scared woman who still clung to my body back on earth. The ripper released the woman and floated away, unsure why it now felt shame for the deed it’d almost done.

“This is art,” Carie said. “The deepest of arts.”

I remembered Carie sitting before the smart canvas in her studio, Sammy working at her side, and I was tempted to stay with them. So sorely tempted. But the Carie I loved would never have taken our daughter to a world like this. The Carie I knew was gone, and I didn’t like where what remained of her and Sammy were going.

“No,” I said again.

For the briefest of moments their souls locked together, swimming back and forth into each other, trading bits of themselves as they discussed my fate. Then Sammy, and Carie, kissed me on the cheek.

“We’ll miss you,” Sammy said, letting me see her a final time as the red-haired child hugging me before each shift.

Carie and Sammy stretched me and sewed me and stitched me back together before throwing me toward reality. I woke to find the people from the fire still huddled around me in fear. I stood them up and told them everything would be okay. I then led them toward the fire engine and the protection of its lights.

A few days later the rippers disappeared.

There are endless theories about what the rippers wanted, but I believe what Carie and Sammy had shown me. That the rippers are built for darkness. Are unable to tolerate even the faintest light shining into their world. But the idea that they didn’t enter our homes and buildings out of respect for us is bullshit. They did that because it made the hunt more fun. Granting an illusion of safety made us more afraid–and the more we feared, the more the rippers enjoyed feasting on our final moments of agony.

I refuse to accept the rippers’ belief that “wrong” is merely a human creation. Now that I’ve been to their world, I know their way of life is wrong. Absolutely wrong. Until I die I’ll scream this simple truth.

But maybe, just maybe, the rippers can be forced to change.

After returning home from fighting the shelter fire, I slept for two days. When I finally woke, I wandered into the basement, where the smart canvas glowed its gentle blue light.

I pulled up the single piece of art the canvas had recovered. It was a finger-painting of our family, created by Sammy when she was only six. Carie stood beside me–red hair down to her shoulders, her outsized-drawn hand holding my own. On the other side of me stood Sammy, a giant green grin touching both of her circle-face cheeks. Her cartoon hand also held mine.

I smiled, feeling echoing smiles from the remnants of Carie and Sammy now living inside me.

I wondered what Carie and Sammy would be like, years from now if the rippers ever returned. Maybe the art they hoped to create would actually work. Maybe we scared humans really could change the rippers. Maybe whatever remained of my wife and daughter would be the conscience which finally stopped the rippers from doing such evil.

Or maybe I’m lying to myself, afraid to see the truth of life.

Seeing no choice but to keep to my flicker of hope, I saved Sammy’s painting and shut off the canvas. I then walked back into the night to see if the station needed me to work an extra shift.

Jason Sanford has published a number of stories in Interzone, including the novella “Sublimation Angels,” which was a finalist for this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novella. He is also a two-time winner of the Interzone Readers’ Poll. His fiction has also been printed in Analog, Year’s Best SF 14, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Tales of the Unanticipated, while his story “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” was reprinted last year in Apex. His website is www.jasonsanford.com.

Say you’re lost in the hustle-bustle of the local farmer’s market in search of some shiny bibelot for your girlfriend, and you find your mother mouth-to-mouth with a man who isn’t your father. In fact, he’s nothing like your father. He’s skinny and shaggy and short. You tell yourself that if he at least looked like your father, you could stomach the scene. Deep down you know that’s not true.

And maybe that’s not how it happens. Maybe you track her down. Maybe you climb the fruitless mulberry in front of their house and that’s how you cut your leg. Maybe you bought yourself some night-vision goggles off of eBay. Maybe you’re watching and waiting, and when you finally do see them together, in their bedroom, naked, you drop a bomb of vomit onto an unsuspecting yard gnome below.

You think, Get your fucking hands off my mother.

But she’s not your mother, is she? She used to be. Before she moved in here. Before she changed her name. Before the funeral.

Say this was your mother, and this is your life. You’d be here too, like me. You’d hear about Porter from a friend of a friend, and you’d show up at his doorstep with a hundred bucks and a wrenching knot in your gut.

Porter opens the door. “Yeah?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

“You’re Hadley?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“All right. Come in.”

I follow him inside. My mind spins, but I still notice that his home is a shitty place. Every step, my feet crunch down on trash and squish on soggy carpet. Lines of duct tape patch a few holes in the wall, but most are left gaping. I stop breathing through my nose before I have time to identity the sour stench assaulting the air.

He takes me to an empty room. At this point, the walls are more hole than wall. Under more relaxed circumstances I would crack up over such irony as the tarp on the floor, but I’m more in the mood for weeping.

“You brought the money?” he says.

I nod and hand him the bill.

He gives it back. “Not until after.”

“Oh.”

He takes another look at the money. “That’s a hundred dollar bill, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen one before. In person, I mean.”

“Oh.” I stuff the thing in my pocket, almost violently.

“Should I get undressed?” he says, and starts for his belt.

“I’m not here for…that.”

“I know, man.” He grins. “Just some people like me naked when they’re doing it. I don’t mind either way.”

I consider this. “Keep your clothes.” Part of me, though, wants to give the other answer. The thought makes me shudder.

“Whatever floats your boat.” He kneels. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I take a step forward, and then pause. “Is this going to hurt you?”

“Fuck, man, what do you care?”

“I care.”

“You say that now. Let’s see if you ask me again in five minutes.”

“Maybe I’m not your normal clientele.”

He sighs. “No, we don’t feel much pain, so clear your fucking conscience.”

“Are you just telling me that or do you mean it?”

He runs his hand down his face. “Look, man. You can either do this or go home. But no one ever goes home, so just face the fucking music and get on with it.”

So I do.

I start off by slapping him hard across the face, and go from there. Five minutes later, I’m not asking, “Is this hurting you?”

Five minutes later, I’m straddling his chest, smashing in his mangled face with my bloody fists, over and over and over. He’s shouting, “Stop it!” and I’m loving every second of it.

Hafwen’s nickname is Zippy. She likes to skip and sing about the dishes as she’s washing them and write poetry on waterproof paper in the rain. She’ll call me up just to tell me that she’s discovered the name for those imprints left in the skin when you press it against a textured surface too long. A frittle.

So when I see her sitting cross-legged on my bed, motionless, not frowning, but not smiling either, I know something’s wrong.

I sit beside her and kiss her. “What’s up, Haf?”

She doesn’t look at me. “I have to tell you something.”

My insides erupt. I’m afraid.

I’m afraid her feelings for me were just a frittle in her heart and now she wants to end what we have before I even have the chance to tell her I love her.

“Tell me,” I say. I try to sound brave, but I fail.

“My mom,” she says. “She’s a Remade-American.”

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know Cambree wasn’t your real mom.”

“No, Hadley. Cambree is my real mom. She’s a Remade-American.”

“Oh God…I’m so sorry. When did this happen? I saw her last week.”

“No, Hadley. She was a Remade since before she married my dad.”

“Oh.”

“I’m a Remade, Hadley.”

“But…” I can’t think of anything else to say except, “You don’t look like one of them.”

“One of them?”

“I’m sorry. I…”

She looks at me now. “I should’ve told you before we started going out, but…I liked you so much. I wanted you to get to know me first before you…you know…decided.”

“Oh.”

“I told myself that I wasn’t lying to you, because I never said that I was alive, but keeping this from you was deceitful and I’m sorry. I understand if you’re angry at me. I’m angry at me too.”

“I’m not angry,” I say, and that’s true. I’d have to be feeling something to feel angry.

“I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one,” she says.

“Me neither.”

She puts her face in the bowl of her hands and makes crying sounds. No tears come out, obviously.

I almost put my arm around her, but I don’t.

“I can’t keep living this way, Hadley,” she says. “I’m a Remade. I’m tired of hiding it.”

I want to tell her, “Don’t worry.”

I want to tell her, “I’ll love you no matter what.”

But I fail.

I thought Hafwen was happy before. But she tells me she wasn’t. She says she was smiling on the outside and crying on the inside.

Now, she cries a lot.

Now, she’s pale, because she’s stopped wearing makeup. She’s cold, because she’s stopped wearing heated clothing. Her hair is white, because she’s stopped dyeing it. She looks dead and says she’s the happiest she’s ever been.

I should be happy for her. Instead, I keep thinking about how someone else used to inhabit her body. I can’t look at her the same way anymore.

She’s used.

Second-hand.

Impure.

She says a lot of Remade girls try to pass for living, because they’re ashamed of who they are. They buy into the whole natural is ugly paradigm. But natural isn’t ugly, she says. Death isn’t ugly.

Whether she’s right or not, I don’t know.

If there is a beauty in death, I don’t want to see it.

I hate death. I hate that my mom died of thirst in a ditch on the side of the road. People drove by, but they didn’t see her. They didn’t hear her.

Now when Hafwen stands right in front of me, I try to look through her. When she talks to me, I try to tune out her voice. Deep down, I know she doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. I also know that Porter doesn’t deserve the beatings I give him every Tuesday morning.

I just don’t care.

“Animal brains have to be illegal,” I say. I say it with conviction, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I defend the living and the systems controlled by the living only because doing otherwise would feel like a betrayal. “They’re a gateway to human brains.”

Hafwen laughs. “You really think there are hordes of Remades out there feasting on the brains of the living?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It could happen.”

“Hadley, animal brains are illegal because Remades eat them. They make us feel good.”

“Have you ever eaten any?”

“No, but that’s not the point. The point is, prisons are filled with Remades, and most of them are there just because they’ve eaten animal brains. The government sells these prisoners to corporations to use for manual labor, and every living person involved makes a lot of money. Doesn’t this seem wrong to you?”

“I guess,” I say. “But you have to admit. Violent Remade crime is a big problem.”

“If you read the statistics, you’d know that violent living crime is an even bigger problem. It only seems like a Remade problem because the media publicizes Remade crime a lot more often. A lot.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“But we are talking about it, Hadley. It’s important to me.”

A few days ago, Hafwen told me the story of her parent’s divorce. I expected her to say that her mother lied about being a Remade and that when her father found out the truth, he left her.

But that’s not how it happened.

Her father, Barry, knew that her mother was a Remade from the very beginning. He was an activist for Remade rights and that’s how they met in the first place. He loved Cambree and he wanted to start a family with her. So they had a baby. Her name was Bronwyn. Since she was born from a Remade mother, Barry and Cambree knew that at any time she could pass away and be Remade with a new personality. This happened when Bronwyn was 19 years old. Barry loved Bronwyn, and refused to connect with Hafwen in any meaningful way, and all the while he blamed Cambree for his daughter’s death. One day he left for work and never came home again.

Now, this story buzzes in my head. I know that Hafwen’s just looking for some living person to listen to her. To understand her. To say, “You’re right. These things are very unfair.”

But instead I say, “I’m going to bed.”

This is our coffee-shop, Hafwen’s and mine. Neither of us drink coffee but we enjoy the comity and the photographs of dancing mannequins on the walls.

Today, I don’t invite her. I’ve never seen a Remade in here before, though I tell myself the reason I don’t call her is because I need some alone-time.

A man and a woman at the next table converse in loud whispers.

I stare at my book like I’m reading.

“I’m no racist,” the woman says. “But they have no legal right to be here.”

“I say send them back to where they came from,” the man says. “Start paving all the cemeteries and let that be the end of it.”

At least I’m not them. I don’t want to get rid of the Remades. I’m all for equal rights. Hell, I’m even dating one of them.

I’m not a terrible person. So why do I feel like such a monster?

Minutes later I’m in my car making a call.

“Porter?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hey, man.”

“Do you want to hang out?”

“Hang out?”

“Yeah. We could go bowling or something.”

“I hate bowling.”

“Whatever you want.”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t usually hang out with clients.”

“Come on.”

“All right.”

Fifteen minutes later, and I’m in a Remade bar. My mind spins, but I still notice that this is a shitty place. Like it hasn’t been cleaned since it opened. Maybe that’s true.

The waitress, who’s either a living person or one of those Remades who buy into the natural is ugly paradigm, hands me my chai, and gives Porter a wad of tin foil.

“Thanks, man,” he says to the girl.

She smiles and walks away.

Porter unwraps the foil.

“What is that?” I say.

“Brains,” he says.

“I know that. I mean, what kind?”

“Human.”

“Oh.” I swallow.

“I’m just fucking with you, man. They’re pig. Want to try some?”

“No!” I’m louder than I expect.

“Calm down, man.”

I try.

Porter nibbles at the brains. He trembles.

After a few sips of my tea, I say, “Is it really so bad being dead?”

“What do you mean?” he says, gazing at his hands.

“I mean, why do so many Remades eat brains? Is it such a horrible existence?”

“No, man. Being dead is cool.”

“Then why do you eat brains?”

His expression changes to one that I’ve never seen on him before. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, when she was disappointed in me, but showed sympathy at the same time. “Figure it out yourself, man,” he says, very quietly.

“Fuck you!” I say, standing.

“Let go of me.”

I realize my hand is squeezing his arm. My other hand, it’s in a fist.

“I think you should go, man,” he says.

Part of me wants to stay and beat the non-living shit out of him. I want to blame him. Not just for how I’m feeling right now, but for everything. My mother’s death. The state of the world.

Everything.

Instead, I release him and say, “Yeah.”

Say you’re lost in the orange groves behind your apartment complex because you’re not ready to go home again, and you find three guys dragging a tied-up young woman toward a hole in the ground, with three shovels nearby. They’re alive and she’s not. You tell yourself that if they were dead and she wasn’t, the scene wouldn’t be so disturbing, because it’s supposed to be the dead who do things like this. Deep down you know that’s not true.

You think, “Get your fucking hands off her.”

Say all of this happens. You’d be here too, like me. You’d crouch down behind the nearest trunk you can find, waiting and watching, with a wrenching knot in your gut.

For a moment I consider racing out into the clearing, bellowing and swinging my fists. But these guys, they’re not like Porter. They’d fight back. They’d kill me.

So I watch them bury the poor girl. I listen to her muffled screams.

They dump her in the hole and start shoveling.

They say things like, “You like that dirt in your face, don’t you, bitch?” and “Fucking zombie whore.”

I try to study their faces, so that I can identify them later, but it’s so dark. And I’m crying too much.

When they finish with the dirt, they pound the backs of their shovels against the grave, over and over and over. They laugh, and high-five.

Finally, they leave.

I dive onto the ground and start digging with my bare hands.

What I’m uncovering isn’t just a young dead girl.

From deep within myself, I pull out a truth that I’ve always known but never wanted to admit. Remades don’t eat brains because of the pain of being dead. The real pain comes from how the living treat them. How I treat them.

I pull her out of the hole. I remove the gag.

She looks at me with fear in her eyes.

I’m afraid she’s going to scream.

I’m afraid she thinks I’m one of them.

But her face changes. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, after I did something bad and then made things right. “Thank you,” she says, very quietly.

I put my arm around her, and in my heart I’m embracing Hafwen at the same time.

I see her when I close my eyes.

She’s beautiful.

I’m ready to go home.

Jeremy C. Shipp is the Bram Stoker nominated author of Cursed, Vacation, and Sheep and Wolves. His shorter tales have appeared or are forthcoming in over 50 publications, the likes of Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Rosebud, Pseudopod, and Withersin. While preparing for the forthcoming collapse of civilization, Jeremy enjoys living in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse with his wife, Lisa, and their legion of yard gnomes. Feel free to visit his online home at jeremycshipp.com

“Which door should we open? Help me think.”

“I’ve told you already, I have no idea!” Thad let himself sag back against the wall. Even with the support, he could feel himself trembling with fatigue and fear.

“Which one?” she murmured, studying the doors; her back was turned toward him, her hands on her hips. “Hell,” she said, “there’s a clue here somewhere. I’m positive. There has to be.”

“Elizabeth,” he started. “What…” His voice came out rasping and thin. It shocked him.

“This clue,” he said, groping for steadiness. “Explain this to me again, would you? What exactly are you looking for? How will you know it when you see it?”

“I should think it would be obvious,” she said. Turning to face him, she seemed to loom before his eyes, then suddenly recede. Expect disorientation, man, he thought, you’re badly dehydrated.

“We’ve been kidnapped by parties unknown,” she began, “–my vote’s still for aliens, by the way. Held, then dropped into this… this labyrinth, or whatever it is. Incredibly slowly, we’ve inched our way through it. Tackled games of skill, strength, wit–and learned that, incidentally, our captors aren’t above penalizing us for a wrong guess… ”

“Exploding thresholds,” he muttered. “Weight-dropped arches, and that napalm thing–”

“Horrible stuff, yes. It’s clear they’d let us die here, and want us to know it. …That brings us to these doors.”

“Exactly.” Which stood before them now in a neat row. Heavy, simple, cold. Identical, except for their colors. The smooth surface of the first shone with a green luster; the second, white; the third, a pale, chilly gold.

Eyes throbbing, head pounding, he felt dehydration and low blood sugar beginning to take him down. “Why don’t you just pick one?” he demanded, seized by a convulsion of despair. “Hand on knob and shove it open. It’ll blow us up or it won’t. That’s better than waiting here to starve to death–or, God knows, whatever else they have in mind!”

Elizabeth scowled. “With due respect, Thad, no. Help me think this through. I know I can find the clue–”

“There is no clue, Elizabeth!” he said angrily.

“Everything can be understood if you look carefully enough. We can find the key. Help me think! It’s got to be here somewhere… They can manipulate everything in our environment, Thad. Examine everything. Where would an alien put the pattern? How would they hide the key?”

Impossible, but he tried. Think like an alien. Everything can be understood…

White, green, gold. How would a master manipulator hide the clue? It’s here, somewhere…

Thad felt the last of his energy leaving him, like a spasm of physical anguish, and closed his eyes to blot out the corridor and the brilliant, hopeless light. Elizabeth stood silently, still staring at the doors.

Is Thad right, or is Elizabeth?

Which door should they try?

Susannah Mandel was born in California and grew up near Boston. She has since lived in Philadelphia and northern France, and is now heading for Japan. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Sybil’s Garage, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others. Her flash fiction appears regularly at the Daily Cabal (www.dailycabal.com).