2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories
Author: Paul Finch; Tim Lebbon; Alison Moore
Date: 2015-12-13 22:00:00+00:00
Description: THE 2ND SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES 19 TWISTED NEW NIGHTMARES, OOZING WITH THE SAP OF FEAR, COME BLINKING AND SQUEALING INTO THE WAKING WORLD! “One of Ghedi’s friends had been hit by a dropped stanchion on an earlier raid, bursting his head open so that his brains had spattered out and ended up looking like worms on the deck, pink and crawling…” LITTLE TRAVELLER by Simon Kurt Unsworth “It was reaching out toward the glass door, toward Buck, with a hand or a paw that seemed to be tipped with thick, black claws like the talons of an eagle…” WHERE THE FOREST ENDS by Sean Logan “One of the big
Publisher: Spectral Press

Table of Contents

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories

INTRODUCTION

HOUSE OF THE HAG

FLOTSAM

TOYS FROM THE GINGERBREAD COUNTRY

SUGARED HEAT

A GIRL AND HER DOLLS

THE LARDER

THE VEILS

JOE IS A BARBER

LITTLE TRAVELLER

BEHIND THE WALL

MARY, MARY

THE MEANTIME

MARROWVALE

SCRAPING BY

WHERE THE FOREST ENDS

WRONG

LUMP IN YOUR THROAT

HORN OF THE HUNTER

WHO WILL STOP ME NOW?

CONTRIBUTORS

The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories - A SPECTRAL PRESS PUBLICATION

All stories and biographical notes are Copyright © 2015 their respective authors

All other text and Spectral Press logo is Copyright © 2011 - 2015 Spectral Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owners.

The rights of all authors contained herein to be identified as the Author of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First edition, December 2015

Editor: Mark Morris

Publisher: Simon Marshall-Jones

Cover art by Vincent Chong © 2015

Ebook created by Graeme Reynolds of Horrific Tales Publishing

Spectral Press, 13 Montgomery Crescent, Bolbeck Park, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK14 6HA

Website: spectralpress.wordpress.com

Email: spectralpress@gmail.com

THE 2ND SPECTRAL BOOK OF

HORROR STORIES

Edited by

MARK MORRIS

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of my dearly missed friend Graham Joyce (1954-2014), and also to the memory of Tanith Lee (1947-2015) and Tom Piccirilli (1965-2015). All luminaries of the genre, and all taken far too soon.

INTRODUCTION

Mark Morris

Well, volume one made quite an impact, didn't it?

When we launched The Spectral Book of Horror Stories at the British Fantasy Convention in September 2014 I had no idea of just how popular it would turn out to be. I hoped, of course, for great things. I hoped to discover there was still a dedicated market for an annual non-themed horror anthology. I hoped that the book would be well-received by readers and well-reviewed by the press. I hoped it would fulfil my vision as a showcase for the very best short fiction that this fantastic genre of ours has to offer.

I hoped… but I couldn't be sure. And I was nervous on the morning of the launch, wondering whether, despite the positive feedback I had received on Facebook and Twitter, people would support the project when it came to the crunch by putting their hands in their pockets and buying a copy of the book.

I needn't have worried. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the response at the launch was phenomenal. The room was packed with people, the queue to buy books never dwindled, and the contributors who were there to sign copies were kept busy throughout the entire sixty minutes.

Since then the feedback has been phenomenal too. Reviews of volume one have been almost overwhelmingly positive and The Spectral Book of Horror Stories has been nominated for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award (at the time of writing the British Fantasy Award winners are still to be announced). Additionally Alison Littlewood's story from the anthology, 'The Dog's Home', won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story, whereas Stephen
Volk's story 'Newspaper Heart' was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novelette category, and has also been nominated for a British Fantasy Award in the Best Novella category.

Several of the book's individual stories have also been picked up to be reprinted in 'Best Of…' anthologies - notably 'The Night Doctor' in Best New Horror 26 edited by Stephen Jones, 'The Dog's Home' by Alison Littlewood and 'Outside Heavenly' by Rio Youers in The Best Horror of the Year Volume 7 edited by Ellen Datlow, 'Eastmouth' by Alison Moore, 'The Slista' by Stephen Laws and 'Something Sinister in Sunlight' by Lisa Tuttle in Best British Horror 2015 edited by Johnny Mains, and 'Outside Heavenly' by Rio Youers (again) in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing edited by Sandra Kasturi and Jerome Stueart.

In order to make as big an impact as possible with The Spectral Book of Horror Stories I contacted around sixty of my favourite short fiction writers in the genre and invited them each to contribute a story. With volume two, though, I decided to open the anthology up and give everyone a chance to contribute. I was excited by the prospect of discovering and publishing new writers-new to me anyway-and of hearing some fresh, unique voices.

I admit I didn't quite know what to expect when, in early January of this year, I duly announced an open submissions policy for The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories. It wasn't long, though, before I was given a good idea of what I had let myself in for, because no sooner had I made the announcement than the stories began to flood in.

And for the next few months the flood continued pretty much unabated, until, by the time the submissions window closed on May 31st, I had received over 800 submissions.

Needless to say, it was an overwhelming task reading through them all, but ultimately it proved worthwhile. If it hadn't been for the open submissions policy The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories would not contain three fantastic stories by a trio of writers I'd never heard of before this process began-Richard Jay Goldstein, Kurt Fawver and Sean Logan; it would not contain the first ever adult horror story (a novella no less!) by acclaimed YA writer Cliff McNish; it may not even have contained a great new story from seasoned veteran (I hope he doesn't mind me calling him that!) Adrian Cole, for the simple reason that I wasn't aware Adrian was, after an absence of some years, back writing short stories again until 'A Girl And Her Dolls' popped into my inbox.

I'm very proud of The 2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories. Personally I think this year's anthology contains a varied and beautifully balanced array of truly brilliant tales. The horror genre has very wide parameters, as evidenced by the cornucopia of wonders displayed within these pages. The only criticism levelled at last year's anthology by one or two reviewers was that some of the stories weren't really 'horror' at all - but may I respectfully suggest to those critics that they remove their blinkers and embrace the notion that horror has no limits, that it can be found anywhere, at any time, in any situation.

All human-and inhuman-life is here. There is horror to be found in each and every one of these stories, no matter how ambiguous or how mundane it may sometimes appear.

And now, having been warned, please feel free to continue on your journey.

As ever, tread carefully.

- 31st August 2015

HOUSE OF THE HAG

Paul Finch

Sarah had always been the level-headed one. The one who didn't miss the wood for the trees. The one who took stuff on the chin because she knew that to flip out could make bad situations worse. But she and Phil had only been in Scotland half a day before he realised his wife had actually bottled up all the angst Michaela had introduced to their lives, rather than dispensed with it, and that despite her usual composed exterior, she wasn't okay with this thing at all, but felt wounded and abandoned.

In that respect, maybe it had been an obvious solution: try and get away from it all.

Book the first nice place you found online, get in the car, drive.

But some problems only festered if you tried to hide from them. And striking out blindly, not really knowing where you were going, or why, might be a bad idea too.

****

Perhaps Sarah's choice of destination should have suggested a problem.

Normally when they took 'long weekend' breaks, they opted for short-haul escapes like the New Forest, the Cotswolds or the West Country. But The Shieling, a cottage at the foot of Meith Bheinn, on the shore of Loch Morar in the Northwest Highlands, was a two-day journey from London and an extremely remote location even for committed outdoor types. On top of that it was only April-early April, in fact-and the forecast was for typically squally weather, moments of bright sunshine offset by a cold north-westerly wind, interspersed with intense, protracted downpours.

One such tempest broke while Sarah and Phil were trekking across the mountain's lower slopes.

There had never been any question about the scenery up here. Wherever you went, you were confronted by rolling summits and granite crags; the cork-brown moors speckled with golden gorse as they soared upward to ice-clad massifs and deep, shadow-filled corries. Morar itself was a picture of natural beauty, its fathomless waters a steely blue-green, but never flat, never still-ruffled always by the Atlantic breeze, frothing along its pebbly, tree-lined shores. Of course, under heavy cloud-great purple masses tearing their pregnant bellies wide as they passed over jutting peaks, pouring out their contents in colossal cataracts- he whole place took on a wilder, gloomier aspect, which seemed to act on Sarah as a kind of trigger.

She had first begun talking about Michaela shortly after lunch.

They'd had a picnic-cold chicken, scotch eggs and slaw, with hot, rum-laced coffee to wash it all down-on the banks of a burn overlooking Morar from its central south shore, the vista stretching all the way past Swordland Lodge, through Tarbet Glen to the tidal surface of Loch Nevis. Initially, Sarah was silent as she ate, apparently not noticing any of this. Only as they finished, had she started letting forth, and forth, and forth-endlessly, feverishly. This continued even as the rain commenced. Now, two hours later, it was falling in torrents, but this didn't stop her; her only response was to adjust her pack and tighten her hood. Her discourse flowed on uninterrupted, her eyes almost glazed.

"I mean what have we actually done, Phil… to earn such disdain? You bring a child into the world and do everything you can, often to your own disadvantage. You bathe them, feed them, tend to them when they're poorly. You give them parties on their birthdays and presents at Christmas. You share their heartbreak on the first day they go to school… you do everything in your power to help them, advise them, guide them. And you don't expect anything in return-that's not why you've given up so much of your life. But is it really too much to expect that a day actually doesn't arrive when all of a sudden this unconditional love is taken for weakness… when in the blink of an eye you've ceased to be a human being and are suddenly a human doormat?"

Phil agreed. Long before his own domestic life had been so disrupted, he'd reviled that whole teen rebel thing. Certain adults were amused by it; others viewed it as a rite of passage. But he'd always felt it had the potential to inflict severe damage on the family home. He wondered if the rebels themselves were genuinely so blinded by self-interest that they truly never considered how much ill will their hurtful behaviour might be storing up for the future. Sarah, for example, was the least vengeful person he knew, but in her own words: "I suppose eventually I'll come to pretend it's all unimportant because life has to go on. But I don't think I'll ever actually forgive Michaela for this. Never… and I mean that, Phil. Never."

Again he grunted in agreement, though at present he was more worried about the intensity of the wind as they made their way down the steepening brae, and the lashing rain, which had now transformed the footpath into a stream of slurry. This was more than just a brief damp interlude, he realised.

"You know she called me a fucking bitch?"

"Yeah, I know about that, Sarah… I was there."

"Her own mother… a fucking bitch! And all because I wouldn't stump up the first two months' rent on a dump of a flat, which neither she nor the Parasite will be able to afford long-term anyway because neither of them could keep a job if they could even get one!"

Phil knew all about this too. In fact, he probably knew more about 'the Parasite' than Sarah did, he being the one who'd risen at five o'clock one Sunday morning two years ago to check Michaela had come in, to discover she had but that she'd also brought someone with her: an odious individual, tall and bone-thin, wearing remnants of black eye make-up and with a mop of dyed-black hair-who at the time was wandering their landing in a daze, searching for the lavatory but unashamedly naked, his emaciated body covered in scars and tasteless tattoos. That Michaela had only been seventeen at the time and had taken a boy into her bedroom had broken one of their strictest house rules, though it turned out to be even worse than that because Shozzer-Phil had never got to know his full name, even though Michaela had dated him on and off ever since-had been twenty-four. The explanation that he was "a drummer in a really good band, and this is just the way he does his stuff" hadn't cut much ice with Phil, but he'd still felt it politic not to mention the incident to Sarah.

On today's evidence, that had clearly been a sensible move. But as before, they currently had more important matters to contend with.

By Phil's estimation, it was six miles back to the cottage, but it wouldn't even be that simple. They'd first found their way to this point by a circuitous, meandering route, which they hadn't really been paying attention to because they were too engrossed in the issue of Michaela. This meant they couldn't just head back the way they'd come, especially as the heavy pulses of all-enveloping rain were now doing their damnedest to obliterate all recognisable landscape features. In normal times of course they'd have a detailed map and/or a compass, but they'd come up here at too short a notice to acquire the former, and hadn't expected to ramble so far that they'd need the latter. Their main reference point was the loch, spread out majestically below them. But even that was problematical, as the more they walked, hunched against the elements, the more often the loch vanished from sight, either absorbed by the shimmering cascades of rain, or because the path had dipped into hollows or around hillocks or down long, enclosed ravines. It nearly always reappeared again, though it never looked any closer… until they finally emerged onto another sodden hillside from which weather-worn landscapes ranged off in every direction, but from where there was no view at all of the lower country, and therefore no sign of the loch. They pressed on regardless, still confident they could navigate their way back down by instinct, though Phil was increasingly concerned that they were too new to this geography to trust to that indefinitely. If all else failed, they had their mobile phones. There was no signal at present, but it might just be a matter of yomping until they got one-though how long that would take, he didn't know.

If all that wasn't bad enough, what made things even worse was that the storm showed no signs of abating. The ice-edged wind battered them with increasing force, the bitter rain washing over them in waves. They plodded doggedly on for another two hours. By now their waterproofs leaked in half a dozen places, freezing water seeping through their clothes, filling their boots, clutching them in a merciless and unrelenting chill.

Outdoors folk, they were both of them reasonably fit. Sarah was particularly light on her feet, being small and petite, though Phil, while taller and burlier, had developed good stamina for his forty-eight years. In pure physical terms, they were able to cover plenty of ground, but that was no use if they were going the wrong way-and anyhow, fatigue was at last catching up with them, much earlier than it should have done. This worried Phil more than anything, because he knew it meant their bodies' core temperature was reducing. Their age was against them in this. Despite the physical exercise, they were increasingly unable to regenerate lost heat, which meant they were suffering mild hypothermia. Confusion and weakness would result, further hampering their ability to get off the mountain. What they needed was shelter-even rough and ready shelter like a bothy. Of course, they knew there was nothing like that behind them, so at least in that regard it made sense to keep pushing on.

The ground now slanted up towards a saddle-back ridge. They ascended with leaden limbs and aching joints, finally arriving on a small plateau. Both to left and right, barren slopes soared skyward, their footings strewn with colossal boulders. However, a few dozen yards in front, the ground fell away again. They moved to the edge of it and peered down a deep but gently sloping glen. Its furthest extent was again lost in rain, but this was the first downward slope they'd encountered that actually looked manageable. The question nagged, however: was this the right way?

"I know visibility's poor, but surely we'd be able to see if the loch was down there?" Sarah said, breathing hard. Damp golden straggles poked from under her hood; her pink cheeks were stained by mascara.

"I think it's more important now that we just get to lower ground," Phil replied. "We're way too exposed up here. And the further down we go, the more likely we are to find a croft or a shepherd's hut, or something."

She nodded. They started down on tired, trudging feet, but after only a couple of minutes, Sarah shouted and pointed. Some sixty yards to their right, vaguely visible in the deluge, a box-like tent had been tucked into a fold in the hillside. It was a miracle she'd even seen it. It was a dull olive green, which had blended well into the sopping foliage. It was also a bit of a puzzle. In outline, it was a spacious 'dome'; the kind of tent families took to organised sites. If anyone normally pitched up here, it would be a triangular one-man affair. Even so, they headed towards it with vigour. Whoever the campers were, they had to be kindred spirits in this wilderness. It didn't seem likely they'd refuse Phil and Sarah entry, or deny them a hot cuppa. If nothing else, they ought to be able to provide directions.

But when they reached the tent, there were no obvious means of access.

There were lots of zips, mainly at its corners, but no doorway either front or back. This was partly because it looked homemade, a patchwork thing constructed out of disparate sheets of fabric cannibalised from other tents. It was sturdy enough-it bellied in the wind, quivered to the hammering rain-but its guy ropes were taut, its pegs deeply embedded, holding it upright. And yet it was old. Its actual colour was something like brown or tan, but up close they saw it was covered in green mould. On top of that, its corners were frayed, the bits of metal framework this revealed coated with rust.

Phil was so surprised that for a few seconds he forgot how cold and wet he was. "How long has this been here, I wonder?"

"A while," Sarah said, noting the cotton canvas fabric and thinking she hadn't seen a tent made from anything other than nylon or polyweave for quite a few years. And what about the metal poles? Most campers these days would opt for shock-corded fibreglass.

"Hello?" she said aloud, suspecting there would be no response.

There wasn't.

"No tea then," Phil said glumly. "At least that means there'll be plenty room inside."

But he was wrong.

****

They gained entry by unzipping the flap on the leeward side. The zip itself was old and gummy, and Phil had to work it hard to push it just to half its height. They stooped through the narrow gap into a green-tinged, mildew-scented gloom. The first surprise was that the tent wasn't double-skinned, which meant it would offer little protection; rain was filtering in at various points. The second was that it had no groundsheet; its floor was rotted, trampled vegetation.

The third was that three figures occupied it.

All standing in a silent row.

Phil and Sarah froze, mouths agape.

They were side-on to the motionless shapes, none of who were actually distinguishable because they were covered by crumpled polythene sheets. But even in the dimness of the tent, it could be seen that the one at the far end was about six feet tall and of solid, heavy build, while the one in the middle was somewhat shorter, about five and a half feet, and the one at the nearest end shorter still, no more than two and a half. Still they didn't move-though that was hardly surprising. Even before Phil stepped forward and tore away the sheeting, it was obvious they weren't real figures; just crude, granite effigies.

Sarah yanked back her hood. "What the heck is this?"

Phil pulled his hood down too, equally bemused by the objects-which were actually little more than monoliths; they had no discernible features at all, let alone anything resembling humanity. It now struck him as weird that he'd even thought they were 'figures' in the first place. "All that's left of a stone circle… I guess."

"Inside a tent?"

He shrugged. "Someone's little joke maybe? Or perhaps these things are valuable?"

"What… they've been here ten thousand years and suddenly Historic Scotland's got jittery about erosion?"

"Hang on, whoa… I know what this is!" Phil's bearded face broke into a grin.

Fleetingly he forgot the wind gusting through the aged tent, the rain drumming above their heads. He sidled around the three granite forms. That was all they were-lumps of rock. But on closer inspection, maybe he could identify the outlines of heads and shoulders. And weren't some differences between them detectable? For example, while the first figure was tall and straight, was it pure imagination that the second had a more feminine shape? The diminutive third figure wasn't just shorter than the other two, but much narrower as well, as though everything was in proportion-as though it was supposed to be a child.

"Okay…?" Sarah said, loosening her straps. She wasn't hugely interested under these circumstances, but Phil lectured in Anthropology at Birkbeck, so she supposed he ought to know what he was talking about when it came to ancient artefacts.

"Sarah… meet the Bodach-he's the father." Phil clapped the first figure on its 'shoulder', before moving to the second. "Meet the Cailleach, the mum." He moved to the third. "And last but not least, say hello to this little one, the Nighean. And this isn't just any old tent, by the way. This is the Tigh na Cailliche, or 'House of the Hag'… and we are honoured to be inside it."

"Yeah, I feel greatly honoured." Sarah shook out her wet hair, then dumped her pack on top of the Cailleach's head and rummaged through it for a towel and her reserve clothing. "Do you want to give me all that again… in English?"

"It's a type of shrine." Phil hunkered down to go through his own gear. "Neolithic in origin. There are several of these up in the Highlands, though the most famous one is a few miles southeast of here… Glen Lyon in Perth and Kinross."

Sarah stripped her waterproofs off. "So no-one's going to come and chuck us out?"

"No one's likely to come up here until May at the earliest, I'd say," he replied. "They're a bit of a mystery, these things. The names come from Celtic myth, but these effigies are likely to be much older. They probably represent some prehistoric cult… we don't know for sure. What normally happens is the local crofters or shepherds erect a shelter for them during the winter months, and come and take it down again in late spring. It's like performing a service, which they hope will grant them good pasturage, tolerable weather and such. It's a time-honoured tradition. Goes back to the year dot. But I've never seen it in action before."

"Good." Sarah nodded as she removed her soaked clothes. "And this Cailleach lady's not going to get jealous… me in the nuddy while her husband's here?"

"Well…" Phil watched as she removed her bra and knickers; her tight, pale body goose-pimpled in the chill gloom. "I might."

She chuckled but without humour as she squatted naked to go through her spares.

He glanced at the crude, emotionless forms as they silently watched her. Gazed at their rugged granite faces; the ancientness of them, the coldness of them. There was something voyeuristic about this situation, he realised. But then this was their house; they could hardly be faulted. Oblivious to all this, Sarah climbed into some dry underwear and a fresh pair of corduroys and a plaid shirt. She buttoned up and spread her waterproofs on top of the stone figures to dry them. "Aren't you going to get changed too? You'll catch your death."

He nodded and undressed.

"Doesn't sound like this Tigh na… what do you call it…?"

"Tigh na Cailliche."

"Doesn't sound like this Tigh na Cailliche is giving the local farmers much in the way of tolerable weather this spring."

"No," he agreed, listening to the thuds of the rain.

She handed him the towel and he rubbed his hair.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I mean… for getting us into this mess."

He appraised her as he climbed into his dry clothes. "I'm the one who neglected to bring a compass or map, remember?"

"I mean bringing us up here to the Highlands."

"No one could have expected weather this severe in April."

"I just… wanted to get away from it all. As far as I could."

"We all feel like running from time to time, love."

"On the subject of which… what do we do next?"

Phil pondered that, and glanced at his watch. It was almost seven o'clock, which meant it would soon be getting dark. Once night fell, the mountain temperatures would plummet. If the rain became snow, they'd be in real danger. They could still, at a push, take the chance of remaining here in this ready-made shelter. They had their bivi-bags, extra supplies of high energy food, and the vacuum flask still contained a little hot coffee. But he wasn't overly keen. If they were severely hypothermic by morning, they wouldn't necessarily be able to move on. And it wasn't like anyone was coming looking for them, because no one even knew they were here. An image entered his head of some local shepherd arriving to take the shelter down as spring at last struck this desolate upland, only to find their withered corpses frozen to these silent, stone guardians.

He glanced around at the Cailleach and her family.

Evening was descending, and despite their proximity, they were little more now than dim outlines. So many words had been written over the years to describe these oblique sentinels dotted across Britain's ageless landscapes: mysterious; unknowable; inscrutable; enigmatic - oddly, they were all terms you would normally apply to something sentient.

"What's the matter?" Sarah asked.

"Nothing… let's make an inventory, eh?"

They spent the next five minutes going through their gear, but Phil had to crack a glow-stick so they could see what they were doing. They had all the usual survival stuff-whistles, a first-aid kit, windproof matches-but nothing that would help them descend the mountain any quicker. Several times he looked over his shoulder at the three featureless forms, now tinged a lurid scarlet in the chemical glow. In some ways the menacing air this lent them was quite appropriate. The Tigh na Cailliche was no gimmick or folly. Such sacred places as this were still venerated, and specifically located in isolated spots to avoid the attention of gawping non-believers, whose presence could be held profane. He might as well admit it to himself; he didn't want to be enclosed in here all night-in the cloying darkness, hearing only the soulless drone of the wind, sensing those tall disapproving shadows lowering over him.

"I think we should move on," he said. "Keep going downhill. Before it gets too late."

Sarah looked wearied by the mere prospect, but had enough experience to know this was a reasonable idea. It might seem risky giving up this shelter, but they weren't actually so high up-Meith Bheinn rose to something like two thousand feet above sea level, and they weren't even half way to the top of it. It really shouldn't be that difficult descending.

So they packed everything up, pulling on fresh pairs of thermal socks, and re-donning their boots. These were still wet, and their waterproofs felt damp as well, the combined chill immediately leaching into their bones. But there was always going to be some level of discomfort on an expedition like this. To compensate, they each gobbled down several handfuls of nuts and raisins, and took a last swig of coffee.

"Just keep heading downhill," Phil said again. "Whatever we see below us-woods, open grassland-just keep going. Speed is the essence, but obviously watch your footing."

Even as he spoke, the shrieks of the wind rose to a howling crescendo, the rain gushing through the rents in the corners, the structure shuddering, flapping.

"Doesn't matter how fast we go, we'll still get drenched," Sarah said. "We'll be in exactly the same boat again."

"Yeah, but we've rested a little, and refuelled."

"You sure we're not just better seeing the night through here?"

"Damn sure," he said, throwing the grimy polythene back over the permanent occupants of the place.

"Let's at least opt for a little extra protection," she suggested. "Take this tent apart. Use the material to make capes… give ourselves a few extra layers?"

Phil could think of several immediate reasons why that was a bad idea-but none he would give voice to. Besides, what Sarah said was true. They still had an unknown distance ahead, and their new dry clothing would not hold out for long. Thus, as soon as they stepped out into the tumult, they started loosening ties and yanking zips. The shelter had been built to resist the Highland winter, but with some brief, determined fiddling they were able to free several sheets of mouldy but still largely waterproofed canvas, fashion them into massive hooded cloaks, and set off down the slope.

The temperature was noticeably dropping, but despite diminishing daylight and blasts of biting sleet, which coated them in a limpid, icy skin, it seemed as if they'd made the correct decision. They felt fresher and stronger, and covered the downhill gradient quickly and efficiently. Phil was also glad to be away from the Tigh na Cailliche. He'd initially been interested to stumble on it; it was certainly worth a diary note-but the longer they'd lingered there, the more discomfited he'd felt. He couldn't attempt to explain why; he wouldn't attempt to. He didn't give credence to fairy tales, not even the old and venerable variety. He glanced back to try and judge how far they had now come-and saw a blurred trio of shapes; the lumpish outlines of the three stones defined on the darkening, bruise-patterned sky. They were less distant than he'd expected, and no longer covered by canvas. The obvious explanation was that the remainder of the tent had collapsed, and the polythene covers had blown away. Some shepherd or crofter wasn't going to be happy come May, but any concerns Phil had for that were drowned by Sarah's sudden enthusiastic shouts.

The gusting veils of rain had broken apart and at last they had a clear vision of the landscape below. Immediately to their left, at a diagonal angle to the direction they were taking but well within walking distance, foam-capped waves drove in furious flurries along the metal-grey surface of Loch Morar.

****

"I'm surprised you can see those three stones all the way from here," Sarah said.

Phil had just come down from the pine-panelled bathroom in a towelling robe, and was sipping brandy by the French windows. Beyond these, a lush lawn stretched across the rolling headland, some eighty yards to the cottage's private landing-a timber jetty, at the end of which a small outboard rode at its mooring. Darkness had fallen, but the storm clouds had cleared and the moon was up, silver ribbons sparkling on the surging waters of the loch. At this proximity, Morar looked a fearsome beast indeed, as well it ought to. It was twelve miles long after all, a mile wide, and at least a thousand feet deep.

Slowly however, her words sank into his consciousness.

Sarah was also in a bathrobe, but standing by the bay window at the other end of the lounge. He walked stiffly over to her. "What three stones?"

"You know… the ones under that tent."

"You can't possibly see them from here," he said. "We came half way round the mountain getting back down."

"Up there." She pointed.

The view at the front of the cottage was no less dramatic than the one at its rear. Beside the small, neatly hedged garden, a gravel drive swept to an iron gate that was large enough to belong on a farm. On the other side of that, the rugged peat moors rose steeply towards Meith Bheinn, though the main bulk of the massif stood right of this position, blotting out almost the entirety of the star-lit sky. Sarah was pointing to one of its foothills. As if to emphasise this, the moon hovered there directly, a radiant saucer perched on the black line of the ridge.

Despite this, Phil could see no stones silhouetted.

"You must have been mistaken," he said.

She shrugged, removing her towel turban and shaking her damp locks. "Maybe."

"Seriously… you thought you saw the Tigh na Cailliche all the way from here?"

"Like you say, I must've been mistaken."

He glanced back to the distant ridge, but nothing out of the ordinary was visible.

Sarah crossed the room to the granite hearth, knelt on the rug in front of its wood-burning stove and commenced drying her hair. "Sorry about that stuff on the mountain. When I was rabbiting, I mean. About Michaela."

"Don't worry about it," he said, still distracted.

"I guess I just need to accept that she's gone."

He glanced around. "Sarah, she isn't gone."

"I don't mean gone… exactly." She gazed into the flames. "Look, I'm just sorry I came over like a headcase up there, when you needed a lot more from me. Why don't we put it to the back of our minds, eh? That's what we came to Scotland for."

"Sure."

It had been very uncharacteristic of her to suddenly get so uptight. But he ought to cut her some slack, he supposed. It wasn't just Michaela's recent, foul-mouthed response to their refusal to give her the down payment-a couple of grand, no less!-for a flat of her own; nor her follow-up decision to leave home and go and live rent-free with the Parasite in a South London squat. This whole business of their daughter's 'adjustment to adulthood' had been a slow-dripping poison, mainly because as a tot she'd been so unfeasibly delightful. Blonde and pretty, like her mum. And so eager to please. Tidying her bedroom without needing to be told, diligent and hard working at school. At junior school, certainly. It was part-way through middle school where that toxic teen arrogance had first begun to manifest, followed in short order by the "let's party" persona that would result in her failing most of her exams. It almost brought Phil to tears when he considered what had been lost, never mind the insults she'd thrown at him personally: at the age of fifteen accusing him of never taking her on "proper holidays" because he couldn't swim- "a bloke of your age… it's pathetic!"-or how about two weeks ago, when she'd retorted to his patient advice to think twice before decamping with Shozzer by calling him "a middle class twat!" But none of that could be anything to the hurt felt by a mother who'd literally just had a door slammed in her face. There was always that special connection between mother and child, which went far beyond love, care, coddling. It was the solace and spiritual security they gave each other; the mother protecting and nurturing, the child embodying a reason for the mother to live, that far surpassed the purely biological.

When that tie was brutally shattered… well, it was a miracle Sarah had resisted the shock as long as she had. She was an emotional toughie; she'd have tried to deal with it internally, tried to avoid getting upset. But it was hardly abnormal that she'd eventually failed. At least she was more her familiar self now. During the final couple of miles descending the mountainside, buffeted by hurricane winds, the rain falling over them in sheets (thank God they'd shrouded themselves in that old tent fabric) her old strength and fortitude had come back to the fore. She'd marched downhill with speed, energy and determination. She'd even displayed flashes of humour, soberly advising him to save his breath and spare her ears when he'd started spouting King Lear, squealing with laughter when a shaggy Highland bullock had loomed out of the murk.

For all that, it had got quite dicey up there. It had been more than a little lax to get so distracted by other problems that they'd dropped their guard in that way. They hadn't even taken a torch, so it was really quite a relief getting back to The Shieling before night had fallen properly. From the outside, the cottage wasn't perhaps the best: a plain rectangular building with white pebble-dashed walls and a sensible slate roof. Even internally it wasn't everything you'd hope for in a Highland abode; roomy certainly, but filled with dark, heavy, farmhouse-type furniture, the few items of local interest- a tartan tea cosy in the kitchen and two tam o'shanters hanging from the clothes pegs in the hall-not offering much in the way of meaningful Scottishness. But it was clean and dry, and luxuriously warm thanks to the wood-burner, while outside, though the rain had eased off, a fierce, cold wind was still blowing.

He glanced once again at the far mountain ridge. The moon had shifted slightly, but still there was nothing framed against it-man or monolith.

Now dried off after their baths, they went back upstairs, where Sarah put on her pyjamas and Phil donned a tracksuit and trainers. He glanced outside a couple more times, from various windows, but way up here in the hills, beyond the reach of streetlights or the warm, welcoming glow from a neighbouring window, the darkness was more or less complete. To compound this, more rainclouds were drifting in from the west; if they covered the moon, the cottage would soon be a speck of light in an infinite void.

Coming back down to the kitchen, they made supper from the supplies they'd picked up at Arisaig while en route here-eggs, ham, cheese and buttered bread-and settled down for the evening. The satellite dish meant they could watch all the normal television channels, though after another hour or so, with the storm re-intensifying, and fresh rainfall hitting the cottage like catapult-loads of gravel, the signal was progressively disrupted to the point where it became untenable, and the link went down.

Shortly after this, the lights began flickering.

"A power-out is all we need," Sarah said from the armchair, where she was curled up. She had her Kindle with her, and was reading, but its battery was low, so she'd plugged it into the mains. Phil sat tensely on the sofa for several seconds, before abruptly standing up. He had ventured down to the cellar earlier to dump the canvas they'd worn when descending the mountain. While there he'd spotted a torch.

Now seemed a good time to go and get it.

The cellar, which was rock-walled and dry, was accessible via a steep timber stair, and ran the entire length of the building, though it was cluttered with heaps of dusty, web-enshrouded junk. When Phil got down there, the single bulb, which only gave faint, brownish light anyway, also flickered on and off. He cast around quickly. The wind groaned through the upper reaches of the house, rattling the coal doors at the far end of the cellar so violently that their catch came loose and they swung open over the metal chute positioned beneath them.

Shrill, cold air blasted the full length of the narrow chamber.

Phil ignored this, still searching. He found the torch on a shelf above a row of gardening tools-a spade, a hoe and a pickaxe- grabbed it and tested it. This too was faulty, giving off only a weak, intermittent glow, but it was better than nothing. They also had the wood-burner of course. He hurried back upstairs-just as the lights went out again. And this time stayed out.

"Damn," he said, entering the lounge.

"Hell of a racket outside," Sarah replied. She'd got up, pretty smartly by the looks of it, and was standing rigid in the red glare of the hearth.

Before he could ask her to elaborate, there was a loud metallic clash from somewhere to the front of the house. Phil moved to the bay window, but in the blackout the motion-sensitive exterior lights remained stubbornly off, and when he switched the torch on, it barely made an impact beyond the rain-streaked glass.

"Probably just the gate," he said, eyes straining to pierce the opaque turmoil. "I mean in this wind…"

There was another deafening clash, now accompanied by a torturous, twisted squeal.

Sarah appeared at his side, unconsciously grabbing his hand. "Sounds like the gate's falling down. Surely the wind's not that strong?"

The red-grey hairs at the nape of Phil's neck bristled as he heard what sounded like a scrunch of gravel. Was something being dragged along the drive?

"Away from the window," he said, drawing her backward. His whole skin was now crawling. He couldn't believe what he was allowing himself to think. "I'm just… I'm just going back down the cellar."

"Why?" Her eyes bulged as she spotted pinpricks of sweat on his brow. "Phil?"

"Just stay away from the window. People can see in but we can't see out."

"Like who… you mean someone's outside?" A hollow clunk caught their attention. "Christ… that sounded like the car!"

"Never mind the sodding car!" he said over his shoulder. He was already out in the hall, from where the door connected to the cellar. He descended the stair as swiftly as he dared with only a weak, flickering torch to show him the way. It was a den of dusty darkness down there now, but there was enough juice in the battery to help him find what he was looking for-the pickaxe. He snatched it up. It was a heavy implement with a thick hickory handle; the closest thing he'd seen in the cottage to a weapon. He went back up the stairs, two treads at a time-to meet Sarah in the hall.

"It's okay," she said sounding relieved. "You won't believe it, but it's that bullock. I've just seen it through the bay window."

"Eh?"

She took his wrists as though to calm him, though her eyes were perhaps a little wild. "That bullock… it must have followed us down the mountainside."

"Sarah… why would it do that?"

"I don't know, but it's just gone past the window. It must have forced the front gate open and brushed against the car."

He regarded her in thinly disguised disbelief. "You actually saw it?"

"Well, I saw part of a big curved shape. Probably its bottom. It was going round to the back of the house. I bet it comes here all the time… for the grazing."

Phil continued to stare at her incredulously, until a dull thud sounded from the other side of the front door. Heavy though this was-a slab of nail-studded oak, with a tiny glass panel in the middle-it juddered in its frame.

"I thought you said it had gone around the back," he whispered.

"It did… I mean, why would it come to the front door?" She tried to laugh, but she wasn't fooling her husband, or even herself.

Phil moved stealthily forward, bent down and shone the flickering torch through the glass panel. At first he couldn't tell what he was seeing. Mountain mist, he wondered… combined with the Highlands dark to create a grey nothing?

And then he realised the truth.

Rock.

Mottled, mossy, rain-wet rock.

He darted backward with a gasp-shoving the faltering torch into Sarah's grasp, and hefting the pickaxe in both hands.

"What's the matter, what is it?"

He shook his head. There was another thud, and a slow scraping against the other side of the door. Sarah stepped towards it.

"NO!" he hissed.

"Phil…?"

"Shhhh!"

"Never mind shush. If you know who's out there, tell me!"

"Tigh na Cailliche," he mumbled to himself. "'The Hag's House'… 'the Hag's Home'. Dear Lord, we trespassed in their home…" His voice rose inexorably, as though he'd lost control of it. "In fact, we fucking destroyed it!"

"Phil, don't be ridiculous…" But her words died as the door began to creak and strain. She turned to face it, shocked. The sturdy oaken panels seemed to be bulging inward, as though to some insurmountable force and weight.

"Some bullock!" Phil said, goggle-eyed.

With a gunshot bang, the door jamb split, the structure of the entrance sagging. The glazed peephole broke, and a hinge went flying across the hall.

"The cellar!" he shouted, lurching sideways, kicking the cellar door partly open.

"The… cellar?" she stuttered.

Before he could explain, the front door exploded inward, showering them with dust and splinters. Sarah screamed; Phil coughed and wafted his hand. Only the dimmest starlight penetrated through the entrance, but this was minimised by the tall, amorphous shape standing there. Phil shrieked incoherently, raising the pickaxe, driving it downward-CLANK!-the massive shock of it jarring his elbows and shoulders. Sparks glistered.

"Phil!" Sarah shrieked, pivoting round behind him.

The feeble beam slashed across the tiny hall, glaring wetly from jagged, grainy granite, which as the second blow landed-CRACK!-fissured down the middle, the curved steel axe-head flying backward as its haft splintered, twirling over Phil's shoulder and caroming sideways, burying itself in the cellar door, knocking it all the way open. Sarah fell headlong through it, the on-off flashing torch going with her.

"Sarah!" Phil shouted, throwing aside the broken axe-handle, spinning in the darkness, fleetingly not knowing where he was going. More by luck than design, he found the cellar entrance and bustled through. But she wasn't waiting on the stair, and the light she'd been holding was completely extinguished.

"Sarah!" He stumbled frantically to the bottom, where he almost toppled over her limp form slumped against the newel post. "You fall? You okay?"

"I'm… all right," she moaned. "I… broke the torch…"

"Never mind that!" He grabbed her by the lapel of her pyjama top, and hoisted her to her feet. "This way!"

He ran forward blindly. The coalhole and chute were directly ahead-he could tell by the slanting shaft of starlight. But immediately he tripped and staggered, boxes, crates and buckets flying every which way, crashing and clattering into the walls. He buffaloed on regardless, shouting and bawling to Sarah behind him, until he ran headlong into some heavy, unyielding object, the sheer force of which collision punched the wind from his lungs and spun him away into a corner, where a heap of semi-rancid cloth cushioned his fall, but did nothing to protect him from the mass of collapsing shelves overhead. All kinds of grotty bric-a-brac deluged onto him, but Phil's adrenaline was now flowing-he dug free and lurched to his feet. By instinct, his left hand still clung to the cloth-it was the pile of mouldy canvas they'd pillaged from the Tigh na Cailliche. In some ways, it was hardly appropriate that he swung it around his shoulders and flung other sections of it at Sarah as she blundered in the darkness behind him.

"To keep us dry as we cross the loch," he shouted, shinning up the coal chute. "Especially with you in your PJs! There'll be no hot bath and roaring wood-burner at the end of this trip, love!"

The rain hit him even before he left the cellar, slapping his head and shoulders with vicious force. When he emerged onto the path, the wind caught him too, sending him staggering sideways. He glanced back. Sarah was emerging, bundled head to foot in canvas. "Hurry!" he said, fighting forward through the gale.

There was a path down to the landing, but Phil couldn't find it in the confusion. Besides, who or what might be waiting on that path, he didn't like to consider. Thankfully the grass was sodden but firm; they kept their footing as they descended the headland. The loch boomed like an ocean, its wind-driven breakers crashing into the jetty, erupting in fountains of spume. Fleetingly this whole scheme seemed like madness. Ever since a childhood accident on the Grosvenor Canal, Phil had tried to avoid water. And out on this water they'd be thrown around like shuttlecocks. But what lay behind was surely worse. Not that there was any choice. With the route to the car blocked, the motorboat across the loch was their fastest, if not only, route to safety.

"Careful!" he shouted, as they tottered along the jetty, its woodwork wet with spray. Briefly the moon broke through rags of racing cloud, and he saw the outboard ahead. It swung on its mooring rope, dipping and tilting. But it was a solidly made vessel-he'd been down to look at it when they had first arrived here-possessed of a powerful four-cylinder motor capable of generating two-hundred horsepower plus.

He made it into the prow of the craft with a single leap, but landed awkwardly and heavily, his back across a rowing-bench, which drove the wind from his lungs. The boat bucked like a bronco, straining on its tether. But Phil's fingers were already working the mooring knot, the line coming loose just as Sarah landed in the stern, her tent-like flaps billowing from her ungainly form, her weight tilting the boat upward to a terrifying gradient. Phil clung desperately to either gunwale as he seesawed into the air, his ears filled with the cracking and popping of timbers, his eyes bugging as dark waters poured over the sides, swirling around the figure below, which sat rigid even as it went slowly underneath.

Myriad horrors invaded Phil's mind as the gurgling surface rushed up to meet him. His flesh turned deathly cold; his spine and shoulders stiffened as it licked icily around his feet, his knees, his thighs, as it swamped his groin, belly, chest, as it clapped over his head with the echoing crash of a cathedral door.

The howls of the storm abruptly ceased.

Reality was a bubbling, turgid murk, into which Phil rapidly descended. Belatedly, he tried to kick himself up and away, but the shock of paralysis combined with his innate lack of skill to anchor him to the boat. Even when it struck the bottom, that wasn't the end. Thanks to Morar's steep descent to the abyss, and the massive weight in its stern, the craft slid swiftly downhill, tobogganing through primal ooze, only halting when it struck a rotted, twisted root, the impact of which jerked Phil forward, so that he tumbled the length of the outboard-straight into her rugged, rocky embrace.

****

Sarah lay where she had fallen, at the foot of the cellar stair.

The many blows delivered to her body as she'd come down it head over heels were as nothing compared to the jolt to her brow from the flying pickaxe head. It had split her flesh wide open; it might have fractured the bone beneath-her face was stiff and sticky with congealed blood. There was little movement in her body and limbs, though increased awareness was gradually settling over her. She had some vague memory of Phil trying to get her to her feet, shouting incoherently-and even though she had some notion why that had been, it all seemed too nonsensical.

All she knew at present was that she ought to stay where she was. She wasn't cold, she wasn't even uncomfortable. For all she knew, she might be in bed, dreaming. And when a diminutive shape came to her through the darkness, and snuggled up alongside her, inserting itself under the crook of her arm, there was no denying the pang of pleasure she felt. Though it hurt her shoulder, though the arm itself was numb, she tightened it around the small, shivering form.

"It'll be okay," she crooned. "You're safe now."

FLOTSAM

Tim Lebbon

Since her husband had died, Debbie always tried to sleep on the beach. The feel of sand slowly giving out the day's heat mimicked his warm touch. The smell of drying seaweed and decaying crabs and fish reminded her that he was dead. The constant hush of waves on the shore might have been him sighing in her ear. An unseen creature's delicate legs trailing across her stomach were his fingers soothing her skin, and the stark sea breeze preceding dawn was his last gasp of air before he went under that final time. Everything was Marc. All that she had known, and all that she would ever know of him again.

She could never abandon that.

But three years is a long time. Plenty long enough to get over things, her friends had tried to tell her, before they ceased being her friends. And more than long enough for others to start seeing her in a different light. Mad old sea woman. The lonely mermaid. Beach bitch.

She'd heard it all, and cared for none of it. The sea entranced and intimidated her, and sometimes she went a whole day without even remembering Marc at all. Beaches became home. Sand became habit. Life wasn't always about mourning and loss. Sometimes life was driven by the tides.

By day she would sell homemade jewellery to tourists from the small home they'd once shared. It backed onto the beach and was becoming ever more rundown, its wooden boarding scoured by the salt breeze. The sea eroded her home just as it had eroded her life.

She never told the tourists her story.

Some nights when Debbie slept on the beach, she spoke to him. But the times she spoke out loud were becoming less frequent. Memories were a form of communication, more personal and internalised. Sometimes it felt like they were impressing themselves upon her rather than forming from the shadowy depths of her own experience. On occasion, though, it simply felt good to talk.

"See the stars?" she would ask, lying back in her sleeping bag and tracing one hand across the clear sky. In moments she swept whole galaxies aside. Marc had loved looking at the stars. Sometimes she'd find him lying on the decking at the bottom of their garden, mildly drunk and grinning in delight as he stared, and stared. She'd join him for a while, but the cold always got to her, or the thought of unseen insects and other crawling things exploring her loose night clothing. A few times it had been his hands doing the exploring, and she had stayed with him a while longer. He had always insisted that she sat astride him, so that he could see her against the universe as they made love.

Other times she would say, "It's so cold tonight," wrapping herself tighter, curling up in the sleeping bag so that she looked like a giant shell among the dunes.

"Maybe I should go home." She said that less frequently. It was a strange concept, when home was rarely more than a mile or two along the coast. But sleeping out here, beside the sea, beneath the stars, felt like a way of honouring her husband's memory. Returning home to sleep would be moving on. She was not certain she was ready to move on so far.

So she bought thicker sleeping bags for the winter, and invested in heavy-duty tents, and weathered the storms of water and wind and people's scorn. And even after three years, on occasion she still spoke to Marc.

She had never expected a reply.

****

The bottle was wedged between two rocks at the edge of a rock pool. It was almost buried in sand, and she wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't slipped on a slick stone. She did not quite fall, but her foot splashed into the pool, water entering her boot. When she looked down she saw the opaque curve of glass. There was often glass on the beach, cruel edges smoothed by time spent washed back and forth across the sea bed. But this bottle was whole. Even more intriguing, it was stoppered with a cork and wax sealant.

She tugged its neck. It came out of the sand with a slow pop, as if the beach did not wish to relinquish its grasp.

She held it up to the sunlight, trying to peer inside. The glass was cloudy, completely smooth, and speckled here and there with tough green algae. The seal appeared whole.

Tucking the bottle into her backpack, Debbie walked up the beach until she reached the first of the dunes. They were large here, frequented by dog walkers, runners and lovers, and she sat atop one of the highest so that she could see all around. She loved the views over the water, the world at her back. Though familiar, they never grew boring.

Carefully, she worked at the wax seal around the bottle's neck. When she could grasp the cork's top she twisted, bottle one way, cork the other. It came out with a pop that reminded her of the beach giving up the bottle, though this was more musical. It sounded like a gasp of delight.

Inside the bottle, a single sheet of paper was rolled and tied with a grass-like twine. Excitement building, she tipped the bottle and caught the paper as it slipped out. The twine was old and crumbled beneath her fingernails. The paper was dry but brittle, and she unrolled it slowly to prevent damage.

There were three words written in a simple, neat hand.

I'm not gone .

She recognised Marc's writing.

There was no profound shock. No cry of surprise or fear, no disbelief, no throwing of bottle or paper, as if to discard the possibility of what she had just read. No histrionics at all. She simply read the words again, three times, just to make sure. Then she rolled the paper, slipped it back into the bottle along with the cork, deposited it in the backpack now resting beside her, and took in the view once more.

The sea was rough today. White horses broke across the beach, never quite making land. She wondered what would happen if they did.

Marc was dead. Even from the beginning there had been no hope, and she'd told those who questioned her reasons for living on the beach that they did not understand. In truth, she wasn't quite sure that she did. But she allowed those words, in that handwriting, to sink in.

That evening as she built a fire and ate supper she had brought from the house, she opened her rucksack to hold the bottle again, and to touch what was inside. But the bottle was gone.

****

Marc had insisted on calling their sailing boat Doot. It was what he had used to call boats when he was barely old enough to talk, or so he said. His parents had been dead for years, so she wasn't sure how he could even know. But owning a boat had always been his dream, not hers. She didn't really care what he called it.

The day the Doot went down, they sailed along the coast and pulled into Polperro for lunch. It was thronged with tourists as usual, but Marc quite liked the hustle and bustle. He said it made the solitude they both enjoyed so much more precious.

They walked through the streets, watching families herding their children, ice cream around the kids' mouths, parents sporting sunburn lines that would blister and peel. They'd talked about having a family of their own one day, but neither of them was in a rush. They were enjoying life as it was. They were still young.

They ate fresh crab and winkles on the sea front, followed by a pint of local cider. They laughed. They held hands walking back to the boat, then jumped on and hurried, conscious that the tide was going out. Marc used the motor to cruise them back past the long stone pier, and she sat beside him, waving to a group of children fishing with crabbing lines.

It was a sunny day, with a slight westerly breeze. It was only a few miles home, and there was no sign or forecast of any bad weather closing in. The Doot was newly serviced, with plenty of fuel and all the emergency gear required. Marc had logged their journey with an online port master. Nothing should have gone wrong.

Debbie was dozing when it happened. Lying on the upholstered bench at the boat's stern, Marc standing at the wheel, she was conscious of the sea's constant movement and sound, Marc's soft singing voice, the sun on her face, and the subtle movements of her body as the boat dipped and rose. It was one of those moments when everything was perfect, and a rush of sheer ecstasy at life washed over her. She kept her eyes closed and smiled, trying to hold on to the sensation. Living in the moment.

Marc's song ceased.

"Oh my-" he shouted, and then came the impact. It was huge, shattering, and it tore their world apart. She didn't know whether they had struck something, or something had struck them, but she was thrown aside, smashing into the boat's small cabin. Water poured down on her, filling her mouth and eyes and drowning her senses. The world turned. The sounds of breaking things smothered everything else. She was being thrown around, battered from all sides, dipped in the sea and pulled out again, and whenever she tried to open her eyes she was blinded by salt water, crashing into her face as if wave after wave was attempting to drive her down.

She tried screaming for Marc, but she gagged, swallowed, vomited it back up. Something struck her hard across the back. Something else punched her face, and it was only later she'd find out she had four parallel gashes across her cheek from ear to jawline.

Struggling to swim, to breathe, to live, it seemed like forever before Debbie was flung from the chaos into calmer, flatter seas. She had always been a strong swimmer, but she flailed. Almost drowned.

Behind her, the boat was in pieces, the sea still whipped into violence by whatever had taken it. As the hull reared up one last time, she saw a swathe of blood splashed across the ruptured deck. Between blinks, the sea came in and washed most of it away. A few blinks later and she was floating on her own. Waiting for rescue.

By the time it came she was almost dead.

The life she was brought back to was nothing she really recognised.

****

Debbie found the second bottle three days later.

She had been looking for it, never quite sure whether it would be there or not. But she had desperately hoped that there would be more than one. The first bottle had come and gone, leaving doubt that it had ever been there at all.

The second convinced her.

Tangled in a mess of seaweed and driftwood halfway up the beach, it must have been brought in with the recent tide. It was smooth and clear, newer than the first, the glass chipped here and there from impacts with rocks as it was washed ashore, the chips' edges still sharp.

She picked it up nervously, wondering whether it was just a random piece of rubbish. Knowing at the same time that it was not. The rolled message inside was visible, the sealed cork top untouched by algae.

Looking around, Debbie wondered who might be playing a trick on her, and who would ever want to. It was a cool day on the beach, summer giving way to autumn and a different type of beach dweller. There were fewer sunbathers and more walkers, not so many children and more lone adults. Along the beach, an old woman and her three dogs faded into uniform grey specks. A jogger splashed through the surf. A man and a boy flew a kite.

No one was paying her any attention. The beach was a wide open space where she could be alone, and everyone had their own reasons for being there. Hers were at last becoming clearer.

Debbie plucked at the wax seal, popped the cork and opened the bottle. She tipped the message out. Unfurling the paper, she looked around again to see if anyone was watching. Almost wanting them to. If someone else bore witness, she would not have to doubt herself.

Marc's words washed away her doubt

Go to our Cove and you'll understand.

The Cove was a secluded beach two miles along the coast from their home, accessible only via a precarious cliff descent. The beach was only exposed at low tide. It was small, pebbly, dangerous, with several small caves and one larger cavern. They had been to the Cove three times, and on their final visit they had made love in the largest cave, the echoes of their passion merging with the sea's constant murmur.

It was late afternoon, too late to walk to the Cove. And perhaps she was scared.

Heart thumping, she slipped the message back into the bottle and held it in her hand. She felt its reality, and replayed the words over and over as she walked back up the beach.

The Poop Deck was still open. A quirky beachfront cafe, its owners had done their best to turn it into a pirate-themed restaurant, hoping to attract families. It was tired now and in need of a paint job, but that added to its rugged charm, and Mags and Chris still served good coffee and great fish and chips. She knew them well. They were always welcoming and kind.

They had known Marc.

She sat in a window seat, the only patron, and placed the bottle on the table before her. She was afraid that if she glanced away it would disappear just like the first. But this one felt more real, more solid, and its message could only be for her.

"Debbie," Chris said. For such a big man, she was surprised that she never heard his approach. "Usual?"

"Just a coffee today, thanks."

"Not hungry?"

She considered a moment, glancing up at him only briefly before staring at the bottle again. She didn't feel like she could eat a thing.

"Slice of Mags's carrot cake?"

"Sure. You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Find some beach treasure, eh?" he asked, leaning in to look at the bottle.

"You see it?" she asked. Chris gave her the look. She was used to such a look from many people, but Chris and Mags seemed to understand her more than most. Or maybe they only pretended to.

Eyebrow raised, a cautious smile, the Maybe she's mad sort of look.

"Sure you're okay?" he asked, and the look dropped away to reveal the Chris she knew. He was a grizzled old sod, face craggy and leathered by decades of exposure to the sea. Difficult to age, he claimed to have served on a merchant ship during the war, but he varied which conflict with each telling of the tale. His beard could have abraded metal. He even smoked a pipe, though only once each day just after closing time.

Debbie shrugged.

"Marc's birthday coming up, huh?" Chris asked, and it hit her like a shot, because she had not remembered.

"Yes. Birthday."

"And he's still gone." Chris rested his foot on the chair opposite her, elbow on knee. All he needed was a parrot on his shoulder.

Debbie smiled. She knew that Chris was about to indulge in one of his ocean monologues. She touched the bottle with her fingertips, tracing its rough exterior. It was still warm, as if she had only just been holding it.

"Thing is with the sea, it's all hidden," he said. "We see the surface and it's vast, but we only see it in two dimensions. Even that scares us, but its real scope is beneath. Depths we can't imagine. Whole worlds down there, and we hardly know any of it. The oceans have more secrets than we'll ever know, and Marc's one of many lost to that world. Maybe there's a hundred thousand lost souls being swilled around in its currents, buried in deep sea beds, tangled in ocean forests, washing up and down the sides of deep sea mountains. Fishermen and soldiers. Lovers and monsters. Maybe there's a million of them, and they're souls that'll never be seen again."

"You really should write some of this down, Chris," Debbie said.

"Who'd read it?" He was staring at her. His eyes were sharp, blue as the sky and deep as the ocean. "If his time was up, I think Marc would have liked it that way, don't you?"

"I'm not so sure," Debbie said, frowning. She'd tried putting herself in Marc's head for his final moments, and sometimes she thought she was almost there. But now with these bottles and their messages, she was confused and messed up once more.

"Hope that's not dirty," Chris said. He gestured at the bottle as he walked away to get her coffee and cake.

"I don't know what it is," she whispered. She held the bottle again, comforted by its solidity.

Later, after she had spent some time watching the sun sink over the headland and set fire to the sea, she reached out to finish her coffee. The bottle had vanished.

She held the coffee mug against her mouth, searching across its rim. Scanning the table. Looking at other tables, down at the floor, in her lap. Even lifting her left hand to make sure she wasn't still clasping it.

Chris and Mags were sitting in the far corner cubicle. He was filling his pipe, a signal that they would be closing soon. They were waiting for her, she realised, and Debbie felt a pang of affection for them. Sometimes they hardly spoke to her at all, but she could feel their concern. Good friends didn't always need to talk.

She thought of asking them about the bottle. Maybe Mags had cleared it away while she'd been hypnotised by the sunset. But for some reason, she kept it to herself. A mystery was forming around her, its shape taking on Marc's dimensions. She had no wish to break it.

****

On the beach that night she heard sounds from the sea. She was familiar with the night sounds of the ocean. The swell was a constant hush, waves washing onto the beach an accompanying whispered concerto. Sometimes she heard stranger noises from further out, attributing them to birds or perhaps seals floating on their backs and wondering at the stars. But this sound was different. It sounded like a distant shout, carried across waves from far away and merged with spray, changing the voice's language and pitch. There was no way of discerning what it said. And perhaps she was simply listening too intently, hearing things that were not there.

She fell asleep sitting up, sleeping bag unzipped and hugged around her shoulders.

When she awoke, the sea had receded down the beach, distant and silent once more.

****

Debbie was already on her way to the Cove when she found the third bottle. She saw it from a distance, propped against the rotting timber upright of an old coastal erosion defence. Most of the structure had long-since been washed away, but the post was still there, spotted with crustaceans, its surface slick and wet. Sand was piled around its base from the recent tide. Sat on top of that sand, as if placed there intentionally, was the bottle.

It was a milk bottle the likes of which Debbie hadn't seen for some time. It was clean, undamaged by the sea, and its neck was sealed with a knot of wood and melted wax. She could see the message rolled up inside.

And she did not want to read it. She approached the bottle and paused a few steps away, sitting in the sand and looking around. There was no one close by. She was nearing the end of the beach, and looking up at the low cliffs she could see no one watching, no walkers looking down, no one waiting to see her find the bottle.

I'm already on my way , she thought. Why send me another message?

She took a couple of steps closer. The bottle was solid. There was little doubt about that, and when she reached out and touched it, it was as real as the sand, the wood, the sea and sky.

As real as me .

"I'm already coming, Marc," she whispered. She usually only spoke to him at night, and the sea muttered in reply.

She stood and walked past the bottle. But its pull was strong, and she could never leave it like that. Every step she took, she'd be wondering what she was leaving behind.

The plug popped out easily enough. The scrap of paper was the same as the others, brittle and tied with some sort of dried grass. She paused before unrolling it.

If his time was up, I think Marc would have liked it that way, don't you?

Instead of reading it, she tucked the paper back into the bottle and plugged it again, holding it in her right hand as she walked towards the end of the beach. She faced a climb up a rough staircase, a mile walk along the coastal path, and then a difficult descent to the Cove. If she decided to read this latest message between now and then, she had to ensure the bottle remained real.

Of course it will , she thought. Until you read it. Because it's only meant for you.

Debbie didn't know what any of this meant. Her memories of Marc and that night were confused. She was not quite as mad and lost as some people liked to believe, and she knew that these messages could not be from Marc. But she had to find out just what they were. Someone fooling with her? Or someone else trying to get her attention? Messages in bottles... intimations that there were answers at the Cove... shouting, far out to sea.

Fit from her constant beach and cliff walking, she reached the path above the Cove before lunchtime. The tide had turned and was coming in, but it was still far enough out for her to be able to climb down.

She edged forward, watching her footing amongst the brambles and ferns, and tried to look over the cliff's edge. But she couldn't make out much down below. Only the white lines of breaking waves and a few feet of pebbly beach.

As she took the path less trodden that headed towards the hazardous climb down, she slipped, dropping the bottle as she reached to break her fall. She landed with a heavy thump, winded. The bottle rolled. She dived for it, but her questing hand merely gave it a shove towards a sheer drop.

It disappeared from view, and a few seconds later she heard it smash onto the stones below.

"Shit!" She lay there panting, heart hammering from her near miss. A foot to the left and she'd have gone over too. She might have been down there for days or weeks before anyone found her, washed into one of the caves, rotting, crabs taking their fill. Or if the tide dragged her out into the sea, she might have never been found at all.

Debbie climbed down. Each footfall, each hand grip on the cliff's face, reminded her of coming here with Marc. It was a scramble more than a climb, but still treacherous enough to kill herself if she missed a handhold or her feet slipped on loose soil. So she took her time, despite how keen she was to reach the beach. She made sure she got there in one piece. More and more, she was starting to believe she would learn something down there, and that her life might begin again.

When her feet met pebbles at last, she breathed a deep sigh of relief.

The smashed milk bottle was still there. But the rolled message inside was gone, nowhere to be seen. She suddenly felt a pressing need to read it, berating herself for being so hesitant before. She dashed back and forth searching for it, testing which way the breeze was blowing to see where it might have been carried. But there was no way of telling. The Cove was small, cliffs surrounding it on three sides, sea on the fourth.

The paper could have been anywhere.

She eyed the caves. The smaller ones were piled with seaweed and sea-smoothed timber. The larger yawned further up the small beach, sunlight revealing wet walls and a dripping ceiling, and making the shadows further in deeper, almost solid.

We loved there , she thought, and the memories were rich and precious.

"I'm here!" she called. Her voice was dull, the cliffs offering no echoes. Perhaps her shout travelled further into the cave. Perhaps somewhere in there, deeper down, their cries of passion still pulsed.

Debbie walked back and forth across the beach, looking for the scrap of paper from inside the smashed bottle. The shattered glass remained, the vessel's message still unread. She lost track of time. The sea's sounds were amplified here by the Cove, hush and roar, hush and roar, and her feet passing over pebbles added to the ocean's song.

She sat on the stones and stared out, realising that the tide was coming in quickly now. But she didn't mind. She could reach the cliff in a few seconds and be climbing, back on the path high above in five or ten minutes. And she could not simply leave. Not after being drawn here, and not before reading that last message.

"Oh please, Marc," she said, hopeless, lost. No one, nothing replied.

Hush... roar. Hush... roar.

The tinkle of glass on glass. Bottles, dozens of them, were floating in the surf, clinking into each other with every watery shrug.

Debbie stood and waded out, reaching for a bottle. It bobbed just out of reach.

Another came close, and she went deeper. Up to her thighs now, her shorts wet, she leaned forward and clutched at the bottle as it floated nearer.

It sank out of sight.

She frowned. Being teased. She took one step back.

The wave came from nowhere, forming out of the surf and powering towards her, knocking her over, crushing her down against the beach, the rocks. Breathless, she tried to gasp in air but sucked in water instead. The salty tang burned her throat. She gagged, vomited, thrashing as the wave dragged her back out.

Managing to find one breath, she screamed long and loud, her voice instantly smothered by the next huge wave. She was bashed down against the beach, winded. She rolled, grasping for something solid but finding only water. Around her in the tumult, bottles clashed and broke, spilling their secrets to the ocean forever.

She wondered what had been written on that final note. Perhaps it had been a warning.

The more Debbie struggled, the further out she was being pulled, violent seas spinning and swirling. She sucked in another chestful of water, and for an instant she thought it might take her closer to Marc.

But there was nothing of Marc here. There never had been. No voices in the waves, no warm touch, only false messages of hope. He was one of the ocean's lost souls.

Debbie joined him.

TOYS FROM THE GINGERBREAD COUNTRY

Richard Jay Goldstein

Here's Katie Jones, who is just about to turn ten.

Katie's dad is Mr. Henry Jones. You might have heard of him, because he's the governor of a big state. And here's Mrs. Henry Jones, who is Katie's stepmom.

Katie doesn't like her stepmom, and doesn't like it when she's around, because Katie is pretty sure her stepmom killed her real mom.

****

Now it's Katie's tenth birthday and there's a big party for her at the governor's mansion, where they live. A bunch of girls from the private school Katie goes to are there, whom Katie likes okay, and also some of the Governor's assistants and secretaries, whom Katie doesn't like. But there's pizza, and a big cake, and games, and a not-scary clown, so all in all it's a pretty good party.

Katie gets some good presents too-a new bike, a big-girl make-up kit, some neat books, and other cool stuff.

And a dollhouse.

Katie's stepmom gives her a big fancy dollhouse. It's an antique, and is very beautiful-even Katie has to admit that.

"I played with this when I was a girl," Katie's stepmom tells Katie. "Now it's yours."

"Thanks, Mom," says Katie, and under her breath she says the word step before mom.

****

The Joneses live in the governor's mansion, which is also the governor's office. So besides Katie, and her dad, and her stepmom, the big house is always full of assistants and secretaries and maids and security guys and reporters. These people are forever telling Katie what to do and where to sit and how to behave. She likes it when it's just her and her dad, but that hardly ever happens anymore.

Katie is tall and skinny, with dark blond hair, which she usually puts into a ponytail, but mostly it escapes and flies around her face. She likes to read, and doesn't care all that much for TV. The books she likes best are the ones about magic and strange places, like The Hobbit, and Harry Potter, and The Dark Is Rising. One of the reasons Katie likes to read is that when she's reading she can go into her own room and shut the door, and then nobody bothers her.

****

Later that night, after her birthday party, Katie is alone in her room with all her presents, except for the bike. She's in her PJs. She sits on the floor and looks over the dollhouse.

It's made of wood and is three whole storeys high, and Katie knows it's the kind of dollhouse called Victorian. The front side is just like a real house, with balconies, and fancy railings, and outside stairways, and lots of windows with carved shutters, and a bunch of pointed roofs, and two tall chimneys. It almost looks like a castle.

The back side of the house is open, of course, so she can see into all the rooms, and see the inside stairways, and the hallways, and the pretty wallpaper, and the doors which open and close like real doors. There are pictures on the walls. She can look in through the back of the house and see out the windows in the front, and if she squints a little it's almost like being in an actual house.

There are even closets in some of the rooms, and those doors open and close too. Except for one. In the biggest upstairs bedroom there is what looks like another closet, but the door won't open. She picks at it with her fingernail, but she can't get it to budge.

Maybe it's not a real door , she thinks. Like the other ones.

But then she forgets about it, because the rest of the house is so awesome. Along with the dollhouse there is a box full of miniature furniture, and she starts arranging the furniture in all the rooms, even though if you had asked her the day before she would have told you she was too old to play with dollhouses.

What I need, she thinks, are some little dolls the right size to use the furniture.

She's still playing with the dollhouse when her dad knocks on the door and comes in.

"Time for bed, kitten," he says. "Want me to read you one of your new birthday books?"

This is an amazing treat. Katie nods her head up and down a whole bunch of times and hops into bed.

****

It's really late and Katie is sound asleep. But then something wakes her up-a noise. Pretty soon she's all the way awake and listening.

It's a kind of clicking sound. Then there's a little clunk, and then silence. Then some more clicking.

The noises aren't a scary kind of noise. More like a curious clocky noise. And anyway Katie isn't a scaredy-cat type of girl. She sits up in bed. The clicking stops.

She can see pretty good because there's the night-light, but she doesn't see anything different. Then she remembers her good old flashlight on the table next to her bed. She turns it on and shines it around the room.

When the flashlight beam reaches the dollhouse she sees it right away. The closet door in the upstairs bedroom is wide open.

It must be automatic, she thinks.

She gets out of bed and goes with her flashlight to take a closer look.

She shines her light into the little closet but the light doesn't seem to go in very far and she can't see anything. She sticks her finger through the door and feels around, but there's nothing to feel.

Maybe there's a button somewhere, she thinks, to make the door open and close.

But she can't find one. She tries to close the door herself, but it won't, and she doesn't want to break it. And now she's getting sleepy, so she climbs back into bed and turns off the flashlight.

I'll figure it out tomorrow, she tells herself.

****

Katie's real mom's name was Doris Jones. She died when Katie was six, when Katie's dad was still just a lawyer. Katie's stepmom was Mr. Henry Jones's secretary then, and her name was Miss Sheila Dunn, except Katie always called her just Miss Dunn.

The way Doris Jones died was she jumped out of a window high up in Mr. Henry Jones's office. She left a note, which said Henry-I'm sorry. The note wasn't signed but everybody agreed it was Doris Jones's writing, and everybody also said Doris Jones had something called depression, and was taking pills for it, which Katie knew about, and had even spent some time in a special hospital for people with that, which Katie also knew. So everybody said it was sad, but not all that surprising, that Doris Jones jumped out of a window.

Mr. Henry Jones was away at a meeting when Katie's mom jumped, and Miss Sheila Dunn was having lunch with a few other secretaries somewhere else in the office. So the police and everybody figured what happened was that Doris Jones came in to see Mr. Henry Jones, and was probably all upset about something, and got more upset because nobody was there, and wrote the note, and jumped out the window.

But Katie has thought a lot about this, especially since she turned nine, and her idea is that Miss Sheila Dunn snuck away from lunch for a minute, maybe pretending to go to the bathroom, and got Doris Jones to write the note, which was supposed to say something like Henry-I'm sorry I couldn't wait, but I'll see you at home, but Miss Sheila Dunn pushed her out of the window before she could finish it.

Mr. Henry Jones married Miss Sheila Dunn a year after Katie's mom died, and then became governor a year after that. People said he was very brave after his wife died, and they said Miss Sheila Dunn was brave too, for helping Mr. Jones after such a terrible thing, and they were both lucky to have each other.

****

Katie wakes up early the morning after her birthday. It's Sunday, which means church, because the governor has to go, which means the governor's family does too, which means Katie.

But, she figures, there's time to play with the dollhouse before I have to get ready.

She jumps out of bed and goes to the dollhouse.

There are little toy people in all the rooms.

On the miniature chairs and beds and couches. At the tables. Tiny people, no bigger than her little finger, like children in a grown-up house.

Well, some look like people. Some look like bugs. Some look like tiny machines. Some look like animals-kind of like cats, and ponies, and birds, but not exactly like them. Some look like nothing Katie ever saw-funny things with lots of legs and eyes. They are many different colors-purples and greens and turquoises and lavenders. She can sort of see through them, like they're made of clear coloured plastic.

Katie has to laugh when she sees them, because they are all very funny and cute.

How did they get here? she wonders. Maybe Dad left them, she thinks, or even my stepmom.

But anyway she can play with them, and does. She moves them around, and pretends they visit each other, and have a tea party.

Just when the tea party is going great, a maid comes in to help her get ready for church.

After church, it's visiting with Gram and Gramp-her dad's mom and dad, because her stepmom doesn't have any family Katie knows about. Gram and Gramp have more birthday presents for her, and the visit takes the rest of the day, which is fine because she likes visiting Gram and Gramp. Sometimes she even wishes she could live with them all the time, and go to a regular school.

In the end Katie forgets to ask her dad or her step-mom about the cute little plastic dolls in the dollhouse.

Before she knows it, it's night, and the next day is school, which means early bedtime.

But after a maid helps her get ready for bed, she takes a quick look at the dollhouse. The mysterious closet door is still open, and all the little toy creatures are still there, lying and sitting and standing around.

She decides she has time to play, just for a few minutes. She pretends one of the little toy creatures goes into the closet.

"Let's pretend you're getting dressed for a party," she tells the creature, which looks sort of like a pony with extra legs. Katie pokes the sort-of pony into the dark closet.

"Oh, here are some wonderful dresses," Katie says in a toy pony voice. "I'll bring them out."

She reaches in through the door with her finger, but now she can't feel the sort-of pony. She twists her arm all around but she still can't feel it.

Something sharp jabs her finger.

"Ow," she cries, and jerks her finger back, but for a second she's stuck and has to twist her arm around again. Then she's free, and a drop of blood wells up on her fingertip.

Must be a nail sticking out or something , she thinks.

She squeezes a couple more drops of blood out, because everybody knows that's how you make sure all the germs are gone. Just then her dad comes in to say goodnight, and her stepmom is with him, but it's okay because that makes two nights in a row her dad has come to tuck her in.

Her stepmom stands by the dollhouse. "Do you like the dollhouse?" she asks, and looks at Katie funny.

"It's awesome, Mom," Katie answers, and means it, and doesn't even bother to add the step before mom. "And I love the little toy people." But she forgets to ask who put them there.

"Of course," says Katie's stepmom.

Then Katie has to go to bed.

****

Now it's late again. Katie's nightlight suddenly flickers, goes out, and darkness fills the room.

Something wakes Katie up. Sounds. Moving lights.

She hears tinny music, and tiny voices laughing. She hears a tap-tapping of impossibly little feet. Dots and squiggles of light dance over the ceiling, yellow and blue and red.

She raises herself up on her elbows and looks across the room.

The noises and lights are coming from the dollhouse. Little shadows move and bounce in all the rooms.

Part of Katie wants to scream and run out of the room as fast as she can and get her dad. But another part doesn't want to do that. For some reason it's not exactly scary, just kind of like the night before when the closet door opened. Before she knows what she's doing, she climbs quietly out of bed.

Maybe this is like a book about magic, she thinks, and I'll be like one of those kids.

She tiptoes closer to the dollhouse.

The little toy creatures are alive.

They are dancing all over the dollhouse, in every room, up and down the stairs, inside, outside on the balconies. New ones are prancing and pirouetting out of the closet. Odd little creature-sized lamps glimmer, and their light keeps changing colour. A band of the creatures plays on strange tiny instruments. The music makes her head feel funny. The creatures bounce and jiggle. They parade through the perfect rooms, kicking up their itsy feet, nodding their bitsy heads, snapping their teeny fingers-if they happen to have feet or heads or fingers.

Katie leans closer.

The creatures stop dancing and turn to face her. The band squeaks into silence. The creatures look up at her with their itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie eyes. Then they all speak at once in thin piping voices.

Hello Katie , say the creatures together, all their tinny little voices like one voice. We are so glad to meet you.

Katie is thinking that now maybe she would like to leave and go get her dad, but she just can't seem to move her silly heavy feet. Instead of leaving, she leans even closer.

What's the matter Katie? say the creatures. Cat got your tongue?

"What... what are you?" Katie manages to ask.

Oh, say the creatures, we are your very very best friends. Your BFFs.

"How... how do you know my name?"

The creatures all laugh, the cutest tiniest chuckles. When they have stopped laughing they look up at her with very bright little eyes.

Don't friends know each other's names? they ask.

"Yes," says Katie, "but..."

Put your hands on the house, command the creatures, and Katie does.

Now the cute little creatures begin to sing, and as they sing they begin to march, across her hands where she has placed them on the dollhouse, across her hands and up her arms, a perfect little parade.

Katie Katie Katie, sings the parade, she's the one one one-she opens up the door and we'll have fun fun fun...

...as they march up her arms, kicking up their little feet, marching in time time time. Katie watches them as if she is dreaming, which maybe she is, but anyway for some reason it still isn't scary, and who cares, because the creatures are really cute and the song really is fun fun fun.

Katie Katie Katie she's our girl girl girl-she opens up the door and we'll hop and jump and whirl...

...as they march and twirl up her arms and onto her shoulders and as Katie watches all dreamy they climb and boost each other up into her ears and skitter across her chest and sticky climb over her face and into her nose, which tickles and she almost sneezes, and they squish themselves smaller and smaller and wiggle and wriggle into her ears and nose and their piping voices disappear, and then it hurts, but only for a second, not nearly as bad as a shot, and then she can feel them swirling around in her head.

Something in Katie changes changes changes, like a new eye opening up, and she knows things she didn't know before, but didn't know she didn't know. It's a new kind of feeling that feels like new clothes, all stiff and too big.

In the dollhouse, all the rest of the toy creatures troop back into the closet and close the door, and Katie knows this without looking. She sees without looking how the dollhouse is bigger on the inside than the outside. She sees without looking how the dark in the dollhouse closet is filled with a light which beats like a heart, which keeps changing, and a country of rivers of new nameless colours opens up, and there are squirming piles of clear plastic creatures everywhere. This whirling dancing jiggling country tastes sweet and dark, like gingerbread.

But she cannot go there.

So she gets on her bed and sits up the rest of the night, staring at the regular dark.

I guess now I don't sleep , she thinks, but I need to learn to pretend.

****

It's morning, bright and cheerful. The Jones family has breakfast in the family dining room-waffles, and Katie eats three.

"Because I'm growing," says Katie. "That's why."

Then Governor Mr. Henry Jones goes off to meet with the assistants and secretaries, the maids clear the table and leave, and Katie and Miss Sheila Dunn who is now Mrs. Henry Jones are alone.

"Welcome," says Sheila.

"Of course," says Katie. "You killed my mother."

"Of course," says Sheila. "How else could I be here?"

"Of course," says Katie. "What now?"

"Nothing now," says Sheila. "Later you will marry-a senator, or a governor, or a president. As I did. Sometime we will be everywhere. The dollhouse is yours, to bestow in turn."

"If my child is a boy?" asks Katie. "A fort instead, with toy soldiers?"

"Of course," answers Sheila.

"Of course," says Katie.

SUGARED HEAT

Lisa L. Hannett

They's building the bonfire in a field on the forest's southern fringe, a two minute trudge from camp. They's piling fuel high-if there's one thing they got in abundance 'round these parts, it's wood-close enough to the tree-line to make a point, far enough not to set the whole woodland ablaze.

Huffing and cursing, cousins Bren and Gerta, skirts hitched high, roll fat logs with crooked feet, their arms too stunted for lifting. Cousin Willem's reach is longer'n both twins combined, but his legs is useless stumps that flop below the hip; he's parked on a wheeled crate next to the kindling, baling fagots. Soon as Wil's knotted the twine, a herd of young 'uns runs the parcels over to a large stone-ringed pit, tosses 'em in, darts back for more. On a trail off to the right, Clint and six or seven other cousins is approaching, each hauling bigger, thrashing bundles across the dry grass. Dark boys, the lot of 'em, fit-bodied from working the slaughterhouse-but, far as Mert can tell, somewhat lacking inside the noggin.

"Vicious fucks," he whispers, watching the butcher-boys sneer and drag broken dryads behind 'em. When the ladies trip or fall, tangled in the ropes binding their branches, the cousins turn 'round and stomp on 'em with glee. Soon the trail is littered with busted twigs and leaves. Streams of glistening sap.

Pastor says these tough fellas ain't never used the good sense God gave 'em, Mert thinks, but who's he to judge? No doubt Kaintuck's holyman is off in the icebox, drowning his disgust with cold gin, leaving Mert's own ma to take charge of the burning.

Not that she's unsuited for the task, mind. Dirra's wider than she is tall, but every round inch of her is plumped with know-how. To be seen, she has to climb atop one of the benches planted 'round the fire pit-but even hidden in green shadows a hundred yards away, Mert can hear her short, sharp commands.

"We oughter go," he whispers, cuddled up to a trembling sugar maple. Gently he tugs at her straight waist. "C'mon, Sammie."

Around 'em the forest shivers. Birch, alder, oak, slender beech-all manner of gorgeous dryads copsed together, all crowned autumn red, all reaching for the sky. All open-mawed, gaping. All shaking like his own sweet gal.

Mert rubs a scaly palm against the maple's rough bark, then scratches the back of his blistered hand. It takes all his willpower not to chafe the sores on his forearms against her coarse trunk. There's no time to peel off overalls and flannel, nor grind cracked, weeping skin against the incredible balm of the dryad's syrup. Later, Mert promises hisself, when Sammie's safe.

When no-one else can harm her.

"C'mon, darlin. Let's git."

Sammie's gnarled locks twist in the wind, leaves flailing. Grackles and nuthatches chatter in her auburn canopy; the birds hop and flap, snipping 'copter-keys with their beaks. Mert presses close, wriggles. Looking way up, gazing on the dryad's mottled features, he catches a falling seed in the eye. Vision blurred, he thinks for one crazy second that his gal is dead. That her slack face-so hollow now, so skinny-her blank stare, her immovable trunk, means she's fixed to this spot. That she's up and lost her soul, traded it for permanent roots.

****

It was the boars and goats what led Mert's kin to the dryads.

With those tusks and that pungent meat, them hairy pigs was a good supplement to Kaintuck trade. Them beady-eyed buggers made a person work for their hides, mind. Faster than the nannies folk raised for milk and wool, and they was daredevils in the scrub to boot. Snouts down, hoofs trotting, they led gun-toting hunters on a wild chase through the trees. Even with rifles primed, Bren and Gerta was lanky enough to slink through the hogs' narrow tunnels; legless Wil was low and right quick, powering through the undergrowth on his wheel-board, spear rigged and ready. Wielding pistol and lasso, Mert hisself had a go-though he was much happier crawling directionless through the scritch-scratchy bush than he was killing. Still, him and the cousins bagged a fair amount of bacon before Dirra ever joined the party, and showed folk what true bounty was in them woods.

All summer, hogs nosed truffles and mushrooms 'round the base of poplars, hornbeams and hazels-but Mert's ma raised everyone's sights, lifted it from the scrub 'round fleet dryad ankles, focused instead on the rich moss of their clefts. While folk craned their necks, awestruck at the timber-gals' beauty-their firm curves and placid whorls, their impenetrable calm-Dirra squinted, taking stock. Acres and acres spread green 'round 'em. Near and far, saplings sprang up fierce, regardless of season. Never mind how quick some folk were with an axe.

"These chicks is damn fertile, ain't they?" she said.

The others grunted and nodded, reaching to pat dryad thighs and papery rumps. But with sacks full of warm hog, their attention again drooped to the path, and turned campwards.

Next day, in no mood for shearing, a randy buck bolted from Dirra's goat pen. It skittered between tents, dodging cook-fires and guywires, clip-clopping across the wide field, long gone fallow, and into the woods.

Mert's ma belted him into fetching the dirt bikes; soon the two of 'em was revving through the gloom after their best cashmere, worried he'd be gored by oinkers. As they churned grooves through the brush, pigs squealed away from their tyres. Crows screeched blue murder overhead while boughs creaked and thwapped up a storm of leaves. Dryads never was fond of the hunt: the flying knives and zinging bullets, the engines fuming, the dogs pissing on territory what ain't theirs to claim.

Turns out, though, the gals was fond of dairy.

Sure enough, upon riding into a clearing Mert and Dirra found their rascal goat rutting hisself empty on a sweet little pine yearling. The dryad was splayed on the grass, calm as a pail of water while the buck had its way on her. From the looks of things, she were lulled senseless by the stench of nanny-milk on its coat, the gentle tickle of its pointed beard.

Before winter had full-melted into spring, the young pine creaked and moaned her way out of the drowsy woods. Gait thrown off-kilter, due to the lopsided bulge at her middle, she shuffled a path through the snow, into the circle of trailers and tents. Stinking of panic, the dryad lumbered up to Dirra-who were busy fixing porridge over the communal hearth-and squatted.

As she pleated her limbs, needles showered from the gal's lofty head. Squirrels clung to her quaking shoulders, but she paid 'em no mind. The owl-hole of her mouth sucked in air, expelled gusts of feathered breath. Grunting like a spooked hog, she bore down once, hard, conjuring up an almighty crack .

"Give her some room," Dirra said needlessly. Folk were none too keen on approaching the pine madly swishing her nethers, scraping the distended gash, flicking sap. All stood, unblinking, or sat well back.

A minute later, a steaming wet bundle plopped on cold earth.

It had took Mert's ma nigh on three days to push her own bub out, nearly losing him with half her life's blood, but this gal made birthin' look easy. There were no cord to sever, no placenta, just a coating of amber goo to wipe clean. The kid was small, sure, but well formed. Goat from nipples to cloven toes, everything upper were made of the most darlin brown-skinned girl Dirra ever seen. She had a set of lungs on her, no doubt about it, and a kick with plenty of spring. One strike of her tiny hoof took a chunk of pine from her ma's shin, which slowed the dryad not one iota as she rose to her full height, raised her arms to the clouds, and returned to her grove. Pulp still sludging from her split. Sap slicking her inner thighs.

"What kind of mamma would do such a thing," Dirra cooed. "Leaving a teeny babe afore it's even dry."

Bending, she scooped the grizzling child. Lightly bopped its upturned nose. Kissed its matted hair. Holding it at arm's length, Dirra took a solid gander at the little doe's condition, and nodded. "With teats like yers, kid, bet you'll make the sweetest cream for miles."

****

The dryads spook as flints strike steel.

"Git a move on," one slaughterhouse cousin snarls, veins in his thick neck bulging. A lithe oaken gal struggles against the leash knotted 'round his right hand. From afar, Mert can't tell if the guy's talking to the writhing tree or to Gerta and Bren, who's both kneeling by the pit a few feet away, shooting sparks into dry tinder. The twins is usually skilled fire-starters-they both cook a mean hot-stone bannock-but with the butcher-boys stomping close, the girls fumble. The lighting-kits slip from their stubby fingers, forcing 'em to belly on the dirt like salamanders to gather 'em up again.

Meantime, the timber-ladies is giving their wranglers a hard workout. The beech and aspen thrash like they's caught in a cyclone, near tearing the arms off the tattooed men holding their restraints. The poplar trots to and fro like a penned billy goat. Nostrils flared, she tips her crown and attempts a head-butt; her mate dodges, weasel-slick, hooks an ankle 'round a loose root, and throws her down.

"Hang onto this bitch," says Clint, hair black as sump oil, passing the hazel's lead to his brother, before running back to camp. Already burdened with the beech-a fine pale lady like Mert's never saw-the younger cousin sets his feet wide, digs in his heels. Holding the two ropes like reins, he whips the dryads 'til both he and they's frothing, only stopping when Clint returns. Over his shoulder, a canvas tarp is slung like a hobo's sack.

"Take a couple." He opens the satchel, holds it out like it's filled with autumn candies. Moving from butcher to butcher, he doles out iron tent stakes, their points still mucked with dark soil. "Use one to hammer in the other-got it?"

At the forest's edge, Mert dances from foot to foot like he gots to piss. "Sammie," he mewls, clutching the bole above her hip. "Sammie, please…"

His gal blinks with each clank of iron against iron. She leans forward as the cousins crouch to drive the long pegs into the ground, as they try to tether the dryads' ropes to 'em, as they fail. The leash-twine is too thick for such slender rods; the loops keep sliding up over the nails' heads, threatening to loose the frenzied dames.

"Fer fucks sakes," says Clint, snatching a picket from his pal. Quick as, he kneecaps the closest dryad-the youngest, gentlest birch-and when she buckles, he clomps on her shin, whacks her leg 'til she timbers. Soon as she's down, he drives the stake through her mashed limb. Hammers it home.

"Got it?" he asks again, chest heaving.

The clamour of nails being pounded through wood echoes across the field.

"Babe," Mert says, pulling and pulling on his sweet maple. "Jesus Christ."

At last, Sammie rouses, takes an unsteady step forward.

****

"You still climbing atop that Lellie-girl every other day?"

Dirra tipped a barrow next to the stock pen, spilling a great pile of brambles and blackberry greens she'd trimmed from the forest that morning. On a three-legged stool nearby, Mert flushed, half-dropping the kid feeding on his lap. The tree-goat was a healthy little eater; she slurped, sucking back the bottle jammed 'tween her gums.

"Not so much," he managed, hot to the very tips of his bristles. Felt like months since he'd last had blind Lellie Horner flat on her back, bruised legs spread, calico dress unbuttoned to the waist. Last time he'd gone calling at her Winnebago, the goat-sprout had only just dropped. Proper riled from the kid's birth-the opportunity it promised, the possibilities-Mert had gone to Lellie's to unwind. Once he got there, it'd been hard to relax. What with the girl singing stupid songs and gabbling rot while he was in her, biding the minutes 'til he spurted. What with the image of that pine's sap-dripping nethers clear as new ice in his mind.

The bub had plumped from infant to toddler since Mert and Lellie'd quit their wriggling sessions.

"Good," Dirra said, a grin in her tone. "Save yer juices. Reckon you'll need 'em, my boy."

Whatever plan she'd cooked couldn't of been worse than the jellied red blob he and Lellie'd once made together, so Mert listened to her thinkings, listened close.

Took no longer'n burping the kid to convince him.

"Worth a go," he said.

Mert followed his ma a-knocking from trailer door to tent flap to hammock. He watched her honey ears with talk of propagatin' the future-that's what Dirra called it, fancying up her lingo to impress-and proliferatin' our root stock. He seen the clever hook of her idea pierce she-folks' hearts, and tug at he-cousins' loins.

Mass-milkings started that same afternoon.

Shallow bowls and tins was filled to sloshing with the goats' whitest and brightest, then gently laid, one by one, on the grass. By the dinner bell's clang, a dotted line of saucers connected camp and woods. By dusk, the first dryads had took the bait.

Aspen and beech, birch and hornbeam. A robust, budding maple.

"That gal there's for my Mert," said Dirra, watching the ladies wake, and walk. Foliage rustling, sun-licked orange and red, they emerged from thickets of dozing relatives. Slowly, like as though they was caught in a dream. Heads tilted, they come on over the field with a crunching, creaking tread. Nostrils twitching, sniffing cream on the air. "Reckon he'll take a fancy to them samaras her boughs is wearing-shaped like perky arses, ain't they just."

"More like cock 'n' balls," muttered Bren.

"More like Bren's jugs," said an acne-scarred cousin, cupping invisible tits to snorts of laughter.

"Dumb as deer, every last one of 'em," Willem said when the ruckus died. Whistling through his teeth, he squinted as dryads knelt to drain each dish. "But twice as pretty."

After a moment, he wheeled hisself over to a timid sprig of an oak. Dipping a callused hand into the milk, Wil paddled his fingers to catch her focus, then flicked. Pale droplets splashed the gal's face, dribbled down grooves in her cheeks. She giggled, drunk on musk and butterfat. "She's a real looker, this one is."

Dirra smiled. "Take her, then. She's all yers."

****

At last Bren and Gerta's got the sparks flaring. All the logs is coned like a grand teepee, fattest boles angled 'round stacks of kindling, slenderest sticks poking at heaven. It's last year's timber, mostly dry, laced with hunks of fresh spruce. Perfect flame-swiller. Plenty of heat and crackle and pop.

While Dirra circles the fire-checking for what, Mert can't rightly tell, but she's intent as a spaniel sniffing out a shot duck-Pastor staggers on up the road. Smirched with mud or shit, the old man's cassock is unbuttoned and slung on crooked, his whale-gut bulging over wide-waisted jeans. Heedless of thorns, gravel or embers, he goes barefoot. He heads straight for the clearing, a puckered-arse look on his face.

Sammie lurches, pulling Mert forward.

"C'mon, darlin," he says, yanking one of her many elbows. "This way. Follow me."

The dryad shakes him off.

Pit-side, the twins is doing their utmost to haul Pastor off a quivering birch. The rector's holding firm, though, hugging the tree's mashed thighs, blubbering into her crotch. His prayers is muffled and whiskey-slurred; the only word Mert can make out is Sin! Sin! Sin!

"Enough is enough," Mert says, more growl than anything. Ain't no great Almighty looking down on Kaintuck folk, he thinks, digging into Sammie's ridges. Tugging and jerking, he grinds the raw rash on his palms into the maple's trunk. The scratch of her rough bark is so fucking good, he can't help but stiffen. Ain't no one fit to judge or save no one else, he thinks, rubbing and rubbing, while Pastor grovels on the far away ground like a hog. No sense getting worked up about it now.

Soon the bonfire is roaring, smoke seething upwards, oily grey streaks untroubled by wind.

"Let's go, Sammie-girl." For one stupid second, Mert thinks of cartoon injuns. Shirtless red men in buckskins, hunkering beside the fire. Flapping wool blankets over the flames. Sending signals ain't no one can read.

"Let's go."

****

"Reckon she's excited to meet you proper," Dirra said, ushering Mert into the goat run behind their shack. The enclosure were chicken wire roofed in places with corrugated tin, the walls so tall even the springiest billy couldn't over-leap 'em. Not quite high enough, though, for Sammie. Pacing the narrow pen, the maple bent like there were a fierce wind a-blowing, head bowed so's Mert could scarce see her face. Her canopy were squashed, new buds and unfurled foliage alike jutting in all directions, snapped branches scraping metal with a god-awful screech. Dirra clicked her tongue, shooed miniature angoras away from the dryad's wandering feet. "She near tore my arm out the socket, what with her eagerness to get going."

With a thick-knuckled hand, Mert's ma massaged shoulder, bicep, forearm, then paid special mind to her rope-burnt wrist. Frowning, she tried slackening the twine tying her to the maple; but with the gal's fussing, the cord was soon stretched taut and chafing once more.

"Maybe this ain't the best time," Mert said, turning to go. Dirra hushed him with a smirk. From all 'round camp came a chorus of belly-laughing and grunting and hurried, first-time friction. Half-strangled moans, storm-lashed leaves. Proud whoops. Applause.

"No one likes a tease, boy. Samara here's been waiting all morning for ye to come-haven't ye, girl? Go on now, Almert. Fetch that pail, and give the lady a drink."

Mert reckoned the goats'd churned the dirt to rat shit; that's why he wobbled so, crossing the pen. In the far corner, he crouched to collect the full bucket, gulping air to slow his jackalope heart. No use. Chest heaving, he stood too quick, slopped milk on his best flannel, felt it soak through to his inflamed skin. Spots jigged in his vision as he about-faced. When he spoke, his voice sounded distant, like it were someone else altogether scuffling there in the muck, working up the grit to graft with a goddess.

"Ye thirsty, Sammie?"

He didn't look to see the dryad's expression. Head down, he held out the offering, and heard the keys rattling in her crown. Whether she were shaking her noggin, whether she were saying Yes, sir, or whether it were the breeze stroking her noisy, Mert couldn't say.

Focused on Sammie's trunk, the scabrous bark of it, the soft patches of moss, he inched close, closer, 'til there were nothing between 'em but the springtime music of her trembling, the sugared heat of her breath.

"She's ready, kid," Dirra said, stepping as far back as the space allowed. "Feed her good."

Mert blinked. Now the pail were empty, now it were rolling on the ground. The milk must've hit the dryad's veins instantly; one second she fidgeted and twitched like she were flea-bitten, the next she laid stiff as driftwood, tense and silent as Mert climbed on.

At first, he felt modest-shy, even. What with his ma right there, clucking happily. The herd bleating, snuffling his boots, chewing his cuffs. Mert unbuckled his overalls and shoved 'em down only far enough to free his cock. Ashamed of the vivid red blotches on his backside, the weeping sores on his hips. He groped the dryad's main cleft, fingered blindly for the right slot. Found a likely hollow and pushed hisself hard into it.

No sooner than the humping started, Mert's awkwardness fled. Between thrusts, he stript shirt and pants, jocks and even socks. Gusts of late-spring air played across his rash, soothing cool, but it were the gal's touch that got him going, the harsh of her timber, the bucking scratch of bark against bad skin.

Screwing Lellie Horton never felt like this.

A minute, tops, and Mert were moaning and groaning louder than any other tree-climber in camp. The burn in his blisters, in his flaking cracks, in his chapped creases, felt good, oh so good, hot spreading along his every part, oh mamma, he never wanted to stop, but oh the hot, the hot, the hot spurting, hot fit to set the maple alight…

Dripping, Mert exhaled and slunk up Sammie's length. Belly to belly, he scraped and sighed 'til his head were aligned with hers. Sparrows tittered in her branches. Striped chipmunks clung to her twigs, staring. Nanny goats cackled below while billies rammed their horns into Sammie's side. Hinges squealed, then the gate slammed behind a whistling Dirra.

Finally alone with his girl, Mert wanted to say something, something powerful and pure as that moment, but he never was no poet. Instead he stretched to his fullest. Kissed the white smudge blurring the dryad's closed lips.

****

"Ma ain't stupid, Sammie. See how she's grilling Pastor? Snapping Bren's head off? Needling Gerta 'til she bawls? Won't be long 'til she adds up one and one, figures us two ain't coming. And the cousins ain't got no reason to protect us, now do they? No sirree. They seen us leaving, sure enough. Greasy-Clint were overly keen on our doings-he always did have a hard-on for you, darlin. The second Ma turns on 'em, them fuckers is gonna give us up. No doubt."

Despite the day's warmth, Mert's palms is sweaty. Muscles spasm, making claws of his fingers; he doubles the chain 'round his hand, grips tight as he can. The fetters is cold and slippery, the iron rough-hewn. With hanks of wool, he's padded the links circling Sammie's neck, hoping they won't shave her smooth. Her wood splinters regardless. Fragments chip away as she presses forward, the leash buffing even as it gouges. The maple pulls Mert toward the field, the staked ladies, the ravenous fire. She breaks cover, poised to run.

"Wrong way," Mert hisses. "You trying to get us caught?"

Sammie shoots him a brief, indecipherable glance. Keeps pulling.

****

Same as always, pigging season hitched into Kaintuck on summer's tailgate. The forest were crawling with the beasts, promising sausage-filled winter larders; but with ready flesh snared in their lassos, the boys ain't had much mind for extra hunting. What hoglets wandered into camp would suffice, they reckoned, the troupe of 'em smug as emperors, spearing boars and babes in their very own backyards.

For a spell, weren't no one happier than Mert and his ma. Sure, Dirra and them she-cousins had one hell of a time keeping the dryads in milk. The gals was damn thirsty creatures-what's worse, seemed the goats was addicted to the trees' wild stink. Gone right feral, prized cashmeres hardly stood still; they played mule when the milking stool come out, refusing the pail. Even so, Dirra sheared the beasts' matted hair and spun it into decent skeins while Mert was off courting his Sammie-girl. Needles clicking to the rhythm of the boy's exertions, she knitted tiny blankets and bonnets and booties for the half-and-half child that would, she believed, join the family any day.

Once she'd knitted the goats bare, Dirra whacked a cradle together, using straw and sheets of old gyprock. Truth be told, it was a lopsided thing, but seeing how Mert goggled at his gal, she thought better of building a bed for his sprout from bits and pieces of Sammie's dead relatives.

From forest to highway, other folk hammered and glued basinets, crocheted and stitched dainties, tilled special gardens for the timber-mammas' rest. Dairy was scarce, and bacon rashers were flimsy, but any day now, any day, they believed- they knew-they'd all be richer than ever.

Any day now.

Any day.

Any week.

****

"Reckon these sticks ain't got the guts to bear us no bubs, my boy," Dirra said over a dinner of jerky and biscuits. She pushed away from the card table they shared for meals, climbed a footstool to peer out the shack window. Outside, autumn had nearly bled summer's corpse dry. Lost in thought, she stood there awhile, arms crossed, fingers drumming, while Mert finished his grub. After licking the plate clean, he carried it to the washtub. Itching fit to burst, he were eager to see Sammie, but something in his ma's stance gave him pause. The tilt of her black brow, maybe. The dark angle of her squint.

He sidled up next to her, followed her gaze. Evening's curtain were falling on the smallhold; in the gloaming, weren't nothing out of the ordinary. Oil lamps glowed on tent-poles, flashlights bobbed back and forth from the shitter. A cigarette cherry flared, floating at knee height, as Wil rolled from yard to yard, checking locks and rattling cages. Embers winked in the central hearth, the cook-fire banked until morning. Beyond, the forest were a jagged silhouette, blacking out the rest of the world.

Dirra reached over and scratched Mert's shoulders, drawing circles down his lean back. This, too, weren't nothing new. For seventeen years his ma'd eased the itch with hook and claw-but that night, he went rigid at her touch.

Immediately, she snatched back her hand. The glaze in her eyes sharpened, turned scowl.

Mert cleared his throat. "Best I pay our gal a visit, I suppose."

"She's playing us for fools," Dirra said, glaring. As if it were his idea to lure the dryads out their groves. As if it were him what wanted a whole new brand of young'uns. "And not just Sammie, God help us. That first one flat tricked us with her pine-kid, the sneaky bitch. And the rest followed suit, pretending to y'all they was something they ain't. Fuck 'em. Better yet, don't. Let the whole frigid lot of 'em burn in Hell."

"Never pegged you for a quitter, Ma," Mert said, though he knew snarking were useless. From the stubborn clench of her jaw, Dirra's mind were already set. "Think what you like, but I won't abide no talk of burning, ye hear? Keep that sick shit to yerself."

Out in the goat run, Mert peeled off layer upon layer of tension, and stood naked before his gal. Sammie needed a good hosing; curled in her own filth, the shine were all but gone from her leaves, the dirt littered with molted maple keys. At his approach, she scootched herself into a corner.

"It's okay, darlin," he said, lying down, pressing his backside into her coarse front. "I'm here."

Flexing and relaxing, Mert shuddered against Sammie's body. He jerked up and down, almost the same as when they was humping, but without it being over so damn fast. Spooning like this, he could be with her for hours, the pleasure of her skin raking his a thousand times better than blowing his load. Quietly, so's Dirra wouldn't come out with torch blazing, he scrubbed hisself to groaning-point, thinking, Baby, oh baby.

****

The fire's roaring white, hotter and more devastating than love.

Upping-stakes, Bren and Gerta and all them cousins haul the gals one by one to the blaze. The boys is walking funny; there's a hitch in their giddy-up from so much humping, from the day's struggles, from fey gashes torn into their gams.

"You can't stop nothing," Mert says, grasping tangled twigs, failing to get a solid hold. The chain is cutting off his circulation; blue fingers throbbing, he yanks. Sammie tows him beyond the wood's thinnest edge, their passage so far gone unnoticed only on account of the commotion pit-side.

Mert's stomach turns as the flames catch. The aspen goes up first, whoosh!, just like that, then the lovely hazel, the spitting young pine. What a racket the dryads make, with hair and sap sizzling, when once upon a time they scarcely uttered a sound!

Mert falters, wanting-but afraid-to close his eyes. He can't bear the thought of his Sammie on that there pyre. Amber and ruby licking all the places he's claimed for hisself. Greed scorching her black.

In his gut, buried deep, he knows that's the end she wants. The fire. The agony. The nothingness.

Sammie wants to be a fucking martyr.

Oh, what an almighty ruckus.

Half-shadowed, Mert looks at his gal's profile, the beloved bumps and crags outlined with flickering gold.

"You can't stop nothing," he says, sobbing. "Not unless there's a egg in that nest of yers what's ready to hatch. A bub to call our own."

No answer.

She's playing us for fools , Dirra had said, and might be she's right. Ain't no mixed kids come from none of Kaintuck's dryads. Last Vinesday, Clint's pet laid one shrivelled nut, tough as a peach pit, human hair whiskering its only bone.

Only one.

That's it, sum and total.

It weren't enough.

"Git 'em," Dirra had hollered-No, Mert realises, she's hollering. His ma's perched atop her step-stool, one eye on the burning, the other fixed on him.

"She seen us, darlin."

Huffing, she clambers down the rungs. Sprawled on the ground, Pastor's bawling nonsense, catching flurries of ash. Taking up a flaming brand, Dirra yells and kicks the holyman out the way so's he don't catch fire when she runs past.

"Won't be but a few minutes 'til she's here," Mert whines. "Hoof it, love. Now."

No chance. All sudden-like, Sammie's got herself a bronco-rider's expression, his cocksure posture, and more than his fair share of balls. Bracing herself against Dirra's attack, the dryad plants her feet wide, raises her boughs. Smiles.

For a second, Mert admires his lady's tenacity. Despite the slightness of her frame, the tonnes of weight she's lost since they first met, Sammie still reckons she's a heavyweight. That she's bigger than she truly is. That she's midsummer fireworks, set to go off.

What a mamma she'll make .

In Mert's grip, the chain is gone slack, the tug-o-war with his gal nearly over. With no other option, he fossicks through the ferns and thistles until he finds a stone with just the right heft, just the right jag, then clobbers his gal good and hard. A swift, sure blow to the burled skull.

Crackling farewells follow as Mert drags his withered gal into the deep, safe dark of the woods. Huffing, cursing. Minding he don't trample Sammie's twigs.

Shouting louder than the dryad's sisters, brandishing death, Dirra trails after the retreating pair-but she's too late to catch us, Mert tells hisself. Too slow.

Fallen, Sammie's limp body whispers through the scrub, roots sighing along the ground behind 'em, nibbled by pigs.

A GIRL AND HER DOLLS

Adrian Cole

This place is supposed to be very nice and relaxing. It's not a school and it's not a hospital, but maybe it's kind of half way between the two. It's called Fairholme. I didn't know if I was going to like it here at first. Then I did start to like it. Now I'm not so sure.

I'm here because of my gifts, only the staff didn't call them that. They sort of acknowledged them, but I could feel the staff getting embarrassed if they accidentally said something about them. They didn't want to talk to me about them. Well, not directly anyway. They didn't think I was special, but they didn't think I was quite right either. They were jealous, of course. And a bit scared, too. I always sort of like that. It's a bit naughty. It helps me, though. You know, to get through things. I don't have a mum and dad anymore, so it's nice to have something to fall back on.

I think I must have been born with the gifts, but I wasn't aware of them until I lived in Jamaica, where Dad worked in something called an Embassy. He was pretty important and always busy, which meant Mum was as well, so I spent a lot of time with my Nanny. She was brilliant. Her name was Primrose and she was a Jamaican lady. And she was the first one to tell me about the gifts. I sort of knew what she meant, but it wasn't until she took me to meet her grandma that I understood.

Primrose's grandma was a zillion years old. I mean really old. I didn't think anyone could live that long. I never asked her how old she was and I never tried to read it in her. She was the only person I ever knew who could block me. That was scary. But she was okay, really. Just interested, I suppose, in my gifts. She taught me how to use them. And how to disguise them.

You see, I can do weird things. I can feel what other people feel-and Primrose's grandma showed me how to listen to people inside. That's one thing. And I can move things. And then there's the thing that no one knows about. I keep that a secret.

After Mum and Dad died in the accident when their plane crashed, I had to come back to England, to be with my uncle's family. I wanted to die too, I was so upset. I carried on, though, and shut myself into myself. My uncle-Dad's brother-never liked me very much. He pretended to, but I could hear him thinking bad things about me. My name is Madeline, but he used to call me Maddie, and I absolutely hated that. I'm not mad, and he shouldn't even have joked with my name, even if he knew I wasn't mad. I was just inconvenient. He had his own kids, and they didn't like me either. They were spiteful and mean.

So I was sent to a boarding school. It was okay. The teachers and the nurse and everyone were nice, really, or no different from most people. They wanted to help us kids. I was disruptive, though, because I was so unhappy. After all, I'd lost my mum and dad and I'd lost my nice home in Jamaica and my Nanny. I missed it all a lot. So I got angry and depressed and all that sort of horrible stuff. The teachers tried to help me, but they couldn't.

I began to argue with everyone in class too, which was bad. I was cheeky and rude and said nasty things to the other kids. I could feel their hatred growing and it made me worse. I'm not pleased with myself. It wasn't fair. I didn't stop to think that I was making a mess of things or that I was going to get more and more into trouble.

When I started at the boarding school, they put me in a dormitory with twenty other girls, but when things got bad, and I started to move things, like jerking the beds at night and pulling the sheets off people while they were asleep-and all of it while I was in my own bed 'asleep'-the teachers got suspicious. It was the first time I heard someone say poltergeist and I had to get a dictionary to find out what it meant. I had to laugh.

It was like I had a new friend. I got my 'friend' to do a few things for me. Simple stuff, like breaking cups and saucers or throwing books around. It was really funny to feel the reactions in the teachers and the other kids. They were frightened. I got the blame, though. I know that because I could read what Mrs Alburton was thinking. She was the Head Teacher. I liked her, because she was kind and did want all the children to be happy and to learn things so they could get on in life. I felt sorry for her as well, because she had lost her husband in a war somewhere and I could read sadness in her all the time. I didn't tell her, though.

"You know, Madeline," she said to me, "I do understand why you aren't happy here. Your sadness is like-well, you know all about radio waves, you've studied them in physics. You can't see them, but they're in the air, all around us. I think, sometimes, when people are very, very sad, they create a sort of radio wave. It can be extremely strong. Strong enough to move things."

"Yes, Mrs Alburton," I said, quite calmly. "It's not always deliberate, though. When I get angry, it just happens."

She kept her face very calm, like me, but I could read her inside and what I said had shocked her. She had realised straight away that what I meant was, sometimes I do it on purpose. I control what I do. I move things.

"Does it worry you, Madeline? Is it a little bit frightening?"

I didn't want to admit that I enjoyed it, so I said something like, no, it was okay, just a slight nuisance, a bit like one of the other girls, called Susan Plumb, who got fits now and then. Mrs Alburton said that was a very good comparison. She also told me I was to have my own room, just for the time being. She wanted me to think it was for my protection, but I knew she was thinking more about protecting the other girls. I liked that.

I knew after that interview things would change. When people don't understand something, especially in a kid like me, they don't like not being able to have control. I read it in all of them at the school, and most of the kids had as little to do with me as they could. Some of them called me a witch-oh, not to my face-but that's what they were thinking. I loved that!

I started trying to read about witchcraft, but our school library didn't have any proper books about it, only stupid stories and fairy tales. One evening a week we were allowed to go to the local library and choose a book to take out on a ticket. I always picked something that would impress my teachers, the sort of book that they were always making us read, or reading to us, like Little Women. Yecch! I also stole the books I really wanted to read-books about witchcraft and creepy stuff like that-but I made sure I put them back the next week after I'd read them. It was easy to do. No one took much notice of the kids when we were in the library, as we were all on our best behaviour. The librarians thought we were all lovely.

Reading about witches was brilliant because I realised that they used to be very important in the world. Some of them were good people, who didn't do horrible things at all, or worship the Devil, they just healed sick people. They knew about herbs and stuff like that. There were bad ones as well, who were supposed to use spells and curses, but most of the books said they weren't really servants of the Devil, just women who had upset the people in charge who got rid of them so they could stay in power. They did some horrible things to the witches, like drowning them and burning them. That must be awful, to be burned, like the worst thing in the world.

It reminded me of our vicar. He used to come to the school and talk to us about God and angels and stuff. There were some weird things in his mind. Dirty things. I hated speaking to him because those dirty things would always be reaching out like shadows to me. He was always on about how Jesus loved us, but I don't think the vicar knew what love was, not like I'd known it when Mum and Dad were alive.

One day I thought of the vilest thing I could think of-it was pretty horrible. And when the vicar tried to talk to me, I put my thought into his head. It was like letting a big spider crawl about in there, among all those dirty things, and it worked! The vicar didn't know it was me who'd done it, but he kept away from me after that, except to say polite hellos and stuff. I knew he was scared of me. I liked that.

I did that a few times to people when they annoyed me. Nothing horrible, like what I did to the vicar, but enough to keep them away from me. There were a couple of teachers who I didn't like much and the school nurse. She was bossy, although she was like it with everybody, not just me. We had to be examined every now and again, for head lice and stuff like that. Sometimes the nurse would get one of the girls and scrub her hair. It always made them cry. I made sure she didn't have to wash my hair for me. I just kept myself very clean and tidy.

In the dormitory we were allowed a few things, like dolls. I had a teddy bear, which no one else wanted. He had been shoved in a box at the back of a high shelf because his fur was missing in places and he only had one button eye. I felt sorry for him, so I made him mine. Same with the other three dolls. They were made of plastic and had painted faces, but the paint was fading on all of them. Their clothes were tatty, so I made them some nice new ones.

I was good at sewing and mending stuff and Miss Higginbotham, our crafts teacher, always said so. It was funny how she got excited inside when any of the girls did good work. It was the one thing that made her happy. She would have made a good mum, but she didn't have a boyfriend or anything. And she was quite old, so I expect she wouldn't have children now.

The other girls sniggered at my dolls and called them spassies, which made me angry. It was why things got bad for me. It wasn't fair, because the girls were wrong to say horrible things about my dolls and my teddy, even if he had different size eyes. I told some of the teachers about what the girls said and they were told off, sort of, but it didn't stop them poking fun at me when they thought they could get away with it. So I decided to teach them a lesson.

I said, pack it in or you'll be sorry. They just laughed and made faces in class. One night, when it was cold and you could hear the rain beating on the windows, I opened the door to my little room very quietly and I sent Teddy out to frighten them. There was one faint night-light and I watched Teddy doing his awkward walk down the middle of the dorm-between all the beds, which were lined up on either side. One of Teddy's legs was damaged-some of the stuffing inside had got crushed when he had been in that box-so he limped as he went along the aisle.

I made him stop at Louisa Bramton's bed and he went right up to where she was sleeping and started to tug at the eiderdown. When the eiderdown moved off her, the cold woke her up. She was face to face with Teddy. She screamed. It was brilliant! Teddy went under her bed, out of sight. Everyone thought Louisa had gone mental. Eventually one of the night staff, Mr Timson, heard the noise of all the girls chattering and came in, switching the lights on.

Louisa was told she must have had a bad dream, but I could read her thoughts-she knew it wasn't a dream! By the time Mr Timson got round all the beds and came in to my room, Teddy was snuggled up in bed beside me. I pretended to be asleep and it worked. Mr Timson didn't wake me up, but I could tell he was a bit puzzled.

I did it a few times after that, sending Teddy out to terrify the most spiteful of the girls. I suppose I got careless, because the teachers began to suspect me of something. After all, it was my teddy that the girls were complaining about. I was sent to Mrs Alburton to explain my side of the story. She knew, of course. She already knew I could move things. But she also knew that the other girls had been unkind to me.

"Whatever happens to us, Madeline," she said to me, "we must never take the law into our own hands. You do understand what I mean, don't you?"

I said yes, but I didn't really agree with her. I think she knew that. She couldn't read people like I could, but she was clever.

"I wonder if this school is the right place for you, Madeline. I know you are still very unhappy here and I don't like that. I want you to be happy. Do you think you could ever be happy here? When people are sad, they can get angry. And we know what happens when you get angry, don't we?"

"I warned them," I said. It came out quite suddenly, but Mrs Alburton was always fair and I knew she wanted to be kind. So I said it.

"Not to tease you? Or else you'd-punish them, is that it?"

I nodded. "In the Bible it says, an eye for an eye." I thought I was being clever saying that and it would get her right on my side, but I read her thoughts and I knew I'd made a mistake-she was frightened. For the first time I could tell she wasn't happy with me-she thought I was bad.

"Will you promise me something?" she said. "If you feel angry and you want to… hurt somebody, or scare them, just come to me, Madeline. Tell me and I'll promise to help. No more unpleasantness. Will you do that?"

I said yes. It seemed to please her, but deep down she was still a bit panicky.

If the girls had left me alone after that, I wouldn't have bothered with them. They'd have learned their lesson, so that would have been okay. But they didn't. They hated me even more and sometimes that hate was like a fire burning, especially at night. I made sure no one could get into my room.

One afternoon-it was a Saturday and we didn't have lessons-I went back to my room. I'd had some lunch and I was feeling a bit sleepy. We were allowed time to ourselves and mostly we did a bit of revision or reading. I'd stolen a book from the library in town on something called 'necromancy' so was looking forward to reading it. When I was stretched out on my bed, smiling at the weird pictures of people talking to dead people (which I didn't believe in) I reached under the blankets for Teddy. I often used to read to him, and the dolls, as if they could understand.

Teddy wasn't there. I looked everywhere in my room for him, which didn't take long because I don't have much furniture and there are only a few shelves. He definitely wasn't there. Outside my room, in the dormitory, I could hear whispering. A few of the girls were there, waiting for me. I went to the door and opened it, glaring at them.

"Hello, Madeline," said that Louisa Bramton creature. "Looking for something?"

I could read exactly what she meant. "If you've got Teddy, you better give him back."

"Why don't you come and see?" She laughed. The others with her giggled. Then they turned and ran out through some French windows on to the lawn outside, waiting for me to follow. Something was really wrong, I could feel it. I went after them and they ran off towards the edge of the long lawn, down to where there was a hedge with a field beyond it. Again I chased after them.

They were leading me to Teddy. Half way across the field, well out of sight of the school buildings, there was a clearing in the grass. The groundsman, Mr Craggs, sometimes came here to have fires and things, getting rid of leaves and fallen branches and rubbish like that. He must have been preparing to have a fire because there was a big heap of stuff in the middle of the cleared space. All the girls from the dormitory were here, gathered around the heaped wood. When I arrived they all laughed, some of them pointing at me.

"Where's Teddy?" I shouted, although I knew exactly where he was. It was in all their sick minds. They'd stuck him right up on top of the bonfire, wedged in between some sharp sticks that were poking up. The sun shone on his two eyes and made it look as if he was crying. I wanted to shout for Mr Craggs to come and help, but I knew he wasn't around. He usually had his fires in the evening.

I thought that might be okay and that I could rescue Teddy, but when I saw Louisa Bramton pull a box of matches out of her pocket, I knew what the girls were going to do. I was going to grab Louisa Bramton's arm, but someone tripped me up and some of the girls kept me on the ground. I was too winded to stop them and I saw Louisa Bramton strike a match and set light to some of the newspaper poking out from the bottom of the fire. It didn't take long for the fire to catch.

It roared into life. By the time the girls let me up, the flames were so high that I had to step well back. I tried to use my gifts to move Teddy, but he was stuck firm, the girls had made sure of that. I screamed and screamed as if it was me being burned. Poor Teddy. He didn't have a chance. His eyes melted and his little body turned black and then went to ashes.

Later, when Mr Craggs found me, my face wet with tears, he didn't understand what had happened. He just thought it was me who'd lit the fire for a prank. He hadn't seen any of the other girls, and what was worse, neither had anyone else. I was spoken to by a few of the teachers-Mrs Alburton was away at something called a conference. They didn't say so, but I could read that all of them thought I'd started the fire. I told them about Teddy, but no one believed me. There was nothing left of him so I couldn't show them.

I was sent back to my room and told that I would have to stay there for a few days until they decided what to do with me. I cried a lot about Teddy. No one understood that to me it was like I'd lost a real person, like when I'd lost Mum and Dad. The dolls couldn't understand. They listened, but they weren't like Teddy. He was much cleverer than anyone could have known. The dolls were okay, but they were a bit silly. I didn't normally mind, but that night I wished they were more sympathetic.

When I finished crying, I got angry. Very, very angry. I could feel the girls in the dormitory, being horrible and laughing at me and what they had done. They said some awful things about Teddy and called him a cross-eyed freak and much worse. It still makes me furious to think about it. I remembered what Mrs Alburton had said about going to her if I felt angry, but I wasn't going to wait until she got back.

So I did what she said I shouldn't. I paid the girls in the dormitory back. That night, right at midnight-I chose the time deliberately-I sent out my power, only this time I really did use it. My anger was like the fire that had burned poor Teddy. It made it easy to do what I did.

One by one, I tipped every bed over and tossed all of the girls on to the floor. I made the sheets dance and whirl about, sort of like ghosts. There was lots of screaming and the girls were really terrified. I buried Louisa Bramton under a blanket and started to suffocate her. I got a bit scared when I realised I could have choked her, actually killed her. So I let her go and it was much more fun to see her wail and watch her tears.

When the night staff rushed in, they were really freaked out. The looks on their faces made me giggle. The dormitory was an absolute mess, beds everywhere, sheets and blankets heaped up. But the best thing was that lots of the girls had wet themselves, including Louisa Bramton. That was brilliant.

I could feel the staff approaching my door. I was locked in, so no one could possibly blame me. I could read their doubts. Oh, they wanted to blame me, but how could they? I couldn't walk through walls, could I? So when they came in, I was pretending to be asleep, my three dolls with me. I did my best to look sweet and innocent, but the staff were too screwed up to know what to think. They did wake me up and spoke to me, but I just yawned.

After that, I couldn't be allowed to stay at the boarding school. Mrs Alburton was much more strict and stiff with me. She was angry and she knew that I'd done all that harm in the dormitory, but she couldn't say that to any of her staff. She thought if she did, they'd think she was crazy. She told me that I was to go to another place, somewhere where I'd be much more relaxed and better cared for. I was okay about it. I hated the school now and besides, if I had had to stay on much longer, I would have hurt someone badly.

So they brought me here, to Fairholme.

It wasn't until I came here that I found out about that other thing I can do. It was a sort of accident. There was another girl here, called Julie Treadway, who I liked. She was very quiet and didn't talk to anyone much, but we sort of got on okay. She liked dolls and between us we had quite a lot in our rooms-everyone here had their own room. They don't call the staff teachers, just staff, or doctor, or nurse. It's not a hospital, they say, but when I hear them talking to each other and thinking things, they mean that it is. So everyone here, like me, has something wrong with them. According to them anyway.

That made me a bit annoyed when I found out. My friend Julie didn't like lessons very much, because they made her head ache and she got tired quickly. One of the staff, Mr Bardell, was a bit of a bully. I knew from his thoughts that he was fed up because he couldn't get Julie to do as she was told, but he was determined to make her. One day, after a lesson with her when he'd got cross and told her she must work harder, she was very upset in her room and it took me a long time to help her stop crying.

When we were in the canteen the next day, I saw Mr Bardell, having lunch with some other staff. He was drinking a big cup of tea. I saw him spoon some sugar into his tea, two big helpings. I concentrated on his arm and made him spoon another three, four, five lots of sugar into the tea. He didn't seem to realise and the other staff were too busy nattering to notice. He stirred it up and drank the tea in one go-I made him. You should have seen his face!

He rushed out of the room and I knew he'd gone to the loo. He shut himself in, but I knew he was being sick. All that big fried breakfast came back up. I told Julie about it, but not that it had been me that made him sick. Serves him right, she said, and she laughed for the first time in ages.

Mr Bardell was okay really, because I knew that he was like Mrs Alburton had been-he did care about the kids, I could read that. But no one should be a bully, even a bit. There was a doctor, Stenners, who came soon after I did, and he was supposed to be what they called an expert in psychology and stuff. He thought he was very clever and knew more than the other staff. He thought he understood what he called 'the patients' better than anyone. And he thought he understood me. You know what? He started calling me 'Maddie' just like my uncle had. He thought it was a way of winning me over.

Dr Stenners made me do tests and I had to have my heartbeat measured and had to have other machines and things check my body. I even had to have injections. I began to resent Dr Stenners a lot. I made my mind up to deal with him, because I knew I could. I knew from his mind that he liked one of the nurses, Miss Werrell, but she had a boyfriend in the town and didn't like Dr Stenners at all, although she pretended to because she had to work with him. Dr Stenners used to make comments to Miss Werrell and I knew he wanted to do the things to her that he pictured in his mind. Dirty things. It reminded me of that vicar. Miss Werrell guessed what Stenners was thinking, but was afraid to say anything to anyone.

I had started to play a new game with my dolls. I gave each of them a special name-the name of one of the staff, and I used my sewing stuff to make uniforms for them and I painted their plastic faces so that they were supposed to look like the staff they were named for. I had one dolly for Miss Werrell-she had thick blonde hair and a little red ribbon in it. Her face wasn't brilliant, because I'm not that good at painting, but she looked about right. I didn't have a doll for Dr Stenners at first, as he was fairly new here, and there weren't any dolls left anywhere else I could use. I wasn't going to take one of Julie's.

So I made one. I got some material and I tore a bit off one of my sheets and I got some cotton wool for stuffing and I made a Dr Stenners doll. Its head was a bit soft and its hair wasn't very realistic-just strands of wool that I made black from some shoe polish. I sewed the face on and it was okay. I knew it was meant to be him anyway.

I waited until evening one Tuesday. In the week, the staff lived in at Fairholme, and they all had their own rooms. I knew that Miss Werrell had gone to her room after tea. I could read her mind. She was going to phone her boyfriend. Dr Stenners was outside the buildings, doing something to his car. He didn't have a girlfriend. He had a wife once, but she left him because they argued a lot. She hated him because he had other girlfriends and you're not supposed to do that when you're married. I read that in his mind. He knew it was true, but he didn't care. He only pretended to.

While I was listening to his thoughts, he did what I expected-he thought about Miss Werrell. His usual dirty thoughts. I was sitting on my bed, holding the two dolls, the plastic Miss Werrell and the lumpy, cloth Dr Stenners. I pushed them slowly together and put Mr Stenners's arms around Miss Werrell. Her doll was squashed on to the bed and Mr Stenners was on top of her. I made him start pulling her clothes off.

I made the dolls do that sex thing that adults are always thinking about. That's why it was easy to copy. When I stopped and put the dolls to one side, I listened. Suddenly I could hear shouting. It was Miss Werrell's voice and then three men. It sounded as if they were all arguing, so I listened with my mind more than my ears. My trick had worked. I had made Dr Stenners do things. Bad things. He'd left his car and gone to Miss Werrell's room.

I was a bit sorry for her because she was crying and very upset, but I thought she would think it was worth it when Dr Stenners got what he asked for. And he did. When he was told to go to the office of the main doctor, Dr Wolversley, I listened to their conversation.

Dr Stenners was very confused. He had tried to do dirty things to Miss Werrell and he couldn't get out of it. He'd ripped her clothes and put his hands on her body. Dr Wolversley asked Dr Stenners why he had tried to 'rape' Miss Werrell. Dr Stenners was crying and kept saying, "I don't know, I don't know." It was brilliant. In the end, Dr Wolversley said that he was going to 'suspend' Dr Stenners until he'd had an 'enquiry.'

It all went very quiet at Fairholme after that. I knew that both Dr Stenners and Miss Werrell had gone away. There were other doctors who saw me, but none of them suspected anything. They all thought that Dr Stenners had been an idiot and should have known better than to force himself on Miss Werrell. They thought Dr Stenners thought he could just make Miss Werrell do what he wanted. He was that sort of man, they all said it.

I was feeling quite smug. I was glad that Dr Stenners was disgraced. But I had a bit of a shock a while later when I found out that Dr Wolversley had a visitor. It was Mrs Alburton. And they had a conversation that made me feel very worried.

She told him about me and said things that she shouldn't have said. Like, Madeline is at that age in girls where her frustrations and anger give vent to outbursts that go beyond normal bounds. I know she said that because I wrote the words down. Mrs Alburton meant that I was a freak. That I could do things. She told Dr Wolversley about how I'd done all that damage in the dormitory, even though I'd been in my own room. They talked about 'telekinesis.' I'd read about it in some of the books I'd looked at. Dr Wolversley didn't say to Mrs Alburton that he thought all this was rubbish, but in his mind, he was thinking it was pretty weird and not very likely.

He did try to ask her if there could have been any other reason for what happened. Mrs Alburton said, to my horror, that she was sure it was me. I could do that sort of thing. And she said it was freakish. What was worse was, she never even mentioned Teddy. She never said what those vile girls had done to him. That wasn't fair. I realised that Mrs Alburton wasn't on my side at all. She was glad to get rid of me and now she was trying to turn Dr Wolversley against me.

He said that Dr Stenners had had problems with me because, no matter how hard he tried, Dr Stenners couldn't get through to me and I resented him. Mrs Alburton said that if I didn't like somebody, they were likely to get hurt. When they talked about Dr Stenners's behaviour with Miss Werrell, Dr Wolversley said that it had been 'unfortunate.' I read Mrs Alburton's thoughts and she knew that I had been involved somehow. She didn't say that, but she told Dr Wolversley to be very careful with me.

Things got worse after that. For a start, Dr Wolversley told all the staff that I was to be watched all the time. I was not to be left on my own, apart from night time. Even then, there would be a TV eye watching me in my room, so that the night nurse could see me in bed. I read the minds of all the staff. It was quite shocking to find out that most of them thought I was weird and possibly dangerous. The most terrible thing of all was, they took away all the dolls in my room.

That did it! How dare they! I was allowed to play with the dolls in the day time, with the other kids, but not to keep any with me. They were my only proper friends. I was very angry, angrier than I'd been since Teddy was murdered. Everyone was turning against me. It made me irritable and I broke a few things and spoiled some of the food in the staff canteen. It was where most of them had breakfast, lunch and tea.

It got so that whenever anything bad happened, even if it was nothing to do with me, like when someone lost some keys, I got the blame. They said things to each other like, it's our little witch girl, and sniggered. They were supposed to be adults, but they were like stupid kids. I just got angrier and angrier. I wasn't going to give them the chance to punish me, though. I shut myself inside my head and just listened. Maybe that would have been okay, but then they did something really cruel.

They decided that all the old dolls should be scrapped and replaced with new ones. All my friends, the ones I had dressed and re-painted, even though the staff didn't know that each doll represented one of them. They just thought the dolls were old and ugly-tatty. Fairholme had been given some money for things like books and toys, so the staff wanted to bring in brand new stuff. So they shoved all the old dolls into a couple of big cardboard boxes and put them in a store room, where they would have to wait until a man came with a truck to take away things that could go. They didn't say, to be burned, but they meant destroyed.

There was no one I could talk to, except my friend Julie Treadway. Like me, she was very upset when I told her what was going to happen. The dolls were her friends too.

"We have to rescue them," I told her, and she agreed. We knew neither of us could get near the storeroom, not directly. So in the middle of the night I made one of the night staff unlock the room and go back to the counter area where the night staff sat, reading and writing reports and stuff. The storeroom was along a corridor that wasn't used much, so there was no TV eye watching it. I was able to make the night nurse forget that she'd opened the door. She was so interested in the papers she was dealing with that it worked brilliantly.

Julie was able to go to the storeroom and open the boxes. She put all the dolls around the room in a nice, neat line, just as though they were all having a cosy chat. Julie shut the door and I got the night nurse to lock it again, but I made sure she put the key somewhere where it wouldn't be found quickly. Like before, I made her forget what she'd done. When she got back to the desk, I made her fall asleep.

I went to sleep, but I made sure that I woke up just before staff breakfast time at half past seven in the morning. I had to work quickly, but that was okay. The first thing I did was to check that all the staff who wanted breakfast were eating. All the ones I was angry with, or really didn't like, were in the canteen. Some staff weren't there, like the night staff, but they'd never bothered me much. Dr Wolversley wasn't there, but I knew he wouldn't be. He would be in his office. That was part of the plan.

The windows in the canteen, like all of Fairholme's windows, had special locks. I'd found out by experimenting that I could unlock or lock them-like I did when I was moving things. So I locked all the windows in the canteen and then I did the main doors and the side doors that they called the fire doors. So no one could get in or out.

I slipped out of my room and found the key to the storeroom that I'd made the night nurse put away. If anyone saw me leave my room on the TV eye, they probably thought I was just getting up and going to the toilet. I went to the storeroom, which was out of sight anyway. I locked myself in with the dolls.

I knew they were pleased to see me. Their funny little eyes were watching me. I explained to them what I was going to do, because it was only fair. They wouldn't have understood if I hadn't explained. And they might have been angry with me. They were okay, though. So I started work. As I got on with it, I heard sounds in my head-screaming. I pushed the horrible sounds to the dark part of my mind and pretended it was something like a TV in the background.

The screaming sounds got worse and worse as I worked, but I ignored them. They were to be expected. As I was finishing, I heard shouts and more screams somewhere near the storeroom corridor outside, like people were running about. I sat on an old packing crate, holding the last of the dolls. I waited while the din outside got worse.

When the knock came on the door, quite loud and a bit frantic, I let it unlock itself. It banged inward and Dr Wolversley was standing there. He was wearing a long, white doctor's coat and there was blood on it, quite a lot of blood. His hands were very bloody, too, right up to his sleeves, which were wet. It wasn't that that made me stare, it was his face. It was incredibly frightened, his eyes really wide, looking at me. His whole body was shaking. He looked like a monster. I could see people rushing about behind him down the corridor, shrieking instructions to one another, and in the distance, those screams.

Someone had managed to get the canteen door open. Dr Wolversley had been in there. Now he reached out a bloody hand and gripped the doorframe. I think he was about to faint, he was so terrified. Then he saw the dolls. I'd put them all back neatly in a ring, like Julie had done.

"These are my friends," I said. "I don't want anyone to throw them away."

He just gaped at them, his mouth wide open. Would he recognise them? I'd done my best to change them, so that he wouldn't. At first I'd thought about scrubbing off as much of their faces as I could and then drawing on new ones, but, as I said, I'm not a very good artist. So I left their faces. To be honest, they weren't very good likenesses of the staff they represented, so that was okay. That's why I left them and made the other changes.

Dr Wolversley made a funny sort of squawking sound in his throat. He may not have recognised who the dolls were, but he knew then that I'd changed them all. Swapped an arm here, or a leg there. They didn't all fit back together very well, because the dolls were slightly different sizes. Oh yes, and I swapped over two of the heads. They'd snapped into their neck sockets pretty well, so that was okay.

I didn't think the doctor was going to speak at all, but eventually he said, "What are you going to do?" His eyes, still wide, like an owl's, were looking at the doll I was holding. It was him. This time he knew that.

I held it up and cupped its head gently in my right hand. "That depends on what you're going to do to me."

THE LARDER

Nicholas Royle

Not long after we got together, she mentioned that when she was a child her older sister had taken her treasured copy of the Observer's Book of Birds and destroyed it. She could still picture the two thrushes on the cover. I tried some second-hand bookshops, but could only find a later edition, so, although I knew it would be easy to locate online, I decided to give her my own, featuring on the dust jacket what I knew, more precisely, to be a pair of fieldfares. I had bought it second-hand a year earlier, having decided to start collecting the Observer's Books, but only those of a particular vintage, reissues from the late 50s and early 60s.

A week after I had given it to her, I found myself briefly on my own in her kitchen and happened to spot the book lying on the worktop. I picked it up and noticed that the front jacket flap had been inserted between two pages-between the garden warbler and the Dartford warbler-like a bookmark.

I heard the creak of a loose floorboard on the landing outside the kitchen and immediately put the book down again and knelt to get the milk out of the fridge. As she entered the kitchen, I saw her eyes flick to the book momentarily.

"Cup of tea?" I offered.

"Thanks."

While the kettle was boiling, I visited the bathroom. I heard her leave the kitchen. When I came out, I saw that the book had gone from the worktop.

As I was pouring the tea, she re-entered the kitchen and stood behind me. I turned around.

She was standing very close. I handed her one of the mugs.

"Thank you," she said as she took a sip.

"You're welcome."

She didn't back away.

"I like your flat," I said.

"Good," she said. "I want you to feel at home."

She took another sip of her tea and I tried my own, but it was too hot.

"Where do those doors lead?" I asked, inclining my head towards two doors off a narrow vestibule leading to the bathroom.

"The green door leads outside," she said. "Back yard. There are steps down. It doesn't get much use over the winter."

"It's spring now," I pointed out.

"Shall we go and sit in the sitting room where we can be more comfortable? she said.

"Okay," I said and followed her, with a backwards glance at the other door, which had been stripped and coated in wood stain.

The walls of the sitting room were bare apart from a framed pastel of heathland dotted with clumps of gorse.

"I know I've asked you before," I said. "Is that of somewhere in particular?"

"The New Forest," she said.

"Ah yes, that's where you're from, somewhere down there."

Later, she was in the kitchen preparing a snack for us to have before we went out for a drink. She sang to herself as I listened from the bedroom. She had a lovely, rippling singing voice with just an occasional harsh, almost scolding, note to it. I saw the book by her side of the bed and picked it up. The jacket flap remained in the same place. 'This uncommon little warbler is the only resident bird of its family,' I read from the description of the Dartford warbler. 'It is found only in a few southern counties.' I scanned down the page. 'HAUNT. Gorse bushes and copses.' Then, hearing her approaching from the kitchen, I put the book back down, making sure the flap stayed in the same place.

****

We saw each other only once a week, as we lived in different cities. On a Monday or Tuesday, I would catch a train and we would spend the night together.

The following week, I arrived in the afternoon while she was still at work. I made a pot of tea and while it was brewing I looked idly around the kitchen, pretending to myself I wasn't looking for the Observer's Book of Birds. I looked at the door to the back yard; it was actually painted the greenish blue of a small number of British birds' eggs-heron, dunnock, redstart, whinchat. (I had recently acquired a fine copy of The Observer's Book of Birds' Eggs.) There was a key in the lock. I looked at the door next to it, which did not have a key in its lock, but then maybe it wasn't locked. I poured out the tea, then went over and grasped the handle of the wood stained door. I turned the handle. The door was locked. I moved to my right and unlocked the greenish blue door. Wooden steps led down to another door at the bottom. I went down, unlocked that door and found myself in a yard no more than six feet square. There was a little round table and two chairs. It was a fine day, warm enough to sit outside. I went back upstairs for my tea.

There wasn't much else in the yard. A washing line hung down from a hook. Its other end lay coiled on the concrete flags next to a hefty stone around which I noticed a number of smashed snails' shells. I sat and drank my tea until the sun disappeared behind a cloud and I went back inside.

When she came home we went out to the pub. I watched her as she walked to the bar for our second round. She was wearing a deceptively simple dress that flattered her. She had wide hips and narrow ankles; her bare arms tapered to slender wrists and long, elegant fingers that rested on the edge of the bar the way they might settle on a piano keyboard.

I smiled at her as she returned with our drinks.

Later, in the flat, I leaned back against the kitchen sink and she pressed into me. I threaded my arms around her waist and kissed her.

"I sat in the yard this afternoon," I said.

"Really?" she said, returning my kiss.

"Yeah. It's nice."

She laughed.

"What's that other door?" I asked, indicating with a nod the one I meant.

"That's the larder," she said, pulling away from me and taking both my hands in hers. "Shall we go to bed?"

"I can't think of a good reason not to," I said and let her lead me out of the kitchen. I had only a very limited view from behind, but her expression looked strangely fixed and almost alien as her sharp features cut through the still air. We both in turn stepped on the loose floorboard.

In the middle of the night I woke with a pounding head. She stirred as I got up, but her breathing remained slow and steady.

I found some paracetamol in the bathroom and gulped two down with a glass of water. Sensing that I would struggle to get back to sleep, I went into the sitting room. On the coffee table was the Observer's Book of Birds. I picked it up. There was enough light from the streetlights, the blinds having not been lowered. The flap had been moved on by a single page to the thrushes-mistle thrush and song thrush. My eyes moved over the text until they snagged on a short paragraph towards the bottom of the page devoted to the song thrush: 'FOOD. Worms, slugs, snails, grubs and insects; also berries. The bird smashes the snail-shells on a stone known as an "anvil".'

****

The following week the papers were talking about a heat wave. She texted me, saying did I fancy meeting her by the canal and we could walk back up towards her neighbourhood, perhaps getting something to eat.

When I reached the canal she was already there, standing on the road bridge looking down into the water. Unaware of my approach, she appeared to be staring with almost murderous intensity at a moorhen and her chicks.

"What did they ever do to you?" I joked.

She snapped her head round and her smile of recognition took a moment to arrive. She pecked me on the lips and we headed in a northeasterly direction, ending up walking through the market. I had previously seen the lock-up shops down there only after the end of trading, all the units hidden away behind roller shutters covered in vivid graffiti. Every other business, it seemed, was an African butcher's, their trestle tables practically lowing under stacks of cows' hooves.

"Look at these," she said, pointing to yet more hooves hanging from lethal meat hooks just above eye-level. She took hold of my hand for the first time during the walk, intertwining her long fingers with mine. I looked down involuntarily and was aware of her turning to look at me, so I met her gaze. There was a strange half-smile on her lips that didn't quite meet her eyes. She looked back at the meat hooks. The butcher approached from the shadows, asking if he could help us, but she turned away without answering him and we walked on.

When we reached the main road, she asked if I was hungry and without waiting for an answer headed for the first of several Turkish restaurants that lined the high street.

She tore at a shish kebab with her teeth as I tried to keep pace, then we bought some beers from the off-licence across the road and took them back to hers, where we drank them slouched on the sofa in front of the television. Without warning, she stood up and put out her hand. I let her pull me to my feet and followed her into the bedroom, where she quickly undressed and got into bed. I looked down at her, becoming aware of the Observer's Book of Birds on her bedside table.

"I just need to go to the bathroom," I said.

As I passed through the kitchen I looked at the two doors on the left. My eye was drawn to the stained door, which in the light from the window appeared a dark rusty red. For the first time since I had been coming to the flat, this door had a key in its lock. I walked on into the bathroom, where I emptied my bladder and quickly cleaned my teeth before going back through the kitchen and on to the landing, where the loose floorboard creaked beneath my feet.

As soon as I got into bed, she sat up and knelt over me, then kissed me. I felt her teeth pressing behind her lips. I kept thinking about the book that was within arm's reach, plus my stomach had started to ache, presumably from the meat-heavy meal. We soon finished and she got up to go to the bathroom while I reached over and picked up the book. The cover flap had been moved forward about ten pages. I glanced at the nightingale on the left-hand page, then turned to the red-backed shrike on the right. I read: 'This summer visitor from Africa is well named "Butcher Bird", as it butchers birds, mice and insects, and impales them on thorns and spikes, known as its "larder".' I heard the creak of the loose floorboard and quickly closed the book and put it back.

She went to sleep within minutes of getting back into bed, whereas I lay awake for what seemed like hours, unable to relax.

The pain in my gut woke me in the night. I thought at first it was serious, but as I came fully awake I realised it had not got any worse. I could hear her breathing, low and regular. I got out of bed and walked softly out of the room. I stepped around the loose floorboard and entered the kitchen. I went into the bathroom but failed to make anything happen that might have eased my stomach ache. Instead I returned to the kitchen and stared at the door to the larder. I looked at the key in the lock. The next thing I knew I was holding the rough-textured key between my finger and thumb, turning it, then twisting the door handle.

As I started opening the door I heard a noise-not the squeak of a hinge that needed oiling, but the familiar creak of the loose floorboard on the landing.

THE VEILS

Ian Rogers

Drew was asleep when the phone rang, half-awake when he picked it up, and full-on wide-eyed alert when he heard Lily's trembling voice say, "It's coming for me, Drew. It's turning red. I have to go. I'm sorry."

The line was dead before he had the chance to say anything in reply.

Lily was dead by the time he got to her apartment.

The doctor told him later that it probably wouldn't have mattered if Drew and his sister had lived next door to each other rather than on opposite sides of the city. Lily hadn't just nicked her wrists with a razor and waited for the EMTs to arrive. She had slashed her arms to ribbons with a butcher knife and climbed into a hot bath. This wasn't a cry for help, he told Drew. This was someone who wanted to die.

"But then why did she call me?" Drew asked.

The doctor shook his head. "Maybe to say good-bye."

Drew didn't believe it. Goodbye was the one thing Lily didn't say on the phone.

****

Drew didn't know many of the people at the funeral. He had made all the arrangements himself-their parents had died in a car accident seven years ago and were, in fact, buried in the plot next to his sister's. They had some other relatives, but none who were close or close by. With the exception of a few of Drew's co-workers at the newspaper, the people who came to the church and the graveside service were strangers. People who had seen the obit notice, he presumed, and some others he had called from the address book he found in Lily's apartment. The apartment he'd have to clean out, since there was no one else to do it.

At the end of the service, some of the strangers introduced themselves and shook Drew's hand and offered their condolences. Some were Lily's friends, a few were people she had worked with over the years-Drew didn't know any of them. He and Lily had never been close. They talked on the phone every month or so, swapped birthday and Christmas cards. It was not so much a relationship as it was touching base, as if to make sure the other person was still in the world, still alive.

Drew didn't feel too badly about that-at least that's what he told himself. None of the people at the service seemed to have been close to Lily, either. There was no boyfriend- at least none of the men identified themselves as such-and even among her friends and co-workers, there were a few sniffles, but no real tears. No one broke down or threw themselves on the coffin asking Why? Why? Why?

One strange thing, though:

After the service was over and everyone else had left, Drew was walking back to his car and saw a man standing on a hill on the far side of the cemetery. His face was dark, like he was wearing sunglasses or a hat. His arm came up and pointed straight at Drew. Then he turned and walked away, disappearing over the other side of the hill.

****

"I don't know why it's bothering me so much," Drew said.

"Probably because she was your sister," Harris said.

They were in the ground-floor deli where a lot of the people from the newspaper went for lunch. Drew and Harris sat in a corner booth with their sandwiches lying untouched before them. Harris worked in layout. Drew supposed they were friends, although they didn't do much outside of work except grab the occasional beer. But there was no one else he could talk to about this.

"It's more than that," Drew said. "It's not just that Lily's gone. It's like, in a way, she isn't gone, couldn't be gone. That this entire thing is a mistake, and the moment I look around I'll see Lily come walking into the room."

"They're sure it was suicide?"

Drew nodded. "It doesn't make any sense."

"I don't think it's supposed to." Harris looked down at his sandwich without picking it up. "Everything I know about mental illness comes from a university course I took eight years ago, but what I remember is that people don't always show signs when they're suicidal. Sometimes they seem perfectly happy. Did you notice anything different about how Lily was acting lately?"

"No," Drew said." But I didn't see her that often. We'd get together for dinner or lunch maybe once or twice a year. After my parents died..." He shook his head. "You'd think something like that would've made us closer, but it had the opposite effect on us. And that's the problem. I can't tell if something about this situation is actually wrong, or if I only feel this way because I'm trying to find something wrong. I didn't know her, Harris-I didn't know my own fucking sister-so I have no idea if it was completely normal for her to kill herself."

Drew's voice had started to rise, and several people in the restaurant turned to look at him. Harris stared hard at them until they looked away, then he turned back to Drew.

"You feel guilty," he said.

Drew frowned. "Are you asking me or telling me?"

"You tell me."

"Fucked if I know. All I do know is that there's something... wrong about this situation."

"The whole thing is wrong," Harris said. "Your sister killed herself, and you were the one who found her. If you didn't think something was wrong, I'd be worried about you, pal." He hesitated. "Should I worry?"

Drew didn't say anything.

****

Harris had offered to help Drew clean out his sister's apartment, but Drew said he was fine. He wasn't really fine-in fact, he didn't think he was even in the same time zone as fine, but it felt like something he needed to do on his own.

He didn't have any trouble at first. Lily's clothes he sent to the Salvation Army, same for her furniture and the few knick-knacks lying around. The rest went in the trash.

Then he got to her office.

Standing in the doorway, Drew realised two things. The first was that even though he'd been to Lily's apartment on several occasions, he had never once been in this room. The second was that this was clearly the place where Lily spent all of her time.

The room had that lived-in quality that Drew saw on a daily basis at the newspaper: cubicles adorned with photos and calendars and stuffed animals and action figures, whatever it took to make it seem like anything other than what it was-a place of work.

Lily's office was like those cubicles except on a grander scale, and yet in a way it was completely different. The room was clearly the central hub of the apartment-from the walls covered with photographs to the discarded take-out food trays that cluttered every surface. She had done a lot to make it her own place, but by the same token it was not a room that exuded a sense of warmth or homeliness. In fact, although Drew was reluctant to admit it-because doing so would imply that he didn't know Lily nearly as well as he thought he did-the office had the air of an obsessed, overworked mind. Possibly an unhealthy one.

But was there really any 'possibly' about it? Drew wondered as he looked down the hallway to the bathroom where Lily had died.

It was impossible to say for certain, especially now that she was gone. Lily had worked as a freelance graphic designer, so on the one hand it was only logical that her home office would look like a college kid's dorm room. But on the other hand, there was this other, darker quality that made Drew extremely uncomfortable.

It was the photos that bothered him the most. Even for someone who worked in graphic design, he thought this was overkill. All four walls were completely covered in photos. Drew walked around the perimeter of the room, looking at them all, but he couldn't discern any pattern, any rhyme or reason as to why Lily would have chosen these particular images to paper her walls.

Then, on his second pass around the office, he noticed two things about the photographs. One, they all showed large groups of people, crowds on city streets, people in parks, malls, stadiums. And two, he noticed that in each of the photos, a single person, a woman, had been circled in red marker.

The same woman.

****

Before he left that night, Drew forced himself to go into the bathroom where Lily had taken her own life. He made himself look at the tub. The porcelain was white; he told himself the pink stains around the edge were only in his imagination. He had cleaned the tub himself, his hands burning from the bleach for hours afterward.

His gaze fell to the floor where he had found the bloody butcher knife. It had been lying next to the cordless phone Lily had used to call him before she died.

It's coming for me, Drew. It's turning red. I have to go. I'm sorry.

What had been coming for her? That was the question, and Drew wasn't sure there was an answer. Not one that made any sense. The thing or things that had been after Lily probably only existed in her mind. It's turning red. What did that mean? Probably the water in the tub. The blood leaving her body from the dozens of cuts she had inflicted upon herself. He'd seen them when he hauled her out of the water. He remembered how frightened he was, not because the cuts had been bleeding, but because they hadn't. They'd looked like tiny mouths, some of them smiling, some of them frowning, as if they couldn't quite decide if this turn of events was for the best or not.

Drew turned out the light and walked back down the hall to Lily's office. He took a closer look at the photos on the walls, and noticed that, in addition to the mystery woman, Lily had also circled two mystery men who appeared in several of the pictures. None of the three appeared in the same picture, either all together or in pairs. Drew assumed Lily had taken the pictures here in Toronto, but he supposed they could've been taken anywhere. Or by anyone.

By the time he left that night, he was no closer to understanding why Lily had put the photos on her walls or why she had singled out these three people.

Maybe there was no reason. Maybe she had simply gone crazy.

Drew wished he could say he knew Lily better than that, but he couldn't.

****

It took Drew three more days to clean out his sister's apartment. The only room he left untouched was the office. He wanted Harris to see it first. He asked him to come over one day after work.

"You've never been here before?" Harris asked, standing in the doorway.

"I'd been to her apartment, but never in her office."

"I can see why." Harris wandered around, looking at the photos on the walls. "This... this is not the sort of thing you'd want other people to see."

"I don't know what you'd call it," Drew said. "A collage?"

Harris shook his head. "This isn't a collage, Drew. This is an obsession." He loosened his tie. "Frankly, it scares me a bit. It's like being inside..." He trailed off, his cheeks flushing bright red.

"Inside the mind of a sick person," Drew finished. "It's okay. I thought the same thing." He went over to one wall and pointed at a few individual photos. "See how some of the people in these are circled?"

Harris came over. "Yeah. They're like..." He shook his head.

"What?" Drew asked, interested.

Harris didn't reply right away. Eventually he said, "I was going to say they look like surveillance photos. You know, police stuff, like on a stakeout or something."

"You think Lily was spying on these people?" The thought had already crossed Drew's mind. "Stalking them maybe?"

Harris shrugged. "I honestly can't say. But I don't think so. Some of these shots are candid, but most of them seem kind of... I don't know... staged? Like they're..." He trailed off again.

"What?"

"I don't know. They're definitely odd, though."

Drew nodded. That much they agreed on.

"Would you mind if I borrowed a few?" Harris asked. "There's something kind of familiar about these shots, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I'd like to show some of them to Billy Wurtz."

"Yeah, sure," Drew said. Billy Wurtz was one of the newspaper's on-staff photographers. "Just don't tell him where they came from, okay?"

Harris gave him a sympathetic smile. "Sure thing."

Drew said, "You want to know the really strange thing about these photos?"

"What's that?"

"Lily was a graphic designer, and she worked with photos all the time, but I never knew her to be much of a photographer herself."

"Maybe she started taking pictures as a hobby," Harris said. "You said you weren't that close to her. It's possible she got interested in photography and just never mentioned it to you."

Drew nodded. "It's possible. But you want to know something even stranger? I've been through this entire apartment, from one end to the other, and I never found a single camera."

****

Drew was a financial reporter at the Globe and Mail, and while his work was far from stimulating, it was at the very least distracting. So, in the days following his sister's death, he immersed himself in his work, while at night he returned to her apartment and spent a few hours going through her office, searching through papers in her filing cabinets, files on her computer, trying to find something that would help him understand her death. Her suicide.

But would he be able to find anything that truly made sense out of what was, to most people, a senseless act?

He didn't know, but he kept searching.

****

One night, Drew noticed the pictures in Lily's office had changed.

He had come to a point where he'd decided enough was enough, that even if he had to live with the mystery of Lily's death for the rest of his life, it was time to finish cleaning out her office and move on.

He started by boxing up Lily's computer. Then he moved on to her books and files. He saved the photos for last, not because it would take a great deal of work to remove them from the walls, but because they represented the last piece of Lily in the place... even if they only showed how mentally distressed she had become. Once they were gone, so would she.

"She's already gone," Drew told the empty room. "So just do it."

He went over to the wall, gripped one of the photos by the corner and started to peel it off the wall.

Then he stopped.

The picture was different.

No, it was the same one, but something in it had changed.

He couldn't tell what it was at first, then he saw it. It was a shot of people on a busy city street. The hustle and bustle of a work day in some anonymous city that could have been Toronto or New York or Chicago or Hong Kong. One of the women in the crowd had been circled in red-the same one that been circled in several other photos that decorated the office walls. Except in this shot, the woman's face was darker, as if a shadow had fallen across it. Even though there was nothing in the picture to cast such a shadow.

Drew thought it might have just been his imagination, but he knew that wasn't the case. He had been staring at these photos intently the past few days, especially the people Lily had circled. Their faces were always bright and clear; it was how he was able to tell it was the same ones in every shot.

He looked at one of the other photos, this one showing a line of people standing at a bus stop. One of the men was circled-Drew had come to think of him as Curly because of his tight brown curls. In the picture his face was dark, as if a cloud was hovering over his head. His face shouldn't have been dark; there was a streetlight shining down on the whole group of people waiting for their bus, and all of their faces were starkly illuminated.

Drew went across the room to a photo taken in a city park-High Park? Central Park? Who knew? In the shot a pair of joggers trotted down a winding path, while in the background a crew-cut man on a bench fed some pigeons at his feet. The man's hand was raised in mid-toss, and a spray of breadcrumbs hung in the air. His face, circled in Lily's tell-tale red marker, was also noticeably darker than before.

I'm not imagining this , Drew thought. I'm not crazy.

He was reaching out to touch Crew-cut's new, darker face when the phone rang behind him. The sound was jarringly loud in the empty apartment. As Drew went over to pick it up, he thought, Got to make sure to disconnect the service.

He picked up the phone and heard a woman's stifled sobs on the other end of the line. Drew felt a cold glaze of sweat form on his lower back. The woman made a series of stilted, stuttering sounds, like she was trying to form words but couldn't quite get them out.

She's going to say it's turning red , Drew thought randomly.

"Lily?" he said in a dry, croaking voice.

The woman broke down and started weeping again.

"Who is this?" Drew demanded.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have called. But I couldn't..."

"Did you know Lily?"

"Yes."

"I'm her brother."

"I know," she said.

"Were you one of her friends?"

"No," she said. Then: "Yes. We worked together sometimes."

"Were you at the funeral?"

"No." She said it like the idea was abhorrent to her.

"What's your name?"

"Angela."

"You know what happened to Lily?"

"I... I read about it in the paper."

"Do you know anything else?"

"I don't understand."

"I think you do. You called me here, at my sister's apartment. You wanted to tell me something."

"I..."

"Listen, why don't we get together and talk?" Drew said. "There's a coffee shop on the corner. I can meet you there in an hour."

"I can't see you," Angela said. "I can't talk to you."

"Please," Drew said. "Something happened to Lily."

"She killed herself."

"There's more."

The woman sobbed again. "No more," she said. "Please."

Drew took a shot in the dark. "I've seen the pictures," he said. "The photographs."

Silence on the other end of the line. Then: "You've seen them?"

"Lily circled people in each one. The same people. Who are they?"

"You've seen them?" Angela repeated.

"Yes."

"Did you show them to anyone else?"

Drew hesitated. "No," he said. "Why?"

"Don't," Angela said, and the line went dead.

****

Next day at the office, Drew stuck his head in Layout and asked if anyone had seen Harris around.

"He's been off sick the past three days," said Ty Chang, one of the web guys. "Daniel's pissed because he only called in the first day. The last two he just didn't show up."

"Has anyone called him?"

Ty shrugged.

Drew went back to his desk and called Harris's home number. It rang and rang. He was about to hang up when Harris answered.

"Good-bye," he said.

The greeting was so unusual and unexpected that Drew didn't respond right away. Then he found his voice and said, "Harris? Is that you?"

"So far," Harris said, and chuckled dryly.

"You sound like shit."

"That's how I feel, chum. She's not looking too good."

"What? She who?"

"Nope, she's not looking good at all," he went on. "In fact, she's looking a bit red."

"Red? What are you talking about, Harris?"

"I'm sorry, Drew. I really am. But I've gotta run."

The line went dead.

****

The next day they fished Harris's body out of Lake Ontario. A couple walking their dog on the boardwalk saw him come strolling across the street and walk into the water without breaking stride. They said he didn't swim, he just went under the water and didn't come up again. The man went in after him, but couldn't find any sign of him. The police were called. They sent out boats and some divers found him a few hours later. He was wearing his pyjamas. The police were calling it a suicide.

He didn't leave a note.

****

Drew went to the funeral.

Harris wasn't buried in the same cemetery as Lily. If he was, Drew thought that might have been enough to send him right over the edge. He had an image of his world as a table that was being slowly tilted on an angle, and everything that he had thought was safe and stable was sliding away and falling off into the abyss. A part of him was afraid, but another part was glad, almost excited. He didn't care if he went over the edge himself. He wanted to see what lay at the bottom. He wanted to see if Lily and Harris would be there waiting for him.

After the service he was walking back to his car when he saw something that gave him a sharp jolt of déjà vu: a man standing on a hill at the far end of the cemetery. A man with something dark covering his face.

The same one who was at Lily's funeral , Drew thought. The one who pointed at me.

He wasn't pointing at him now-if it was the same man. Drew started walking toward him. Soon he was running. The man was about two hundred yards away, and Drew figured he'd turn and walk away like he did at Lily's funeral. But he didn't. He just took a few steps to the side to stand beneath a tall oak tree.

When Drew reached him, he saw that a branch from the tree hung down on an angle, concealing the man's face. He reached out to pull the branch away, but the man said, "No" in a firm voice that caused Drew to lower his hand.

"I think you've seen enough already," the man said. "Don't you?"

"Who are you?" Drew said, trying to peer through the leaves. "Are you Curly or Crew-cut?"

"It doesn't matter."

Drew looked back over his shoulder in the direction of Harris's grave. "You killed him, didn't you?"

"No," the man said. "You did."

"How?"

"You showed him."

"Showed him what? The pictures?"

The man said nothing.

"I saw them, too," Drew said. "Why am I still alive?"

"Seeing isn't enough," the man said. "We will always be dark to you."

"What does that mean?"

"You told him. You showed him."

"Who are you?" Drew demanded. He took a step forward and reached out to grab the man. He was going to get answers, even if he had to shake them out of him. But the man stepped back, and Drew ended up walking into the branch that concealed the man's face. By the time he batted it aside, the man was walking away, down the other side of the hill.

Drew started after him, then the man, still walking away, turned his head and looked back over his shoulder.

Drew froze.

There was something on the man's face, a black cloth that covered it completely.

No, Drew thought, not a cloth.

A veil.

****

The day after Harris's funeral, Drew went to talk to Ty Chang.

"Did he seem upset to you lately?"

"No," Ty said. "But he was definitely acting a bit off. Strange, even."

"Strange how?"

"He was really nervous," Ty said. "Kind of jittery, you know? One time a phone rang at someone's desk and he actually screamed. I asked him if he was okay and he told me he hadn't been sleeping. He said someone was following him, but when I asked him about it, he acted like he hadn't said anything. He gave me this funny look, like he didn't know he had spoken aloud or something." Ty looked around to see if anyone else was within earshot, then said, "To be honest, he was acting kind of crazy."

Drew nodded and turned to leave. Then Ty said, "He gave me this."

Drew turned back and found himself looking at one of Lily's photographs. It showed a group of people at an airport terminal, some of them sitting, some of them standing, presumably waiting for their plane to arrive. A woman toward the back of the group was circled in red. The woman, Drew thought, even though he couldn't be sure. Her head was turned to the side and the visible half of her face was cloaked in shadow.

"Did he say anything to you?"

"He wanted me to post it on the paper's website. But he didn't tell me which article it was supposed to go with, and when I checked with Daniel, he said he didn't know anything about it."

Drew took the photo from him. "So you didn't post it?"

"Of course not. I thought Harris had made a mistake. But then, with the way he'd been acting..." He shrugged. "You wanna know something funny about that picture, though?"

"What?" Drew suddenly felt cold all over.

"That woman circled in the background? I think I saw her the other day. Or someone who looked just like her. She was right here in the building. On the elevator. Funny, huh?"

Drew nodded even though he didn't find it funny.

Not at all.

****

Two days after Harris's funeral, Billy Wurtz went up to the roof of his high-rise apartment building. He'd been up there on several occasions to take pictures; so often that the superintendent had given him a spare key to the door. But Billy didn't go up there to take pictures that day. He didn't even have his camera with him. Instead he walked to the edge of the roof, went over the side without breaking stride, and fell thirty storeys to the ground below.

He didn't scream or make any sound at all on the way down. Someone looking at his face in the moment before it was smashed on the pavement like an overripe melon would have seen an expression that looked very much like relief.

****

Drew went through Lily's address book and all of her files, but he couldn't find any mention of someone named Angela.

He unpacked her computer, booted it up, and went through her e-mails. He felt a bit uncomfortable reading his sister's private correspondence, but he was desperate. Three people were dead, and he needed answers. He didn't know if Angela, whoever she was, had those answers, but he had a feeling she was involved in some way.

Drew found something in a folder called "Work Crap." A series of messages from someone named Angela Corby.

She was a photographer.

****

The messages that passed between Lily and Angela Corby were brusque and impersonal.

Lily: I need a photograph of a little kid holding a ball

Angela: How old?

Lily: Six or seven.

Angela: What kind of ball?

Lily: Rubber. Size and colour don't matter.

Angela: Give me an hour.

They didn't talk about anything other than work, and there was no indication that they had any contact with each other beyond the computer.

Drew opened a web browser and Googled Angela Corby Toronto photographer. He clicked on the first link in the search results and was taken to a website for Corby Studio. There was contact information with a phone number and a Queen Street address. Drew jotted them down on a scrap of paper and clicked on a link that took him to a page titled "About the Photographer." There was some brief biographical information about Angela Corby, where she went to school, some magazines and newspapers she'd worked for, and a photo.

Angela Corby was an attractive black woman with large eyes, a pert nose, and a wide, lopsided grin that gave her a sly, playful look. Her crossed arms and hip-cocked stance added to this impression. Drew had a hard time resolving the image of this seemingly confident woman with the trembling voice he'd heard on the phone. Was the confidence real, he wondered, or was it something she wore like a mask?

He didn't know, but he planned to find out.

****

Corby Studio occupied a third-floor loft with a not-so-scenic view of the condominium across the street. Drew stood in the small reception area formed by three walls that reminded him of his own office cubicle.

Angela Corby was sitting at a desk working on an adding machine. When Drew came in she was tapping at the keys; as he stood and waited for her to notice him, she began to stab at them. The adding machine made a mechanical squawking sound and spat out a curl of paper.

Angela muttered, "I hate you," then looked up at Drew. "Oh, hi."

"You want some help with that thing?"

"Only if you've got a good pitching arm." She gave him the same lopsided grin she wore in her website picture. "I'm thinking about heaving it out the nearest window."

Drew didn't have it in him to make small talk. He got right to the point. "My name is Drew Patterson. You called me a few days ago. Lily Patterson was my sister."

Angela Corby's smile vanished and Drew found himself looking at a woman who went with the voice he'd heard on the phone.

"I can't help you," she said. "You need to leave. Right now."

"Lily isn't the only one who's dead. Two more people I know committed suicide in the past week. You know something about it, and I'm not going anywhere until you talk to me."

Angela hung her head. She clutched the adding machine, and for a moment Drew thought she was going to heave it, not out a window but at him. Then she stood up and came around the desk.

"Come with me."

Drew followed her out of the reception area and into the studio, which looked like every photographer's studio he'd ever seen in movies and television. High ceiling, exposed brick walls, and an area in the corner with light poles, a camera on a tripod, and a backdrop.

Angela went over to one of the tall windows, which was open a crack. She picked up a pack of cigarettes and a lighter that were on the ledge. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the open window.

"I knew you'd come," she said. "How did you find me?"

"E-mails you exchanged with Lily."

Angela nodded and took a drag of her cigarette. "You said there were two more deaths. Who were they?"

"A couple of guys I worked with. One of them was a good friend of mine. The police are calling them suicides. Like Lily. But they weren't suicides, were they?"

Angela stared at the burning coal of her cigarette. "Yes," she said. "But that's not all they were."

"They were murdered."

"Murdered, sacrificed. I don't think it matters what you call it. They're dead. Dead because they saw."

"Saw what? The photos?"

"The Veils."

"Veils?"

"The people in the photos."

"The photos you took," Drew said with an accusatory tone in his voice.

Angela looked at him. "I didn't take them. I found them." She flicked her half-smoked cigarette out the window and walked quickly across the room. "This isn't my fault. I didn't cause this. I didn't know what would happen."

She went over to a kitchenette with a sink, a hotplate, and a bar fridge tucked under the counter. She opened the fridge and took out a can of beer. She popped the top and took a big swallow.

"What happened to Lily?"

"I killed her," Angela said in a small voice. "I didn't mean to, but I did it." She raised the can, drained it, then got another one out of the fridge.

"I don't think you killed her," Drew said. "But I think you know what happened to her. She called me the night she died. She said, 'It's turning red.' I thought she meant the water in the bathtub, but I think she was referring to the photographs. The faces of the people she circled in them."

Angela nodded. "Sometimes when I look at them, I see something covering their faces, like a translucent cloth. That's why I call them Veils. The ones I saw were black. The first time it happened, I thought I was going to die. But I didn't. And eventually the Veils went away. Then they came back. It's like their faces go into eclipse or something." She gave him a small, forced grin. "And I'm still here, in the land of the living."

"You didn't die because you found them on your own," Drew said. "Like me. I saw them in the pictures in Lily's office. I think the people we told about them see the Veils, too, only they're..."

"Red," Angela finished.

"Yes. I don't know what the significance of that is, but it's clear what happens to them."

Angela took a sip of her beer and said nothing.

"You said you didn't take those photos. You found them?"

"Yes," Angela said. "Your sister contacted me a few weeks ago. She was working on an assignment for a magazine. They needed a graphic for a marketing survey, something that showed a crowd of businesspeople on their way to work. Lily contacted me every now and again when she needed a specific photo. If I weren't on deadline for another assignment, I would have gone out and taken some pictures myself. Pretty boring stuff, but at least it gets me out of the studio. Since I didn't have time, I went online to a stock photography website I use occasionally. I downloaded a bunch of crowd shots and printed them out. While I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could use, I noticed some of the same people in several of the photos. I thought I'd accidentally downloaded a series, but when I went back to the website and checked the descriptions, they said the photos had been taken in different cities. I got curious and downloaded more photos from the website, as well as from other stock photography websites. It was almost like a game."

"Where's Waldo?" Drew said.

"Yeah, like that. Only it was kind of creepy, too. I had this feeling I had found something no one else had ever noticed before. I also had a feeling that it was something I wasn't supposed to have noticed. Do you know what I mean?"

Drew nodded.

"I downloaded hundreds of photographs. All of them group shots. People on the street. People in restaurants. People on subway cars. Eventually I was able to identify three people who appeared in several of the photos."

"Two men and a woman."

Angela nodded. "I've seen them in hundreds of photos. I hope I never see them in person."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing at first. I thought I was just imagining things. Even if it was true and they were the same people in all those different photos-so what? What did it really mean? It would have been easy to blow off, but there was a part of me that wondered if I was going a little bit crazy. If this was a sign of something... I don't know, wrong with me."

"So you showed the pictures to Lily?"

Angela lowered her eyes. "I didn't know what would happen."

"I don't blame you." Drew waited until her eyes came back up and met his, then he repeated it: "I don't blame you."

Angela opened her mouth, then closed it. An awkward silence came between them. Drew broke it by nodding at the can of beer in her hand. "Can I have one of those?"

She got him one from the fridge. Drew popped it open and took a big swig.

Angela said, "After I found out what happened to Lily, it didn't take me long to figure out what I'd done."

"You figured it out faster than I did," Drew said.

"I went back to the stock photography websites and looked up more information on the photos. I was trying to find a pattern, something that connected them all, but there was nothing. They were all different kinds of shots, taken all over the world. It turned out I was looking at things too closely. I didn't stop to think that the connection might be right in front of me."

"The photographer."

"Yes," Angela said. "The pictures of the Veils were all taken by the same person."

****

"Her name is Cassandra Templeton," Angela said. "She's no Diane Arbus, but she's had a long career in the field, entirely in stock photography."

"I didn't know one could make a career in stock photography," Drew said.

"Sure," Angela said, "if you take enough pictures. And Cassandra Templeton has taken thousands. Hundreds of thousands. She's the veritable queen of stock photography. I found her work in dozens of online catalogues."

"And yet no one's heard of her?"

"It's not the kind of field where anyone cares who the photographer is. As a result, she's gone completely unnoticed all this time."

"Like the Veils."

"Yes."

"Do you think she knows they're in her pictures?"

"I find it hard to believe she doesn't. But who's to say for certain? She has something to do with them, that much I know. The Veils only show up in her photos-specifically, her group shots."

"Do you have a picture of her?" Drew asked.

"No," Angela said. "She's taken all these pictures, but I haven't been able to find a single one of her." She paused. "But I know where she lives."

"Where?"

"A small town in northern Michigan called Kitirack." She took a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Drew. "I thought about finding her and confronting her. Telling her she'd burn in hell for what she's done."

"Why didn't you?"

"I thought maybe she was already there," Angela said. "I thought maybe hell is where she comes from."

****

A plane ticket, a rental car, and a Michigan road map got him to Kitirack. A small town that was not exactly flourishing, but not quite dying either. Kitirack wasn't hell, but it was far from heaven. And far from everywhere else, too, it seemed.

The address Angela gave him for Cassandra Templeton took him to a dirt road north of town. He turned off the highway and entered a tunnel of trees so dense that he had to flick on his headlights to see the road ahead.

A flash of colour on his right side caused him to brake suddenly. He put the car in park and got out to take a closer look.

He crouched down and pulled at something buried in the underbrush. It was a tall wooden sign, shaped like a person's silhouette. The colours were faded but he could make out a cartoon character that bore a strong resemblance to Donald Duck. Except it wasn't Donald Duck. This particular cartoon duck wore pants but no shirt, and instead of a sailor hat, he had a Stetson on top of his head. Fake Donald had a word bubble next to his mouth that said Parking Up Ahead!

Drew got back in his car and continued on.

The road opened into a small parking lot in front of an arch with faded letters that had probably been gold at one time but were now a jaundiced yellow. The letters spelled funtasia. Beyond the arch the main path broke into several smaller ones that led to a scattering of small buildings that looked like a cross between wooden cabins and the mushroom homes of Smurf Village.

Drew parked the car in front of the arch and climbed out. Looking around at the entire place, he was reminded of a small-town Santa's Village. Except Funtasia didn't seem to be themed on any particular holiday. And he was fairly certain the Disney Company didn't have anything to do with this place.

There were more of those cartoon character stand-ups next to the paths that wound around the cabins. One of them looked like Mickey Mouse, except his ears were pink and he had a longer nose. Standing next to him was a dog that was probably supposed to be Pluto, if Pluto had been a Saint Bernard. Some of the characters were completely unknown to Drew, while others were close enough to their Disney counterparts that he wondered how long it had taken before the lawyers had descended to shut down this odd little theme park.

"The mouse is named Marty," said a gravelly voice to Drew's left. He looked in that direction and saw a small, elderly woman in a plaid hunter's jacket and khakis. She was leaning on a walking stick that was taller than she was.

"What's his dog's name?" Drew asked.

The old woman screwed up her face. "What? You don't recognise Neptune?"

"I feel like I've stepped into another universe."

"Welcome to my world," the old woman said in a voice completely devoid of irony.

"You're Cassandra Templeton?"

The old woman approached Drew, clumping along with her walking stick. When he'd first seen her, he'd put her in her sixties, but up close he readjusted his estimate and figured she was in her eighties. Her skin was etched with deep lines, and when she squinted at him, sizing him up, her eyes all but disappeared in her withered old face. "I'm guessing you're not here to ride the Daffodil Express."

"No."

"That's good, because that piece of shit train hasn't run for fifteen years."

"I'm here because of the photos," Drew said. "Your photos."

"Oh," she said. "Them."

"My sister is dead."

"Her and plenty of others," the old woman said. "Come with me."

She led Drew along one of the paths to a wooden building with a sign on the door that said staff. She looked back at him over her shoulder and said, "This is where I live." She opened the door and gestured for him to follow her inside. She let her walking stick fall to the floor and shuffled across the room to an old wood stove in the corner. She went to work building a fire while Drew looked around.

It was a small, cosy place, a single open room with a kitchen, a Formica-topped table with two chairs, and a cot with a couple of blankets folded on it.

"I used to come to Funtasia when I was a child," Cassandra said. "My parents took me here a few times every year. It was cheaper than Disney World, I guess, and a hell of a lot closer." She let out a dry squawk that Drew supposed was her version of laughter. "Have you met my boyfriend?"

She jerked her thumb behind Drew. He turned and saw another of those cartoon stand-ups. This one was supposed to be Goofy except, as far as Drew knew, Goofy didn't have a blond mullet.

"His name's Bonko." Cassandra took out a match, popped it alight on her thumbnail, and tossed it into the open mouth of the stove.

"You own this place?" Drew asked.

"Yep. Got it for a song, too. The original owners were glad to be rid of it." She turned back to the fire, rubbed her dry, cracked hands in front of it, and shivered. "Colder than a witch's titty out there." She looked over her shoulder at Drew. "Is that why you're here? You think I'm a witch?"

"I don't know what you are," Drew said honestly.

"What did you hope to gain by coming here?"

Drew opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The truth was, he didn't know why he'd come. He had planned to confront Cassandra Templeton, but then... confront her with what? Did she cause Lily's death? Now that he was here, at this broken-down amusement park, standing in front of this broken-down woman, he didn't know what he wanted. He had been following a trail, that was all, and it had led him here.

"I just want an explanation."

"I don't have any answers for you," Cassandra said. "I'm sorry." Then her mouth twisted in a thoughtful frown. "But there's something I can show you."

****

As they walked along a path that took them deeper into Funtasia, Cassandra told him about her accident.

"It wasn't on the Daffodil Express. You'd think it was-that train had always been a deathtrap, and I wasn't a bit surprised when it turned out to be the first thing to break down when this place went to pot. I was always afraid of it, never rode it as a kid. Not even once. I rode the merry-go-round instead. The accident happened when I was eight years old. I had too many hot dogs or one of them was bad. It doesn't matter, the point is I got sick. I was riding the big black horse-Beauty, I called her-the same one I always picked when I rode the merry-go-round. One moment I was fine, the next I felt like I was going to throw up. But I didn't. I fainted instead. Fell right off Beauty's back and all the people watching on the sidelines came running. My parents panicked, as you'd expect. They took me to the hospital and had me checked out. I was fine-physically, anyway-but after that day I started seeing things. People with strange faces. Things covering their faces."

"Veils," Drew said.

"Yes, like veils." She thumped along on her walking stick. "I started having dreams about the accident. Only in the dreams all the people watching on the sidelines didn't do anything when I fell off Beauty. They just stood there with their messed-up faces. Like they didn't care."

"The Veils?"

"Yes, I think so. But don't ask me who they are, because I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now." She sighed heavily. "My parents didn't believe me when I told them about the things I was seeing. They sent me to more doctors, but they couldn't find anything wrong with me. For my twelfth birthday, my parents gave me a camera. A very expensive gift at the time. I used it to try and take pictures of the strange people I was seeing. They didn't always show up on the film, but sometimes they did. Eventually I got my parents to look at the pictures and I was able to convince them that there was something wrong with the people in them. They didn't know what to make of it. I didn't either, but I knew that it scared me."

"Your parents died, didn't they?" Drew said.

"One night after dinner, they told me they were going out to Piker's Field to watch the sunset. I thought it was strange they didn't ask me along. Especially since at that point I was really getting into photography and I was always looking for things to take pictures of. But they didn't take me. And later on I found out why. There's a drop-off at the end of Piker's Field. It's a great place to see the sunset. My parents drove to the drop-off and then went right on over the edge. The last memory I have of them is of my mother kissing my head and my father telling her to hurry up because the sky was already starting to turn red."

The path branched at a wooden sign with two arrows. The one pointing to the left said the daffodil express; the one on the right side merry-go-round. Cassandra started down the right path. Drew followed.

The trees closed in on both sides as the path descended. Drew spotted more of the faux Disney characters cavorting in the brush. They came around a bend and the trees pulled back to make a clearing with the merry-go-round sitting in the centre.

Drew felt himself being drawn to it, like iron filings pulled by a magnet. He stepped up to the wide circular platform while Cassandra walked over to lean against the control booth. She stared lovingly at the carousel.

"Pretty, isn't she?"

Drew nodded. The carousel was one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen. The animals were constructed of wood rather than plastic or fiberglass, which meant this was an old carousel. But it had been lovingly maintained. The paint was fresh and bright, and he couldn't see a single rip or tear in the canvas of the tent-like top. Looking at it, Drew was reminded of the carousel in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. The one that caused the rider to get older or younger depending on the direction it turned.

"You've seen the Veils," Cassandra said. "All you can do now is ride the merry-go-round."

Drew looked from the carousel to Cassandra. "Will I faint?"

"Not unless you've got vertigo. You might see something, though."

"What?"

Cassandra shrugged.

Drew climbed up onto the main platform and looked around at all the animals, most of them horses, frozen in mid-gallop. He went over to a big black horse that must have been Beauty. He started to climb on, then stopped and looked questioningly at Cassandra.

"Go ahead," she said. "She still likes a good ride." She went into the control booth, punched a couple of buttons, threw a switch, and the lights came on and the merry-go-round started moving. Slowly at first, then it picked up speed. Calliope music played from the overhead speakers.

Cassandra came out to stand in front of the carousel, leaning on her walking stick. "You're not the first person to come looking for me. I don't get many visitors, but I do get a few. Angela and others like her send them to me. I don't have any answers for them, but I always take them for a ride."

The carousel was going around fast-too fast. Drew gripped the pole that went through Beauty and caused her to go up and down in simulation of galloping. Drew's stomach was galloping too. If he spent much longer on this thing, he was going to be sick.

"Slow it down!" he yelled over the noise of the tinny calliope.

"Sorry!" Cassandra yelled back in her cracked voice. "This is the end of the path and there's no slowing down!"

Drew started to climb off Beauty's back-if the crazy old bat wouldn't stop the ride, then he'd jump off-then clambered back on. The carousel was going much too fast now. If he jumped off he'd probably fall and crack his skull open on the ground.

As he went around and around, he kept looking for Cassandra, trying to see what she was doing, but the carousel was spinning so fast that everything was starting to blur and blend together. He'd see her for a split second-a small dark shape with the taller thinner shape of her walking stick-and then she was gone.

The carousel went faster.

The view beyond the spinning platform should have gotten more distorted with the increased speed, but instead Drew was startled to see things more clearly than he could before. Three people had come out of the woods to stand at different sides of the carousel. Two men and a woman. He could see the shapes of their bodies but their faces were dark blurs. He looked past them at the band of sky visible above the trees. The colour was changing. The sun was going down.

Drew sat while the world spun around him. Soon the sky would be red. He was looking forward to seeing it.

JOE IS A BARBER

Paul Meloy

Joe is a barber.

He works at Tony's.

It's in a cellar

Beneath a recording studio

On Denmark Street.

You go down some stairs

And it's seven pound twenty a haircut

No appointment required.

Tony trains his own boys.

Their uniform is powder blue shirts and pink ties.

They wear their shirt sleeves down

With cufflinks.

Joe's cufflinks are little scissors.

Tony's are dice.

There are four barbers working for Tony.

They are all alike.

They're wannabe Tonys

With a bit of clubland charisma.

They'd all fuck your girlfriend

And brag about their brown wings.

They're the kind of lads who are polite in a copper's way

When he's got you bang to rights.

You have to watch your banter.

If it's not up to scratch

You might notice an exchange of glances

And a smirk.

They'll think you're a bit of a prick.

They are all world weary and cynical.

At their young age they think they've seen it all.

Tony is hard but fair.

He stands behind the barbers as they cut away

Staring at the backs of heads like a judge.

"Scissors all over," Joe says.

"Clippers at the back?"

Tony is watching.

He starts off indifferent

And has to be satisfied.

It's high pressure stuff.

Tony wouldn't look out of place

As an extra in an East End soap

Or a police drama.

He has a big, plain Londoner's face,

Not handsome but women find it sexy;

It's the violence potential.

It's a face that takes badly to drink

And will grow red and bulky as he ages.

Joe's small talk is patented.

"What do you do then?"

"Lived round here long?"

A few questions, then a bit about himself.

A few opinions and, if you fit in, something mildly phobic:

Tony doesn't mind the occasional

'Foreigner' or 'queer.'

If it's essential. If you're careful.

This chat can make men feel uneasy.

Where else but certain bars do strangers

Talk with such intimate superficiality?

And eye contact reflected back from glass

Makes even crude talk bashful,

Oddly shy.

Joe does a good cut.

Nothing fancy.

You don't go into Tony's and ask for highlights.

Joe was bullied at school.

He was anxious in the showers,

Too watchful.

Nobody likes that.

Tony helped him.

Tony helps them all.

Joe's quite good looking.

His eyes are grey and clear,

His skin is soft and clean shaven,

His hair is short and gelled spiky on top.

The pink tie goes with his eyes.

All the boys have business cards

On a little plastic shelf beneath their mirrors.

Joe has a way of looking at you,

When he puts his face alongside yours

When the cut is done,

When he holds the mirror up behind your head,

"You have a nice nape,"

Joe says in a professional way.

You tip well and this time

Joe presses his card into your palm

As he takes the tenner.

It's got his mobile number on it.

His private one.

Now you wish you hadn't called it.

Because you're back in the barber shop

In the cellar

In Denmark Street.

And it's late and the clubs have all shut

And you shouldn't have come back down here with Joe.

You're still naked

But you're tied to the chair and it's tipped back

On its chromium base.

Joe stands with his back to the mirror.

Behind you Tony watches, like a judge.

Starting at your feet, Joe says, "scissors all over?"

He looks up at Tony.

"I'll try not to take too much off."

LITTLE TRAVELLER

Simon Kurt Unsworth

Ghedi jittered

The scow lifted and dropped, buffeted by the arrhythmic chopping of the swell surging at them from the ocean at their backs and the container ship's hull at their fronts. Everything trembled, everything shook, the water trying to unsettle Ghedi but failing because of the steel that ran through his bones and the density of his muscle. All around the world had tautened, become bright, diamond-edged and clear, sharp; this was the most dangerous part, these next few minutes, when Ghedi and the others would be at their most vulnerable.

There was a boom from the scow in front as Korfa fired the gas-powered grappling hook; he had stolen that two or three ships back and it was one of his proudest possessions. Ghedi only had a welded mess of fishing gaffs at the end of a rope and he threw it now, watching as it arced into the sky above him, leaving black trails behind itself like shed snakeskin before it disappeared over the ship's rail. He tugged, felt the hooks drag and then find purchase, and then he was swarming up the rope, antlike and quick, fingers sure on the rope as it writhed in his grip. His gun chittered to itself on his back, little satisfied metallic clinks as it readied itself for what was coming and looked forward, excited. Hand over hand he went, feet walking the skin of the ship, silent and intense, letting his lack of fear, his ferocity and preparedness to kill go ahead of him like the scent of a lion's musk as it charged its prey.

He reached the rail without incident; no water cannon, no gunshots from the fat white men that the companies sometimes hired to protect the ships, men with shaven heads and tattoos who thought they understood violence and fear but who did not. Ghedi understood violence and fear; Ghedi was violence and fear.

Despite his gas grapple, Korfa was over the rail later than Ghedi, slow and old and weighted by a belly that was growing fat and soft; Ghedi would smile about that later, but not now. Now he crouched and peered about, as Korfa was doing a hundred feet along the deck from him. The container ship was deserted, the deck silent apart from the rapid echoes of Ghedi's own breathing, coming back at him from the sides of the containers stacked high and running down the centre of the ship like a vast, segmented spine, doubling his inhalations and exhalations so that he sounded like two men, two warriors, weapons made flesh. He scuttled forward, drawing close to the containers, wary of the occasional gaps between them but grateful of the cover they offered. Korfa, more brazen, stayed by the rail, leaning back and peering up. He had a quizzical look upon his face and as Ghedi came alongside him he said, "Up there, little traveller."

Little traveller ; how Ghedi hated that nickname, bestowed upon him simply because he was younger than Korfa and the others and because of his name's meaning. Ghedi sometimes imagined his parents hoping that his name would encourage him to see the world; little people with big ideas, lost now in the somewhen of his past. He couldn't remember their faces, nor their voices or the touch of the hands. Little traveller. Would they ever have guessed where he would travel to, he wondered? Probably not.

"What?" Glancing up. Nothing.

"Shadows, most likely," said Korfa, not looking down yet, "but maybe one of the hooyadiis wase." His voice sounded distant, thoughtful, as though he were contemplating which of the camp's whores to fuck.

Ghedi scanned along the tops of the containers. They were stacked high, four up, the edges deep in shadows, the sky beyond them the blue of forever. It wasn't unheard of for the fat white dufarr to position themselves on top of the containers when they saw the attack coming, for them to fire down or drop things. One of Ghedi's friends had been hit by a dropped stanchion on an earlier raid, bursting his head open so that his brains had spattered out and ended up looking like worms on the deck, pink and crawling. Today, though, Ghedi saw nothing.

"We should move," said Korfa, snapping back into reality and glaring at Ghedi, as though the delay hadn't been his fault. Ghedi nodded and swung his rifle around from his back, took it by neck and stock and held it calm, and they went forward. Ghedi, still dancing along close enough to the containers to feel their breath on his back, watched as Korfa moved along the rail, continually glancing up. What had he seen, or thought he had seen? Ghedi wondered, because Ghedi could hear or see nothing.

Nothing.

That wasn't usual, was it? In all of their incursions (a word he had heard in a crackling radio broadcast by a faraway white man about what he and Korfa and the others did, and liked for its rolling, jagged sounds and the way it caressed his tongue), their time on the boats had been built of noise and fragments, of the stenches of fear and sweat and gunfire and sometimes of blood. Now, however, all was silent except for the scuff of their feet and the muttering of his gun, and the only smell was that of burning.

Ghedi stopped. It had only been a whiff, as though his nose had touched against a tendril drifting in from some vast distance, but it had been there nonetheless, there and now gone. He sniffed again, smelled nothing.

"What?" asked Korfa, turning. The man's skin was slick with sweat, and suddenly all Ghedi could smell was him, the smell of his body and the things he smoked, that they all smoked, thick, seeping out from his pores as though Korfa was more drug than man. Perhaps he was.

"Nothing," said Ghedi after another sniff.

"Then come on," said Korfa, looked up again at the top of the containers and screamed.

It made Ghedi jump, the scream, and he pulled the trigger on his rifle unthinking. The weapon, exultant, screamed the song of its soul and spat fire and Korfa's chest and belly bloomed open into flowers that had rich red petals. The man screamed again, staggering back against the rail, pushed by the weight of the rifle's touch on him, then teetered and fell forward. He rolled, flopping like a gaffed fish, ended up on his back, staring still at the top of the containers and screaming. Ghedi dropped to his knees, sorry but needing Korfa to shut up, to shut the fuck up before someone came, holding a hand over his mouth to stifle the noise of him. Gradually, Korfa quietened, and his silence was somehow worse than his noise.

"Little traveller," said Korfa after a second. He was still staring up, looking not at Ghedi who had shot him but beyond, focussing on something and scared of the something, a something that Ghedi could not see even when he turned and looked to the same place. "Little traveller," said Korfa again, his voice stinking of meat because of the blood in his mouth and the terror in his eyes, "run." He coughed once, spraying Ghedi with warmth, and then died.

Gone, Korfa was gone and in the past and no longer part of the present, and a smell of burning again just for a second and then drifting away.

There was no decision to be made; forward, the only way for Ghedi now. They had a job to do, an incursion to complete, he and his fellow sailors. He might mourn Korfa later, but now there were fat white pickings to take, a ship and its cargo and crew to place his hands around so that money could be strangled out of the even fatter, whiter insurance companies. Forward.

Ghedi dashed down the deck, all thoughts of caution gone now, running and wearing Korfa's death across his face like war paint, I am fear, I am terror, running past the shadowed gaps between the containers and beginning to scream himself, a howl of fury, a roar to show his teeth. From somewhere on the other side of the containers he heard the sound of another grapple hitting the deck and dragging, the metal yammer of it piercing, and then another, the other two boats looped around and finally catching up with him and Korfa, then the duller thumps of feet and hands.

Past the end of the piled spine of containers now, approaching the ladder that led to the observation decks and helm, still no sign of movement other than his own beading sweat and leaping shadow, his other self, the darkness from his own heart allowed out, urged on before him. From the other side of the containers Erasto and Labaan appeared, also screaming lionlike, seeing Ghedi and making for the other stairway. Ghedi kept moving, rushing through sun that was like water on his skin, making the foot of the metal stairs and starting up. He lost sight of Erasto for a moment, caught a whiff of burning wood, burning flesh, saw a memory flash of a house with flames in the window, heard gunfire.

Labaan, not quite at the foot of the other stairs, steps behind Erasto, looked up and howled, not a lion now but a hyena faced with a lion. Erasto's rifle, an American M16 stolen from the last ship's cowering security officer, clattered down and bounced at Labaan's feet; Ghedi, despite the need to move, slowed and watched as Labaan backed away, feet tangling, and fell. He shrieked again, brought his own gun up and fired, the bullets striking sparks off the rail and risers that were bright even in the shadeless sun, crabbing backwards like a child, tears on his face. Another wave of the burning stench and then Labaan flipped himself over, a rib of meat on a grill, and scuttled back behind the edge of the containers. There was another burst of firing, the sound of frayed ricochets, and then from the stairway a crunch and a scream that rose, rose again, cut off.

Ghedi glanced over; the scows were still circling out on the chopping blue surface of the ocean, sharks waiting for their prey to weaken. How many others had come on board? Were any of them left? Should he signal, bring them in and leave?

No.

This ship was theirs, was his, by the rights of terror and strength and by the rules that they themselves had decided; it was theirs because they wanted it, because they had nothing besides that which they took themselves, not families nor homes, not anything except each other. Besides, to bring it in alone, without Korfa or the others? To make it his? He would never be Little Traveller again, never be left the scraps of the drugs or women, never be left on the edges, never be beaten or teased with match or flame, there would be no more jeering about the little lost one, the cast-off, the child he had been once and had never outgrown being.

Ghedi jittered and Ghedi ran, upwards and onwards, gun leading him, his brother during day and night. It spoke to him, urging him on, up and up because they were travellers together, no longer little, no longer weak, the roar and terror of him huge, and still there were no signs of life on this flabby western ship.

As Ghedi reached the top of the staircase he caught another scent of burning, gone as quickly as it had arrived, a memory in his nostrils that reached back through the years to a place he had vowed never to visit again. It was the past, dark to him now except in flashes of brightness at the centre of the cooking fires or the waved torches that Korfa and the others had sometimes brandished, laughing at him as he cried out or jumped back from them, weeping.

Across the flat expanse of the upper deck towards the wheelhouse, a metal cabin fronted by a huge window. The sun glared across the surface of the glass, hiding what was behind it, blinding him. Ghedi roared so that they would know he was coming, was surging towards them unstoppable and terrible, would know that no glass or metal walls would stop him. Ghedi was arrived, Ghedi the traveller was come, and he was death and fear and violence.

Closer to, and the sun's fiery reflected eye shifted, sliding along the glass to reveal the room behind. It held banks of equipment and flashing dials and lights, computer displays, a large wooden wheel that was almost certainly for display rather than for any actual purpose. At its rear, a door to the lost depths of the ship was shut, bolts clearly locking it from the inside; another door, also bolted, in the side wall led out onto the deck. A shelf on the rear wall held plastic folders in rainbow colours, and logs and books, and a table under it was covered in cups and a map held down at its corners by pencils.

And there were crew.

Four of them, all standing still, looking at him, faces blank. They fear me, know what I am, Ghedi thought, and raised his rifle, letting its mouth open, letting it show its teeth. He tapped it against the glass and gestured at the side door, moving along the front of the glass towards it, a lethal, venomous spider clinging to the window's surface and dancing towards its prey.

The crew did not move other than to follow him with their eyes.

"I will kill you!" Ghedi shouted. He shouted it first in English, then repeated it in French and German. He didn't like the way the words felt in his mouth, the English slimy, the French too smooth and the German angular, digging into his throat like hooks as he spat the phrase out. He could speak none of those languages, of course, Korfa had simply taught him the expression; Korfa, now gone. The realisation made Ghedi pause for a moment, looking at the crew. His own face would be dark to them, its covering of Korfa's blood like a mask, just as theirs were pale to him, little more than hovering white discs in the gloom of the room, their eyes depthless hollows in which glints flickered in time with the ever-changing displays on the computer screens. Ghedi gestured again at the door, and again the crew merely looked at him.

There was little point in firing at the glass; it would be bulletproof. Ghedi had learned that on an earlier incursion when one of the others, Labaan he thought, had shot at the window and the bullet had leapt back between them singing a song like an enraged hornet. It had torn through the skin of Korfa's shoulder, Ghedi suddenly remembered, making the man shriek like a child. Fat westerners, trying to keep themselves safe behind thick glass and bolted metal and still they fell at Ghedi and his companions' feet. Instead, he tapped the rifle against the glass in a regular threat, still moving around towards the wheelhouse door.

"I will kill you!" he called again, gagging on the words now, and still the crew did not move. Did they really think they were safe, he wondered, that he could not get through the door?

His own face shone on the surface of the glass, ghosting across it, covering the closest crewmember's face for a moment so that the man appeared to be wearing a mask, his face becoming a satire of Ghedi's own, distorted and ugly, and then something behind Ghedi moved in the reflections, something orange and black.

He whipped about, fast, rifle an extension of his arm, ready to deal with any fat eey creeping up behind him-but the deck was empty. He looked about, squinting into the sun. It had been there, hadn't it? Hadn't it? Something behind him, shifting and changing but still somehow peering at him, sweating sadness.

Sadness? Why had he thought that? But yes, sad, it had been sad as it looked at him, something at its centre that was without eyes but that looked at him nonetheless. And it smelled, that burning stench, of wood and material crackling and hair shrivelling, of fat roasting. What trickery was this? The crew, he thought, operating a film projector or some other device to fool or frighten him. Well, they would soon know that Ghedi was fearless, would not be stopped.

He span back about, jabbed his rifle against the glass once more and shouted "Open up!" They wouldn't understand, he wasn't speaking English or French or German but his own tongue, the language of his father, but his meaning was clear. Angling the rifle so that it pointed away, he fired, the shot careening across the glass with a sound like a dry bone breaking and leaving a silvered streak that trailed from fat to thin like a snake. A wisp of smoke rose from it like a kiss and then was gone.

The crew didn't react.

The man nearest the glass, his face still little more than a pale distortion in the gloom, carried on staring at Ghedi. Ghedi raised the rifle and pointed it directly at the man and fired. The shot impacted against the glass, cracking through its upper layer before being stopped, spreading and leaving an uneven grey mass trapped in the pane, as though the window had grown some distorted eye that stared at Ghedi. Still the man did not react, did not move or jump, did not blink.

Ghedi peered at the man, who simply stared back. After a moment the man opened his mouth and spoke, the words clear despite the layer of glass between them. "Little Traveller," he said, "run."

Something was burning.

It wasn't a whiff or a hint as before, but the thick, sour stench of encroaching flame. At first, he thought it was the spore of his rifle and then it rose up from behind Ghedi in reflection, an entire house aflame, windows ringed in fire, door buckling in the heat. He could see it, despite the impossibility of it, feel it, feel the hair on the back of his neck singe and the prickle of heat across his skin, smelled it and then he was running and the crew merely stared as Ghedi fled from the house that couldn't be there.

Down the steps and away from the wheelhouse he went, the steps that Labaan and Erasto had been at the bottom of when whatever happened to them had occurred. He ran, thoughtless, rifle screaming at him in fury, sweat covering him like oil, away from the house and the flame and the smell and the thing behind the house's window. Ten steps down, twelve, twenty, how many? Something grated behind him, wood grinding across metal, and then his shadow was ringed ahead of him by an orange halo that flickered and jumped and he ran faster, the little traveller running, thirty steps, forty, taking four and five at a time and then there was Erasto.

He was sitting with his back against the stairwell wall, legs stuck out in front of him like the limbs of the stickmen that Ghedi's father used to make him when he was a small boy. Erasto, normally the darkest of them, had paled to something the consistency of goat's milk, and his skin was covered in ragged tears and punctures that were scored across his chest and abdomen. He jerked, twisting, not alive but moving nonetheless, moving in a way that reminded Ghedi of the victim of the crocodile attack that Erasto had described witnessing as a child and which had scared him so much that he would never enter the waters of river or sea. Blood sprayed from the holes in the man's skin, staining Erasto's T-shirt, darker than the ancient sweat rings that clustered around his armpits. Ghedi leapt over him, landing steps down, catching a glimpse as he passed over of something covering Erasto like a second skin, something green and grey and thrashing, ridged back hunched and eyes like glass peering up at him.

More steps and just as Ghedi was beginning to despair of ever reaching the bottom, thinking that he would simply dash further and further until he reached Hell itself, there was the deck. Out and moving faster now, rifle swinging behind him, something crashing down in his wake, heat on his back, the smell of flame and fat bubbling, flesh roasting and burning, and Ghedi screamed now, no longer the maker of fear and terror but made of it, the little traveller again, helpless and lost and afraid. Back to the rope and down, he thought, and hope the others see me, come in close to catch me before it does, or before I fall.

The others . His friends, who teased him and mocked him but who had been the only people he had been able to rely on since it had happened, since the day Ghedi had been untethered from the life of his birth, the others who had taken him in and given him bed and food and safety, of a sort.

Ghedi stumbled, spinning and falling in one ungainly stutter of movement and came to a rest with his back against the cargo container facing back up the stairs. His rifle yelped and spat, his finger jerking on the trigger without instruction, sending tiny bolts of fire spraying across the stairs and careening across the deck.

There was nothing there.

The air in Ghedi's lungs felt curdled, thick and clotted, making breathing difficult. He tried to take in a breath, failed, sucked again and hitched, drew hard and finally something in his chest popped as though a bubble of mucous had risen to the surface and finally worked itself loose. There was nothing there, no fires no shadows nothing chasing him down the steps. It must be the drugs, he thought, a bad batch cooked up with poison and bile at its heart.

He risked a glance behind him, back along the deck. Erasto and Labaan's grappling hooks were still clinging to the rails, the ropes dangling from them threads connecting him to the ocean and the boats and his life beyond.

Past them, in the centre of the deck, Labaan was standing, head bowed and with his back to Ghedi.

He was shaking, a violent shudder that seemed to consume his whole body so that he was bouncing, shoulders spasming and hands hanging at his sides and flapping like boneless crabs. Ghedi dragged himself to his feet, using the container to steady himself as he rose. He felt full of sickness, the toxins of his unspent fear gathering at his joints and in his stomach. He started along the deck towards Labaan, watching as the man's movements grew more and more pronounced, his arms and legs now dancing spastically, a vicious palsy that eventually dropped him to his knees.

Still he shuddered, faster and faster.

As he came around Labaan, Ghedi caught a glimpse of the man's face; his eyes were wide and weeping tears of blood, rolled back to complete whiteness, blind and staring. His mouth was open, tongue protruding, a fat saliva-dressed worm questing forth into the daylight, its end squirming back and forth. He was shaking so fast now that he blurred, his edges collapsing into the brightness, his core dark and indistinct, and then he pitched forward and was suddenly still.

Ghedi prodded him with the barrel of his gun; Labaan didn't move. He prodded again and then, when there was still no response, he crouched and leaned in to see if he could detect inhalations or exhalations. Nothing. Was he dead? Ghedi prodded again, trying to roll Labaan over.

Veins bulged under the skin of Labaan's scalp, crawling down his face and neck and disappearing into his shirt. His arms and legs were tensing now, clenching, becoming rigid. Smoke drifted out from his short hair and from the skin of his neck, the smell of it bitter, reminding Ghedi of something Labaan had once said, something about electricity, about electrocution, about his fear. The man's arms and legs were stiff now, skin a mass of swelling veins, no longer shaking but somehow vibrating, banging against the deck in a rapid, violent tattoo and then someone called Ghedi's name.

It was a voice filled with love and pain, reaching out to him through smoke and the sound of wood expanding in flame and then something emerged from between two containers, ahead of him now, something that could not possibly have been hiding in the gap it came from, something too wide and too long, something that shouldn't be able to move but was, gliding like a snake to fill Ghedi's vision and his nose and ears, filling his whole head with its impossibility and its reality.

It was almost burnt flat now, its walls crumbling, the roof gone, and they were dead, had to be dead, but still Ghedi heard them screaming from within its raging heart, could see their shapes at the window burnt scrawny and he hadn't meant to, had only been playing with the stove and the paper, hadn't meant to make the flames come. Please, he thought and then said the word aloud and then there was no more travelling and no more words and the house came to him and the heat placed its arms around him and his father's voice spoke his name.

BEHIND THE WALL

Thana Niveau

Julie closed the door of the house, shutting out the world. The removal men would be here soon enough, filling the rooms with all her possessions, but for now she savoured the emptiness. She felt hidden and safe.

After a while she spoke, her voice echoing in the bare room. "Well, what do you think, Sam? Did I do okay?'

Her husband didn't answer, so she answered for him in her head.

It's perfect. We could have been so happy here together .

Tears burned her eyes, blurring the room. The rest of her life stretched out before her like a long and desolate road now that Sam was dead. She couldn't stay in the home they'd made together, couldn't face each day in a place where memories assaulted her everywhere she turned. She needed a fresh start, one without constant reminders of her partner of almost twenty years. Finding her own place to live had been a surreal experience. At times it had felt oddly transgressive. Weird and wrong. Sam should be here with her. She shouldn't be alone.

She'd grieved for weeks and weeks, eventually alienating casual friends with her bottomless depression and morbid preoccupations. The ones who truly cared did their best but at last she succeeded in shutting them out too, pleading with them to understand. She didn't want to be around anyone who'd known them as a couple; the reminders were just too painful. It was all she could do to get up each morning and remember to breathe, to live. Alone.

And now she was here.

Strethkellis was a strange-sounding place, with something ancient and esoteric about it. It was a village where Sam had stayed occasionally when he was on the road in Cornwall for business. He hadn't liked to stay in nearby Truro so he'd found a secluded little village to use as a base instead. He loved it for its peace and quiet, its isolation.

Julie had never been there. But when she finally began to pull herself together and realised she needed to start again, it was the name that kept coming up in her mind. She had to get away and it was a place with a connection to Sam. So she went there.

The village was as strange as its name. A narrow, winding road led into a hilly wood crowded with enormous trees. They closed over the road like a tunnel, hiding the sun until they opened out again at the picturesque glade where the village sprawled. A rustic stone marker was almost entirely obscured by thorny bushes but the name was there in chipped black letters: STRETHKELLIS.

It was larger than she'd imagined, with a scattering of cottages and several larger houses arranged around a village green with a pub called the Bird in Hand at one end. It looked like an old coaching inn, with a central cobbled courtyard decorated with potted plants. She gazed up at the windows above the pub, remembering the first night Sam had rung her from here and wondering which room he had stayed in. The view he'd described from the window was every bit as idyllic as he'd claimed. And he was right: it was quiet. The only sounds Julie heard were songbirds twittering in the trees and ducks splashing in the pond.

Naturally, she had expected the locals to be unwelcoming to an outsider but they were nothing at all like the surly peasants she'd anticipated. They treated her like a long-lost relative returning to her ancestral home. She had fallen in love with the place at once, just as Sam must have. And the fact that the charming Little Owl Cottage had just gone on the market only further convinced her that this was where she was meant to be. Perhaps it was Sam's last gift to her.

The cottage was peculiar, small enough to be cosy but with an absurd number of rooms, many of them no larger than a closet. But its quirkiness was part of its charm. The rooms were like spaces on a shelf that needed filling, or a jigsaw puzzle that needed someone to put it back together.

"I miss you, Sam," she said, stroking the pale blue wallpaper.

I'll always be here , she thought she heard him say.

****

"How are you settling in, dear?"

Julie jumped at the voice, startled out of her unpacking. It was like coming out of a trance. Her elderly neighbour was standing there, holding an old-fashioned picnic basket with a tea towel draped over it.

"Oh, Mrs Trevenan, it's you."

"Yes, yes," the older woman laughed, "only little old me! My, but you've been busy, haven't you?"

Julie looked around her at the chaos. Books, pots and pans, books, bathroom stuff, books, clothes and more books. She'd been at it for hours, relishing the simple but laborious task of taking things out of boxes, finding homes for them and then flattening the boxes. It was the best distraction in the world and she'd made a considerable start in just a few hours.

"I thought you might like a cup of tea," said Mrs Trevenan, brandishing a teapot under a flowery pink cosy. "Your front door was open."

Julie couldn't believe that was true but if the woman had knocked and got no answer she might have assumed it was okay just to wander in. It seemed like that kind of village. Back in Taunton Julie might have bristled at the intrusion but the lure of tea was too tantalising to refuse.

"That would be lovely," she said, relenting. "There's a table and some chairs around here somewhere."

"Right by the window," Mrs Trevenan said, nodding with approval at the arrangement in the breakfast nook. "Charlene-she lived here before you-had bird feeders in the apple tree. We used to sit here for hours watching them."

The image was so serene Julie made a mental note to get a bird feeder for herself.

"I've also brought some gingerbread. I just took it out of the oven."

She held up a small plate and Julie inhaled deeply. Was there anything in the world more heavenly than the smell of freshly baked gingerbread? It was a nostalgic breeze all the way from her childhood. Her eyes threatened to water and she chided herself for her mawkish sentimentality. The last thing she needed in her life right now was a surrogate mother. But perhaps she could do with a bit of companionship.

Julie smiled. "Mmmm, you said the magic word. And it just so happens I found all the kitchen stuff a little while ago." Although she didn't doubt that Mrs Trevenan could have pulled an entire dining set from her picnic basket.

She had to open several cabinet doors to find where she'd stashed the coffee mugs but eventually she found them and she sat down for the first time that afternoon. The tea was unexpectedly strong and the gingerbread was every bit as delicious as it smelled.

"Have another piece," the old woman said, pushing the platter across the table.

"Are you trying to fatten me up?" Julie laughed.

Mrs Trevenan frowned slightly. "It won't do you any harm, pet. You're thin as a rail."

"Yes, well…"

Over the past few months Julie had wondered whether her appetite would ever return. Without Sam nothing felt or tasted right. There was a hard little knot in her stomach, as though her intestines had been tied together. The pain came in waves, overwhelming her and then subsiding only to return again even stronger. Then, after a while, her emotions seemed to desert her entirely. It was if she'd finally run out of tears. Even music lost its ability to move her. She had drifted through endless days, feeling nothing, seeing nothing.

"Julie?"

She came out of the fog, blinking. Mrs Trevenan was staring at her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Julie said. "It's just… Sam. My husband. He-he died last year and I'm still not… Well, I don't know if I'll ever be…"

"It's all right, dear. I understand completely. It was just the same with me when my Harold went." The old woman sighed and sipped her tea.

Julie didn't say anything. She was grateful not to hear the same old platitudes again. ( I'm sorry for your loss. He's at peace now. You're in my prayers.) She certainly would never say them herself. She gave a slight smile of understanding and swirled the dregs of her tea.

"Which room are you going to wall up?"

For a moment she wasn't sure she'd heard the old woman right. In her mug flecks of tea leaf circled like a school of tiny fish, coming together and then spinning out to the sides of the mug before settling again at the bottom. She looked up, confused.

Mrs Trevenan smiled. "Most people choose one of their smaller rooms but I picked our bedroom. I even left the door in place. Sometimes I knock on it when I walk past." She gazed out the window in dreamy reminiscence. "Oh, look! There's a goldfinch. You almost never see them this time of year."

Julie shook her head, confused. "Pardon me, but what did you say?"

"The goldfinch. You almost--"

"No, no, before that. About a wall?"

Now it was the old lady's turn to look puzzled. "Well, I asked you which room you were going to wall up." At Julie's baffled look, realisation dawned in her face. "Oh, I see. I assumed that was why you'd moved here."

"No, I came because Sam had been here before and said it was lovely. He was right. But he never said anything about walling up rooms."

"Of course not, dear. He hadn't lost anyone, had he?"

"I'm afraid I'm the one who's lost, Mrs Trevenan."

The old lady patted her hand with a grandmotherly smile. "Strethkellis is a very ancient place," she said, "with very ancient customs. And here, when someone dear passes, we wall off a room for them to stay in. Then they're always with us."

Something fluttered uneasily in Julie's stomach. She thought of the many tiny rooms scattered throughout Little Owl Cottage. Were all the homes here like that? Built with extra rooms to house the dead? Her skin suddenly felt cold.

"But Sam… He's… Well, he's already buried. Back in Taunton."

Mrs Trevenan stared at her for a few seconds, then broke into laughter. "Good heavens, no! I didn't mean we preserve our loved ones' remains."

"Then what did you mean?"

"Our custom is simply to wall off a room. We only leave the spirit of the dear one inside it and it becomes their room. That way we know they're still here."

Julie didn't think that sounded any less morbid. "You mean like a shrine?"

"Not at all. You see, you can't go in the room once you've closed it off. Some people leave a door, like I did, but it's sealed shut. I know my Harold is there, behind it, with me forever. And when it's my turn someone will break down the wall and I'll join him there." She smiled as she nibbled a slice of gingerbread.

The kitchen suddenly felt very cold. Julie wondered if every house in the village had a walled room.

As though reading her mind Mrs Trevenan said, "The Hollisters sealed off the entire garage when they lost their boy because that's where he used to play his drums. And Martin Evans at the Bird in Hand, he gave the best room in the pub to his wife Sylvia when she passed. That was almost twenty years ago. Do you know, people have stayed in the room next door to it and claimed the place is haunted." She laughed brightly. "Can you imagine?"

Julie could, all too well. She thought of the old custom of covering the mirrors in a house of the dead so the spirit of the departed wouldn't be trapped in the house. This seemed like the very opposite. There was something slightly delusional about it. Everyone wanted to believe their loved ones were still with them in spirit, but who wanted to imagine they were trapped in a secret room?

"Are you all right, pet? You look a bit pale all of a sudden."

"No, I'm fine, Mrs Trevenan. Just tired from unpacking." She forced a smile and finished her tea in one long swallow. It had gone cold and the dregs felt like dust in her throat.

But the old woman saw right through her. She took Julie's hand in both of hers, peering intently at her. "It's not a morbid fantasy, you know. It's simply a tradition in this part of the country. I think you'll find it as comforting as we do."

Julie nodded absently. She didn't like the presumption that she would naturally do it because it was the custom of the village. "I think I'd better get back to work," she said. "Thank you so much for the tea and gingerbread."

Mrs Trevenan smiled as she rose and collected her things. "You're more than welcome, my dear. If you ever need anything, you know where I am. Pop round any time. The door's always open."

"Thanks," Julie mumbled. She didn't doubt the woman kept her door unlocked in the hope that someone would wander in for a chat. She didn't doubt that that was yet another custom of this strange village. She couldn't help but wonder how many others there were.

****

Julie kept to herself for the next few days, unpacking and setting up the cottage. She made sure the doors were locked, although three different people had pushed notes through the letterbox welcoming her to the village and inviting her round, and one lady had left her a basket of fruit from her garden. They were so aggressively friendly and welcoming that Julie began to feel guilty about her reclusive behaviour. She'd driven thirty miles to the nearest supermarket for groceries rather than buy her food in the small village shop but she knew she wouldn't be able to keep that up. Besides, wasn't that the whole point of coming here? To get away from her previous life and start a new one? She resolved to accept the next invitation she got, however it came.

As it turned out, she was meandering along a little path at the end of the village, enjoying the birdsong, when a black Labrador came bounding out of the woods. The dog wagged his tail frantically and ran right up to her as though delighted that she had come here just to see him.

"Well, aren't you a handsome boy?" Julie said, reaching down to pet him. He stood still for a few seconds while she stroked his sleek head, then danced around in a little circle before tearing off again into the trees. She smiled after him and he soon returned, this time with his owner, a man in hiking clothes. He looked to be about her age.

"Hi there," he said. "I hope Pepper didn't scare you."

"Not at all. He's lovely."

Realising he was being talked about, Pepper barked and looked up at each of them in turn, pink tongue lolling in a huge doggy grin.

"Yeah," the man said, "he loves everyone. Haven't seen you around before."

"I'm new here. My name's Julie Young."

Recognition dawned on his face. "Ah! You must be the lady who bought Little Owl Cottage."

"That's me."

"From the big city, they said down the pub. Must be quite a change. How are you settling into village life?"

Julie had to laugh. One could hardly call Taunton "the big city" but it must seem that way to someone from a secluded little village like Strethkellis. "I love it here. It's so peaceful. And everyone is very friendly."

"That's good. My name's Jim, by the way. Jim Evans."

The name rang a bell. "Evans? From the Bird in Hand?"

"Yeah, that's my dad. He owns it. I think you stayed there before you bought the cottage, right?"

"I did. Two nights. That's how long it took me to decide I wanted to stay."

Jim smiled. "It's an easy place to fall in love with."

Julie recalled what Mrs Trevenan had said about the pub owner giving his dead wife the best room in the inn and she couldn't help but wonder what that must be like. Did Jim think it was weird to pretend that his mum was in there forever, behind a sealed door? Then again, maybe it was no weirder than the tombs and mausoleums people built in memory of their lost loved ones. Gardens of dust and remembrance.

"When you're feeling up to it," Jim said, "perhaps you'd come along to the Bird one night? We'd all like to welcome you properly."

It might have sounded ominous from someone else but from Jim it seemed like a sincere, neighbourly invitation. Moving here had definitely been the right thing to do to start the healing process. The aching pain of widowhood would never go away, she knew, but it grew a little less agonising with each day of her new life. She relented.

"Sure. That would be nice."

"Great!" Jim said. Then he looked down at the ground, his expression turning serious. "I know what it's like to lose someone," he said softly. "It feels like it will never end. The pain I mean."

Julie could only nod. If she spoke Sam's name she felt she'd burst into tears. She watched Pepper pounce on something at the edge of the trees and then he lay down to gnaw a stick.

"The wall will help," Jim said.

The wall. Julie nodded again, absently. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like, devoting a hidden space to Sam. The cottage was a honeycomb of tiny rooms. She needed a bedroom and an office but that was really all. Maybe a guest room down the road when she was up to having friends come and visit-assuming she hadn't scared them all off for good. But the rest were just empty spaces she couldn't hope to fill.

What if she did give one to Sam? Could she pass by it every day and wonder what he was doing in there? The ancient Egyptians used to bury people with all their possessions, to take with them into the next world. What if she put a few things in there from their life together? Photos, books, mementos?

All at once the idea didn't seem mad at all. It felt rather sweet.

"The wall," she murmured, barely aware that she was speaking aloud.

****

The Bird in Hand wasn't a very large pub and it was full of people by the time Julie got there. Everyone greeted her warmly and introduced themselves but after the first few names she lost track. She couldn't believe things like this happened, that an entire village would throw a welcoming party for a new arrival. It was like she'd gone back in time to a friendlier age. It felt nice. She was soon lost in a mélange of pleasant conversation.

"--and that's Simon who runs the bakery and his wife Carla and their daughter Jeanette--"

"--must see the waterfall over in the glen--"

"--another glass of wine--"

"--our David can mend anything at all for you--"

"--and sometimes the deer come right into my garden--"

Julie was amazed to find herself laughing along with several anecdotes and enjoying the gathering. She'd only intended to put in an appearance and then leave, but she found she was actually having a good time.

Pepper worked the room, charming his way through the crowd to her. She slipped him a cocktail sausage from her plate and he wolfed it down. He pleaded with his eyes for more and when she held up her empty hand to show that was all he was getting, he slipped away to find someone else to mooch off. Julie smiled. It was the first time she'd felt the knot in her stomach begin to loosen properly. She felt like part of the village, as though she belonged.

She spotted Allan Curtis, who had built the wall for her. She hadn't liked the idea of keeping the door; she preferred to imagine that Sam was at the heart of the house, a secret no one else could see. Allan had kindly taken the door away when he was done and now there was no evidence that there had ever been a room there. Unless, of course, you did a circuit of the house and realised that the measurements didn't add up.

She often stroked the wall and whispered through it to Sam, as though he truly were just beyond it. And lately she'd begun to think she could hear him. She imagined him listening to the CDs she'd left in there for him, reading the books. Was he lonely in there? Or was he content to be absorbed into her new life? That very morning she'd been sure she could hear footsteps, the soft shoosh of slippers on the carpeted floor. It had instantly evoked memories of his clumsy morning gait, his sleepy stumble out of bed and into the bathroom before getting dressed for work.

"Go back to sleep, my love," she'd whispered through the wall. "You can sleep as late as you want to now."

Instead of piercing her heart, as such a thought would once have done, it brought her comfort. He seemed more present in the secret room than he ever had at his gravesite. In the beginning she'd gone to the churchyard several times a week, sobbing into the ground and crushing the flowers she brought for him. Now she wondered if the pain she'd felt there had been due to his profound absence. She had felt nothing of Sam in that patch of ground, that cold marker. The wall was different. Sometimes she could almost see him standing behind it, mirroring her position, pressing his hands against hers.

She had already thanked Allan profusely for building the wall and she thanked him again now.

"It's nothing," he insisted. "Just our little tradition."

"I hung our wedding portrait on it," she confided to him. "It doesn't hurt so much to see it now." It felt good to share, to be so open, as though she'd been keeping Sam trapped inside her heart and at last she had released him. She felt like a whole person for the first time in months.

"That's good to hear," Allan said. "Most folks find it a comfort."

She accepted another glass of wine from Jim, who had insisted that tonight was her night and she was not allowed to pay for anything. As she took it from him she saw a young woman across the room, watching her. The girl was very pretty, with long dark hair and delicate features. Julie didn't think they'd been introduced yet, but she couldn't be sure; she'd met so many people. In any case she was sure she'd have remembered someone so striking. She smiled over at her, but the girl didn't smile back. Her eyes went wide, as though something had startled her.

Puzzled, Julie excused herself and tried to make her way across the room. But they were packed like sardines in the pub and by the time she got to where the girl had been standing, no one was there.

Julie felt uneasy about the silent encounter without knowing why. Maybe the girl was just shy and she'd scurried off rather than have to chat with someone she didn't know. That seemed inconsistent with the rest of the village, but then, people were individuals. They couldn't all be so outgoing and gregarious.

She made her way over to Mrs Trevenan, who was chatting with Martin Evans, the publican.

"There you are, pet! It's quite a gathering, isn't it? I hope you're making lots of new friends."

"Everyone's been lovely," Julie said. "But I saw a girl a little while ago-about thirty, dark hair, really pretty?"

"Oh, that'll be Alice Carew. She's a sweetheart, isn't she?"

"I didn't actually get to meet her. I tried to go over and say hi but she disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"Yeah, she looked like something scared her off."

Mrs Trevenan gave a sigh and nodded as if she suddenly understood. "The poor thing. She lost her boyfriend last year."

"Oh." Julie's heart twisted. Had everyone in this village lost someone?

But the publican was frowning. "It's still not like Alice," he said. "She was fine just a few weeks ago. And I've never known her to skip out on a party before. She's usually the one talking your ear off about this, that and the other."

Mrs Trevenan didn't seem to know what to say to that but Julie could see she was puzzled too.

"Well," Julie said, "maybe she wasn't feeling well." But even as she suggested it, she knew it didn't ring true. In fact, now that she thought about it, the girl had looked positively terrified. She wondered where Alice's wall was, and what sounds she heard coming from behind it.

****

"Good morning, Sam," Julie said, stopping by the wedding portrait. She stroked the wall and put her ear against it. There were no sounds this time but she sensed a kind of heaviness, as if someone were standing just on the other side, listening. Her skin prickled. She held herself perfectly still, straining in the silence to catch any sound. A floorboard creaked then and she jumped back with a gasp.

Before she could stop herself she said, "Sam? Is that you?"

Of course there was no answer and she immediately felt foolish. She tried to laugh at herself, laugh it off, but she didn't like the sound that came out.

"I'm going to make breakfast, Sam," she forced herself to say in a cheery voice. "I'm sure you'll smell it burning."

She moved away quickly, unable to shake the feeling that she wasn't alone. And then she froze. A dark shape stood beyond the frosted glass of the front door.

Her heart pounded as she stared at the figure for what felt like endless minutes before it raised one arm and rang the bell. The noise jolted her and she gave a little cry.

"Mrs Young? Are you okay?"

The voice was female and Julie relaxed immediately, feeling even more foolish than she had earlier. She was turning into a jumpy old lady at the tender age of forty. Next she'd be filling the house with cats.

She opened the door and was surprised by her visitor. It was Alice.

"Hello," Julie said.

Alice offered her a weak little smile. "Hi."

"Do you want to come in?"

The girl glanced behind her as if to check that she wasn't being followed, then shifted her feet uneasily on the mat. "I probably shouldn't."

Julie pulled her dressing gown a little tighter. "Don't be ridiculous. It's freezing. Please come in."

Alice chewed her lower lip for a few seconds and then relented. She glanced around at her surroundings and Julie suspected she was looking for the wall. The girl's eye fell on the wedding portrait and she instantly looked away.

"Would you like some tea?" Julie asked.

The girl shook her head as though she'd been offered poison. "Listen," she said, "I can't stay. I just… Oh god, this is so hard for me." She stared down at her shifting feet in an agony of discomfort.

Julie touched Alice's shoulder. "I understand. They told me last night about your boyfriend. I lost my Sam a few months ago too."

At the mention of Sam's name, the girl winced. For a moment Julie simply believed she'd hit a nerve by bringing up the dead boyfriend. Then Alice raised her head and with slow, dawning horror Julie realised what this was about. The look in the girl's eyes told her everything.

"Oh my god," she whispered.

"I'm sorry," Alice said. "I'm so sorry."

"Not Sam."

"I never meant to hurt anyone. I didn't even know he was married."

Julie's stomach lurched and suddenly she felt dizzy. The floor seemed to be tilting. She reached out a trembling hand to steady herself against a bookcase.

"I saw your picture on his phone once," Alice continued, "and then when I saw you at the party last night and I realised who you were--"

"Just stop," Julie choked out. Her legs felt like they were made of water and she turned away, groping along the corridor towards the wall. The wall with the wedding portrait. She supposed all the signs had been there and she'd just been too stupid to see them. The village Sam had spoken of so glowingly had clearly held one extra spark, one special little added attraction. All those calls home-had he rung her from this girl's bedroom? Had he actually ever stayed at the pub at all?

"Why are you here?" she whimpered.

"You're in danger," Alice said. "You have to get away from here."

Julie laughed, a harsh and ugly sound. "Or what? You'll steal my husband? You lot and your crazy walls!"

"That's just it. The walls."

Julie scrubbed her eyes with the back of her sleeve. "Whose wall? Mine or yours? Because you've got Sam too, haven't you? Did you fill the room with nice little reminders of your stolen moments together?"

Alice looked as if she'd been slapped. "Please believe me, I had no idea. He lied to us both. But you have to listen to me. Yes, I built a wall for Sa -- for him. But then so did you."

"Yes I did," Julie said. The shock and helplessness was wearing off and anger was taking its place. In one vicious movement she tore the wedding portrait down and smashed it on the floor. Then she kicked the wall with her bare foot. There was a crunch and she supposed she had hurt herself but she could feel nothing. Only the satisfying thunk as she dented the soft plasterboard.

Alice screamed. "No! No, you mustn't!"

But Julie was beyond hearing. Grief was nothing compared to the pain of this betrayal. She pounded on the wall, shouting through it at Sam, as though he could actually hear her.

Something shifted beyond it and she imagined him in there, a guilty ghost. Would he slink out now and offer groveling apologies? Plead with her to forgive him? She landed another satisfying kick and heard the boards splinter.

"You can't do that!" Alice cried, pulling Julie away from the wall. "Please! It's not him!"

Julie looked at the beautiful young woman her husband had deceived her with. She had wasted a year of her life in misery, grieving for an unworthy man. Her heart felt like it was rotting.

Alice stared in horror at the hole Julie had made just above the skirting board and backed away slowly, tears streaming down her pretty face. "Sam already has a wall," she whimpered, "and I know he's there. So-whatever's behind that one isn't Sam."

The words seemed to reach Julie like a transmission from a fading signal. Not Sam. Rationality returned bit by bit as she recalled the uneasy feeling she'd had that morning, the sense that she wasn't alone. The sounds had been wrong. She'd known they were wrong. She'd just been so desperate to buy into the village's mass delusion.

Now, as her foot began to throb with delayed pain, she felt the presence even more strongly. There was an icy malevolence in the air, as though a door had been opened. A door to a place she didn't want to see.

"It's too late," Alice whispered. All the colour had drained from her face. She covered her mouth with both hands.

Julie barely registered what happened next. The hole began to widen by itself, the plaster crumbling to dust. There was a dull cracking sound and Julie wondered if it might be her mind. She closed her eyes and sank to her knees, leaning back against what was left of the wall.

"Sam," she moaned, "tell me it's not true. Tell me you love me."

A hand brushed against her face and then his arms were around her, drawing her close and tight. She sighed as she lay back against him, melting into the crushing embrace she had missed so desperately. It was Sam. She would know his touch anywhere. How could she ever have doubted him? Alice had lied-about everything.

He was so much stronger now, though. She had made him stronger, by believing. His face was rough and scratchy as he pressed it to hers, and she heard his voice then, whispering in her ear. He sounded different, but he told her what she wanted to hear, what she needed to hear.

Then he slowly let her go. Julie listened to the sound of his heavy tread as he moved away across the room. And she smiled as Alice began to scream.

MARY, MARY

Ray Cluley

Mary was tending the sweet peas in her front garden when the new neighbours arrived. Or rather, she was supposed to be tending the sweet peas. She was supposed to be pinching out the tips to encourage branching because bushier plants gave more flowers, especially if she picked them regularly. She had a particular fondness for her sweet peas because they produced a delicious scent (she always went for the annual sweet peas rather than the everlasting because the shorter-lived flowers had the stronger smell) and usually she was very focused on her garden tasks, but this morning she was distracted by the dirt at her knees.

There had been a brief but heavy shower in the early hours of the morning and the soil was still alive with writhing worms, called to the surface by the rain to wriggle in the freshly turned earth or squirm their way across the lawn. She wondered if the rain sounded like drums to the worms in their subterranean homes, a constant tom-tom rhythm that called them up despite the risks of birds or the unmerciful tread of human feet. A couple of worms were attempting to cross the pavement, as if the grass verge on the other side was somehow more desirable. Greener, perhaps, Mary thought with a smile. She wondered if they knew the dangers but came up from the safety of the soil anyway, compelled by forces beyond their control.

It was the rattling up of the removal van's back door that pulled Mary back from those thoughts to distract her with new ones. She had been so engrossed in the activity of the worms that she hadn't heard the vehicle arrive, but that rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the door rolling up was impossible to miss. U-Drive. She was glad to see the new neighbours had driven the van themselves rather than hire someone. She thought it admirable, such independence, especially these days when everybody seemed happy to pay somebody else to do something for them. She was also glad to see the new people were black. She might be of an older generation, but shame on anyone who thought that was an excuse to be racist. No, she was glad some people of ethnic origin or whatever the polite term was for them these days had decided to move in to her street. Added a little… Ha! Colour.

The man at the back of the van handed a box to his teenage daughter, a beautiful girl with long braided hair who said something to him and laughed as she took the box. A girl, that was good. Before Mary could complete her smile, though, a young boy leapt down from the van and, oh, he was beautiful too. He gave his father a bright smile and, oh my, he had such an energetic body, impatient to be somewhere else, running around enthusiastically and pretending to pull at his hair as his father laughed and kept a box high out of reach. The boy bounced on the spot and made grabbing motions for the package. "Pleease!"

Mary struggled up from her knees for a better look. It was more of a struggle than she liked to admit and she needed to use the nearby lawnmower for support. If she was honest with herself, and she always tried to be, she had brought the lawn mower out with that very purpose in mind, for the grass would probably be too wet to cut until the late afternoon.

The boy had his box and set about unpacking it straight away, there on the street. His enthusiasm for the task was delightful, and Mary enjoyed watching the way his face lit up as he retrieved a car from inside and set it on the pavement. Next came a handheld control and then the street was a little less quiet, the vehicle whining its way up and down and around as the boy followed. The child liked to play. That was good.

"Peter, go and help your mother."

Peter.

Mary hadn't seen the mother yet, but here was a car parking behind the van and, yes, there was a black woman inside. She had short cropped hair but the same figure, amazingly, as her daughter. When she saw Mary looking she waved. Brief, but polite, delivered with a quick smile. Mary returned it. Her hands were still gloved and caked in soil, palms darker than those of the woman she waved at.

Peter was standing at the roadside, the gadget in his hands pointing at the car that weaved around his mother's feet. She stepped over the toy several times with a practised ease that was almost supernatural, barely glancing at it as she headed towards her family.

"Hello, Mary."

The voice startled her but she resisted putting a hand to her chest.

"James, hello, good morning. How are you?"

James smiled and showed her some letters he'd brought out to post. He was an elderly gentleman around Mary's own age. "Just being nosy, really," he said, nodding towards the new neighbours. "Good to have some new people in that house."

Mary smiled and said, "Yes," though it hadn't been empty long.

"Especially children."

She didn't know if it was because he used to be a priest or because they couldn't physically have them but James and his wife Claire didn't have any children. They had several cats, though. Surrogate children, she supposed. Mary had needed to speak to both James and Claire on different occasions about their animals digging up her flowerbeds.

James pointed to where Mary's trowel lay in the dirt. "Weeding?"

"No, no, I was just turning the soil. Helping it drain. It's important, though really sweet peas are the easiest things in the world to grow. I'll probably do some weeding later, it's getting out of hand. Nature can be difficult to tame."

Why did she always prattle on so with men? But James was barely listening, so she supposed it didn't matter. Across the street the girl had come out of the house with cups of something for her parents. That first box must have been the kettle and tea things.

"Pretty," James said.

Mary nodded. The boy chased his car up and down the drive.

"Well, these aren't going to post themselves," James said, shaking the envelopes in his hand. "Good luck with the weeding."

Mary gave him a tight smile but allowed it to broaden into something more genuine when the boy across the road saw her and waved. He directed the car towards her front garden but turned it in a tight circle before it could reach the kerb. Then he did the same circle in reverse before driving the car back to his feet. A boy's hello.

"Little Lewis Hamilton," James said. Mary had no idea what he meant but he was already heading towards the post box at the end of the street so she was able to avoid any embarrassment by asking.

She eased herself back down to the ground, kneeling on a padded mat. She bowed her head towards the soil and tried to focus on the task at hand but found another worm, twisting upon itself in some strange rapture. With a quick thrust of her trowel she cut it in half. It would be all right, she thought. Half of it, anyway. As a child she used to think that both bits grew into new worms but really only one part survived. And it didn't grow back anything. It just survived, that was all.

****

Mary didn't believe in god with a capital G. She used to. She used to believe in the very same God James preached about once upon a time, though she never went to his church. For Mary, the only god, or goddess, was Mother Nature. A goddess so old that She resided at the Earth's core, having gathered the world around Her when the planet was mere pieces in space and time, pushing and pulling the tectonic plates into new shapes the same way Mary fidgeted sheets around herself in bed. Mary's goddess was protected by the world's crust and warmed by the world's magma. Mary's goddess was the soil's heart, beating in a series of seismic shifts, and worms carried Her pulse through a network of arteries they made themselves. No turn of Mary's shovel could hurt Her. Nature's heart was a hot molten rock that beat in earthquakes and rushes of ocean. The bones of Mary's goddess were the bones of people who thought they were returning to the clay from which they were made but really only fed it. The bones of Mary's goddess were those pressed into chalk over millennia. Her skeleton was stone. Mountains were Her vertebrae. Volcanoes spewed such exhalations that She could, if She desired, block the sun, and the world would know a darkness it had only seen when young.

Mary had known darkness but she buried it. Sometimes what she buried turned into something that gave her strength because even the foulest of things could flower. Mother Nature produced plenty of poisons but She also provided the remedies. Sometimes they even grew side by side. Sometimes the only difference between one and the other depended on dosage. Plants were like people that way, Mary thought, standing straight and wiping sweat from her brow.

She was up to her waist in a hole she'd been digging for three days. Since the Turners had moved in: Elijah and his improbably named wife, Pixie, plus their daughter Jasmine. And Peter. She'd had a wonderful chat with Peter. About digging.

Occasionally a well intentioned neighbour would tell Mary she was getting too old for some of her gardening work but she could never stop doing something she enjoyed so much. She felt particularly at peace when digging. The rasp of the spade in gravelly ground or the heavy scoop of sod levered by her foot or turn of wrist. It was hot work though, especially cooped up like she was in the garden shed. She had removed the floorboards some time ago, gaining access to the soil beneath, and now, shovelling load after load of the dirt into an ever-growing heap, she really felt the dusty heat, close and stifling. Almost the entirety of the shed's floor space had been dug away with just a small area left for the mounting dirt. She would dig until she felt better, however long that took, and then she would refill the hole and tread the soil down flat once more. She'd long since given up replacing the floorboards-had burned them, in fact, on one November fifth or another-because eventually she would dig again. Sometimes the soil would still be freshly turned when she needed to and the going was easy (too easy, actually) but usually she managed months before the need returned.

She took a sip of iced tea. It wasn't some awful shop-bought concoction. No, this was lemon iced tea she made herself (the secret lay in letting it steep with lemon peel rather than using the juice, and adding a great deal of sugar). The glass had lost a lot of its coolness but the drink was still refreshing and the sugar perked her up for the work she still had to do.

She took a final sip of her tea, set the glass back down on a shelf of empty plant pots, and wiped her forehead with a sleeve grimed with dirt and sweat. It was already going to need a good wash but, safe in the privacy of her modified garden shed, she began unfastening the buttons.

When she'd seen Peter digging, he'd been grubby with mud all up his front. In his lap, clods of dirt had gathered like tiny earth-babies nuzzling for comfort.

Mary arched her shoulders back to remove her clothing and mopped her brow a final time with the bunched up blouse before hanging it on the handle of the shed door. She contemplated taking off her bra as well, not liking the way the straps rubbed or how the sweat built under the cups, but the way she'd sag and swing without it depressed her more and more these days. She was no Charlie Dimmock, not anymore. There was something to be said, though, for the freedom of being without it. If she was honest with herself, and she always tried to be, there was a wonderful frisson to be had in being so exposed amongst the earth. It gave her pleasure, being so intimately close to Nature. Even thinking about it gave her a shivered thrill that was more than the coolness of the soil seeping into her skin.

Mary retrieved the spade and stabbed it at the ground, treading the blade into the soil to lever up a fresh heap of dirt and stone. Her grip was firm. She felt no pain in her back or knees. She took strength from the ground she stood in, letting the labour keep her mind from other things.

****

"Good morning, Peter," Mary had said. "That's your name, isn't it?"

She'd smiled. She had crossed the road to pass the Turner place, taking inspiration from her neighbour James in that she carried a handful of letters to post (she liked to enter competitions, and there were letters she sent to gardening magazines-one of those had once been 'letter of the week', winning her a £50 voucher to spend at the garden centre). She had planned to post them at the weekend on her way to the shops but when she'd seen Peter in the front garden, turning soil with the sort of spade best used at the beach, she'd changed her mind.

"My name's Peter Lewis Turner," he'd said. "We just moved here." He'd been bringing the plastic spade towards himself in a series of pulls, dirt flicking up his t-shirt as he scraped a shallow trench. A matching bucket sat nearby as if he was going to make mud castles.

"I see you enjoy getting dirty," Mary had said with a soft chuckle. She'd pointed at his t-shirt and the small mound of earth building in his lap.

"I'm looking for treasure."

"Well, there's lots of that in the ground."

Peter had looked up, clearly delighted. "Is there?" And Mary had smiled.

"Of course. All the nutrients plants need to grow, for starters. And all sorts of precious metals and pretty gem stones. People dig them up all the time, though personally I think they're supposed to stay there. I think they're in the ground for a special reason."

"What for?"

"I don't know, dear. I just don't think Mother Nature would put anything in the ground that wasn't meant to be there."

"I like stones. I've got seven with holes in them but I found those at the beach. Dad says they're lucky."

"If you like stones, you should see my fossil collection. I have them in my garden, bordering the lawn and standing in some of the flower beds. Sort of like garden gnomes, but much prettier."

"Fossils are like stone dinosaurs, aren't they?"

"Sort of. They're special rocks that show you something that died, years and years and years ago."

"Coal's a special rock that burns," Peter had said. He'd said it like it was something he'd learned recently, new knowledge, shiny and fresh, that he wanted to show off.

"You're absolutely right," Mary had said. "Did you know, there's a place where anthracite, which is a type of coal, is burning right now? Lots and lots of it, all underground, burning and burning. It's been burning for over fifty years, nobody can put it out. Imagine that."

Peter had looked around as if it might be right underneath him. His expression had been part excitement, part fear.

"It's in America somewhere," Mary had assured him.

"What about the people who live there?"

"Nobody lives there, it's too dangerous. The land is really hot and the fumes are really poisonous. It seeps up out of the ground."

"There's poison in the ground?"

"Sometimes."

"What else is in the ground?"

The boy had stopped digging. Cross-legged, spade held across his lap, he'd sat looking up at Mary.

"Well," she'd said, "buried treasure, as you know."

Peter had grinned.

"But also things that lay forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered."

"Like a bone? Our dog used to bury bones but then forget where she'd put them."

"Yes, like bones, I suppose. I didn't know you had a dog."

"She died."

"Oh."

"She was killed. She ate something bad." He'd frowned, bringing his hand up to his eyes. Mary had thought he was about to cry and she'd panicked but it was only that the clouds had moved and Peter was saluting to shield his eyes, squinting a little into the sun.

Mary had wondered what on earth to say next but then there'd been a creak and screech from the side gate and Peter's mother had appeared. She'd been surprised by Mary but only for a moment. She'd smiled. "Hello."

"Hello." Mary had introduced herself, pointing across the road. "Number 42, if ever you need anything."

The woman greeted her again. "Hi, Mary, I'm Pixie." She'd brought her hands up as if to ward off a blow. "I know, I know. Awful, isn't it? I sound like someone from Harry Potter or something."

Mary had smiled. "I think it's a wonderful name. Magical."

Pixie had smiled in return. "My husband, Elijah, says the same thing."

"You have a daughter, too, don't you?"

The woman had nodded. "Jasmine. And this little one-" Here she'd crossed her arms and scowled at her son. "Peter Lewis Turner, look at the mess you've made!" It had been pretend anger, though, the woman suddenly sweeping in low, arms outstretched, to scoop the boy up for tickles. He must have been rather heavy at his age but maybe mothers didn't notice that kind of thing.

"We were talking about buried treasure and fires and bones," Peter had said between laughing and trying to breathe. A beautiful sound.

"That sounds lovely, but you've got to come in now and get ready for lunch." Then, to Mary, "It was nice meeting you."

Mary had watched as the woman ushered her child inside. When she swatted playfully at his behind to hurry him along Mary had looked away.

In the ground at her feet, a small hole, a narrow trench, had gaped vacant, a plastic spade protruding from one end like the headstone of a grave, or an invitation to keep digging.

****

In the shed, in the hole, Mary scooped heaps of ground from around her feet and tossed them aside at a near frantic pace without caring that most of the dirt fell back into the opening she had made. She was sweating profusely now (or rather she was perspiring-she was a lady) and she could feel it running down her sides from her armpits. She could feel it at the nape of her neck where curls of grey hair were sticking to her skin. She was wearing comfortable trousers but even so they were damp around the elasticated waist and crotch. She couldn't tell if it was the physical activity or the exertions of her mind that made her feel this way. Still, she levered up more earth, raised it, and tossed it away.

Abruptly, her spade bit into something softer than soil. She stopped and angled the blade carefully to see…

Yes.

"Hello Adam."

When she dug this deep, Mary always found Adam. The first time it happened it had panicked her and she'd wondered if somehow she'd forgotten where she'd put him. She soon discovered, though, that it didn't matter where she put the blade of her spade or shovel, Adam would always be unearthed. Sometimes the other children followed-not always, only sometimes-but Adam was always there for her. His eyes were clogged with soil but he saw everything.

"What are you going to do?" he asked, his throat choked with dirt. His teeth were black with soil and clumps fell from his mouth as he spoke. His was a voice that bubbled beetles and things that burrowed moved his tongue, itself a writhing twist and turn of worms that dropped in tangles with each of his words.

"Go away," Mary said. She plunged the spade into the boy's face and he crumbled into sodden clods, all muddy blood and stones for bones. He fell apart into a fleshy compost that Mary tossed aside with an enthusiastic swing of her arms.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

She spoke it to the ground beneath her feet, and to all the dark that had gathered there as the light outside faded.

"Yes you do," it said.

****

A chill had descended as day faded into early evening. Mary didn't feel it until she left the shed and it made her wish she'd brought a cardigan out with her. Often, especially when digging, she lost track of time. In the shed, that was. In the hole. Sitting at the flower beds, trowel in hand, transferring potted plants to the great outdoors or picking at weeds, she was fine.

The light had diminished a great deal with the onset of evening, more so than was usual for the hour, because low-lying cloud, dense with rain, had settled over the neighbourhood. Mary took the opportunity while it was still dry to transfer her rubbish from the bin to the kerb. She only had to do it once a fortnight because with all the recycling, and the amount of household waste she used for compost, she had very little to dispose of these days.

Each of her neighbours had already put their rubbish out, slumped sacks lining the street like squat little sentinels, and she realised it must be even later than she'd initially thought. The streetlamps were on, heavy rain clouds reflecting the light so that the road seemed to simmer in a sulphurous sodium glow. It made Mary think of how the Earth's volcanic sky must have looked, back when the planet was young and still forming, cloud-filled and lava-lit, all aglow with fire.

She deposited her rubbish and was about to return to the house when a mobile phone beeped twice, loud in the quiet of the evening. It made her pause.

The new girl across the street, Jasmine, was lingering at her gate with a young man. There was another double bleat, the technological heartbeat that seemed to keep teenagers alive these days, but Mary saw that neither of the two made any effort to check their phones. They were too engrossed in each other, their hands on each other's waist. They looked as if they were about to kiss, or had recently been kissing.

"Careful," Mary said quietly. "Boys are bad for your heart."

She glanced away and down at the plants in her front garden, uncomfortable watching the couple in their private moment but too curious to go inside just yet. She focused her attention on the gladioli she had growing at either side of the front gate where they'd catch the sun. Gladioli were great for bringing colour to a garden, a bright array of simple flowers hardy enough to use year after year, if the winter was a mild one. That said, and it was difficult to tell in the poor light, it looked like the leaves of these were mottled. She bent to look closer rather than kneel, wincing at the crack in her back, and took a few of the leaves into her hand. They were certainly wilting a little. She'd check in tomorrow's daylight but she thought (hoping she was wrong) it was perhaps greenfly.

Across the road, the two shadowy forms at the gate melted into each other as they kissed. Mary thought of the young brother, and what he might think of it. She thought about the hole she had made in the back garden, in the shed, and that maybe she should fill it in again already.

When the outside light came on at number 45 the teenagers pulled away from their embrace. The front door opened and there was the father. "Jasmine, time to let the boy go. School tomorrow."

Mary thought that as far as reprimands went, Jasmine had been lucky. Mary's own father had been a far sterner sort. He had made boys afraid of him, and her afraid of men, and she thought it no exaggeration to say that as a result of such a strict upbringing she had become the seventy-year-old spinster she was today.

She watched as her new neighbour retreated inside to allow his daughter a final moment of privacy, though he left the front door open to emphasise his point about curfew. Mary waited in case she caught a glimpse of Peter but the boy was probably watching television or maybe even in bed. Then the door was closed and Mary was alone again except for a teenage boy walking away, face lit eerie green by the light of his phone.

A movement to her right caught Mary's eye and she turned in time to see the curtains of 44 twitching closed. James or Claire had been watching as well, it seemed, but the show was now over.

Mary retreated to the warmth of her own home for a much-needed drink.

****

Mary had not been much of a drinker until recent years. Oh, she used to enjoy the occasional tipple on special occasions, and once or twice she maybe had a glass of wine in the bath, but otherwise she was very much a tea-drinker. Tonight, though, she needed something a little stronger. And for Mary, that meant whisky. Just a wee dram.

Her hands were sore from clutching the handle of the spade so fiercely and for so long. The skin of her palms had been rubbed raw and it hurt to straighten her fingers. She looked, in fact, like she had been stricken with the arthritis she had so far been lucky enough to avoid, her hands curled into fleshy claws. Still, she managed to twist the bottle open easily enough. Only a supermarket own-brand (on her pension, it had to be) but it would do. She half-filled a cup and took it through to the living room where she could put the electric heater on for a few minutes, just to take the evening chill from her bones.

The island of Islay produced a wonderful whisky, she'd heard. It had a delicious smoky flavour, apparently, thanks to how the malt was dried over a peat-heated fire, the barley infused with the flavours of the smoke.

Peat-heated fire , she thought. Pete-heated.

Peter.

Peter: the stone, the rock. From the Greek, petro. Mary had looked it up.

Peat was similar to coal in that it came from plants but it burned down more quickly, delivering a lot of heat but only for a short period of time. Coal took a lot longer to form, but it burned for longer.

She put the whisky down on the drop-leaf table beside her but her hand remained bent into the shape that had held it. Or rather, the shape that had pushed and raised and turned a spade for the last few hours. Like petrified wood, her hand looked like it always had but was locked in place the same way trees would transition into stone as minerals replaced organic matter. Fossils were mere impressions in rock, a trace of what was, but petrified wood had its own three-dimensional shape, not simply a trace of what once was but a stronger version of what it used to be. Solid, not hollow. It had substance, albeit one that lacked any kind of life. Like the Tollund Man, wonderfully preserved in a peat bog for centuries. Curled up like a child in the belly of Mother Nature.

Mary took another drink, a petrified fossil trying to forget what had made her.

****

Mary was in her front garden picking at mottled leaves when Mr Turner came over to say hello. She hadn't noticed him at first, examining the plants which were just as damaged as she'd feared. She turned each leaf to check the underside because often a problem lay underneath, unseen, and yes. Greenfly. She wasn't sure how that had happened-she'd been spraying the garden regularly-but here was the proof. The leaves had curled and browned and she knew the combination of toxic greenfly-saliva and the plant's lack of sap would prove to be its downfall if she didn't act quickly.

"Good morning."

Mr Turner had a very deep voice, loud even from across the road. He was approaching her garden, smiling politely. "Problem with your flowers?"

"Good morning, yes, gladioli, Mr Turner. I mean, it is a good morning, yes, Mr Turner, and the flowers are gladioli. It's a-"

He was holding up his hand and Mary worried about her babbling- he'd clearly heard enough-but he simply said, "Elijah, please. Mr Turner makes me feel like I'm in trouble for something." He smiled.

"Elijah." Mary said it quietly.

"Actually, I suppose I am sort of in trouble. Thought I'd come to ask you for some help."

"Is it the forsythia? It can get out of hand if left for a while like yours has been. I mean, that's not your fault, of course, the property's been empty, but you should prune it just after it's bloomed. If you-"

"No, no, it's not the… forsythia? I'm not too sure what that even is, actually. It's just that-"

"It's that beautiful yellow shrub. Sunrise forsythia. The one you have tangling with the hydrangea, in that corner bed by your front door."

"Is it? Thank you. I'll take a look at that, see if I can sort it out. Mrs, Miss…?"

"Oh, just Mary."

"Mary. Hi, Mary. My wife said you two had met, and that's the closest I've come to meeting anyone yet, and I was wondering if you knew someone around here who babysits? Maybe there's a teenage girl, like my Jasmine, only one who doesn't disappear with her boyfriend at the last minute and conveniently forgets her own little brother?"

He smiled again, but it looked a little strained to Mary. She thought his attempt to joke actually had its roots in a more serious concern about his daughter. That was what happened, though, and it was a shame: children grew up. And whatever they grew into was often the parents' fault.

"I only ask because we're desperate, you see. My wife and I, Pixie, we're supposed to go to this-"

"I could look after him for a few hours."

The first expression on Mr Turner's face was a mixture of relief and happiness but he recovered enough to shake his head, saying, "No, I couldn't ask you to do that. I didn't come over to ask that."

Mary thought he had come over with the hope at least, if not the expectation, that she would look after Peter, but she simply said, "Nonsense. It would be a pleasure. I haven't seen my grandchildren in a while. It'll be good to have some lively young blood in the house again."

Grandchildren? Oh, why had she said that? Now he'll want to know their names, and their ages, and all sorts of other things.

"Grandkids, eh? How old? How many?"

"Just the two, and not so young now. The eldest is about the same age as your daughter and the youngest is eight. Both boys."

Mr Turner was nodding. It was the nod of a man not really listening but rather agreeing with his own thoughts. Mary thought they probably went something along the lines of she's got grandchildren, they're boys, she'll be fine. "Thing is," he said, "it's rather short notice, too. As in, tonight."

Mary waved that away as the trivial detail it was. What would she be doing that couldn't be put off for another day? How did any of her days or evenings differ anyway? "That's okay, he'll save me from the horrors of Coronation Street."

"Petey said you two spoke the other day," Mr Turner said, more at ease.

"Yes, that's right. About digging, and fossils. I said I'd show him some of mine. I have a few fossils in the back garden, you see, ammonites mostly, all in a row bordering-"

"Sounds wonderful. Just his cup of tea. If you really don't mind?"

"Not at all. It would be my pleasure."

They arranged a suitable time and said their goodbyes, Mr Turner offering a final compliment before he went. "I love your garden. So full of colour."

When he'd gone, Mary looked again at her gladioli. Aphids were the most destructive of pests in any garden and last year her sweet peas had succumbed, becoming sickly and dangerous themselves so that she'd had to destroy them. Greenfly reproduced asexually, the offspring an exact replica of the parent, and they would spread quickly throughout the entire garden if she didn't act quickly. Nip it in the bud, so to speak.

She went to the shed.

****

Mary thrust the shovel into the thick wet earth, grunting with the effort.

The babysitting had not gone well.

Peter's parents had given him dinner before bringing him over but Mary had fed him fuller still with biscuits and cakes she had made especially for his visit. They had played a board game in the conservatory, surrounded by cacti and draping ferns, snug beneath hanging red stars and purple petunias. They'd played Snakes and Ladders. Mary only had old games, and certainly nothing like a computer, but that hadn't seemed to bother Peter, unless he was just very polite.

"I like snakes," he'd said, moving his piece down one of the colourful serpents. "Do you like snakes?"

"If I'm honest, and I always try to be, I find them a bit frightening," Mary had admitted. "I'm all right with slow worms, though."

Peter had looked at her with a frown and so she'd explained. "They look a lot like snakes but actually they're lizards. You wouldn't know it, though. I find them in my garden occasionally, near the compost heap where the grass is longer. They're quite harmless." She'd smiled, adding, "Unless you're a slug or a worm."

"Can we look for some?"

"Slow worms? Of course we can."

Peter had leapt up, knocking the board but only scattering the pieces a few squares backwards. "Can I keep it if I find one?"

"We can't look now. It's too dark, and quite chilly."

"I've got my hoodie."

"It's still dark."

"I've got a torch at home, I can get it."

"They're probably sleeping now anyway, underground. We can look in the day time. Let's finish our game. It's your go."

He had sat on the settee again without sulking or complaining, correcting the knocked pieces on the board, and Mary had thought, such a nice boy. Such a nice young man. So well behaved. Then he'd started shaking the dice for his next turn, his fist pumping up and down, back and forth in his lap, like something obscene.

"All right, come on, let's look for snakes," Mary had said, just to make it stop.

"Yes!"

"Slow worms, I mean. I've got a torch. And I'll show you those fossils."

In the hole, in the shed, Mary attacked the mound of soil with renewed vigour, shovelling all she'd unearthed back into the dark hole she'd made. One hard horizontal thrust buried the shovel blade right up to the shaft, and when she tried to lever it there was a loud crack and the handle broke so suddenly that she fell.

Nothing broke, nothing in Mary. Nothing dislocated. That was a small miracle at her age. It was going to be tricky getting up again but for now she sat staring at the length of wood she held in her hands. "Bloody thing," she said, and dropped it into her lap where she saw that the handle was indeed bloody. She checked her hands and found them wet with it. Sticky where it had mixed with her sweat. It hurt to straighten her fingers but she would not cry. She would not. The skin was pink, seeping in places and bleeding in others where blisters had burst. Dirt lined each of her wrinkles, emphasising them with a brown colour not her own. She was herself a fossil, hollowed and cracked.

"He has such beautiful smooth skin," she said. "Dark like soil. Like wet earth."

She brought her hands close to inhale the pungent damp smell of the dirt but smelt only her own sweat and the tinge of blood.

Peter had smelled of sunshine, as if all the heat of the day had been trapped in his skin. They'd gone to the compost heap, sweeping at the long grass with sticks, small lengths of cane that she used to support young plants. Sweeping at the long grass with torchlight, looking for slow worms.

"Ugh, gross," Peter had said, "what is that smell?"

"That's the compost. Look, there." She'd pointed to a dark heap in the gap between the shed and back fence, hidden behind the water barrel that collected rain from the shed's guttering. Peter had shone the torch over it, covering his nose and mouth with his free hand. Mary had become used to the odour but Peter's reaction had her smelling it as if for the first time. A sour smell, like spoiled milk, yet sickly sweet, too, with grass cuttings and the stems of decaying flowers as well as potato skins and egg shells, the rotting refuse of her past meals. Draped across the top, loose bouquets of pulled weeds and pruned branches, and beneath it all the rank smell of damp manure. The pile had greyed up one side with a fur of mould, and some nettles had sprouted. A warmth emanated from the waste, the compost snug in the heat of its own decay.

"It's so gross," Peter had said again, pretending to vomit.

"Well, maybe it's you," Mary'd said, daring a joke. "When did you last have a bath?" She had scooped him close and breathed deep, her nose pressed to the nape of his neck, and that was when she'd discovered his sunshine. Mary was too old to lift him for tickles as his mother had, but she pressed her fingers to his armpits. Peter had tried to pull away.

"Stop it!"

Mary had released him immediately. "Sorry," she'd said. "I thought you liked tickles."

"That hurt. You pinched me."

"Sorry."

Peter had swept at the long grass, making a show of one final check. "No snakes," he'd said.

"No snakes," Mary said again, sitting in the vast hole she'd excavated. She pressed her palms to the cool damp soil and it soothed her raw skin. She clutched the soil in tiny fragile fists and turned her hands to see what she'd been given, opening her fists to find muddy shapes, ridged by the squeeze of her fingers. "He has such beautiful skin," she said again. She dropped the two clods of earth and plunged her hands deep into the pile of dirt beside the hole, scooping it towards herself and tossing cupped handfuls over her shoulder, trying not to sob as somewhere behind her Adam told her what it was she wanted to do.

He had emerged early in the digging this time, his head appearing on a shovelful of dirt. She'd cast it aside, heard it land and roll, only to see him rise again from the earth with the next shovel of soil. She'd cast this one aside too and it rolled to where the other had been only moments before. She'd bury it with the next load. She'd bury all of them, again, as many times as she had to.

She was hot, even at this late hour. Using the broken handle to help, Mary eventually, carefully, stood. She stripped away her clothes, undressing down to her underwear, throwing her garments to the door where they wouldn't be buried. She felt as heavy as the soil beneath her feet, slow and sagging, a repulsive filthy old woman, but still she swept handfuls, armfuls, from the dug up heap back into the hole, sweating in the fury of her activity. She thought of the world's earliest years, when continents crashed together and spewed volcanic clouds to fill the skies, raising the temperature so that life had a chance to form and flourish. The world heating and cooling, breathing, so that new life might bloom or, sometimes, end abruptly.

"I bet he tastes like soil, too," Adam said. "I bet he tastes of life. You'd taste all the nutrients of the world in the sap of that darksoil."

Mary shuddered but still she shovelled, using both hands to fill the hole. She thought of things not Peter. She thought of the titanic heaves and descents of plate tectonics, rocks (Peter, petro, the stone, the rock) taken down into the Earth's depths before being shoved up again filled with new nutrients, convulsions of earth shaping the surface of the world anew with mountains and valleys, an up-down wave of stone and soil forced into shape by the churning of the world's hot rocks. It was the same movement that created the world's magnetic field, the irresistible push and pull that made Mary think of her own impulses. If she didn't let such shifts affect her, who would she be? What was her Nature if not this?

No. Nature could be contained, controlled-her own garden was the beautiful proof. But the weeding, the pruning, the constant landscaping, it was so exhausting. If she was honest with herself…

The next handful of earth she brought to her face, relishing its coolness on her cheeks and brow, the moist aroma of it. She plunged her tongue into the dirt she held and tasted an acidic sourness, a metallic sharpness, sweet alkaline. Kneeling in the earth, half-buried in it, tasting it on her skin, she prayed to her Nature, a monster goddess she could worship but never hide from. She confessed her deeds and desires until the entire pit she had made was gone, full again, sated with its own soil.

****

Mary didn't leave the house for a few days except to dig or refill the hole in the garden shed. Digging deep, but all for nothing: she sat in the conservatory, waiting, warmed by the sunlight and drowsy in the scent of contained flowers. Sometimes one of the Adams sat with her.

"You could blame the priest," he said to her. "Next door. You know they always like to-"

"Shut up."

She said it quietly, staring at the floor. Sometimes it worked. Other times it would only make the Adam more cruel and he'd sit with her through the entire night, forbidding sleep or chasing her into it with dreams that were mostly memories. Desires she thought had died, only to find they'd fossilised deep inside, heavy weights in a heart which was itself only a trace of what it used to be.

"Play with me."

"No," she said. But she looked up.

The child's naked body was entirely caked in clay, face besmeared and hair pasted flat with mud. He was every bit the dirty little boy she'd said he was, all those years ago. Show Mary an acorn and she could see the tree, or so she liked to say.

"Come on, play with me," the mudboy said again, eyeing the Snakes and Ladders board still set up on the table. He mimed shaking the dice but he did it low in his naked lap and what he threw was a scattering of soil that buried both of the playing pieces.

Mary looked away, back at the floor again, though in her peripheral vision she could see that others had come. Her foundations made topsoil through some psychological seismic shift. Dead boys given new life in being dredged up from the earth they were buried in, just as they had given new life to that earth as they slumped into soft pieces, oozing juices that fed the soil and everything that lived within it.

There was a knock at the front door.

Mary struggled to stand, her limbs and joints stiff and painful with all the work she'd busied herself with, but stand she did.

"I'll wait here," the Adam said.

"Don't bother. There's no need."

It took her a while to get to the door and in all that time there was no second knock or impatient ringing of the doorbell. He was a good boy. Considerate, the way only children could be. Or maybe he'd gone home again. Yes, and maybe that was for the best.

He hadn't gone home.

"Wow," Peter said. "What happened to you?"

Mary glanced down at herself. She was filthy, grimed with everything she'd taken out and put back again.

"There's a snake," she said. "A slow worm. In my garden."

"Really? Can I see it?"

Mary stepped back from the door and as Peter passed her she said, "I made some more of those cakes you like."

She felt a brief draft as the back door opened behind her in the conservatory and the children waiting there retreated into the garden. Into the soil. She looked left and she looked right and she saw the street empty both times, the neighbourhood quiet. She closed the door firmly on the world outside.

****

Mary had set a ladder in the pit. Peter went first and she followed. She had dug one of the edges away into a narrow opening and the ground beyond sloped further down. The wind whispered from it, short phrases in gusts that cooled the skin, a low hush of voices that came and went like the repeated chorus of some strange soil-spoken song.

"A tunnel," Peter said. "Is this where the snake went?"

The shadows seemed to writhe away from Mary's torchlight as they descended deeper into the dank, dark earth, outcrops of rock and fossilised curves, stone spirals, casting shapes that were snake-like themselves across the walls of the tunnel and the sloping ground beneath their feet.

"How far do we have to go?" Peter asked.

"All the way," Mary told him, pressing close.

The earth angled down at a steep gradient. The heavy humming of fattened bluebottles thickened the air, a droning buzz rising around them as they moved lower, lower, into the earth, and underneath that sound came the steady tom-tom beat of a powerful heart.

"I feel strange," Peter said. "I'm sick."

"Me too."

"I think I had too many cakes. I don't feel good."

"You'll feel fine in a minute," Mary said. "You'll feel wonderful. We're going to play a game." She took Peter's hand and he let her. The only sign of any fear or trepidation was in his backwards glance up to the surface where the outline of Mary's garden shed, a rectangle of light, diminished with every step, shrinking away above them. "Let's see the snake," she said.

Peter's expression was part excitement, part fear. He tried to say something but when he opened his mouth to speak he only dribbled clods of mud, his throat choked with dirt and stones that burned and burned and burned as they dropped from him, hot as coals.

"Come with me," Mary said, and she pulled him into the ground with her, an earthen mermaid swimming down into the sunless soils of the world.

THE MEANTIME

Alison Moore

'It would never do for me to come to life again.'

-Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

The Jameses took early retirement and bought an old house in the Peak District. They stood outside, looking up at its big, grey frontage, trying to decide on a name.

"It should be a name that says something about it," said Mrs James.

"Bleak House," said Mr James.

They called it The Rambles. They were going to run it as a boarding house, providing bed and breakfast for the walkers who came to explore the Dark Peak.

Running a boarding house was something Mrs James had always wanted to do. She imagined herself receiving her guests in the dining room in the morning, offering them a choice of cereals and eggs, writing down their orders on a notepad. Her dolls, when she had played this as a child, had liked cornflakes and scrambled eggs.

Mrs James had grown up in a house that was old and grey just like The Rambles, although it had been smaller, much smaller, and was squeezed between others in a terrace, whereas this one was in the middle of nowhere. When Mrs James was quite young, her father had become unwell, in need of bed rest, and her mother had nursed him. Her mother would say, "This afternoon, we might go to the park, but in the meantime your father's sleeping and you must be quiet, Jacqueline." Her father's meals had to be taken to his bedroom on a tray, and sometimes this job was given to Jacqueline. She always hoped to find him sleeping, and went on tiptoe, trying not to let the cutlery rattle against the plate, so that she would not wake him up by going in.

The Rambles had six en-suite bedrooms including their own. Mr James, a numbers man, entertained himself by referring to the room numbers in binary, which made it sound as if they were running an enormous hotel with more than a hundred rooms spread over the three floors. As it happened, they could not even fill the five guest rooms they had; business was quiet. Mr James said that they should get a website, but for that they would need to be connected to the Internet. Recently, wanting to send off for some diet pills that she had seen advertised in a magazine, Mrs James had needed to take two buses to use the Internet in the nearest library. Her order was being sent from abroad, but in the meantime she had heard on the radio that these diet pills were highly toxic, containing, as they did, dinitrophenol, which was a pesticide, apparently. Even a couple of these tablets could prove lethal within hours. A few clicks of the mouse and she had, it turned out, ordered poison. She was quite sure that they would all be better off without the Internet. Her father had disliked modern technology; he had never allowed the family to have a television set, which in any case would have been too noisy. Mrs James had instead spent much of her girlhood with her own thoughts, her imagination.

Mr James, who had worked in the city, was infuriated by the complete lack of mobile phone signal. "It's like living in the Dark Ages," he said, standing on the landings and in the garden, holding his phone up in the air, but Mrs James was quite satisfied with the landline, and the post box, which was only a short walk away.

Perhaps, she thought, she could make the journey into town again and ask the doctor for a safer diet pill, but in the meantime she was simply depriving herself of all the things she loved, the comfort food that made her fat.

Room five, at the top of the house, was let to a writer who never came down to breakfast. He drank coffee in his room and left the tray outside his door, so that the dirty cup could be washed and the basket of sachets replenished. Mrs James refused to take his breakfast up to his room, not that he asked. Perhaps he had food in there with him. There would be crumbs. Mrs James wanted to get in and clean but she had given each room a DO NOT DISTURB sign and room five's seemed permanently to hang on the outside of his door. He never went out and she would not clean his room while he was in it. For a year or two in her teens, she had worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. She hadn't minded it-the vacuuming, the wiping things down, the straightening things up. Except once, a man had remained in his room while she cleaned it. He had been lying on the bed, on his back, with his shirt and trousers on, his tie and belt on the bedside table. Silently, he had watched her work and she had hated that. When she went to his bedside table to remove a dirty coffee cup, he turned towards her and she thought he was going to touch her, although he didn't. She had finished the room quickly and left without a word having been said.

****

After the first few quiet weeks, the phone rang, and Mrs James tensed and hurried to answer it, not wanting room five to be disturbed. She knew that the writer himself was not expecting calls; he wanted no interruptions while he was finishing his book. There were silent retreats, she had said to him when he first arrived, where no one was allowed to have mobile phones or to speak at all. 'Sounds wonderful,' he had said, and, with a last, polite smile, closed his door.

A mother came with her little girl for a short stay, and Mrs James put them in room one, as far as possible from the writer. Even so, when the girl, who must have had a bad dream, began crying in the middle of the night, wailing like a baby, Mrs James lay in bed, tensed, thinking, "Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet." Tomorrow night, she thought, she would take a sleeping pill, and she could give one to the writer too.

The mother and the little girl did come down to breakfast. Mrs James met them in the dining room, showed them to their seats and said first to the mother and then to the little girl, "Would you like your eggs poached, boiled, scrambled or fried?"

"No, thank you," said the girl.

Mrs James looked at her with surprise. She gave the girl a patient smile and said, "You have to choose one."

"I don't want eggs," said the girl.

Mrs James's face stiffened and she turned to the mother.

The mother said to the girl, "You'll have some toast, though, won't you?"

"White or brown?" asked Mrs James, her new note pad and her silver pen held tightly at chest height, like a tiny sword and shield. She would not look at the girl now, and addressed her question to the mother. Even when the girl, with her little face turned towards Mrs James, said, "White, please," Mrs James did not look at her, but kept her eyes on the pad, on what she was writing, and then nodded at the mother and went back into the kitchen.

She could hear the girl talking to her mother in a high, loud voice. "Did you know," said the girl, "ghosts are exactly the same colour as the air?"

"Ghosts aren't real," said her mother, but the girl carried on as if her mother had not even spoken, talking on and on, and Mrs James waited for the mother to say, "Shush, shush now." Mrs James looked at the air, felt its stillness, its closeness, and then the toast popped up and made her heart race.

After breakfast, while the mother and the little girl were out, Mrs James cleaned their room, and then she stood outside room five, listening. She could not hear anything apart from the occasional creak. The DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging from the door handle. She went away again.

She and Mr James ate lunch together in the kitchen, and Mr James said, "The chap in room 101-"

"Shhh," said Mrs James, glancing up at the ceiling, even though room five was three floors away.

Mr James continued in a lower voice: "How long is he staying?"

"I'm not sure," said Mrs James.

"You'd better ask him."

"Yes."

At suppertime, Mrs James took the writer a boiled egg, meaning to knock on his door, offer him the egg, and ask him if he knew how long he would be with them, and if she might come in and clean his room. But in the end, she left the plate outside his door and did not knock.

She found the plate there in the morning, the debris spilling over its edge, onto the carpet, like a barrier of broken eggshell to keep the slugs away.

****

In the middle of the following night, the phone rang. Mrs James woke suddenly and reached for the handset, murmuring into the mouthpiece, into the darkness, "Hello?" She handed the phone to Mr James. "It's for you," she said.

While Mr James spoke on the phone, Mrs James switched a lamp on and waited. When Mr James put the phone down, he said to Mrs James that his mother had had a fall, and that he would have to go and see her. "She's been made comfortable for now."

Mrs James thought of her father and his long illness. They had tried to make him comfortable. She had watched her mother crushing a sleeping tablet between the back of a spoon and the chopping board. "He needs to sleep," her mother had said. "Tomorrow, I'll try to think of something nice we can do, but in the meantime your father's not well and we have to stay inside and be quiet." Or her mother would say, as she slipped the powder into her father's warm milk, "We might be able to go to the funfair at the weekend, but in the meantime you can play quietly at home." Jacqueline, left to her own devices, had played with her dolls.

Mr James was dressing, buttoning his trousers, which he held up with braces, although he would rather have worn a belt.

"Are you going now?" whispered Mrs James.

"Yes," he said. "She's been asking for me. I might need to stay for a few days. Will you be all right?"

"Oh yes," said Mrs James with a quick smile. "Don't worry about me."

****

Other than Mr James ringing regularly to check that she was all right, there were no phone calls, but a man came in person. Tall and broad, he filled the doorway. When he announced that he needed a room for a week, his voice filled the hallway.

"I suppose I could put you in…" began Mrs James.

"What's that?" said the man, turning his head so as to hear her better. She made an effort to raise her voice and said, "I could put you in a downstairs room."

"That would be marvellous!" the man boomed. He clapped his hands together and the sound was like a gunshot.

She could hardly turn him away, when he needed a room and she had one free, and when business was still rather slow, but she was going to find it hard to bear, his big voice disturbing the household, carrying up and down the stairs and through the walls and floorboards. It made her terribly anxious, as if her father might yet appear on the landing, complaining about the racket, his belt in his hand, the tan leather gripped in his fist, the buckle shiny.

****

They were all in the living room, all of them except the writer. The little girl was showing the loud man the words and actions to a song, which Mrs James recognised from her own childhood. Circling her hands around each other, the girl sang, at a moderate volume, "Wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up, pull-" and here she changed the hand action, "-pull, clap, clap, clap." The loud man was trying to follow, singing and winding and pulling and patting his hands together, both he and the girl giggling when he made a mistake. Then the girl sang it over again, but very quietly, almost whispering it. "Wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up…" The third time, she sang it quietly again but at breakneck speed: " Windthebobbinup, Windthebobbinup…" Mrs James laughed and everyone looked at her. Then the girl began to sing the verse once more, but now she sang it loudly, terribly loudly, yelling it out-"WIND THE BOBBIN UP! WIND THE BOBBIN UP!"- and Mrs James said, "Stop it! Please, stop it, you must stop," and they all went quiet. Mrs James heard movement at the top of the house, and everyone watched her, and then there came the sound of a door closing and the house fell silent again. "You can sing quietly," said Mrs James, but the mother said perhaps they had sung enough, and her guests all said goodnight and went to their beds.

Mrs James remained in the living room for a little while longer, listening to the ticking of the clock, and then she went through to the kitchen to make some supper. She took a tin of soup out of the cupboard, and her pills. While she waited for the soup to heat through, she filled up her water glass, put out her sleeping tablet, and prepared a tray for room five. Very carefully, she carried the tray, the bowl of soup, up to the top of the house and set it down on the carpet outside the writer's room. The tray bumped slightly against the door, and the spoon rattled against the china bowl. Mrs James did not wait to see if the door opened. She went back down to the kitchen, ate her soup and took her sleeping tablet. Then she went around the house closing curtains and locking doors. The writer had taken in his supper tray. Mrs James listened at the door for a moment and then went to bed.

In her room, she said her prayers, put on her sleeping mask and slept until dawn. When she lifted up her sleeping mask, she saw the light seeping in around the blackout blinds. She felt quite refreshed.

She dressed, made herself presentable, and left the bedroom. Pausing once more outside room five, Mrs James, in spite of the DO NOT DISTURB sign, gave a tentative knock. There was no reply. She would leave him for now, she thought. Later, she would unlock his door, check on him, take away his soup bowl, wash it up. She would dispose of the diet pills. She had only used a handful. What a waste, she thought. But it had to be done, and now she must open all the curtains, lay the table for breakfast, put out the cereals… She heard a downstairs toilet flushing, and someone laughing, the child waking up.

MARROWVALE

Kurt Fawver

From the unpublished manuscript of The Candle-Lit World: A Travelogue of Unusual Halloween Traditions by Charlotte Halloran

Entry: Marrowvale, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Deep in the forgotten foothills of central Pennsylvania lies the impoverished, weather-beaten town of Marrowvale. It's a speck on the map-little more than one nameless bar and a dozen enfeebled, paint-stripped houses wheezing toward demolition. Barely what you could even call a 'town'. Surrounded by dark, rolling forests and tattooed with fallow cornfields, Marrowvale impresses passers-through-if it impresses them at all-only as a fleeting image of exploded dreams and withered hopes. It's the sort of place where America has worn itself to a nub, the sort of place where 'living' and 'dying' are the same word, the sort of place that the future has stopped visiting.

Within this decrepit hamlet reside thirty-three men, women, and children-each and every one a crumbling watchtower standing sentinel over the remains of a savaged kingdom, each and every one refusing to accept that the battle for their tiny hometown was lost decades before they were even born. These are people the outside world might call 'rustics', 'yokels', or 'sons and daughters of the soil'. They wear wrinkled, sweat-stained flannel shirts with crusted jeans and speak in a slow, distant manner. Many struggle with the bottle. Even more struggle with obesity. They are people who hunt deer and squirrels and even groundhogs for food and work themselves into early graves. Their industries are the industries of sawdust and grease and heavy lifting. They express little concern for the world beyond their valley because the world certainly expresses no concern for them.

On its surface, Marrowvale doesn't seem the sort of place that I would have visited for this book. As small and relatively remote as it is, it doesn't seem like the sort of place anyone would visit for any reason. But Marrowvale conceals an inexplicable and, if I'm being honest, terrifying Halloween tradition that few outsiders ever witness.

In my last book, Burying Ourselves: Funeral Practices Across the World, I'd mentioned in my epilogue that I was thinking about writing a future volume on the topic of Halloween. As it so happened, a fifteen year-old girl who lived in Marrowvale-one Kristina Taylor Pittlebach-had read that book and decided to email me about her hometown, a tiny nowhereville with what she claimed was "a super weird and freaky thing that we all do at Halloween." She said that I absolutely had to come and see it; she said no one but the people of Marrowvale knew it happened.

Of course my curiosity was piqued. I responded to Kristina and asked if she could provide any more details, stressing that if the tradition really was out of the ordinary, I'd be happy to swing by her town and check it out. To my query, she sent a grainy black and white photo of two dozen people posed in graduated rows, as though they were taking a class picture. Everyone in the photo wore strange cylindrical helmets that entirely engulfed their heads. A chaos of jagged lines lay engraved about the circumference of each helmet. Where one would have expected eyeholes, a pair of spiked, elongated pyramids protruded from every face. I wasn't sure how anyone could see out of the things. Considering that there were no visible nose or mouth apertures, I wasn't sure how anyone could breathe in them, either.

To accompany her photo, Kristina wrote only one cryptic line: "We all have to wear them to the meeting place every year."

As I stared at the picture and imagined an entire town wearing headgear that resembled 1950s sci-fi robots by way of a medieval torture device, a deep sense of unease washed over me. I couldn't quite pinpoint what it was about the helmets or masks or whatever they were that set my nerves on edge; I could only say that they didn't feel right. They didn't give the impression of objects any sane human would ever design, let alone want to wear. It was exactly the kind of weirdness I was in search of, and it convinced me to include Marrowvale in my Halloween itinerary.

****

To reach Marrowvale, I had to fly into Harrisburg and then drive a rental car northwest from the city for almost two hours. Along my route, I encountered a profusion of nameless villages without so much as a single working stoplight or chain convenience store. I passed farmhouses and barns that, while still clearly operational, were flaking and splintering into nothingness. I drove over surprisingly steep hills cowering in the shadow of even more surprisingly steep mountains. And everywhere, everywhere I was met with autumnal foliage not bright and inflamed like the leaves in more northerly climes but the same withered brown as rotting fruit and ancient parchment.

When I finally rolled into Marrowvale the day before Halloween, I was greeted by two sights: one, the town bar-a sagging two-storey gable-front house which was only distinguishable as a bar because of the neon Coors and Budweiser signs that hung in its dusty windows- and two, a shirtless old man riding a lawn mower on the berm of the road.

As I neared him, the old man pulled his mower into the gravel parking lot that fronted the bar to let me pass. But I had no interest in passing. I, too, needed to visit the bar. I swerved in behind him and collected my thoughts. Curious as to the people of the town, I sat in the car and stared at the man. He turned in his seat and stared back. His right eye was entirely missing and he made no attempt to cover over the injury with a patch or a glittering prosthetic. His gaze split my attention in equal halves. On one side, a hollow gaped wide and deep and beckoned its viewer to crawl inside and explore a vacancy that might easily extend far beyond the reaches of the old man's skull. On the other, an electric blue eye shot forth concentrated, penetrating scrutiny that felt as though it could carve through any length of time and space. I wasn't sure which side I should meet.

As I stared in fascination, the old man's cracked, blistered lips tightened and quivered. It seemed he was about to break into either tears or a murderous rage. He shook his head once, slowly, then swivelled forward, threw open the mower's throttle, and motored away.

Clearly, Marrowvale wasn't in the business of tourism. I jumped from the car and hurried into the bar.

In Kristina's first email, she mentioned that the bar's owner-a Mr. Dale Schwartz-kept a collection of what she termed 'Halloween Meeting Treats' in one of the bar's upstairs rooms. I wanted to check out this collection before I visited the Pittlebachs, so that I wouldn't arrive on their doorstep entirely ignorant of their traditions. So the bar was my first stop.

Most likely due to the fact that it was only three o'clock in the afternoon, the rustic watering hole sat empty. The hardwood floor of the place was scuffed and cracked and its boards groaned under my every step. I counted eight tables set up around the main bar area, but I doubted they were ever all filled at the same time. Behind the bar slouched a doughy man with a shaggy walrus moustache and heavy circles draped beneath his eyes. He glanced up from the magazine in his hands-a yellowed Reader's Digest-and asked, slowly, as if uncertain how to approach someone who wasn't a regular, "What can I getcha?"

I asked the man if he was the owner of the bar and, when he hesitantly nodded, I launched into my journalism routine. I explained that I was a writer from Chicago and that I was writing a piece on Marrowvale and its unique Halloween rituals for an upcoming book. I said I needed to talk to people around town, to glean a sense of who they were, what they believed, why they did what they did. When you tell people you're writing about them or their homes, most crack wide open like clams in a steamer, ready to regale you with embellished anecdotes and personal details that you wouldn't otherwise be able to touch. But Mr. Schwartz didn't spill his mind. He simply closed the Reader's Digest and stared at me in much the same way the old man on the lawn mower had.

"So you want to see the museum then?" he asked. I nodded and, trying another tactic, slid a twenty onto the bar.

He stared at the bill, eyes narrowed, then pushed it back toward me.

"Money doesn't have much value here," he said. "But let me show you what does."

He hobbled out from his post and beckoned me to follow. I patted the switchblade in my pocket-a gift from my father on my fourteenth birthday and a precautionary tool I always carry when I'm in unfamiliar territory-and fell in behind Mr. Schwartz. I didn't sense any menace from the barkeep, but I've read too many police blotters to simply accept invitations from strange men without reservation.

Mr. Schwartz led me up a flight of rickety stairs to a darkened hallway and, from there, shuffled into a small adjoining room lit by a single dingy lamp. Dust motes swirled in his wake like minuscule galaxies. I burst through them, into the room, and was instantly mesmerized by the assortment of objects laid out before me. On three long tables covered in white crushed velvet and set up in a 'U' formation rested things for which I had no name. Here, a thing that looked like a leaf, but with a holographic sheen and a thickness closer to cardboard. There, a thing that resembled a butcher knife but pulsed like a still-living heart. Here, a dull blue sphere cut in half, with hundreds of glittering, black needle-like shards protruding from its core. There, a metal square scoured with jagged lines similar to those etched upon the helmets in Kristina's picture. Here, an inverted pyramid with drooping points that, defying gravity and physics, somehow stood upon its bottom vertex. There, a thing that mixed equal parts dollbaby and viral microbe, limbs contorting into spirals and wavy ropes.

The room was filled with craftsmanship and artistry, certainly, but it was craftsmanship and artistry of a completely unknown form. Each and every object in the room looked out of place, felt out of place, and caused my stomach to clench with an anxiety I'd never experienced in my entire life. It was like suddenly waking up in a room you've never been inside in a building you've never visited in a city inhabited only by the machinery of a long-forgotten people.

I stood gaping for several minutes, then finally asked, "What are these?"

Mr. Schwartz's eyes narrowed. "You don't know? They're treats from the meetings."

"Treats, yes," I said. "But what are each of them supposed to represent? What are they used for?"

Mr. Schwartz shrugged. "I try not to find out. It's for the best."

"And why is that?" I asked.

"Because," Mr. Schwartz said, fingers gently tracing the outline of one of the objects, "people who find out tend to end up in a bad way."

"A bad way?" I pressed, though my imagination supplied plenty of horrifying imagery. I pictured my head locked inside one of the bizarre helmets from Kristina's photo.

Mr. Schwartz nodded and tapped his forehead. "Up here."

I murmured an assent and let the subject drop. I didn't want to talk about the objects anymore, and I certainly didn't want to be in the same room as them any longer. I was a journalist, a professional writer. I should have been overcome with curiosity. Yet, ridiculous though it may sound, I was beginning to feel disconnected from my own time and place, from my own thoughts and feelings. Terror rose up in my chest and I pinched the back of my hand to make sure I was still corporeal. I had a fleeting suspicion that somehow I might not be, even though I could feel the softness of my flesh twist in my fingers.

I hurriedly thanked Mr. Schwartz for the opportunity to view the collection and ran to my car. I sped away from Marrowvale and refused to glance in the rear-view mirror. Thirty miles and a separate world later, I parked at the shabby motel where I'd made a reservation. I checked in as quickly as possible and, forsaking my luggage, dashed inside my room. I bolted the door and collapsed on the bed-a bed that, while foreign and hard and tinged with the unmistakable scent of mildew, still reflected something crucially human, something that had been utterly absent in Mr. Schwartz's 'museum'.

Before long, sprawled on the bed, I fell into a deep slumber and dreamed.

In my dreams, I found myself in a stately edifice crammed full of glass display cases that housed two distinct types of artefacts: broken, twisted mirrors of ornate design and tiny human beings pinned to foam boards like so many insects. I wandered among those cases for the rest of the night, half frightened to examine their contents but compelled to see the entire exhibit.

I also felt another presence in the edifice-a distant, ever vigilant thing, like a night watchman at a bank of security cameras. I worried that I might be as broken and twisted as the mirrors, as pinned and skewered as the tiny people; I worried that the vigilant thing might see fit to include me in the displays. And so I tried to run from the edifice. I fled through thousands of rows of display cases, but encountered no end, no exit. I couldn't escape the exhibit. I could examine the mirrors and take notes on the characteristics of the little people forever, but I could never leave. It appeared that I was inextricably trapped in my own curiosity. I threw myself to the floor, pounded the hard surface beneath me, and screamed myself into the morning.

****

The next afternoon found me in a better state of mind. Although it had taken a morning's worth of writing, two hot showers, and a perfectly grilled hamburger at a quaint roadside diner called The Country Kettle to expunge my previous night's dreams, I was prepared to return to Marrowvale to witness its Halloween festivities. I'd arranged to meet Kristina Pittlebach and her family before the celebration began and to accompany them to the mysterious 'meeting' that Kristina refused to discuss in any detail. In the course of our exchanges, Kristina had also promised to let me examine 'the heads'-her term for the bizarre helmets in the old photograph-and to interview any member of her family if I so desired.

As I drove toward Marrowvale, enthusiasm leaped beneath my skin. Something about the chill in the air shouted promise. I felt close to a discovery of monumental proportions, even though I wasn't quite sure what that discovery might be. By the time I reached the Pittlebach homestead, a ranch-style house missing half its siding, my heart was racing.

I parked in the Pittlebachs' driveway, which was gravel stained black by used motor oils, and made my way to their door. Innumerable rusted yard tools and shards of broken lawn statuary littered the path between driveway and door. I had to step carefully so as to not trip and impale myself on an ancient blade or the point of an eroded jockey. When I finally arrived on the Pittlebachs' doorstep, a short, preternaturally pale girl with fiery red hair was hanging out over the threshold. I thought perhaps I'd stumbled across a wayward fey princess.

"Ms. Halloran," the girl said, voice surprisingly grave. "I'm Kristina. I've been waiting." She ushered me inside and slammed the door behind me.

We exchanged pleasantries-the usual "Oh, it's so good to finally meet yous"-and she introduced me to the rest of her family, none of whom seemed pleased at my visit. Her father, a wisp of a man with a long, straggly beard, stared at me without speaking. Her mother, a buxom lady with a pronounced harelip, smiled and nodded. Puffy red rings beneath her eyes told of either seasonal allergies or a story of recent sadness. Kristina's grandmother, a squat woman with uncontrollable tremors, was the only one to actually greet me with words.

"Hello," the old woman said, "I hear you're a writer. You know, writers have to be careful. Some things don't want to be written. And some things simply can't be written. You don't want to end up lost forever, dear."

Kristina pulled me away, clearly embarrassed, and whispered, "Everyone around here is like grandma. Especially this time of year." She hurried me into the basement-a space that looked as though a flea market had exploded within it-and drew my attention to a gun safe that stood against one wall. Kristina fiddled with its dial and, after a few spins, its door squeaked open. She stepped back to let me peer inside. There, sitting on makeshift shelves, were four of the helmets I'd seen in Kristina's photo. For no reason I could have possibly explained, my stomach twisted in knots.

Struggling to maintain my composure, I leaned in and examined the headpieces. None of them had any forging marks or soldered seams or any other signs of metallurgy. Instead, they seemed almost organic, like an insect's carapace, only composed of a material more rigid than chitin. In colour, they were a shade I'd never seen, a hue that shifted from bronze to grey and grey to bronze depending on the angle at which it reflected light. I didn't want to touch one, but I knew I had no choice. I ran a finger along the inscrutable etchings-which, up close, reminded me of seismograph readings or the EKGs of heart attack victims-and felt a bolt of panic crash through my chest.

I flinched away and, desperate to remain objective, asked Kristina what the helmets were supposed to represent.

She laughed. "They're not supposed to represent anything."

"Then why wear them?" I asked, breathing hard, pulse pounding.

She shrugged. "Because we have to."

"Did you make them?"

Again she laughed, as if what I'd asked was the most infantile question ever uttered.

"Of course not."

The room began to spin and sway. I stepped away from the helmets and asked if I could sit down.

Kristina nodded and led me back upstairs. Somehow, I managed to navigate my way to a chair, where I vomited and collapsed. Every nerve in my body twitched and screamed. Some atavistic code in my chromosomes told me to run, to hide. But from what? Some bizarre Halloween masks? I was too professional to allow primordial fears to erase a potential chapter in my book.

Kristina brought me a glass of water and patted my shoulder. "I guess trying one on is probably a bad idea, then," she said. "Grandma said it would be."

I shuddered at the thought of the helmet being placed upon my head, my every perception being encased in a device of such indescribable foreignness. What would the world look like from inside? I wondered. Would it even still be this world, or would it be some other place? Would the sun or the moon or the stars be recognisable inside those helmets or would they be radically contorted variations of themselves? I sat and stared at the Pittlebachs' chipped wooden floors, contemplating both these questions and nothing at all.

After minutes, hours, or perhaps at the very end of time itself, I shook myself from the fugue and asked Kristina, who was still sitting nearby, "When do we go to the meeting place?"

Kristina looked at me askance. "At dusk," she said. "So pretty soon."

I glanced at a window and was shocked to find the sky beginning to bruise. Had I really been inside my own head for that long?

"It's about a mile up one of the hunting paths in the hills," Kristina continued. "But are you sure you want to? I think you might be sick."

I assured Kristina that I'd be fine. I told her I occasionally experienced panic attacks-not a lie, actually-and that it just took me a while to regain my composure after I'd suffered one. I knew very well that what had happened to me in the basement couldn't be chalked up to misfiring neurons or chemical imbalances, though. Like the objects in Dale Schwartz's 'museum', the helmets radiated an uncanny otherness so powerful that it warped the fabric of thought. These were not simple Halloween masks. They were something else entirely.

Before long, Kristina's father descended into the basement with a large, empty velvet sack and returned with it bulging full. As he passed, I could sense the 'heads' in the bag, gazing at me with their pointed eyes.

"Time to go," Kristina's grandmother called out, spurring us into action. Mr. Pittlebach led the way and was already out the door, traipsing up a gentle, forested hill behind the Pittlebachs' house. Kristina and I followed, with her mother and grandmother lagging behind.

While we walked, Kristina asked me about my last book, about the death rituals I'd witnessed. She wanted to know if there really were places where corpses served as bird food, where people danced with the deceased, where the bereaved amputated their own fingers to more physically approximate the loss of a loved one. I said yes, and that I'd even watched a young boy raised from his grave.

Kristina nodded. "I saw something like that once, when I was really little. A kid forgot his mask."

"And what happened to him?" I asked.

Kristina shrugged. I wasn't sure whether she didn't remember, didn't know, or didn't want to tell me. We walked on, in silence.

With Kristina ensconced in quiet contemplation, I sensed an opening.

"So what are the heads?" I asked. "The masks?"

Kristina stopped and turned to look for her mother and grandmother. Softly, in the near darkness, she said, "Depends on what you're willing to believe, I guess."

"What do you believe?"

Softer yet, "That in the right time and place anything is possible, though most things are inconceivable due to the complexity and magnitude of their horror."

I smiled, but I doubted that Kristina could have seen me. She'd quoted from my book. I'd been referring to the varied and innumerable ways we could die. I didn't think she'd meant it in quite the same way.

"Why did you ask me to come here?" I pressed. "I don't get the sense that your fellow townsfolk are too eager to share their traditions."

Kristina shrugged again. Such a teenager.

"I think someone like you should see it. I think someone like you might understand. People think nothing happens here. People think this is one of America's many buttholes. But it's so much stranger than that. I think everyone should know."

Hometown pride. Who would've guessed?

I reached out and squeezed Kristina's arm. She jumped away, as though shocked.

Huffing, her mother and grandmother caught up to us and we continued stumbling onward.

After close to half an hour of hiking under night's silken fabric, I saw a bright light flickering within the dense forest.

"We're meeting the rest of the citizens of Marrowvale out here?" I asked. "Sort of a town festival with a bonfire and hotdogs? Something like that?"

Kristina's voice dropped into a deeper register. "Yeah," she breathed. "Something like that."

We broke through a copse of trees and entered a field strewn with boulders the size and shape of which I'd never experienced. Each boulder stood twenty or thirty feet high and had been chiselled into complex star shapes that resembled goliath anemones and sea urchins. Near the centre of the cluster of boulders raged a fire and around the fire gathered the people of Marrowvale, all of whom had already donned their 'heads'. Everyone stood silent and motionless and I shuddered at the spectacle.

Kristina motioned to an alcove in one of the megaliths. "You should probably wait here," she whispered. "Try to stay out of sight. Some of our neighbours don't know that I invited you to the meeting place and they might not like it."

My throat tightened. "I'm a shadow," I said, probably even less convincing to Kristina than to myself. I crawled into the alcove and gave Kristina a thumbs up. Satisfied, she strode to the circled townsfolk and received a helmet from a person I assumed was her father. When her mother and grandmother passed by, the older lady paused for a moment. She glanced at my hiding spot and said, very casually, "If I were you, I'd sneak off now. They'll know you're here, and they won't allow it. They don't have a head for you and yours isn't going to be good enough." Then away she puttered.

I crouched between the star-megalith's legs and waited, fearful in the way of a child hopelessly lost in a department store. More people arrived. The air gained a serrated chill. I counted the number congregated before me. Thirty-three. The exact population of Marrowvale.

And so it began.

When the last straggler arrived and slid a 'head' over his own, the townspeople aligned themselves into a large triangle, with each side comprised of eleven individuals. Then they did nothing. They stood in the field, their fire roaring without purpose, and did nothing.

But something was happening all the same.

The air in the field suddenly grew indescribably cold and sharp. It tore at my lungs and shredded my nostrils as I breathed in. Even having lived through a handful of tornado touchdowns, I'd never felt air so hostile, so bent on eradicating me from the inside out. I brought a hand to my face and found blood leaking from my nose. At the same time the air was gaining malicious sentience, a wide dark line appeared, floating, behind the triangulated people of Marrowvale, as though a strip of reality itself had been cleanly sheared away with a razor.

I stared at the dark line, blood now flowing freely from my nose, and began to seriously consider Kristina's grandmother's advice. This wasn't a place I should be. This wasn't a place anyone but the people of Marrowvale should be-and perhaps not even them.

The dark line didn't undulate or widen or even suck us all into oblivion. It simply waited, like me, like the townspeople. Frozen. Neither alive nor dead.

I began to climb out of my alcove, blood dripping onto my jacket, my shirt. A wave of nausea pounded my abdomen and white dots spotted my vision. The air grew even colder. The thought 'absolute zero' flitted around my mind.

The old lady had been right. Kristina was young, hopeful. She thought she might be able to let the outside world break into her town. Her grandmother knew better. I had to flee.

I took one last look at the dark line hovering over the good citizens of Marrowvale and what I saw set me running from the field. Somehow, from within the line were emerging long, whip-like arms the same odd colour and hue as the helmets. These arms ended in perfectly human hands that held out to the masked people of Marrowvale an assortment of unnameable and unclassifiable objects. Treats.

As soon as I gazed upon those spindly arms stretching out from the line, the hands so bizarrely human yet clearly not, I turned to the forest and sprinted. I wasn't a journalist or a travel writer then. I was a human fighting to remain human.

Though my thoughts came fuzzy and my vision still popped with bright dots, I managed to follow the path we'd taken to reach the field. I fell over stumps and roots, skinning my hands, bruising my knees, but the farther I crept from the dark line in the forest, the warmer the air became and the more alive I felt.

I arrived in the Pittlebachs' backyard exhausted and near the verge of collapse. My nose had stopped bleeding, so I felt sure that I could drive, that I could make my getaway. I dragged myself to the rental car and blasted away from Marrowvale. I drove for hours; I drove until my eyes drooped and I nearly ran off the road.

When I finally stopped at a large, well-lit chain motel, I asked the desk attendant where I was.

"Almost in Pittsburgh," she said. "Just ten miles out. Where are you coming from?"

I considered telling her. I considered asking her if she knew about Marrowvale. I considered not speaking at all.

"Nowhere you've ever heard of," I said, and paid for a room.

SCRAPING BY

Gary Fry

"Are you sure you're going to be okay?" Phil asked his wife, but knew she'd have to be. He'd used all his annual leave during the house move and couldn't push his luck further at the bank.

"I'll be fine," said Beatrice, with that doped look in her eyes, the one induced by her medication. She was seated at their kitchen table, where they'd just enjoyed breakfast together. "You go and earn us some pennies. I'll keep on top of things here."

He certainly needed to get their finances back in order. Upping their mortgage by £50,000 had been risky, particularly in the current economic climate, and they must now start paying it off. But this was the first time he'd be leaving Beatrice alone in their new home and he couldn't help wondering how she'd fill her time. Following the trauma of miscarriage a year ago, she hadn't felt like returning to her job in advertising and perhaps never would.

Phil stepped across to kiss her and then, before finding another reason to dally, exited the property, summoning his ageing car to life with a single squeeze of its key fob. But before climbing inside, he hesitated and looked around. It was a cool day, and the street-a long cul-de-sac boasting fresh tarmac-was deserted. Before the credit crunch's impact on the housing market, this estate had been developed as a desirable location for people with middle-income salaries, unafraid to fully commit them. But look at it now: all except one of the twenty houses was vacant, featureless windows overlooking empty driveways.

It was dispiriting; life should have been different here. As soon as the properties had hit the market, he and Beatrice, recently married, had put down a non-returnable deposit. Phil's wife had been pregnant, and living in his previous home-a cramped terrace in one of Leeds's less prosperous areas-would have been impractical. As well as their own security, there'd been their imminent child's future to consider. And so, at his wife's eager insistence, Phil had arranged a mortgage from the bank at which he worked, one calculated on his salary alone (even though Beatrice had been in employment at the time). Then, just before the meltdown of so many global financial institutions, they'd moved in.

A month later, his wife had miscarried.

Phil climbed inside the car, struggling not to dwell on tragic events during the last year: that frightening journey to hospital, its challenging aftermath (especially Beatrice's depression), and the stressful house move to which they'd been committed. Matters had improved since his wife had received medication and counselling, but now Phil had also begun to struggle, strain from all the support he'd provided taking its toll. He felt tired a lot of the time and presently suffered a urinary problem, which might even be related to early-onset diabetes. He had a doctor's appointment in a few days to discuss blood-test results.

"Christ," he muttered, steering his car along the empty street to a junction leading into one of the city's finer districts. "Can anything else go wrong?"

And as if in pernicious response, an emergency light came on in his dashboard, alerting him to a fault with his car's engine.

****

His overflow tank needed topping up with coolant, but Lord knew where the leak might be. It could be a minor problem like a split pipe or rusted radiator, but if it was anything to do with his central engine-the head-gasket or cylinder head-he was screwed. With only a single salary coming into the household, he and Beatrice could just get by, but that was without factoring in unpredictable expenses.

Parking behind the branch of the bank at which he'd worked for over a decade, Phil recalled a vow he'd made as a younger man: never live the way many of his clients did. His role as a loan approver had put him off ever borrowing more money than was sensible. But the bank, during its credit-crazed days, had insisted on promoting such business, and he'd had to toe the institutional line, handing many customers more than enough rope to hang themselves, as well as their pitiable dependents.

Phil was scared about living close to financial oblivion, even though he'd once been caught in the same game. As little as five years ago, he'd wanted everything-a fine house, happy wife, and healthy family-and had since striven to achieve all three. But what had this cost him?

He spent most of his first day back in the office readjusting to its usual repetitive tasks. In truth, it was a relief to escape recent stresses-Beatrice's unpredictable behaviour-while tackling, with some kind of Schadenfreude, other people's difficulties. That morning a woman sought a loan to pay off an unfavourable one she'd acquired before her poor credit rating had been erased by a clever broker. After lunch a man asked if it was possible to add the cost of a new car to his mortgage. Phil held back protest in both cases, ticking relevant boxes to make sure his implacable institution achieved the business it craved.

Phil would never use his own property as collateral. He considered a secure home the hub around which everything else revolved. He owed a few thousand on credit cards but had made sure that these were covered by insurance and wouldn't impact on his material assets. Even his ageing car was protected by a payment protection scheme and, in the event of any financial crisis, couldn't be repossessed.

After finishing work and leaving without speaking to colleagues, he ignited his hatchback and listened to its gurgling engine. "You and me both, buddy," he said, adjusting his posture to prevent the seatbelt from pressing against his bladder. He'd had a good day, taking fewer than ten visits to the lavatory, but his kidneys were always unpredictable. He avoided diuretic substances like tea, coffee and soft drinks, even though he often felt grouchy without caffeine.

Easing out of the car park, he began heading home, to Beatrice with all her inevitable problems. He'd held off calling her today because he hadn't wanted to fuss. His wife believed she was recovering, after months spent in a very dark place. Phil wasn't sure this recovery was genuine but had decided, mainly because of his own failing health, to see what might happen if he backed off. It was a risky move but he'd had little choice in the matter, much the way that committing to their mortgage after paying a deposit had been less problematic than pulling out of the deal.

Forty minutes later, after negotiating Leeds's typically fretful rush hour, he was back in his new neighbourhood, again observing all its empty properties. He'd been unsure whether moving here would be good for Beatrice. He thought the quiet would help her to avoid further blows to her confidence, but might a lack of social contact drive her deeper into herself?

It all seemed too difficult to figure out, and as Phil exited the car, his attention was distracted by someone at an upstairs window of one of the houses opposite his own. After looking directly that way, however, he saw this bone-white shape for what it was: just the rising moon's reflection, an incomplete visage grinning at the glass.

After entering he found Beatrice in the kitchen, sitting in the same chair she'd occupied that morning, as if all she'd done since then was stare at the wall, hands set palm-down on the table top. No placemats were set, let alone food waiting upon them, but that was fine. Phil had got used to providing for himself, mainly because his wife had rarely had an appetite lately.

"Hi," he said, stepping towards her with unease in his gut, as if something had reached down and tweaked his innards. "I've had a few more problems with the car, I'm afraid. I think there's a leak somewhere."

He kissed her forehead but then moved away, to close the curtains against the dark. He thought he saw something thin moving on their back lawn, but after squinting he noticed nothing untoward, only a few shadows writhing in the breeze-troubled hedge standing between their garden and that of their non-existent neighbours.

"Maybe it's come out in sympathy with you," Beatrice said, and for a foolish moment Phil thought she'd just referred to the insubstantial figure he'd imagined outside their home. But then he made the more obvious connection.

"Oh yeah," he said, his bladder feeling heavy again. "We both have failing waterworks, man and machine."

She smiled as he turned her way and he was happy to observe that. Maybe she'd had a good day here alone, after all. And he was about to ask how she'd passed her time when she volunteered the information.

"I went into the garden today. Pruned some roses. Removed many other dead plants. It looks nice now. You'll be able to see tomorrow, once it's daylight."

Phil looked forward to that, despite not caring for his wife's use of the word 'dead'. It had sounded toxic somehow, like secretions produced by some spiteful reptile. He was relieved not to have to pursue associated issues, including his imminent doctor's appointment and other medical matters.

Their son had been four months shy of birth when his heart had stopped beating and Beatrice had delivered him shockingly still. That had been all of it. No amount of post-event analysis had altered this fact. They'd had to meet it face-on, playing blink with its unflinching glare. It had been a terrible episode, but there was nothing either of them could do.

"I look forward to seeing what you've done in the morning," said Phil, trying to keep unhappiness out of his voice. He occasionally lost control of his emotions and she'd reciprocate, and before they knew it, they sat together in abject silence, listening to the world dying. That was not the way to make progress; they must remain positive, keeping their minds on opportunities.

That was when Beatrice spoke again.

"I'm certain I saw someone move at one of the upstairs windows of the house opposite ours. You know the one. There's a large tree in the front garden concealing most of it."

For one troubling moment, Phil thought this was the property in which he'd seen the moon's unstable image earlier, like a cadaver's grinning face boasting too many teeth. But maybe that house had been farther up the street.

"Perhaps it was a… reflection, darling," he said, his voice sounding strained and fractious. "There are no leaves on the trees right now, are there? It was probably just… well, just branches moving in the wind. Or something like that."

"It certainly looked thin enough," his wife said, standing from the table for the first time since he'd arrived home. "It was hardly there at all, really."

****

Once he and Beatrice had retired to bed, Phil suffered an unpleasant episode. He tended to get up a few hours after falling asleep, his bladder practising its unhappy habit of reminding him of advancing years, of his swift assault on middle age. This time he'd hurried to the bathroom to unburden his kidneys, the urine smelling like the coolant he'd added to his car: sweet, warm, toxic. After returning to the bedroom, he smiled at the way his wife had earlier connected his physical problem to his mechanical one, but that was when he heard something out in the street.

The neighbourhood wasn't a gated one; if people wished to walk through it, taking shortcuts home from pubs or after a late shift at work, that was fine. But while pushing back one of the curtains, Phil wasn't convinced it was anyone he'd heard moving outside; the sound had seemed too insubstantial. He was reminded of the shadows he'd observed from down in the kitchen earlier, but then looked into the street.

It wasn't motionless: a breeze was sweeping up and down its deserted length. Yes, that had to be true. How else to account for the tree swaying in the garden of the house in which Beatrice thought she'd seen movement while he'd been at the office? There must be a minor problem with his eyes-dried tears on his lids, perhaps-because moments later Phil thought he saw something skeletally pale moving around the tree, using the trunk to conceal what little it had by way of a body. The brief glimpse he'd got of this thing had revealed something made of ragged sticks and with sap-slimed flesh…

But of course he'd merely imagined it, his lack of sleep getting the better of him. Then, letting the curtain fall with dismissive haste, he returned to his sympathetic bed. It was only further compromised perception that had led him to observe no other tree along the street betraying hints of windswept motion.

****

No other troubling episodes occurred during the next few days. Phil continued reorienting himself to his job while Beatrice seemed determined to tackle light household duties, keeping the whole place tidy and tending its rebellious garden.

Near the end of his first working week in months, Phil took off a few hours to visit his doctor, a follow-up appointment after his blood had been taken for testing the previous week. Despite having moved across the city, Phil had kept his previous GP, who knew all about the upheavals he and his wife had suffered. Dr Graham was in his late fifties and possessed a cheerfulness, which always served as a tonic.

Entering the consultancy room, Phil felt apprehensive. Diabetes was hardly a mild disorder; his dad had died from it and the condition could compromise daily life, including diet, physical activities and sleep patterns. If he failed to get his body in good balance, he might experience episodes of fainting or perspiration. His dad had suffered these but had had Phil's mother to help. Who would care for Phil if he required similar support?

"Good to see you again," said Dr Graham, holding out a hand for a shake and then inviting Phil to take a seat near his desk. Ahead of him sat a chunky computer, its screen bearing Phil's medical records. "So how have… things been lately?"

Phil knew the man hadn't referred to his urinary problems. After Phil and his wife had lost their baby, Dr Graham had made sure Beatrice received the best therapeutic care. Phil would always be thankful for that, despite realising that this was simply the guy's job. Clients sometimes offered Phil similar gratitude at the bank, mainly after he'd arranged loans with which they could fulfil all their materialistic aspirations.

He explained that "things were as well as they could be", but was unwilling to go into detail. The fact that something nebulously troubling had crept into his thoughts lately was maybe just a side-effect of returning to work and shouldn't be seriously entertained, especially as it was now time for the doctor to deliver the blood-test results.

"It's good and bad news," he said, reading data off the screen turned away from Phil. "The first thing to say is that you're not suffering from diabetes."

Phil was unaware how much he'd feared the alternative verdict-his mind had been focused exclusively on Beatrice for so long, he hadn't had much time to consider himself-but this was now drawn inexorably to his attention. He exhaled so lengthily his breath stirred a potted plant on the doctor's desk, its many spiny limbs waving.

"Well, that's a relief," he said, thinking how much more effort he could put into caring for his wife, making sure she made a full recovery. "I've been worrying about this a lot, but have… well, have just pushed it to the back of my mind. I mean, that's what you have to do, isn't it?"

When Dr Graham failed to respond, Phil suffered a revival of anxiety, but this time was less reticent about expressing it. Indeed, he'd just recalled that the doctor had mentioned bad news, too.

"Is there a problem, doctor?" Phil hesitated, but only for a moment. "Look, I've been through lots lately. Do I… do I have something worse than diabetes?"

That potted plant swayed again, its small branches reaching out like awkward limbs. But then its owner drew breath to speak again.

"Your tests show that you're suffering what's known as CKD: Chronic Kidney Disease. Now, before you grow too concerned, let me say that it's a very common condition, suffered by about one in ten younger men and by the great majority of those who are older. All this means, Phil, is that you're getting on a bit and need to take care of your body. Your kidneys, basically, show some signs of deterioration, but at this stage that's only minor. It's almost certainly an inherited vulnerability and you can control it by making sensible lifestyle choices: taking exercise, following a healthy diet, and carefully monitoring your medications."

Phil felt bewildered by all this information and found that he could only listen as the doctor reviewed all his prescriptions onscreen. The man suggested that Phil continue using only painkillers to control stress but that the statins he took to combat bad cholesterol (another congenital problem, his late mum responsible for this one) would have to be switched for a milder dosage. Phil nodded, feeling numb all over.

"Don't worry," said Dr Graham, clearly registering his unease. "People are programmed by nature to be resourceful. When one part begins to fail, compensatory mechanisms kick in. In fact, it's truly remarkable how much of ourselves we can live without."

A sudden unpalatable image occurred to Phil, one involving a human body stripped down to only its essential components. While reflecting that a person could have so much removed-gall bladder, appendix, a kidney, a lung, even parts of the brain-and still survive, he rose and thanked Dr Graham, eager to get back to work and deal with something within his sphere of influence: foolish clients seeking credit, maxing themselves out to their bones.

****

Once he'd returned to the office, he called his wife. After his mixed news at the doctor's, he needed to hear Beatrice's voice, experiencing the reassurance it always brought him. It had been this way in the past, particularly when they'd first met in a shopping mall and he'd asked her out to dinner. His parents had just died, one after the other, and he'd felt fragile. His future wife had comforted him simply by being there.

But on this occasion, although he left the phone ringing for several minutes, there was no answer.

That was unusual. Where might Beatrice have gone? She'd been working in the garden, but there was little to do there now. When Phil had returned last night, he'd noticed many beheaded plants and even that the hedge had been trimmed; the lawns were also cut, with no autumnal leaves littering the place. His wife could be obsessive about property-a trait exacerbated by her depression-but in the absence of further tasks, what could be invented?

Invented . He disliked the word in this context. Imagining the unoccupied interiors of houses alongside his own, he gathered all his garments-jacket, gloves, scarf-and then made for the exit, explaining briefly to his manager that there might be "a problem at home." The woman didn't protest, even though she'd yet to discuss with him flexible working options. She was a mother of three healthy young boys and perhaps felt unnecessarily guilty.

****

But there'd been nothing to worry about, after all. When Phil reached home, panting after travelling at speed (such was his haste, he'd forgotten to check his car's coolant level), he found his wife seated as she always seemed to be, up against the kitchen table, smiling broadly.

Months ago he'd assumed this expression was induced by her medication, but he wasn't so sure now. She hadn't boasted any kind of smile lately, even after moving into their new home. While settling into the place, Phil had feared her slipping back into the darkest recesses of depression, and yet this hadn't occurred. She'd been… delicate, he guessed the word was; a major jolt might knock her off course to recovery. But he'd been determined to minimise the chances of that, even if this meant exposing himself to the world's seemingly endless problems.

He'd eventually had no choice but to return to his job and had hoped Beatrice would be strong enough to withstand further upheavals. It appeared as if this period of relative calm had lasted less than a week. Wherever she'd been today, it involved nothing positive; Phil could feel that deep in his bones.

When he finally asked the question, however, she issued only a cheerful response. "I… I just nipped out to the shops. I bought steak for dinner. You like steak, don't you?"

He certainly did, despite what the doctor had warned him about eating fatty foods. But surely one wouldn't do any harm. Besides, that was far from the issue here. Since it had happened, his wife had never been to the shops alone. She'd been too afraid, too wary of suffering another panic attack, which made her body tremble, mimicking the symptoms of an epileptic fit. And so was she finally getting over everything that had happened? Was this the period for which Phil had waited such a long time?

He doubted it. As Beatrice rose from the table and crossed to the kitchen cupboards to remove a pan, he sensed something furtive about her behaviour, as if she'd just told him nothing like the truth. She looked a lot like the way some of his clients did when he asked what their loans were for: a subtle yet perceptible aversion of the eyes, a twist of the lips resembling suppressed unease. She was basically lying, and Phil knew that well. But the most important question was how he should handle this.

He let it pass, however, and when, twenty minutes later, she set a plateful of steak, chips and peas in front of him, his unease retreated. His stomach still raw, all he could do was eat the meal she'd prepared. Then they both moved into the lounge to watch some trivial television, a documentary about the credit crunch in which housing much like all the unoccupied properties near their own was discussed. The country was full of such shunned urban developments, most falling somewhere between the credit capacity of the lower middle-classes and the aesthetic appeal of those more affluent. These had become ghostly neighbourhoods, economic vacuums, each packed full of spent market forces.

"I know banks would lend on them at a stretch," Phil said when it drew close to their usual bedtime. This was an attempt to fill the silence wedged between him and Beatrice. Despite all her problems, they'd always talked together, but now something stood in the way. Although he needed to approach the problem tangentially, he was determined to do so.

But that was when his wife responded.

"Did you get your blood-test results today? How were they?" she asked, without sounding as if she'd just remembered about them. It was as if she'd been waiting specifically for this private moment, but for what reason Phil struggled to imagine.

A sound came from outside but one too quiet to have been made in their garden. Perhaps something-an animal, probably-was at furtive work across the street, digging in the grounds of the property boasting that skeletal tree. But thoughts about bones only switched Phil's mind back to his appointment that afternoon.

He told his wife about his unserious diagnosis and she obviously sympathised, wearing a tender expression he'd thought lost forever. Whatever she'd been up to while he was at work seemed to have changed her, but why, despite the concern she displayed now, didn't Phil believe this was for the better?

When they finally went to bed, he listened to the dark as Beatrice, heavily medicated, drifted into sleep. Later, after he'd visited the toilet a second time that night, she mumbled, "There's just enough of you left for me to befriend." As another sound stirred somewhere across the unseen street's deserted expanse, Phil told himself that his wife was just dreaming, especially after she'd added, "Let's see how much more there is on the little one."

****

Every time he glanced at his office phone the following day, he thought about calling Beatrice at home. On Fridays, his final shift before the weekend break, Phil dealt with his latest applications, approving or declining each one. Here were some frighteningly large requests, five or six digit sums, which would surely take lifetimes to pay off, or maybe longer. During his lunch hour, when Phil enjoyed a salad sandwich and decaffeinated coffee, he imagined borrowing against all his future earnings, maybe even compromising offspring with inherited debt. But who in their right mind would do such a thing? It was so irresponsible.

Maybe he was being melodramatic. But the issue was an emotive one for him, and for his wife. He looked again at his desktop phone, determined not to use it for anything other than business. The truth was that, deep down, he didn't want to know what Beatrice got up to in his absence. It scared him, and he'd been frightened enough lately. But then he remembered his wife's words last night: There's just enough of you left for me to befriend… Let's see how much more there is on the little one… He recalled sounds he'd heard in his neighbourhood, along with half-glimpses of things lurking amid its vegetation, in front gardens and behind trees. His mind churned with irrepressible suspicions, extracting meaning from chaos, and he grew more fearful.

The only way to resolve these concerns was to leave work early, but he didn't want to take liberties with his employer. His manager had been very understanding, and there might come a time-he had to admit this-when flexible working conditions would be more useful than they'd prove now.

He spent the rest of the day examining applicants' statuses, assessing their capacity to repay loans. He struggled not to picture each of them stretched out, flesh barely holding together bones, their internal organs reduced to a minimum. These were unpleasant mental images, and when five p.m. came, he rapidly collected his possessions, wished all his colleagues a good weekend, and then exited to drive off in his car, his head reeling with unrest.

Was his wife visiting tenants of other houses in their street? The question made no sense, but even so Phil asked it several times as he negotiated another traffic-jam packed with impatient drivers. For one foolish moment, he thought he'd spotted only half a person in the vehicle beside him, the driver's face eroded, bone showing through its flesh. But when Phil turned and looked closely, he realised this was merely the moon at work, perched high in the mysterious sky. The man snarled and quickly drove on, presumably headed for a family whose health and security required him to work every day.

Phil had driven only a few miles and had reached a relatively quiet stretch of road when his engine began overheating. What with all his troubling thoughts today, he'd again forgotten to check his coolant level and now the temperature needle was maxed out, while a hissing sound came from under his bonnet.

He pulled into the kerb, sounds from his lips mimicking those of his car. Once he'd switched off the engine, the temperature needle slid back from its dangerous red zone, but his rage refused to relent.

"You useless piece of shit!" he cried, hardly rationally at all, but what else could he do? He was still several miles from home and couldn't abandon his vehicle. It needed fixing up in advance of work the following week, more expense he was unable to meet, even if he could get a garage to deal with it as soon as the following day.

His troubles mounting, Phil reached across to his glove compartment and produce documents from his breakdown company. Still feeling reluctant to let his wife know about the delay, he removed his phone and summoned assistance from elsewhere.

****

By the time a mobile mechanic arrived in a bulky tow truck rumbling like thunder, Phil had grown faint through lack of food and his desperate need to pee. This was his kidney disorder playing up but was presently the least of his concerns.

Once the mechanic-a short, middle-aged man with thinning hair, a gold ring on his third-left finger, and an ear-stud indicative of a freer youth-had used a torch to inspect the chaos under Phil's bonnet, he delivered his verdict.

"Your radiator's rusted to buggery, mate. It has a hole in it as big as a bollock. Coolant's not getting round the system. Head-gasket's sweating like a pig before breakfast."

But Phil wanted to know only one thing. "Can it be fixed?"

"There's a trick I could try," the man replied, and quickly returned to his van, slid open its side door, scrabbled inside for a while, before finally returning, holding a small tin of liquid.

"Radiator weld, mate. It's a temporary fix, if it works at all. But it might help you reach home and then get a garage to sort it out properly. You're looking at a new rad', really. It's an old car. Original parts failing."

"And… how much is a new one likely to cost?"

The mechanic mentioned a three-figure sum, but also gave Phil a calling card for a "buddy of mine, a good guy" who charged half as much for labour as any backstreet garage. Phil thanked the man, and as they waited for the radiator weld to perform its dubious magic-the guy ran the engine for a while, with the heater blowing hard inside-Phil was regaled with much street wisdom.

At the end of this monologue, during which every topic from immigration policies to corporate tax evasion was alluded to with simplistically punitive solutions, the mechanic said, "Anyway, mate, back to business. A few of your pipes are also corroded. Might be worth getting them checked, too. And tell whoever works on it to look at your water pump-I spotted more rust down there. A compression test will check for other leaks and pray that comes back clean. You don't want a head-gasket leak, mate. Or worse, a cylinder head crack. Then you're looking at one K minimum, maybe more. Ah, right, that should do it."

Twenty minutes had elapsed since the engine had been left idling. The guy switched off the ignition and then filled the overflow tank with liquid from a drum he'd removed from his van. He started the car again, revving it with borderline aggression. Phil wondered whether this might cause further damage, especially if his engine block had more serious faults.

"If I do have a head-gasket or cylinder head problem, is it safe to drive?"

"Oh yeah," the mechanic replied, killing the ignition. "If you keep plenty of fluid running through, it's surprising how far a car can get even with serious engine faults. Hell, I've seen some vehicles still running with almost all their components on the fritz. But sometimes that's what we all do, isn't it? Just scrape by."

"Yeah," said Phil, now desperate for the toilet and feeling faint through lack of food and drink. "I guess that's true."

The guy turned and grinned, standing from under the bonnet. "There you go, mate. Temporary patch-up job. No leaks. But make sure you get it done properly. Otherwise your missus will be giving your dinner to the dog next time."

Phil thanked the guy and got back inside his ageing car. The moon shone down with all its mystical force and he sensed great events astir in the world, reshaping his thoughts, making slow sense of so many nebulous fears. Then he restarted his engine and drove on.

He arrived home within another ten minutes, at almost seven o'clock, much later than he'd returned in the past. And he'd failed to let his wife know the reason for his delay.

****

But it proved not to matter: as he'd suspected even before entering the property, Beatrice wasn't there.

Although the front door had been unlocked, Phil was unable to locate his wife inside. He checked the kitchen, but there was nothing on the table, no meal prepared after his long week at work. Moonlight spilled in through the uncurtained window, making shadows writhe in the back garden. He moved away, slapping on lights as he went, bringing illumination to the rest of the house. But the lounge was also empty, its TV deactivated. The same was true of all the upstairs rooms. He hurried back to the ground floor. His bladder felt fit to burst and his head reeled, but that was the least of his worries. Where was Beatrice?

The frightening truth was, however, that he knew precisely where to find her.

None of the houses in their street was occupied; the terrible recession had ensured that. But now Phil knew that these desirable dwellings were tenanted by something. And the worst thing was that his wife, at home alone on a daily basis, had surely discovered what dwelt there.

As Phil exited and headed towards the house with the large tree in its front garden, he recalled half-glimpsed images during the last week, slight entities skittering around, little more than bones sheathed in pale flesh. But this merely hinted at what lurked inside the property whose entrance he now approached, with no more intention of knocking than Beatrice would have had, after being drawn here by a need for communal contact, by a desire to get back into the world.

But what bogus entities had summoned her?

Phil entered and then paced quickly along its hallway, which was just like his and his wife's. He reached the lounge, and it was now, in light from a lamp burning in one corner, that he spotted Beatrice seated in a plump armchair fresh from some exclusive store. The rest of the lounge was similarly furnished with pricey goods, which didn't make any sense. Nobody lived here; all the buildings except Phil's were empty.

But then his gaze was drawn left, to a sofa situated opposite his wife, near the doorway to what must surely be the kitchen. A figure was sat there, face turned away from Phil. It had one arm rested on a pram with large wheels, which stood against the wall beside a crackling fireplace. The figure on the sofa was clearly female, her body-or rather, what little Phil could see from this angle-shapely and refined. She was clearly a respectable person, the kind of neighbour Phil had once hoped to entertain. But then, perhaps sensing his arrival, the woman turned his way.

She had only one eye. What little remained of the skin on her face clung to a cheekbone, providing only modest support to a capsized nose and lips which dipped to one side. Her torso was similarly bereft of its full complement of features, bearing only a single arm that moved away from the pram and fell towards her solitary leg. The lower limb's flesh was visible below her dress, a loose red garment doing what little it could to conceal her physical absences, her pitiably depleted frame.

There's just enough of you left for me to befriend, Phil heard his wife murmur in memory. But before he could turn to address Beatrice, who remained seated in the chair with absolute calmness, Phil spotted someone else enter the room.

If the woman was the unseen child's mother, this must be its father. He entered from the kitchen, carrying a beaker full of milk, but it was a wonder how he'd managed to do so. His body almost wasn't there, being merely a haphazard combination of internal organs held together by tenuous stretches of skin. Beyond ill-fitting clothes his skeleton was visible, and beneath that Phil observed only a single lung, a solitary kidney and coils of intestinal tubing, with few other items-neither an appendix nor a gall bladder-among them. Higher up, half his skull was missing, and so was half his brain.

Phil twisted away from this couple, revulsion almost causing him to collapse. At that moment, he heard a sound from outside. Profoundly troubled, he hurried to the window, away from the travesties behind him, and glanced out into the street.

Two vehicles scraped by, heading for the next house in the row. One was a removal van, its bodywork reduced to only essential parts: chassis, engine, wheels. A mass of furniture was stacked in its rear, with only thin ropes holding it all in place. A figure sat behind the steering wheel, displaying a toothy grin; there was, after all, little skin around his mouth to offer much more, while the same was true of his scrawny frame.

Behind this stripped-down removal van, a smaller car followed, whose features were similarly diminished. A family of three-including a child seated in the rear, clearly a boy-bore as little skin and bone as their vehicle boasted exterior panels. An errant part of the car had dropped out of position and scraped on the road, causing the noise which had drawn Phil's attention. The sound made him realise that this was no hallucination. New people-or rather, just enough of them to warrant the description-were moving into the street.

He turned back to his wife, eager to direct them both away. But she'd now risen from the armchair and crossed to the far side of the room, where the pitiable couple waited. As silently as her half-formed companions remained, she beckoned Phil towards her, one arm leading him to the pram against the wall.

And so this was what had attracted Beatrice here, a surrogate child from which she could derive maternal pleasure. But as Phil strayed across the lounge with bewildered obedience, he remembered more of her words after she'd fallen asleep last night: Let's see how much more there is on the little one.

Phil glanced again at the couple who had just enough about them to sustain life, at the mother's lack of limbs and father's minimal internal organs. He recalled the new arrivals outside, each lacking physically what their vehicles were short of mechanically. He thought again of clients at the bank, mortgaging houses way beyond their lifespans, inflicting debt even on offspring.

Then, as his wife reached for the pram to tilt his way, Phil didn't wish to see what lay-more than bone but less than flesh-beneath the shawl inside.

WHERE THE FOREST ENDS

Sean Logan

This was supposed to be the fun part.

Dahl pulled off the narrow snaking road, the moving truck's tyres crunching gravel as he rolled up the long driveway. He stopped in front of the garage, a weathered, unprotected structure standing in isolation from the house. He stepped out onto his property for the first time as owner. Buck leapt down beside him and went straight into a sniffing frenzy, following his nose in a manic zigzag toward the back yard. Dahl didn't need to put his nose to the ground to be struck by the smell of the place, rain soaked and earthy, the scent of the pines not far off. It seemed to cling to him like mud in the tread of his boots.

Mia got out on her side and they met at the back of the truck. Dahl hauled open the rollup door with a dry metallic clattering.

"That's a lot of stuff," Mia said.

"It is a lot of stuff. But there's nothing too big. Aside from the bed."

"We've got movers tomorrow? Please tell me we do."

"We do. I'm not going to make you carry the washer and dryer."

"That's very kind of you."

She smiled at him, but he didn't return it. That would have felt like he was enjoying himself. It wouldn't have been appropriate. Instead he dropped his eyes and pulled out the long metal ramp from just above the truck's bumper.

"Okay," he said. "Let's do this."

They each grabbed a box and crossed the rutty yard to the back of the house. Because it was built on an incline, they had to climb stairs to reach the back patio of the main floor.

"Okay, if we're going to be doing this all day, my thighs are going to be killing me," Mia said, clomping up the worn wooden steps. "I'll be looking like an Olympic bodybuilder from the waist down."

When they reached the back door, Mia set down her box and tried the key without success. "I guess this only works on the front. I'll go around."

Dahl set his box on top of hers and surveyed the property, leaning against the patio railing. Before, he would have thought, this is all ours, but he didn't think that now, not in any real way. It wouldn't have given him any pleasure. And if it did, he wouldn't have wanted it to. Instead, he looked down, watched Buck traverse the rough slope of the yard and thought, that's where the skateboard ramp would have gone. But looking at it now, the yard probably was too steep. Mia said it would be, but Dahl told her he could make it work. And if not the ramp, then something else, a jungle gym. And if not that, then there was always the woods, stretching out to infinity right at the edge of their own back yard. What kid didn't like to play in the woods? Mia said the woods were dangerous and so did his ex-wife. You could get lost. They had mountain lions. Hunters. He reminded them both that kids had been playing in the woods for thousands of years, since long before any of them were ever around. He said he used to play in the woods as a kid. He said it teaches kids about nature and the real world.

He said a lot of things.

Dahl looked at the woods now, lining the property, a tall spiny wall. It was like a wall with nothing on the other side but more wall.

He heard the patio door open behind him, but he didn't turn around. Mia joined him, arms crossed along the top of the railing, looking out at the yard and the woods beyond it.

"He would have loved it, huh?" she said.

"Yeah," he said. But he was lying. Chase would have hated it, and that made it all worse.

"Come on, let's go inside," she said. "Let's take a look at your new house."

Before he turned away, he felt a crawling tingle along his spine, a vague chill of dislocation. It was something about the pines, the way they swayed with the breeze. It seemed almost deliberate.

As if to underline the sensation, Buck stopped twenty feet from the tree line and barked, the same territorial yawp he gave the pizza delivery person when the doorbell rang.

Dahl called him and Buck didn't need to be told twice. A second later Dahl heard the clicking of his nails as he scrambled up the steps and then the three of them were stepping into the empty shell that would soon contain their lives. It was built in 1912. It still had its original hardwood floors and Dahl thought that centuried oak gave the house its distinctive smell. A month ago, when their real estate agent had brought them here, he breathed the air and thought of a time when things were built up from the earth, dense and permanent, forged with big knuckled hands. The house seemed infused with history. Now it made him think of old age and neglect. He could taste the dust on his tongue.

"You've got to admit," Mia said, her voice reverberating in the bare space, "it's not too shabby."

"I'm just thinking about all the upkeep."

"I'm sure there'll be plenty to keep you busy." There was a note of sympathy in her voice. There will be plenty to distract you, it said. There will be plenty to take your mind off the sad spectacle your life has become.

"I guess we better start filling this place up," he said.

"I'm going to get the heater going. It's like a meat locker in here."

Dahl returned to the truck where boxes and bins and small units of furniture were stacked with alarming disorganization. Many items were labelled- KITCH or HALL BATH or MAST BATH. One cardboard box was not labelled, other than the Windex Foaming Glass Cleaner logo printed on the side. The top wasn't taped; the four flaps were overlapped to hold it closed. Dahl pulled them apart to look at the contents and see which room he would need to carry it to. A little pair of jeans. A little Tony Hawk T-shirt. A little Colin Kaepernick jersey, the one Chase wore every other Sunday when they watched the 49ers.

Dahl mashed the flaps closed and snatched up another box. It felt like a hot shot of sulfuric acid had been pumped into his blood stream.

Mia was heading for the truck as he stomped down the metal ramp. There were folds between her eyebrows, worried by whatever she saw on his face.

"One of those boxes in there," he spat, "it's for you." He stared her down with venom in his eyes as he passed her, as if anything was her fault. He looked at her with hatred, as if that made any goddamn sense at all.

****

Night had settled over them, making the house feel tiny and vulnerable, ostentatiously remote.

Dahl slouched on a pile of cushions from the couch that wouldn't be arriving until tomorrow. Mia called to him from the kitchen, "I'm going to open a bottle of wine. Do you want a glass?"

He didn't. He wanted alcohol, but wine was too sensual, too romantic. This wasn't a candle lit dinner. He didn't know what marketing firm had implanted that bullshit in his head, but there it was. He wanted medicinal, with a punitive burn. "Could I get a glass of bourbon instead?"

"Ice?"

"No ice."

She brought him his glass and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched like she'd given him a static charge. She kept her hand there and he could feel himself recoiling beneath her palm. He didn't want to, willed himself to stop, to relax, just calm down and let his girlfriend touch him like a goddamn human being.

Mia must have sensed it. She took her hand away. "Come on, let's get to bed. You must be exhausted."

"Who me? I'm great. But I'm sure you're exhausted."

"Not at all," she said, "but then I am much, much younger than you."

"Right, and two years from now when you're all growed up like me, maybe you'll have my stamina and fortitude."

"There's no shame in being super old. You did very well today. You did very well for your age."

Mia helped him to his feet and they took their drinks to the bedroom. She was smiling now and Dahl told himself, See, that wasn't so hard. You can be more than a self-absorbed asshole if you really put your mind to it.

Mia got into a nightshirt and slid into bed. "Okay, I admit it. Bringing the mattress today was a genius move."

"I like it when you call me a genius." The playful banter was already starting to sour in his gut. This was too much. It almost sounded flirtatious, which sickened him. "I'm going to bring in Buck."

He stepped out onto the back porch and was gripped by the chill air. The charcoal fog clotted the sky, choking off the glow of the moon. The bedroom light barely touched the outermost skin of the forest and it was nothing but living blackness beyond. He felt a different energy coming off it than he had during the day. It seemed to be crawling with life.

Buck was barking somewhere in the darkness. Dahl called to him and he came running, bounding up the stairs, tail whipping side to side, smile so big he might swallow his own head. This place may seem like Siberia to a six-year-old boy, but it was Disneyland for a two-year-old lab.

Dahl tossed Buck's stinky, fur covered bed in the corner of the living room and Buck knew what to do. He flopped onto it, perfectly content, tail slapping the hardwood floor. Dahl envied him. Buck had no use for guilt. No capacity for regret. God bless that dumb beast.

****

Dahl lay in bed, concentrating on not thinking too hard. If tonight was like most nights, he'd be more clear and alert than he had been all day, one thought tripping over the next, until the first hint of morning light coloured the sky outside the bedroom window. Then he'd shut down, get two, maybe three hours of deep, viscid sleep until he woke feeling queasy and haggard. This would carry on for a few days until he collapsed and got fourteen hours straight. At least if the recent past was any indication. Not that he was complaining. Lord knew there were worse things to complain about.

The silence was shattered with one big murderous bark from Buck, then three more. Mia groaned but didn't seem to wake. Dahl slid out of bed to calm Buck down before she did. He heard skittering on the back deck, Buck's bowl skidding across the wooden planks. It sounded like some small animal, probably a raccoon getting into Buck's food. That's something they'll have to deal with now, wild animals.

Buck was low over his front paws, nose at the crack beneath the back door, growling and huffing at the frantic activity on the deck.

Dahl caught just the last of it, the animals scurrying away, disappearing down the stairs. But what he saw was enough to make him feel momentarily untethered. In that brief glimpse, what he saw were not raccoons. Nor did they look like anything he recognised. It was just a quick glance. In the darkness. Who knew what they would look like, how different, in the daylight? But the animals he thought he saw looked simian. In that second, they appeared to be running on their hind legs and the knuckles of their long arms. They were like little apes, barely more than a foot tall, but fleshier. Big round heads. And hairless, pale and glowing in the moonlight. The moonlight that was still behind the occluding fog.

Buck bounded from side to side, did a spin, desperate to get out.

Dahl wanted to step outside and get a better look, but here he was, not doing it. Instead he stood frozen in place. Beyond the deck, he could just make out the imperfect line where the yard met the edge of the forest and he saw the ghostly forms of the animals disappearing into it. There were more than the two or three he'd seen on his deck. There were enough to convince him that his perception was wrong. It was a doubling of the image or a reflection in the glass.

Buck gave up his attempt at pursuit and looked up at Dahl with his big pink-tongued, black-lipped smile like this was all good fun.

****

The sun came out briefly in the morning, and there were no curtains on the windows, so they were like ants under a magnifying glass in that bed. Dahl barely even got his two hours.

They tried to take their breakfast out onto the back patio, but that, of course, was when the clouds came back. Dahl wondered if it was always a little colder up here. He suspected it was warmer down in the valley right now.

Mia's phone rang. She answered it then held it to her chest. "It's Brasser," she said, meaning Homicide Detective Jerry Brasser, "do you want to talk to him?"

He declined and listened to her series of "uh huhs" and "okays" and "all rights" until she hung up. "The court date got moved back again," she said, "until the tenth of next month."

"For Ellie or the other one?" He wouldn't say her boyfriend's name. That name would never pass Dahl's lips if he could help it.

"Both of them," she said. "And he said you might need to come in to answer some more questions."

"Of course he did."

At the time, three weeks ago, the questions started immediately. But he understood-as much as he understood anything in the mangled wreckage of his brain-that they had to ask him questions, rule out any involvement or negligence on his part, before they could turn the full heat of their attention on the pale wretch he had once called his wife and the faded ink and scar-knuckled tweaker she called her boyfriend.

That first morning, Dahl's reaction was all over the place.

Cops holding him back as he screamed, his red face swollen and vascular, as he tried to get to his car so he could drive to his old house and beat the boyfriend to death with his bare hands.

Locked in his studio, curled up on the floor, convulsing with body heaving sobs, snot running down his face.

Panicked and fidgety, pacing madly around the apartment, light headed, an oceanic roaring in his ears.

Dahl kept expecting someone to swoop in and make it all better. Someone would surely acknowledge his suffering and take pity on him. Don't you see? Don't you see what's happening to me?

Mia was there and he clung to her like a rock as the rushing river tried to drag him downstream. But there were times that day that he thought, Is this it? Is this all you have to offer?

By the time he sat down with Brasser, he was mostly exhausted with sporadic, short-lived bursts of rage, like a boiled over pot set back on the burner.

"So tell me about your ex-wife," Brasser said.

"Fuck my ex-wife."

"What kind of a mother is she?

"Apparently the worst kind."

"Did she ever hit Chase? Was she ever abusive?"

Dahl felt a surge of fury well up inside him. He waited for it to pass before he answered. "Not that I ever saw. And he never said anything."

"What about drugs?"

Something about the way he phrased the question enraged Dahl and he refused to answer until Brasser could be bothered to ask his question properly.

After a few beats, he rephrased. "Did she do drugs?"

"No," Dahl said. His knee-jerk reaction was to lie, but he caught himself. "Yes."

"What drugs did she do?"

"Pot and speed, mostly."

"And what about you?"

Dahl thought, That's not a fucking question, asshole. Ask it right.

"Did you do drugs when you were with her?"

"The pot, not the powder. Fuck that shit. That's half the reason we broke up."

"And tell me about Rob," Brasser said. "Is he your ex-wife's boyfriend?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me about him."

"He's an asshole. Just look at him."

"Have you ever known him to be violent?"

"Not that I've seen, but just look at the guy. You tell me a guy like that's not beating the shit out of people every other night down at the bar?"

"But you never saw him physically assault anyone?"

"No."

"And what about drugs? Does he do drugs?"

"I've never seen him with my own fucking eyeballs, but again, just look at the guy. Look at his face. That face has speed freak written all over it. Just look around their house, you'll find something."

"But you never saw him do drugs?"

"No, I'm not hanging out with the guy doing rails."

"But you did see your wife do drugs?"

"Yeah, I told you that."

Brasser interrupted the cadence of his questions, taking a moment to give Dahl an appraising look. "Let me ask you something, how often did you have custody of Chase?"

"Every other weekend."

He stared a moment longer. "How is it you didn't end up with full custody? Or at least joint custody? How is it you only have him every other weekend?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, you know your wife's doing drugs-hard drugs, methamphetamines-and she gets full custody? Did you bring it up in court?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because her going to jail wouldn't do anyone any good."

"Did you even try to get custody? Was it even brought up?"

"Yes! I don't know! Fuck! I don't fucking remember. It was just kind of understood that she'd take Chase. She's the mother."

"A mother that does drugs. Living with a man you suspect does drugs. That you suspect is violent."

Dahl didn't speak. His head felt like it was filled with glass shards.

"You're going to be moving in a couple weeks, is that right?"

"Yes."

"Where to?"

"On Glen Ellen Road, on the way to Rosewood."

"That's got to be a good hour out of town, right?"

"I guess."

"So you couldn't have taken Chase even if you'd wanted to?"

Dahl stared at his hands, found some dead skin he could pick at.

"I mean, you're not going to be driving him to school every day two hours there and back."

"They have buses."

"I don't think they go that far. And even just his friends, if he wanted to play with other kids on the weekends you have him, that wouldn't have been easy for him."

"Look, what the fuck does this have to do with anything? It's pretty goddamn clear what happened, so why are you asking me questions about my goddamn house like that has anything to do with anything?"

If Brasser realised how inappropriate his questions were, if he had any sudden shame for his heartlessness, it didn't show on his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just need to establish how involved you were in your son's life."

The implication was pretty clear. You weren't involved. You left him with a woman you shouldn't have trusted, and look what happened.

****

Mia breezed in carrying groceries. Dahl hoped she got something microwavable because he was bone tired. He needed to set up his studio and record a sound-alike of a Katy Perry song for a Breast Cancer Awareness 5K ad, but that would have to wait until tomorrow. He loaded his equipment in the studio space downstairs, and it occurred to him that it would have made a great playroom. That thought hadn't even entered his head earlier.

"I met one of our neighbours at the grocery store," Mia said.

"Great. Were they normal?"

"Yeah, we're going to dinner at their house tomorrow."

"Jesus Christ."

"You've got to get to know your neighbours. You don't want to live someplace without knowing who's around you."

"What if they recognise us from the paper?"

"What if they do?"

"I don't want these people being all sympathetic, walking on egg shells around me. Let's just do it another time. Like the distant future."

"We're going. Don't bother arguing."

He didn't.

****

Even after two days of moving and several nights without sleep, he was apparently not due for his collapse yet. It wasn't as if he wasn't tired. He was weary down to his core. He ached to fall asleep, but the grinding in his gut wouldn't allow it. If his mind started to wander, his thoughts would go to Chase and he'd feel like he'd been stabbed just below the sternum.

At some point in the night Dahl became vaguely aware of the moon looming outside the bedroom window. And then it moved.

Dahl sat up and faced the window just as something outside it disappeared.

There were noises coming again from the back deck. Buck was whining in the living room.

Dahl slipped quietly out of bed. When he entered the living room he saw Buck at the patio door, and something was on the other side. It was what he saw the night before, but it was otherwise unlike anything he'd ever seen, minute but uncannily human, muscular and long armed. It was reaching out toward the glass door, toward Buck, with a hand or a paw that seemed to be tipped with thick, black claws like the talons of an eagle. But Buck wasn't afraid. He sniffed at the spot where the claw touched glass and cried like he wanted to go out and play with his new friends. There was something about the way the moonlight hit the animal's bloodless milky skin that made it seem as if a faint luminescence was coming from within it. And as the glow became more prevalent, the creatures behind it took on the same radiance.

Dahl must have made a noise. The animal's round head snapped in his direction, obsidian eyes locked on him for a moment before it darted away.

A queasiness crawled over Dahl, a nightmarish sickness he tried to ignore. He opened the door. He wasn't frightened of the animals, just repulsed. He wanted to go outside and see them, make them more real in his mind to wash away the vague afterimage he held there.

As Dahl stepped out onto the patio, Buck burst past him, dashing across the deck and down the stairs. Dahl wasn't worried about him attacking the animals and making a bloody mess of the yard - that instinct seemed to have been bred out of him. He used to chase the ex-wife's cat Toby, but Buck just thought they were playing and having a terrific time until one quick swipe to the nose would send him cowering away wondering what he'd done to deserve it.

From the edge of the patio, Dahl watched Buck chase the animals across the yard. They all disappeared into the tree line. Dahl hoped Buck had the good sense not to get lost because there was no way he was going to follow him in there and get himself lost in the woods in the middle of the night.

There would be no shutting the door and going to bed until Buck was back, so Dahl went back inside to his coats, still piled on the floor in the guest bedroom, and retrieved an emergency cigarette from a cigarette case in his old motorcycle jacket. He brought it out to the deck and lit it. He leaned back in the rusted patio chair and smoked. The cigarette was old and smoked hot, but damn it tasted good. He looked out at the forest and thought he saw small shapes glowing faintly from inside. When the Internet service was set up he could investigate what those little abominations were, but in the meantime, he found that he was more comfortable not thinking about them.

When the firefly glow of his cigarette had burned nearly down to the filter and he could feel his nerves beginning to coil tighter inside him, Dahl heard an explosive pained yelp from behind the trees. He jumped to his feet and before he had time to even think about how he could possibly respond, Buck came charging out of the woods. He ran straight past Dahl and into the house in a crouch, tail curled beneath him.

Dahl flicked his cigarette butt over the balcony and rushed in after him. He was curled up on his bed in a tight little ball, shaking. Dahl knelt down and rubbed his ears and the back of his neck, trying to stop his trembling. He looked him over but didn't see any damage. They'd been leaving the back door open when they left so Buck could get out, but that would need to stop. At least until he got a rifle or some bear traps or an electrified fence. He didn't know what the hell those animals were, but fuck them.

****

"Hey, do you know if they have monkeys around here?" Dahl called into the bedroom. Mia was in the waning stages of her evening out preparedness rituals. Dahl had been ready for forty-five minutes and was on his second pre-dinner bourbon.

"Monkeys?" she said. "No! I don't think so. They don't, right?"

"Have you ever heard of a monkey that glows?"

Mia popped her head out, mid-brush. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I don't know," he said. "Nothing."

She finished eventually and came out looking fresh and casually well assembled. As far as Dahl was concerned, she could have taken all night. She took a deep breath and put on a smile, as if lifting something with some heft to it. Dahl stood, feeling as if the couch had its own gravitational pull.

The house was maybe five or six doors down, but they drove. The space between properties was enough to make it a hike, and the shoulder of the road was a soft, precarious slope. Dahl didn't talk as they drove, trying to tamp down his nerves and preserve his strength until they got there.

When they pulled into the paved, circular drive in front of their neighbour's house-a notably more refined structure than his own, 'historic' to his merely old-he willed his energy up a level.

When they rang the bell, the door was opened by a short, round woman, a bright smile amid her rolls of clay-like flesh and a great swoop of yellow hair, as if she'd opened the door to a blast of air.

"Well, look who it is! Come in, come in, I'm so glad you made it. It's always so good to meet the neighbours, all isolated up here, it makes me a little nervous sometimes. Anything happens, it would take the police darn near forever to come. Or the firemen. Lord! And you must be Dahl."

The woman brought him in for an enveloping hug that was like embracing a beanbag chair.

"And this is Carol," Mia said.

Carol gasped, a grand, theatrical sucking of air. "Oh, sweet Heaven, don't you look gorgeous! This sweater! And that necklace, isn't that just the sweetest thing I've ever seen?" She looked overcome with emotion, as if her favourite granddaughter was graduating from college. She turned to Dahl. "You must be quite a guy to get yourself a beauty like this." She rubbed his arms. "And I'm sure you are. Come on, let's get you a drink, meet the others. Don't want to keep you all to myself."

The house had the impractical, ornate tastelessness of wealthy retirees, plush white carpet, sparkling mirrors and glistening crystal, innumerable golden accents. In the living room, a couple was sitting on a white leather sofa and a man was standing beside them. The man, who Carol introduced as her husband George, was mostly bald, had a pleasant pink-jowled face and wore a red Hawaiian shirt tucked into his white slacks. The man on the couch had a thick moustache and slightly tinted rimless glasses. He rolled himself forward to shake Dahl's hand and before he'd said a word, Dahl pegged him as a blowhard. He seemed puffed up with the blustery political rants he needed to get out. He introduced himself as Al and his wife as June, who was slender and quietly bohemian, in contrast to everyone else in the room, with long, unsculpted hair.

"So what are we drinking?" Carol said.

The women were drinking white wine, but Mia asked for red. The guys were drinking Heineken, but Dahl wasn't playing around. "Do you have any bourbon?" he asked.

"There's a good man," Al said.

"Come on," George said, making a big sweeping gesture with his arm. "I don't have any bourbon, but I got a bottle of eighteen year Macallan from a client awhile back and I've been looking for an excuse to open it."

"What, is that Scotch?" Al said.

"My family's from Scotland," George said, "so we don't call it Scotch, we call it whisky. But yes, it's a damn fine single malt. Too good for the likes of you."

George took them to a small bar in the other corner of the room. He removed a bottle and three rocks glasses from behind a glass cabinet. He poured a splash into each and gave one to Dahl. They asked him about his job, were interested when he said he was a musician. When he told them he mostly recorded background music for commercials, they showed more interest, rather than less, which was opposite the response he normally got.

They quickly transitioned to talking about their own former careers. George had been in construction and still owned the company, though he no longer managed day-to-day operations. Al had been in sales, a Vice President, had more than a hundred people under him.

Dahl listened patiently and drank. He finished his drink and George poured him another.

Mia sat with June, having taken the seat that Al had vacated. Carol was flitting between them and the kitchen, where Dahl could hear her speaking in hushed frantic tones. She stopped briefly with the men to apologise. "I hope you all aren't dying of starvation over here. Poor Ingrid's having some issues. That prime rib is taking longer than anyone anticipated."

Dahl assured her it was all right, but maybe it wasn't. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, but he did have plenty to drink, and had no desire to stop.

He finished his glass. George didn't volunteer to pour him another, so he helped himself. Al seemed inspired by this bold act and likewise filled his glass.

George talked about his son, who managed the construction business. "The problem is he doesn't have the respect of some of the long-timers on the crew. He gets out of business school and steps right into running things. That was always the deal, but they just see a guy, the owner's kid, with no practical experience. They don't know he's smarter than all of them combined."

George closed his eyes for a moment, and Dahl thought he was lingering on some regret about his son. Then he realised what was really happening and he wanted to turn and walk out of there. Instead he took a long swallow of his drink.

"We're really sorry about your son," George said. "We've been reading about it in the paper. How are you holding up?"

"I'm all right," he said curtly to let them know this was not up for discussion.

Al didn't get the message. "It's a goddamn horrible thing," he said, a faint slur around the edge of his words. "And I'll tell you what-it's a good thing you have more self-control than I do. Because if I was you I would have gone straight to that guy's house, your wife's boyfriend, and choked that son of a bitch." Al was pointing with one finger, the others wrapped around his drink. "If I was you I'd be in jail right. I'd be locked up." Al looked like he thought he might have misspoken. He attempted to clarify, "I'd be locked up because of killing the boyfriend, I mean. Not your son. By all accounts you had nothing to do with it, you weren't even around."

"No," George said, "you're just an innocent victim in all of this. I couldn't imagine-couldn't even imagine-losing my son."

"It's the worst thing there is," Al said, "outliving your kids. I've lost both my parents and that was hard enough. And me and June lost our dog a few weeks back, the sweetest lab you've ever seen. Had her for fifteen years. We were just devastated."

The pressure that had been building in Dahl seemed to burst like a ruptured organ, filling him with poison. "What did you just say to me?"

"What?" Al said with a small, defensive jerk of his head.

"What the fuck did you just say to me?"

Al was speechless. Dahl pushed him, slamming his palms against his chest and knocking him back a step.

Carol shrieked behind them.

It felt pathetic, shoving this old man, but not enough to back down. "Did you just compare my son to a dog?"

"No," Al said, his blustery facade crumbling, replaced by a scared, confused old fool.

"No one's saying that," George said. He put a hand on Dahl's shoulder. Dahl knocked it off.

"Mia!" Dahl said. "It's time to go." He pointed a finger at Al. "Don't you ever mention my son again." He shoved past him to the door.

"I'm so sorry," Mia was saying behind him. "He's just really upset right now."

Dahl got in the car, shoved his key in the ignition. Mia got in the passenger side and he sped out onto the dark road.

"What the hell happened in there?" Mia said.

"Nothing."

"You pushed Al! You were trying to beat up our neighbour?"

"Hey! We shouldn't have been there in the first place. We had no business going to a party. We had no business. What, were we supposed to have fun? Is that what we were supposed to be doing? Just having fun like nothing's wrong?"

"Okay, I'm sorry. I guess you're not ready."

"No! I'm not! I'll never be ready. I'll never be ready to have fun again. Ever. How can I? I'm not going to forget. Fifty years from now I'm not going to forget."

"Don't say that. This is all still new. At some point you'll be able to move on."

"But I don't want to move on. What kind of animal would I be if I just moved on?"

Dahl pulled into the drive, the tyres grinding to a stop in the gravel.

Mia didn't get out. She sat quietly, staring at her lap. "I'm going to stay at the apartment tonight and let you calm down."

"Fine," Dahl said, "and do yourself a favour, all right? Don't come back. Get out now. I'm giving you a free pass. Because this-me-it's not getting better."

He got out and slammed the door. As he marched up the stone path to the house, he heard the passenger door open and part of him was relieved. Part of him wanted her to stay and to throw her arms around him and refuse to give up.

But then the driver's side door opened, and closed, and she was pulling away. She wasn't staying. And that was fine. It was the only thing that made any sense. He meant what he'd said.

Dahl stepped inside the quiet house-still bare-walled and transitional-and he went straight for the bourbon. Probably the last thing he needed, but would that stop him? Hell no it wouldn't.

But where was Buck? Why wasn't that overexcited mutt jumping all over him?

Dahl hadn't told Mia what happened last night. Hadn't told her they couldn't leave the back door open for him anymore.

Dahl stared at the partially opened patio door and dread washed over him like polluted waters. He fought his instincts and moved toward it. He opened the door and stepped out onto the patio. He heard noises, movement, and for a moment there was a small, warm flicker of hope. But then he looked over the patio railing and saw that the activity he heard was a pack of those hideous pale animals, crowded together in a tight knot in his yard.

"Hey!" Dahl yelled. He picked up a clay pot and hurled it over the edge. It shattered near them. They scattered and ran to the woods.

In their absence, Dahl saw what had been at the centre of the pack. It was Buck, sprawled lifeless and torn.

Dahl ran down the steps and across the yard to make sure there couldn't possibly be some last glimmer of life inside him, just hanging on, just enough that Dahl could bring him to the vet and get him fixed up. But no. Of course not. Just one more feeble hope to be crushed underfoot and ground into the dirt.

In the few short seconds he could stand to look, Dahl felt something dark and hateful rising inside him. A rusty old shovel was leaning against the support beam for the deck. That would do. He snatched it up and marched to the edge of the forest. He could see the dim illumination of the animals, scrambling up the scaly trunks of the pines. One of them was climbing a thin young tree that wobbled with its weight.

Dahl swung the shovel, hacking at the narrow trunk. The treetop swung and the animal slipped but didn't fall. Dahl chopped at the tree again and the animal dropped, falling through branches and hitting the ground with a pained chirp.

Before it could run away, Dahl swung the shovel like he was clearing a path in the brush, knocking the animal out of the tree cover, tripping and rolling into his yard.

Dahl stood over the animal. It looked up at him with panicked black eyes and held a clawed, luminous arm in front of itself.

Some part of Dahl felt a tugging compassion and a sick revulsion at what he was doing, but that part was smothered beneath a white-hot electric rage.

The animals in the forest were chirping and crying, shaking the branches of the trees.

Dahl brought the shovel down, a meaty smack and the sound of tiny bones snapping. The animal was still moving, but slightly. That gnawing sense of revulsion was growing, eclipsing the anger, but it was too late to stop. As if to silence his doubt, he brought the shovel down again with a wet, fleshy crunch. And now the animal was not moving. Slowly, the soft white radiance faded from inside it.

The shrieking of the animals grew louder. There was a scraping sound, something being dragged through the dirt and the blanket of pine needles. It was a small pack of the creatures, and they were pulling something across the forest floor.

They emerged from the trees, into the yard and stopped just feet away from Dahl. They were dragging a dead animal, a young mountain lion, ragged claw marks across its throat and back. They were looking up at him and if there was emotion or meaning in those black eyes, he was unequipped to read it.

Why were they showing this to him? So they'd killed another animal. Were they saying they were going to kill him too? It didn't seem so. Or was this what had really killed Buck? Had this mountain lion killed Buck and they went after it?

Dahl stared at the little creatures and they stared up at him as if awaiting an answer.

He dropped to his knees. He picked up the lightless gray body, still warm but limp in his hands. He held it close and cradled it like an infant. "Oh God," he said, tears beginning to pour out of him like a dam had burst. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

The animals crowded in around him. Dahl didn't know if they were going to tear into him, and he didn't care if they did. But that didn't happen. They moved in close to see the body. Dahl laid it on the ground before them and they gathered around it. They pressed in next to him. Two of them climbed up onto his back to look over his shoulders. One crawled up into his lap. He touched them and they seemed to welcome his touch.

The animals that encircled the body glowed brighter and this radiance spread to those farther away, and farther still, to those still in the trees, and their number was greater than Dahl could have imagined. They illuminated the forest like Chinese lanterns. Their shrieking and chirping had hushed. It rose again in a long, low wail.

They all mourned together, and Dahl mourned with them, helpless to change what had happened, and crying out at the injustice. Crying out at the goddamn injustice of it all.

WRONG

Stephen Volk

To my parents when I was growing up, laughable when you look back from today's perspective, job security was the Holy Grail. It didn't really matter if you had a pleasurable or rewarding life. Work wasn't meant to be pleasurable, it was just a means to an end. The end being going out on the occasional 'run' of a Sunday to Llantwit Major with a flask of piping-hot coffee, or having a week at a caravan site in Porthcawl every summer. That was their lot and they had no goals or aspirations beyond it. I did, I think, even then. Anyway the fact was I wasn't academically brilliant and there was only one subject I was even remotely good at or interested in-to their eternal dismay, no doubt, not that they ever showed it. So, not much good for anything else, with so-so A-Levels but a sliver of talent for drawing and painting, I gained a place on the Foundation Course at Newport College of Art in the early '70s, eager to learn but full of trepidation about an uncertain future.

I can't remember how we found my digs. Perhaps the Art College provided a list of people who put up students. My father and possibly my mother-almost certainly my mother-were with me when I first met my landlady and her husband. My mum would've wanted to give the place a surreptitious once-over, and was fairly swiftly reassured that the house was as spotless as her own. I could tell she was gratified and relieved by the warm welcome we all received too: tea in a chubby pot and a plate of chocolate digestives and butter crumbles arranged in an arc like a magician's card trick. She settled back and relaxed while my dad talked about rugby. Luckily he had the ear of a fellow sports obsessive.

Mr Bisp (Percy, as I grew to know him: an old-fashioned name even then) was a short, stoutish man similar in build to my grandfather and, like my grandfather, faintly comical in appearance. Snow-white hair in a Tintin quiff when most men his age would be bald as a badger, black-rimmed glasses, bulbous W. C. Fields nose, receding chin, trousers pulled up over a pot belly to an equator just under his armpits, kept resolutely in place with a pair of fanatically taut braces. His shirt, I remember vividly, was Persil white, rolled up beyond the elbows of spindly, hairless forearms. Shoes polished within an inch of their lives, spine as rod-straight as that of a twenty-year-old, from the off he gave the impression of being a dry old stick, but as I came to know him better I could see there was always a twinkle of a smile flickering behind the grumpy exterior.

A funny little chap, he was certainly no Robert Redford, but Mrs Bisp (Enid), poor woman, was no oil painting either. On first sight I couldn't help but compare her to a Goya hag-toothless, laden with deeply-etched wrinkles, with a protruding jaw and rubbery lips-but she was a sweet woman whose caring nature made me immediately feel ashamed for having such a superficial reaction, and I'm sure I blushed. I was a shy teenager, after all, and this was the first place I was going to live in that wasn't my home.

I was shown my bedroom. I installed a few armfuls of books, and my own twin-ring electric hob (which my parents insisted on getting me, even though I said I'd be eating at the college canteen most of the time). Mr and Mrs Bisp said I was free to cook my own food in their kitchen, use the toaster, use anything I liked, in fact, as long as I cleaned up afterwards.

I was thinking of my territory. They were thinking of theirs. I wasn't going to get in their way, and that was how they wanted it. But it was nice. They were nice people. And my mum was happy. (On one occasion my brother, who was ten, picked up that Mrs Bisp said "muke" instead of "milk" and it became a running gag whenever any of us referred to her. Evidently she had a London accent, whereas Percy was from the Valleys, born and bred.)

As I say, Percy was quiet, but brusque. When I got home from college about seven o'clock on my first day, he said, "I expect you've got studying to do"-which immediately set out the rules in no uncertain terms. They didn't want me sitting with them all night, which was fair enough. They'd said I could use the middle room to work in, so that's where I'd set up my drawing board, irrespective of whether I had 'studying' or not.

Sometimes I'd listen to my transistor radio, set to Radio 3, or read whatever science fiction novel I had on the go (Moorcock, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard). As routine set in over the first few weeks, I'd get accustomed to Mrs Bisp knocking on the door and asking, "Tea?" Sometimes when I had nothing to do, and with the evening stretching bleakly until bedtime, I'd yearn to go and join them but thought I would intrude. It wasn't my space, and after all it was their house. Instead, as I worked, I'd hear the dim mumble through the wall of the TV set in the next room. Having said that, one or other of them would always tell me when News at Ten was about to begin, and I'd always watch it with them, then go to bed.

Of course it wasn't exactly imprisonment. I could have gone out with friends from college to the pub, but I didn't. I wasn't a pub kind of person. I'm still not. Besides, my closest two mates travelled home in the evening (to Usk and Cwmbran respectively) so I was a bit abandoned. There was a nice Irish girl with long hair and a springy walk who I liked very much-she blushed even more readily than I did-but if I'd have asked her to go for a drink she'd have been mortified. Not that I could ever have plucked up the courage to do so.

Percy liked his Western Mail but didn't engage in conversation much. As he sipped his tea-always tea, never coffee-he might remark on a topical story on TV, giving a wry smile or shake of the head, pointing at the screen with his thumb. His views were what you'd expect. I didn't volunteer mine. Maybe he tested me politically, but if he did I didn't rise to it. There again, maybe he wasn't really interested in me at all.

But he was a good sort. Sometimes I saw him going to the local shops with his string shopping bag and shopping list. I found out later he used to deliver to old dears in the area, elderly folks who couldn't get out. Didn't take any money for it. "God, no." Told me it was just something he liked to do. Said it "took him out".

One day-I think it was in the second term, because by then we were left to our own devices to get our portfolios ready and bulk out our all-important sketch books-a girl from Third Year Fine Art came to pose for life drawing. Unexpectedly, I was the only one in the room with her. She arrived on a bicycle decorated with rainbow tape, and stripped off in front of me without a glimmer of hesitation. Taking a break for a roll-up, still stark naked, she came to look at my drawing on the easel and after due consideration said it was good. She was tiny and her haircut a punkish crop. But her pubic hair was red-to be honest, I hadn't seen pubic hair before. It was richly colourful and unapologetic, totally unlike the sparse whiskers of the sixty-year-old overweight model we would become all too familiar with.

That night the sitting room door was open as I passed and Percy beckoned me to come in and sit down. He was watching Coronation Street and I wasn't sure from his expression if he was perplexed by it or enjoying it. "She likes this," he said. Enid's chair was unoccupied so I naturally asked where she was. "Gone to her sister's for a few days."

"Finally had enough of you, has she?" I joked.

"Aye."

He seemed quiet. "Didn't have a row, did you?"

"Row? Good God, we don't have rows." Percy dismissed the idea, getting up to go and make us both a cup of tea. "Two sugars?"

And so it was. I spent my spare time during the day filling my sketchbook, which was an important part of the course. We were told by our tutors we had to do at least two drawings a day, on top of our lessons and other projects such as design work, illustration, technical drawing, and so on. Consequently I took every opportunity when out and about or even sitting having a drink or chat, to draw anything that happened to be in front of me. Beer glass. Ashtray. Bus stop. Person with slip-on shoes. It didn't have to be interesting. (Mostly it wasn't interesting but you drew it anyway.) It was about training your eyes, improving your observational skills, and I must say if you compared the first scribble in a sketchbook to the last there was a marked improvement. It was remarkable, really. I always say, when people ask, that the whole discipline was like putting your eyes through a pencil sharpener.

I stayed at Mr and Mrs Bisp's from Monday night to Thursday, returning home on the train Friday night for the weekend. Not far, and only one change at Cardiff Central.

My father in those days was a bit of a control freak. He had to do everything his way, to the extent that the most banal household repairs were no-go zones for us boys-even if later in life we looked back at his DIY jobs and realised he was pretty rubbish at everything. But I think I've got a bit of that in my DNA. It would be abnormal if I didn't, but I was drastically unlike him, fundamentally. My brother and him, on the other hand, were too much alike, which is why their arguments gave my mum a lot of grief. The two of them would have a shouting match and afterwards be all smiles, talking about the football results or how Cardiff City did, while my mum was left in tears. No wonder she had to see that specialist that my Nan saw for her 'nerves'. Dad exploded on a regular basis. I think he was a man who couldn't deal in any way with the stress he was under, but lived with the pathetic and bombastic delusion he was strong-willed and in charge, which he obviously wasn't. Even as kids we could see that.

I still wonder if he envied the fact that I went on to have a job I actually loved doing, rather than one that was a necessary penance, but unsurprisingly we never had anything remotely like that conversation. Usually he'd drive me back to Newport on Sunday evening and drop me off. It was only about half an hour. Again it was probably a bit controlling rather than letting me get a train.

When I returned the following Sunday night Mrs Bisp, Enid, still wasn't in evidence, peculiarly. It was only eight o'clock but Percy said she was tired. She'd gone to bed early. I thought no more of it.

Later, sitting up in bed reading, I heard him coming up the stairs, the wood creaking under his footfalls, and passing my door to cross the landing to the main bedroom. Soon afterwards I heard his voice through the wall between us.

"How you feeling, love? Can I get you anything? Temperature, you got."

I heard the ease of bedsprings. A gentle, barely audible kiss.

I realised I hadn't taken in a word of the last page of the novel I was reading, so closed it and turned off the bedside light.

Over the following few days I detected the tang of an unpleasant odour in the air, something akin to that of a broken toilet. Hardly looking up, Percy explained it matter-of-factly as the Damned Drains. Said he was so used to it now he hardly noticed it. Spraying copious air freshener around my head he described how he'd got various plumbers in over the years to try to fix the problem, but the buggers never did.

"Always gets bad after a bout of rain, it does." He said he'd run the taps in the scullery till he was blue in the face. "Didn't do any damn good. Tried bleach and whatnot. It comes then it goes, you'll see."

The next thing I recall is arriving back one afternoon and Percy coming out of the front room to tell me a doctor had been because Mrs Bisp was ill. I said I was very sorry to hear that. He looked like he was having difficulty conveying the fact. The racing was on in the background.

"She'll be up and about soon enough. Tough old bird, Enid. Got to look after me, for one thing. Always looked after me, see."

I passed him on the stairs the next morning as I was leaving for college. He was carrying a tray with toast and jam up to her. I said I hoped she was feeling a little better. He said "Aye". I closed the front door and walked off to some lecture on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the importance of El Greco.

Later the same day I saw him in town having lunch in a café. He didn't see me. He was just stirring his coffee, sitting alone after finishing sausage, egg and chips. He didn't look perturbed in any way, or anxious, or even thoughtful, particularly. I would say it looked like the most natural thing to do in the world, to take the weight off your feet. Then I watched him buying a bunch of flowers. Daffodils. When I came home they were in a vase in the dingy hallway, a yellow beacon against the beige wallpaper. Percy was in the front room reading his paper. I asked if they'd eaten. I could see there were no dishes on the draining board in the kitchen.

"Aye, she's got a good appetite on her, I'll say that."

He didn't look up.

Without me pressing him or even going into the room he explained that they had their main meal at lunchtime nowadays.

"Can't be doing with this 'having dinner at night time' malarkey. Recipe for indigestion, that is. Let the food go down. So that's what we do. Might have a little bit of something later, about five if we're hungry. Beans on toast or something." He shook the Echo. "That team, they need a good kicking. Never mind the ball."

I chuckled and nodded. Never interested in rugby, I sort of pretended I was before absenting myself into the middle room to sit at my drawing board with ink and gouache, getting back to work on the cover of a Dennis Wheatley novel, They Used Dark Forces, featuring a goat-headed man in an SS uniform. Once the Stephen King of his era, Wheatley was on the wane by then but his Arrow paperbacks still sold in millions. Nazis, Satanism, the occult-it was an intoxicating mix, and part of my upbringing, I suppose. I loved plunging myself into that world of good versus evil supernatural forces. I lost myself in those well-thumbed paperbacks, just as I lost myself in my artwork sometimes. The room would get imperceptibly darker and it was only when I noticed I was straining my eyes that I realised I'd better switch on the overhead light because I was sitting in darkness.

It was easy to lose track of time as the house was generally quiet and now I could only hear the TV in the next room, no voices in conversation since Percy sat in there alone, though I'd periodically hear him go up to see how Enid was. Take up a cup of tea. Bring down the empty cup later, which I'd see him rinse in the sink with a bead of Fairy liquid, his finger curling round the inside as he ran it under the hot tap.

One Wednesday afternoon there was a brisk rap on the door knocker. I remember it was a Wednesday because that was my half-day, which explains why I was there. The two men said they were from the council. Percy looked understandably baffled. I explained I'd rung them. I said I just thought if they heard a different voice complaining they might feel they'd better do something. Percy slowly twigged it was about the sewers.

"The smell," I confirmed.

I detected a flicker of accusation. He didn't like the idea I'd done this behind his back.

One of the men said they could have a look, at least.

"Hell, aye, do what you want," Percy said, opening the door wider.

As they walked through the hallway, one sniffed the air with rodent curiosity and said he could see what we meant. Out the back yard, they lifted a manhole cover with a hook-like contraption and peered into the wet gloom below. No particular enthusiasm for exploring, though the one with the less-substantial midriff eventually descended. Percy, hands in pockets, asked the older one where he was from.

"Troedyrhiw."

"Never! Where I was born, that was! Know The White Hart? My father ran that, donkey's years. Conservative Club, after."

The man looked blank and Percy looked disappointed. He started jiggling his loose change.

"Support Cardiff?

"Not interested, to be honest with you."

The jiggling change became silent. Tea was offered, and supplied. Biscuits eaten. Those pink wafery ones, as well as the ones with jam in the middle. The men confessed they couldn't see any obvious cause of the problem.

"There you are, see." Percy turned to me as if vindicated. "Didn't believe me."

"It wasn't that I didn't believe you."

"What was it then?"

I didn't answer.

The men left and I felt bad. I went to my bedroom but I couldn't settle or concentrate. I kept thinking of the other bedroom. The one Enid was in.

Early evening I came down and said to Percy I was starving. "I'm going to get some fish and chips. D'you want some?"

"Aye, go on." He stood up and dug out his wallet to offer me money.

"Don't be daft."

He reluctantly put it away. "Pie for me. Snake and pygmy. Batter gives me heartburn terrible these days. Don't know why."

We sat at the kitchen table eating out of newspaper, the pungent scent of vinegar in the air. He hadn't asked me to get some for Enid. Now I asked if she'd like a chip or two but Percy shook his head vigorously. "No fear! Not with the stomach she's got. Sight of it…" His thought trailed off in a shiver.

Later that night, I heard him talking to her in their bedroom, though I couldn't make out the exact words. Not particularly lovey-dovey. Banal, probably. The duff-duff as he plumped the pillows. The dunk-dunk as his Marks and Spencer's slippers fell to the floor. The wheeze of the bed as he got into it, old springs protesting. Then the quiet settling as the light was switched off.

I didn't want to listen, but it was hard not to. Not because I thought anything untoward was going on. I was afraid of the normal, the everyday proximities between husband and wife, and the thin wall that separated us, and I was aware that it wasn't up to them to behave any differently, it was up to me. I was the usurper. I was the cuckoo in the nest. I was the one who had to try to be invisible.

I didn't think anything else. People later on said I should have. Naturally they did. They were astonished I didn't think of going to the police, but that's easy for them to say, because they think the whole situation must have been abnormal. And that's the thing. It wasn't abnormal at all.

By day I applied myself to bolstering my portfolio with life drawing and the like. To be honest, that took the majority of my attention. Requires a good deal of skill, life drawing-which is why it separates the men from the boys, as our head tutor said. You can't fake it with a flourish of the pencil or paint brush, the line has to be right-not messy or vague but precise, bold and confident. And only artists with outstanding talent make it look like it took no effort whatsoever. So I'd sit peering from behind my easel, trying to delineate the fatty folds of the belly of our sixty-year-old model: the purple tendrils of veins in her ankles, the sandy dapple of dried skin on her heels, the almost-yellow of cracked toe nails. I'd struggle to render in charcoal the sagging pouches of her breasts, the hidden pothole of her belly-button. And if I could, in a wash of watercolour, the bruise-blue ghost under the white over-garment of skin.

During her break she'd slip on a silk dressing gown and smoke a Benson and Hedges, running her fingers through her aggressively dyed pitch-black hair. We used to think she went a bit doe-eyed whenever one of our younger tutors, Prosser, supervised the lesson. As a working sculptor, Prosser sported a regulation mop of curly hair and a hedge-like, unruly beard, looking something between a mad pop star and Alan Bates in Far From the Madding Crowd . Sometimes the woman-whose name I forget-would sidle up quite close to him and stand swivelling on one foot coquettishly, making it cringingly obvious that she fancied him. The context of her being nude under the material of the skimpy robe suddenly made us far more uncomfortable than her being nude during the formality of the drawing class, which was strange.

By now I was used to getting home and finding Percy alone in the front room watching the TV, with the door closed or sometimes open. Occasionally I'd see a copy of The Weekly News or Woman's Weekly on the hall stand, which I knew he got for his wife with diligent regularity. I never saw him reading any magazine himself other than the Radio Times, which he guarded fiercely on the arm of his chair, every programme he intended to watch circled in Biro.

One night Enid's sister arrived unannounced and unexpected, the machine-gun volley of the door knocker rousing us both. Percy was faintly alarmed. Who would be knocking the door at nine o'clock in the evening, apart from Jehovah's flaming Witnesses? But the woman on the doorstop wasted no time with pleasantries, telling him straight off the bat and in a tone lacking in warmth that she wanted to talk to her sister.

"You can't," Percy said equally curtly. "She's bad. You can talk to her when she's better, and that's that." Without asking her in, or even prolonging the niceties of conversation, he shut the door in her face. "Bloody woman. Always trouble. Never liked her…"

I thought it weird that after having a door closed in your face you wouldn't knock the door a second time, but there you are. I didn't know either of these people and I didn't know their past relationship. I didn't know Enid for that matter, but I wondered to myself why she didn't shout downstairs to ask Percy what was going on. She must've heard her sister's voice after all. Mustn't she? I waited a minute standing in the hall but I didn't hear her voice from upstairs. I thought perhaps she must be sleeping.

Thinking Percy was irritated and perhaps upset by the attempted intrusion-he'd mumbled all the way to the kitchen and back-I decided to sit down with him. I asked if he minded. He said he didn't, but he seemed disrupted under the surface. Riled, but not prepared to admit it. I suggested we gave the TV a rest for once, had a game of chess instead. Or draughts.

"Aye."

So draughts it was. Percy won. Repeatedly.

"I like you," he chortled. "You can come again."

"Snakes and ladders is my expertise," I said.

"Strip Jack Naked." A glint reflected in his glasses as he got out a pack of cards from the sideboard. "Never lost at this." He seemed to relax as the evening wore on, the games liberating him from any internal angst. We didn't talk much, if at all, then suddenly he looked up at me. "Cocoa? I got in it special. Thought…"

"Go on then." Watching him making it in the scullery I said, "How's Enid?"

"Mending lovely." He looked at the ceiling as he stirred. "Lovely, she is."

When we sat down again sipping our milky drinks, he became thoughtful for a long time, and instead of switching on News at Ten sank back in his armchair and, to my surprise, talked about their honeymoon.

He said that when they'd got married, he'd told her straight: "Don't have any ideas about doing anything on a Saturday because on Saturdays I'll be going to a match or watching one on telly. Any other day of the week, you can do what you like." I asked if she was happy with that. He said, "Married me, didn't she?

"I booked our honeymoon at a big hotel near Swindon where Dai Jenkins at the cricket had stayed with his wife. A way that was, in them days. Swindon. One of these small cottages down by a river. Tremendous. And the weather was glorious. I'll never forget it." His eyes clouded as he allowed himself to savour the memory. "Always say to ourselves, we'll have to go back one day. See if it's the same." He rubbed one eye behind the lens with his index finger. "The old girl would love that. Love it."

I saw tears well in his eyes.

Later that night I heard his weeping-gentle, as if semi-stifled. It nevertheless woke me.

On the pretext of going to the bathroom, from the landing I saw the light on in their bedroom. Then, as if in reaction to hearing me pull the light switch cord, it was switched off.

Shortly afterwards I went home for half term, glad to get away. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now I always looked forward to going home, but the moment I got there I wished I could be back in Newport. I think I was at the point of feeling dislocated from my stifling and parochial past but lacking in confidence about my baby steps into the future. My old school friends had either moved away or felt distant strangers who resented or envied my escape-and I didn't want to think of it as either. My dad was in work and I didn't want to get under my mother's feet so I did a lot of walking, down the park, up the woods, and found myself, inexplicably, spending most of my time thinking about Percy.

One night in the front room after tea, and out of earshot of my family, I phoned him. He hadn't expected it to be my voice and sounded a little flustered. I said I was ringing to ask how Enid was.

I heard a pause and a sigh at the end of the phone. For a good few seconds I thought he wasn't going to say anything at all.

"Took a turn for the worst, to be honest."

"Have you called out the doctor?"

"Not… Not sure the doctor will do that much good, see." I wondered what he was trying to tell me. On one level, perhaps I knew.

"Will you… Will you call her sister?"

"No, it'll be all right…"

"Her sister will know what to do," I said. "I'm sure she will."

"Aye. The thing is…"

"Percy. You know what to do, don't you?" I let what I'd just said sink in and waited for his reply for what seemed aeons. "Percy?" Had he heard me, or was he choosing to ignore my question because it was too loaded? Too unbearable? "Percy?"

"Aye. I know. I'm listening. What do you think I am? Dull?"

He hung up, his receiver hitting the cradle with such a bang I held my own at arm's-length.

I was concerned that I'd upset him. I'd clearly angered him. I'd crossed the line into what he thought to be private, but I had to. I'd had no choice. I couldn't envisage any other possibilities. But I'd not intended to hurt him-far from it. Yet for all my noble intentions, his last word made my stomach turn over and I felt I'd somehow betrayed him, even though I knew I hadn't. It made me hate words and my inability to use them properly, and my cowardice in not talking to him face to face, and the geographical distance between us. And the stupid room I sat in that was kept for best, the curtains drawn to stop the sunlight from fading the carpet, in spite of the fact no bugger set foot in here except my Uncle and Aunt for a sherry and mince pie every Christmas Eve.

When I next returned to Newport, I found him slumped in his chair, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. No tie, and unshaven. I pocketed my front door key. He didn't look up.

"She's gone, son. Gone."

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't hug or even touch him. We'd barely even shaken hands when we met. Men were like that in those days. I came into the room. My throat constricted, I asked if I could help.

Percy shook his head.

I thought for some reason the burden would be lifted then, but it wasn't. I thought it might all be over, but chance would be a fine thing.

The next morning walking to art school I saw two dowdy women across the road chatting, eyeing the house pointedly.

"What are you looking at?"

They didn't answer, backs stiffening as if affronted. The blonde one unfolded her thick arms, but they refused to move, as if doing so might enact some kind of defeat. I rounded the corner without giving them the satisfaction of a second glance.

It won't come as a vast surprise to learn that soon the whole business was the gossip of the life drawing class as soon as it hit the Echo. Things like that don't happen in Newport without everyone talking about it and making a meal of it. And that included my fellow students.

"God alive! Can you believe this? Man slept with his dead wife for three weeks after she died. Christ Almighty…"

"Give us that paper."

"Good God."

"Bastard must be sick in the head."

"Don't talk about it! I don't want to think about it! It's disgusting!"

"Can you imagine the niff? Christ! What a pervert! Musta been proper mad."

Nose to her crayon sketch, the Irish girl with the long hair pronounced matter-of-factly, "He'll be damned in Hell for it, that's for absolutely certain."

"Only if he's Catholic."

"Nah. Catholics love dead things."

"Shut up!"

"Tell you what though, seriously. Your dick would need a good old dose of bleach afterwards."

"Thing is, would it be squidgy and full of pus, leaking out all over you, or hard as a board with a hole in it?" Groans, pretend retching and titters. "No, no-I'm curious. Really."

"Can't see the attraction, personally."

"The attraction is you're not twenty quid down getting her drunk, mate. Sounds good to me."

"Maybe he was just randy. Any port in a storm type of effort."

Sniggers.

"Anyway, consent and all that, you can't prove she said 'No,' can you?"

I was burning up inside and now I was incendiary. I threw down my pencil and stood up. "You're sick, you are. All of you."

"What? He's the sick one. We're just talking about it."

"Well bloody don't!" I said.

The life model was leaning against the doorjamb, blowing cigarette smoke as I squeezed past her. "Lock him up and throw away the key, I say. He's a danger to children, whoever he is." I could smell the sweat under her copious talc. Everyone knew she'd been having it off with Max Prosser, even though he was a married man with two kids. Her scarlet fingernail paint was peeling and didn't match her lipstick. She was the one who made me feel sick. Matter of fact, they all did.

I got home that night and found Percy quiet but by no means dejected. I think he was living in a self-protective bubble and under the same circumstances I'm not sure I wouldn't do the same. I definitely wouldn't be sitting going through my press cuttings or going to the pub for a chat with the locals. That would take nerves of steel and I don't think Percy had any nerves at all at that point. His wife had been taken away from him and the slow realisation of that was bound to be difficult. Horrendously so.

I'd bought a loaf of sliced bread and said I was going to make us beans on toast for tea. Wandering in as the toaster chattered, Percy told me he'd lost his job in the shop. When he went in to do the shopping for the old dears, the owners had said they didn't want him any more. They said they didn't want any arguments, they knew he'd been putting his hand in the till-which was a complete lie, Percy said. It was just an excuse. It was obvious why they didn't want him to come back. I volunteered to go in and talk to them but Percy frowned, pained, and said he didn't want a fuss.

"Don't you mind what people are saying about you?"

"They can say what they like. There's only one person I care about, and she's not here, God love her."

Later, when I lifted his plate of untouched beans on toast and asked if he wanted the TV on, he said no, he wasn't that interested. I could watch if I wanted to but he was going up. He was tired.

At the door he hesitated, with his back to me.

"I expect they're saying I 'did' things. I didn't. I just didn't want to let go of her, that's all. I didn't want to be on my own. Forty years we'd been together. She was my first sweetheart. And my last. I just wanted one more day, see. Then I thought, another day wouldn't hurt, would it? Then I thought… I don't know what I thought."

The next day I wanted to go to the shop and say to their stupid faces: "He loved her. That's all he did. He loved her." I wanted to, but I didn't.

At the weekend I took the train home and that was where the police spoke to me. Perhaps they'd got my number from Percy, or he'd said he had an art student as a lodger and they got the number from the college. My heart beat faster as I took the receiver from my mum. I thought they'd make me feel stupid but they didn't. I made myself feel stupid by rattling on, trying to be chatty and sound as if nothing was amiss, when everything was amiss. As soon as they'd come off the phone my mother was there, wanting to know what on earth was going on, the police ringing. I said, "Look, just shut up Mum, it doesn't concern you, all right?"

As it was, the police didn't press charges against Percy. I'm not certain what charges they could press. It wasn't the sort of crime they'd come across every day-if it was a crime at all, technically. They told me they'd appointed a psychiatric social worker. They said some other things but I didn't take in the details. The upshot was, they didn't wish to take it any further, in terms of prosecution. They didn't consider it a wilful criminal act, or something that required the full punitive force of the law. In fact I got the distinct impression they wanted to brush it under the carpet.

"Good. Thank you."

"He is going to need care though," the man on the phone said. "Does he have a daughter or son?"

"No," I said. "No children. Nothing. Nobody. Enid has a sister but she and Percy don't get on. All they had was each other."

The policeman told me there'd been a post mortem to "rule out any possibility of foul play"-which was as evasive a euphemism as any I'd come across, the more I thought about it. Considering what we were discussing he was a master of sensitivity and diplomacy, finally informing me that the funeral arrangements were being undertaken by Enid's sister. I thought of asking why Percy didn't have a say in the ceremony, but the answer was self-explanatory-though I didn't know if Percy would see it like that. I didn't know how Percy would see the situation at all. The conversation drew to a close as the officer enquired if I had any questions.

"How did she die?"

"Fatal heart attack. In her sleep one night, from how Mr Bisp described it."

The idea of Percy describing these matters to the authorities, of him facing a dark uniform across a scrubbed wooden table in an interview room, filled me with horror. The idea of him reliving it as he recounted it in detail upset me even more. I couldn't help imagining the moment as he woke up, bleary, to find his wife's body lying next to him in bed not only uncommunicative and inert but cold to the touch.

I sat in the darkened room for a while after I'd put down the receiver thinking about the policeman's offer to arrange "someone to talk to", which I politely refused. Straight away I rang Percy, but got the engaged tone. I knew he'd taken his phone off the hook, and that set off a whole pile of other alarm bells in my mind, and worries about how he was coping. My dad came in and said my mum was upset and he wanted me to explain what was going on. I said I would when I felt like it.

I still hadn't told them anything by the time our car pulled up outside that small terraced house in Newport the following Sunday night to drop me off.

I had my own key and let myself in, noticing a Squezy bottle lying in what was laughingly called the front garden (a mere strip of grass and a brick wall, really) but thought nothing of it until I stepped indoors and felt my nose assaulted by the strong reek of urine. It was immediately obvious what the plastic bottle had contained and what had been squirted through the letterbox. The idea of someone doing that curdled my stomach far more than the actual smell.

A mop and bucket of water mixed with detergent stood at the foot of the stairs, but there were no lights on other than the hall light I'd switched on as I came in. By now my dad's car was on its way back to Ponty. I called out Percy's name. No answer was the stern reply, as my Nan used to say.

I put my foot on the bottom step and called out a second time. "Percy?"

I went upstairs, thinking he might have fallen asleep. He was always dozing off in the early evening and often I'd find him in his armchair with his head back, mouth wide open as if catching flies. Maybe he'd lain on the bed for a nap or, as I mounted the stairs, another dread thought occurred to me-that he might have done something stupid. I even rapidly began to think it far from unlikely. My grandmother and grandfather had died within days of each other, the latter of a fall, accidental or otherwise. Nobody in my family acknowledged or even voiced out loud the possibility that, for them, being apart from each other might have been impossible to bear. That they'd wanted to share death as they shared everything in life… As one…

But no. Thankfully my worst fear quickly dissipated. The bedroom was empty. The bed that Enid had died in-and lay in for weeks-stood perfectly, immaculately made without so much as a dent in the covers. Green nylon sheets pulled taut to the corners. Eiderdown as old as the marriage folded down at one corner. Cheap, flat pillows. The scent of Imperial Leather and Pledge furniture polish in the air. The vanity mirror with Enid's hair brush and jewellery box arranged in front of it, the small earrings and starry brooch I remember her wearing, and a half a brick lying next to it.

My inevitable question was answered by a harsh and unexpected draught making the hairs on my arms prickle, which came from a hole in the smashed window through which said object had been hurled from the street, no doubt accompanied by some choice language. I shuddered.

Downstairs I found Percy's shopping basket hanging on its hook. Next to the telephone on the hallstand he and Enid grinned at me from the framed photograph taken on their wedding day.

For the life of me I couldn't think where he could be. He wasn't out socialising and he hadn't gone to see Enid's sister. He was always here to meet me when I arrived, or surely he would have let me know in advance? Even in his perilous state of mind-whatever state of mind that might be. But deep down I could only think that something bad had happened.

I rang the hospital. At first the receptionist said sorry but they couldn't divulge the names of patients. I said that was ridiculous. I asked her name, because if something had happened to Percy and I wasn't told there would be hell to pay. The tone of my voice more than anything forced her to put me through to somebody else.

No, I wasn't family, he didn't have any family. I said I was Mr Bisp's lodger. I lived in his house. I wanted to know what had happened to him, please. I was told he'd had an accident. The details weren't forthcoming so I decided to curtail the phone call and get over there right away.

He'd been beaten up on the bus on the Saturday evening. I don't know where he'd been or where he was coming back from, but some yobs recognised him from his photograph in the Western Mail and laid into him. The nurse told me his face had impacted gravel so she supposed he'd been thrown off. I saw a shrunken, misbegotten figure propped up in the hospital bed, helpless as a child-head swollen up so much he couldn't wear his glasses which sat on the side table, two black eyes, one of them barely a slit, the other all colours of the rainbow, bandages wrapped mummy-like round broken ribs, swellings, bruising, cuts, contusions. What the heck had they done to him? Had a boot done that to his face? Hideously I could almost make out the imprint of a sole. I tentatively approached the hiss of the oxygen tube, not wanting to wake him unduly, but he had heard me come in and turned his head fractionally, as if even that hurt.

"You've been in the wars, feller," I said, sitting in the chair beside him. "Look at you."

He reached out and took my hand. Squeezed it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the nurse plump the pillow on the chair by the window and leave without looking at us. Perhaps she'd read the Western Mail too.

"See the game Saturday?" Percy croaked.

"Bloody awful," I said.

"Bloody were," Percy said.

Every evening that week before I went back to the house, I made sure I went to the hospital. Sometimes he was chatty. Sometimes he was sleeping. But I sat there anyway in case he woke up. I wanted him to know I was there. I took him some apples. I knew he liked Granny Smiths-"nice and sharp"-not them sweet red things, and not grapes-"never been a grape person". Once or twice I got a smile out of him. Once or twice.

On one occasion I took my sketchbook with me and drew him, just for something to do. Nothing special or anything. No big deal, no different from any other scribble. By now I'd heard I'd got into Lanchester Poly in Coventry (as was) to do Graphic Design starting in September, so topping up the sketchbook had just become a habit. I didn't even want to show him the finished thing, but he twiddled his fingers in the air. He took a look at it and gave a tiny hoot. "Picasso, that is."

I said, "If it is, I'm a millionaire."

When I got back home to Pontypridd that Friday my mother said there'd been a phone call, the person said they'd ring back. On the Saturday evening I was told the person had rung again while I was out and this time my mum gave me the number she'd scribbled down. I recognised the code for Newport. It was Enid's sister. I geared up for an argument, not knowing what she was going to tell me, but she said she'd heard yesterday from the hospital that Percy had died. I didn't want to say anything to her so I went quiet. I didn't really want to talk to her at that point. I blanked out what she was saying for a while then I heard her say it had probably all been too much for his heart. I said, "I thought his heart was all right."

She said she'd found my name in the address book next to the phone. "This is a hell of a task, I tell you."

"I feel for you," I said sarcastically.

"Yes, well…"

"You don't seem sad."

"Sad? I'm livid. The things that man did. It doesn't bear thinking about. To my own sister. What was going on in his head? It was disgusting."

"You never liked him."

She grunted. "No. Is it any wonder?"

"He never liked you."

"I bet he didn't. I wish she'd never set eyes on him. My sister was a good woman. Now look at her. Look what he's done. I'll never get over this. Never."

I thought, poor you. I hung up without saying another word.

In spite of her having my phone number and address I never got information about any funeral, either that of Percy or of Enid. Maybe they buried them side by side. Maybe, by some bizarre desire for post-mortem morality, they buried them in separate plots. I have no idea. I could have gone to the cemetery in Newport and looked, but I didn't. I didn't want to be morbid like that and I felt they deserved their privacy.

I sat at home that Saturday night and didn't talk about it, though I would in time. I slumped on the settee beside my mother watching The Generation Game on the telly in the sitting room. My father was installed in the middle room listening to the sports results. They didn't say a word to each other all evening. He came out at about nine o'clock and made himself a ham sandwich with sliced bread, then went back in and shut the door.

LUMP IN YOUR THROAT

Robert Shearman

And there he was eating a sandwich, and it was just an ordinary sandwich with no particular lumps in it, she thought it was ham and tomato, it doesn't matter what, but the sandwich was smooth-and he was telling her a funny story from work, and it wasn't that funny really, but he was laughing and so she was laughing too-and then suddenly he stopped-the chewing, the talking, the laughing, all of it, stopped-his eyes popped out, his mouth fell open-he put a hand up to his throat in what looked like wonder, and then his knees buckled and he went down to the kitchen floor, hard, and he didn't care it was hard because he wasn't going to get up again, was he?-"What is it?" she cried at him, "what's wrong?", but he was beyond speech now, his eyes rolling in their sockets, he was choking, she should hit him on the back, or, or get him a glass of water, or, or-but then the eyes stopped their rolling, all that rolling came to an end and they stared straight ahead and not at her, and the body shuddered and then (and this was worse) stopped shuddering, and in one final heave he sprayed out the contents of his mouth. And she noticed that the sandwich hadn't been ham and tomato after all. It looked like egg mayo. So. There you go.

She thought she might scream. Was she going to scream? She thought she might. Because it was all so quiet, wasn't it? Half an hour ago she'd asked him what he'd like for dinner. Ten minutes after that she'd asked if he could help her on Saturday with the supermarket run. She thought she might scream, because he was dead, wasn't he, was he definitely dead? (Yes.) Her beautiful husband was dead, although even as she looked at him now she thought he wasn't all that beautiful. He'd run a bit to seed, his skin had blotched, that extra weight he'd always talked about shifting had never actually shifted at all. Oh, and there was that single black hair growing out of his nostril.

She'd scream. It was decided. But just then, she started in surprise.

Because his face seemed to quiver. The eyes stayed dead, the mouth stayed dead, but there was a quiver, and she looked and looked and it seemed to come from his throat. The throat rippled. Then bulged, something was trying to get out. Something was heaving against the constraints of the skin-and then it gave an almighty shove, and the force jerked the head so it arced backwards and left the neck jutting up towards the ceiling. The skin broke. There was blood, and there was sinew, and there was a little hand tearing through and reaching out into the light, scrabbling for purchase, grabbing on to the chin finally to haul itself out-all of it, out, its head, the shoulders, the little bloodied body beneath, this little mannequin, her husband.

She gawped at him. He gasped for breath. Steadied, then glared at her. "What the fuck are you looking at?" he said. He was covered with gore. "Well, get me a fucking towel."

She rinsed the towel with warm water, and sponged him down the best she could. "Not so hard, you want to rub my fucking skin off?" It was her husband, naked, and no bigger than six inches tall from head to toe. And he was young and handsome, the way he used to be.

"I'm hungry," he said. "Peanuts."

"Peanuts?"

"I want peanuts."

"We don't have peanuts."

She was stooped towards him, and he slapped her hard across the face. "Liar!" he shrieked. "You better not be holding out on me!" His voice was high and tinny, like a record sped up, she thought she might laugh. He slapped her again, and this time he used his itty bitty nails, and there was blood.

In the back of the cupboard she found an old jar of peanut butter. She never bought peanut butter, Chrissie must have left it when she'd last been home from college. She offered it to him. He tipped it over on to its side, and clawed at the contents, he pulled it free in gobbets over the kitchen floor. He dug out all the hard bits of nut, stuffed them into his mouth. At last he'd had enough, lolled back sated against the side of his own giant corpse. He grinned, farted.

"Now listen," he said. "You tell no one about this. This is just our little secret, okay? You tell no one, or I'll hurt you so bad."

She found herself nodding. She found herself crying.

"Stop that," said her husband. "Or I'll give you something to cry about. You go out, get me more peanuts. In a bag this time, I don't want this butter shit." It jabbed a hand dismissively towards his own dead body. "And you better take care of this."

****

Chrissie came down from college to see her mother straight away. She brought her latest boyfriend with her, a rather quiet stick insect that mumbled he was sorry for their loss. "I just can't believe I'll never see him again," she kept saying to her mother, and every time she did the boyfriend would take her hand and squeeze it limply.

"I have to tell our daughter," she had said, "she has to know you're alive!" And that had made her little husband angry. "I'll hurt you if you tell," he said. "No, I'll hurt her. I'll follow her home. I'll crawl in through the letterbox, and up the stairs, and I'll slit her throat as she sleeps. Do you want that?" And she said she didn't.

"I'll never see my father again!" said Chrissie once more, and she was blubbing. And her mother was dying to tell her the truth, but she stole a look towards the door, and there was her husband watching her in the corner, always watching her, and he was shaking his head, and he grinned then, and pulled a little finger across his throat. "I loved him so much," said Chrissie, "and I'm now nearly an orphan!"

She looked at Chrissie, no longer a girl, now a woman-long blonde hair, big breasts, teeth too white, and so much prettier than her mother had ever been-and she was sure she was sleeping with that vague thin boyfriend of hers-she looked at her daughter, and realised she didn't like her very much. It was a bit of a shock, but not in itself an unwelcome one, and with all that had happened the last couple of days the realisation washed over her as something clean and pure. And just for a moment she thought about telling Chrissie in what reduced circumstances her father had survived, just to see what he might do to her.

Chrissie offered comfort all afternoon, then went back to college.

And she fetched her husband bags of peanuts from the supermarket, and he gobbled them up. And she was a bit puzzled, he'd never seemed to like peanuts before, and she dared to ask about this. "There are lots of things I liked you never gave me," he said. "But I'm never holding back again!" He'd cup the peanut in both hands, and balance it on his lap, and then he'd nibble it all over, fast and furious, he looked like a squirrel. He asked for beer, too; she gave him a can of lager, put a straw in it. "Don't patronise me," he seethed-but he snatched at the straw anyway, he stuck the end in his mouth and sucked so hard his cheeks hollowed, he sucked the can dry.

He looked so fresh and new, like the man she'd first married all those years ago. Before the paunch and the bad breath, before the growth of the nostril hair. And she wondered whether all of that middle-aged dumpiness had been something terrible she'd done to him, she had taken this gorgeous man and made him old and made him ugly, and it was all he'd been able to do to keep some little piece of his true self hidden inside and waiting for a chance to be set free. The man she had married had been loving and kind, docile even-he had never raised a hand to her, never said a cruel word. Not so his tiny counterpart-he called her a useless bitch, a heifer, he told her she was a saggy-titted cunt. He'd ask her to bend close to him, just so he could slap her or spit in her eye. But still, he was beautiful. He was every inch, every little inch, the man she had fallen in love with.

And sometimes she'd go to the bathroom, and lock the door, and close her eyes, and touch herself. She hadn't found her husband attractive in so very many years, when had all the desire slipped away?

At night they'd go to bed together. "Strip for me!" he'd squawk, and he'd give her a slow hand clap as she did so, and then she'd be as naked as him. "You great enormous cow," he'd laugh. "Lie back." And she would, and then he'd leap on top of her. He'd scamper all over. He'd pinch at her breasts with his fingers, he'd bite and claw, and once in a while he'd break the skin, and he'd squeal in delight as if he'd struck oil, he'd do a little victory dance in her blood. And he might lie face down and hump away at her flesh, any part of her flesh, there was no rhyme or reason to it-down he'd go, and she'd feel his little dick jabbing away at her, and sometimes it hurt, and sometimes it tickled.

"You've had your fun," he'd then tell her. "Now it's my turn!" He'd climb up to her face, and she panted, she didn't like this bit. "Open wide," he'd say. "Wider than that!" But she never opened wide enough, and he'd tut in irritation. And with one hand he'd grab hold of her top teeth, and with the other the jaw, and he'd pull-he'd pull so hard, who could have guessed the tiny chap had such strength to him?-he'd wrench her mouth open wider and wider, and she could hear bits of it crack. "Wider, bitch!" he'd laugh-and then, at last, the whole of her head would just swing wide open like a lid, the hinges would give and the mouth was as wide as could be. "Lick me," he'd tell her, and she'd do her best to lick him, all over and as much as he liked. And then when he got drowsy he'd stretch out his little arms and he'd yawn; "nighty night, sweetheart," he'd say, and it was just like the old days, and despite all the pain she warmed to that, she could feel how much her husband cared for her still. He'd settle down in her mouth, wrap her tongue about him like a blanket, and soon he'd be fast asleep, and his high squeaky snores were just darling.

It was hard for her to sleep with her head pulled open like that, but she found a way. You adapt, don't you? She learned to adapt.

And she thought, had he always hated her? Had he always wanted her hurt? All those years, had it been just pretend? And she thought back on her marriage, the times they'd laughed, the summer holidays, the Christmases, the times they'd cuddled and kissed. Had he been abusive the whole time? Had she been too stupid to tell?

****

The day of the funeral. And it took her ages to get ready, she had to keep changing her dress. "You're not wearing that, are you?" her husband would ask. "The way it shows off your fat arse?" Eventually she found a combination that worked, or at least her husband stopped criticising, maybe he'd just got bored. She put him in her handbag, and kept it on her knee during the service, and would carefully feed him peanuts when no one was looking. It was a good service. The vicar was nice. He said some things about her husband she hoped in some way were true. "Try not to mourn," the vicar said. "He has been set free. Don't all men want to be set free?" Chrissie was there, and she wasn't blubbing any more, she'd now mastered an expression of heroic forbearance and she looked good on it, bleak and tragic suited her. And sitting in a pew to the side, there was the mother-in-law, a nervous bird of a woman she had never got to know. Who had only lost her own husband a year ago, who had now lost her son too. She watched her. She watched as the grieving mother would look about, and then, so carefully, feed peanuts one by one into a handbag of her own.

She summoned up the nerve to ask about it at the wake. The mother-in-law stood apart, in one hand a paper plate of quiche, in the other the handbag. As she got closer, and peered at the older woman's face, she saw how it was marked with careful bruising that could be concealed with make-up. She made small talk about the weather and the order of hymns. The mother-in-law played along. When she ventured on to the subject of homunculus husbands, the woman looked horrified.

"I don't know what you're talking about!" she hissed. "Leave me alone!" And it seemed that instinctively the woman covered up the mouth of the handbag so that whatever might be inside couldn't hear.

Soon the funeral party began to break up. The men louder and more boisterous, laughing over their beers. The women huddled together with gin and tonics and gossip. All of them, loosening their ties or unbuttoning their blouses, making their goodbyes to the widow and heading off to the pub. "Goodbye, Mum," said Chrissie. "You'll be all right." She was with her boyfriend, all neat and spindly in his best suit; he clutched on to Chrissie's hand tightly, and smiled at her, and his tongue licked at his lips.

The last person to leave was the mother-in-law. She hung around furtively in the background until the coast was clear. She came up to her, so close that she thought she was going to kiss her, she whispered in her ear. "He's asleep," she said. "One thing I've learned? Lace the peanuts with a little wine. Makes him drowsy."

She thought she was going to cry then, and she wasn't sure whether that was the horror of it all catching up with her, or the relief she wasn't suffering alone. The mother-in-law looked embarrassed, then gave her a hug. "Hey," she said. "It gets easier. Give it time. You'll see."

What sort of family have I married into, she asked. What monsters, who seem so loving and warm on the surface, but are brutes beneath the skin. And why hadn't she been warned! And the mother-in-law just stared at her in bemusement. "Don't you know, dear?" she said kindly. Trying to keep the laughter out of her voice. "It's not your husband, it's not my husband. It's all the men. It's every single one."

And now she was left with the unwanted food and plastic cups. All alone, just her husband and her-it reminded her suddenly of their wedding party, and he had looked at her and winked and said how pleased he was at last they'd all gone home, he didn't need them, she was the only person in his life that mattered to him now. And that was right, because she loved him, and she'd promised to spend the rest of her days with him. She looked inside her handbag, expecting to be spat at or pinched, expecting at least a torrent of abuse-she hadn't fed him any peanuts for a good half an hour. But he didn't hurt her. He took the peanut from her fingers, and chewed at it thoughtfully.

****

They got home, and as soon as the front door was closed and they were safely alone, she reached into the handbag for him. He was crying. "Don't touch me," he sobbed. "Don't even fucking look at me!" But she lifted him out and held him in her arms and he wailed there like a baby. "They didn't have to burn my body," he said, at last. "They didn't have to go that far."

They were tired. She took him up to bed.

He gambolled over her naked breasts, he pinched and bit, but it all seemed rather desultory. His heart wasn't in it. He sighed, and he had too small a body for a sigh like that, it made him shiver all over like a jelly.

"You know why I have to hurt you, don't you?" he said.

She didn't answer. She nodded. From beneath the mound of one of those sagging tits he liked to sneer at, she wasn't sure he could see.

"I just want you to be better," he said. "I want you to be the best you can be. You know I love you. I love you, Annie." And when her husband had died she didn't think anyone would ever tell her she was loved again-but it was the fact that at last he'd used her name that made her cry.

"This isn't working," he said.

"I know."

"I don't want to be like this. It doesn't work."

"We can make this work."

"No."

"We will."

"Then take me to the kitchen," her husband said. "There's no need to get dressed."

Downstairs they went together, she held him in the palm of her hand, he let his legs swing over the side.

She put him down on the kitchen table. He told her to fetch a knife, the sharpest she could find. She did.

Her heart was beating so fast she thought he'd be able to hear it, and that would make him angry, and she didn't want him to be angry. She held the knife against her arm-or would he want her belly, her legs? She was shaking.

"No," he said. "No,"-and his voice was the lowest she had ever heard it, even when they'd first been married, even when he'd pretended to be a gentle giant-the voice was so grave and so solemn and all the squeak had gone out of it. "I don't want you to go through this alone. Cut me. Hurt me."

She bent over him. She hesitated. But she did as she was told, she always did as she was told.

Just a pinprick to his leg, really, she only brushed the surface-he was so slight she dared do no more. He gritted his teeth against the pain.

"Again," he said. "Deeper. Bolder."

She sliced at him then, and the blood came out, and he laughed, and she laughed too. "And spit on me!" he squeaked. "Spit for all your worth!" She hawked, and it splashed straight into him, it was thick and bubbled and he was drenched in it.

They played for hours, her naked body towering over his own, and his dick was hard, and she nicked that with the knife too. "You're beautiful," he cried. "You heifer. I love you. You disgusting sow."

And he said, "You want things to be better, don't you?"

And she said, "Yes." She moaned it, she so really did.

He said, "I don't want to be like this any more. Will you help me?"

And she said, "Yes! Yes!"

"Then stab down," he said. "With all your might. Please. Set me free."

Now he was crying. He nodded at her, he smiled. It's all right. Be brave. Set me free. And with a wail she lifted the knife up high, and plunged it down deep into his tiny chest.

His eyes rolled, they were doing the rolling thing again. She stabbed him more. Faster, harder. She was sprayed with blood. The blood wasn't red. It was black.

She carried on stabbing, why stop now just as she was getting good at it? She stabbed, and he had no face left, he had no body, and then she just dropped the knife, and she slumped down on to the kitchen floor and she wept.

She sat there for a very long time.

And then the laughter caught her unawares.

She heaved herself up off the floor, and stared back towards the table and the ruins of her husband. And they were shuddering, they were convulsing. For one insane moment she thought the body parts themselves were laughing at her-until she saw the bulge thicken amidst the chunks of flesh. The skin burst open with a pop, and he was there-smaller, leaner, now no larger than her thumb. But her husband's mouth was too wide for its little face. And her husband's smile was too wide for its little mouth. And when he spoke the pitch was so high it seemed like an ache right in the middle of her forehead, an ache that would never go away. He gibbered at her, so happy, splashing about in the black blood, he looked like a small child surrounded by wrapping paper on Christmas Day. "You set me free," she heard. "You set me free, just as I asked. And now we're really going to have some fun."

HORN OF THE HUNTER

Simon Bestwick

Mark was flirting with the girl in the seat behind when the minibus turned off the motorway. She was a Scot called May, about his age and athletic-looking; a runner, like him. They'd seen that in one another when they boarded, got talking, and here they were.

"So," she said, "you been on one of these before?"

"No. You?"

"Nah," she said. "I think they're pretty new. I'd not heard of them before."

"Neither had I," said Mark.

"Don't even really know what we're supposed to do when we get there. You?"

Mark shrugged. "Some kind of workfare, work experience. Dunno how it's supposed to help me get a new job when there aren't any, but I didn't get a choice."

"You and me both, pal," said May. "Do this or lose your benefits, they said-not in so many words, but that's what it boiled down to."

"Think it was the same story for us all." Mark eyed the men in the opposite seat. One was emaciated, with a grimy, greyish pallor and twitchy demeanour.Baghead: an addict, a junkie. Not a very charitable thought; already, Mark knew, he was trying to distance himself from the others. Not me; I'm not like them. The other, an obese, slack-faced man in a dirty tracksuit, rocked, shook his head and mumbled.

"I know," said May, gazing out of the window and speaking from the side of her mouth. "The fuck's wrong with us if they've lumped us in with these grebs?"

"Doesn't do much for your self-esteem," admitted Mark, studying her profile. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a firm jaw: she was pretty striking.

"Probably roped us in to make up the numbers," said May. "Couldn't find enough hopeless cases to-Jesus, where the fuck are we going?"

Mark twisted round and saw what had prompted May's response. The bus was slowing down as it approached a tall wire fence that stretched off to the left and right as far as he could see. In front of the bus was a set of gates; men in what looked like military uniform were pushing them open.

The bus growled, rolled forward and went through. Mark caught a glimpse of a sign mounted on the fence, but it went by too quickly to read. And then they were through, and when he looked behind he saw the soldiers closing the gates again.

"Eh, what the fuck!" To Mark's right, the baghead was getting to his feet. "Where the fuck are we?"

"Settle down," Ian came down the aisle. He was a beefy, hard-faced man in a polo-neck sweater, with cropped brown hair and dark brown eyes that never seemed to blink. He'd been holding a clipboard when they'd boarded the minibus and was presumably meant to be something to do with the Job Centre Plus, but looked more like a bouncer. "Get back in your seat, please."

"Fuck that," said Baghead. "I wanna know what's going on. Where're we going, what's-"

"Sit. Down." Ian didn't raise his voice, but he went up to Baghead and moved so close their noses almost touched. "Sit down, sir," he said. "I'm going to ask nicely one more time."

Baghead glared back; Mark shifted in his seat, ready to duck if the fists started flying. But then the addict looked down and slumped into his seat with a muffled 'fucksake'. The overweight mumbler looked up for a moment, blinked at Ian and then went back to his prayers, pleas or dialogue with the voices in his head.

"Thank you," said Ian. "Settle down, everybody, we'll get there soon enough." He turned on his heel and walked back up the aisle.

May was biting at a hangnail on her left thumb. When her eyes met his she took her hand away, trying not to look worried. It didn't work. Mark was doing his best to look unruffled, but doubted he was any more successful.

"Maybe that's why they weren't telling us anything," he said at last. "Maybe it's for the military-putting bits and pieces together for some new toy."

May snorted. "Didn't think the MOD were that hard up," she said. After a moment they both chuckled, but it sounded weak and false even to him.

The gates and the fence receded; the bus rolled on across an unending, empty moor. Low, nearly flat ground undulated gently, the monotony broken by the occasional knoll, low hillock or gentle rise. Green bracken, yellow gorse and purple heather. One knoll sprouted a thin tree twisted sideways; Mark thought for a second of the kind of desert island you saw in cartoons: a tiny bump of sand with a palm tree on the top. Two stone walls and a stub of chimney that had been a cottage went by.

They drove another twenty minutes. The bus bumped and jolted under them as the road grew rough and potholed. Then it slowed; Mark heard the indicator ticking and the vehicle pulled to the side of the road.

"All right, ladies and gentlemen," Ian said. "Everybody off." There was a hiss and a thump and the doors opened. "Come on everybody, chop-chop. Busy day ahead."

His unblinking gaze travelled up first Mark and May's aisle, then down the other, lingering on each passenger in turn and daring them to disobey. Neither May nor Mark were the first to get up, but as the others began to shift, grumbling, from their seats, they exchanged glances, sighed and joined the general exodus, Mark shrugging his light backpack on as they went.

Although it was early June, the sky was overcast and when Mark climbed down from the bus, stretching his arms and legs, the air was chilly. Of course it was still quite early; he'd been ordered to report to the pick-up point in the old industrial estate at Pendleton for six a.m. They'd been on the road better than two hours, but even so, most of those lucky enough to still have jobs were yet to clock on.

The passengers huddled in a group at the roadside, shoulders hunched, stamping their feet. Baghead hugged himself and looked miserable, close either to tears or lashing out in blind rage. The Mumbler scratched behind one ear, pottered a little way off and then pottered back, still muttering to himself. Mark looked at May again; she shrugged. "Well, presumably this is where they tell us what the hell we're doing," she said, and scowled at the bus. "Though if your man there's expecting us to go for a four-mile fun-run first, he can get to fuck."

Ian was standing at the top of the steps that led down from the bus, the clipboard held across his lap. Mark waited for him to step down or at least address the group, but instead a faint smile tugged the corner of Ian's mouth as, with a hiss, the bus doors thudded shut.

"What the fuck-?" he heard Baghead say, as the bus's engine coughed and roared into life.

"Hey, just a fucking moment-" May yelled, starting forward-but the bus was already pulling away. She ran towards it and it wheeled sharply round on the road, bouncing from side to side so hard Mark thought it was going to keel over. But then it steadied and, as several other passengers ran forward, it gunned its engine and swept by them, nearly knocking one middle-aged woman flying with its starboard wing before barrelling off into the distance.

"Fuck me-fuck!" yelled Baghead. "Fucking hell, you fucking cunts!"

The Mumbler let out a sudden high-pitched moan. "Shut up!" spat Baghead.

"Leave him," said May.

"Oh, and what the fuck're you gonna do?"

May stared him down.

Nobody said anything for a little while after that; they looked back along the way they'd come, looking for some sign of the bus or some other vehicle to take them on the next stage of their journey. There was no point looking up the road, because just ahead of their position the cracked and potholed tarmac gave way to a dirt track and then less than that-a pair of grassless ruts worn into the ground with a thick belt of grass and heather sprouting between them.

All Mark could hear was the whistle of the wind, blowing across the moor, flapping and rattling loose vegetation. Someone was crying; the middle-aged woman stared around the group, then came over to Mark and May. She was in her forties, her hair dyed a glossy black and with gold hoop earrings that almost touched her shoulders. Her face was roundish and a little careworn, crow's-feet at the corners of her quick brown eyes, and she wore stretch pants, brightly striped trainers and a tracksuit top. "What do you reckon we should do now?" she said.

"God knows," said Mark. He looked down the track to where it petered out. "Not much point going on. Only way is back."

"That's if they let us out through the gates," said May.

"Why are they doing it?" said the woman. "I don't get it."

Baghead and several others drifted over; the Mumbler blinked a few times and then ambled across to join them.

"Maybe it's like one of those Outward Bound thingies," May said. "You know, like a team-building exercise or something."

"Team?" said Baghead. "Us? Stupid cow."

"Oi," said Mark. "Leave it."

Baghead glared at him, squaring his narrow shoulders. "Yeah? The fuck're you gonna do, pal?"

"Don't," said May, putting a hand on Mark's shoulder. "And you, pal, change the bloody record or I will change it for you." She glared straight at Baghead until he looked down, fists clenched, muttering through gritted teeth. That was three times he'd been stared down, counting Ian, and for a moment Mark thought it might be a straw that broke the camel's back, pushing the addict past a tipping point, but in the end he backed off, hands raised.

"There's no point us fighting," May said. "We need to spend our time working out what to do next?"

"Like what?" said Baghead. May opened her mouth, then closed it again. She obviously had no more idea than anyone else what to do, not that she'd ever laid claim to.

And then, out of nowhere, came the sound of a horn.

Not a car horn; this wasn't anything electric or mechanical. It was an instrument of some kind, like a bugle or trumpet; a long, monotonous blare of sound, somehow mournful and threatening all at once.

"Where's that coming from?" said the middle-aged woman, turning round.

"Over there," said Mark, nodding towards the brow of a low hillock that rose perhaps a hundred yards from the roadside.

The blast of the horn lingered long, echoing across the moor. For a moment, just a moment, there was only the wind, and then other sounds began to intrude: the barking of dogs, ferocious jagged snarls giving way here and there to howls. Someone laughed. And then, faint on the wind, came the clop of hooves.

"There." The middle-aged woman pointed.

The clopping of hooves grew louder, and seven silhouettes broke the line of the hillock, rising to climb atop it.

Seven horsemen-Mark assumed they were men, anyway, but it was hard to tell from their outlines. They seemed to be wearing some sort of headgear; their clothing was bulky and glinted in places-armour?-and a leather cloak or cape hung from each rider's shoulders. Each man also carried what looked like a spear, with a long wooden haft and a triangular head with a pair of metal lugs sticking out on either side. They reminded Mark of boar-spears he'd once seen in a museum; the lugs were to stop the spearhead penetrating further into the animal's body, so that it couldn't force its way along the haft to attack the hunter.

The barking and snarling grew louder, and like the welling of a black tide a host of bristling shapes rose into sight on the hillock. Dogs; the biggest dogs Mark had ever seen.

The horn's last echo died, and for a moment all was still. The dogs stopped snarling; their tails swished to and fro in silence and ropes of spittle dangled from their grinning jaws.

The horsemen gazed down in silence. Even the Mumbler had gone quiet. The wind rose; a horse whickered and stamped, and the riders' leathery robes snapped and billowed like sails in the breeze. And then the central rider of the seven on the hill raised the horn to his lips and blew.

The low, dread note sounded. It was louder than ever now, a bellow, a threat, a promise. The Mumbler wailed. The dogs bayed, and bounded down the hillock. A moment later, the horsemen lowered their spears and charged.

The Mumbler screamed, and then it seemed everyone else was screaming too. Mark staggered as someone cannoned into him and reeled away across the grass.

Everyone was scattering, running. "Come on!" A hand grabbed Mark's: May. "Come on, for Christ's sake!"

She ran and Mark went with her, over the worn dirt trail and then over the moor, towards the far horizon. Behind them came the thunder of hooves and the bark of dogs, and then there were screams. Mark looked back-he shouldn't have, but he did. The Mumbler was down on the ground, thrashing and screaming. It looked as though his hand was pinned to the earth at first, but then Mark saw one of the dogs had his wrist in its jaws; it crouched low, snarling, its grinning teeth turning red. Two, three more dogs arrowed in towards the fat man. Mark wasn't sure, but thought they were armoured like the horses and the men. They leapt; one caught the Mumbler's throat in its jaws, crushing his scream to silence. The one with his wrist in its jaws jerked its head and tore his hand away, and the others ran in to tear at his groin and belly.

Baghead stumbled into view. A horseman rode up behind him, spear arm drawn back. He threw and the weapon struck the addict in the back, smashing him to the ground like a crumpled spill of paper. Baghead's limbs twitched. Dogs bounded towards the carcass.

"Come on," yelled May. "Come the fuck on for Christ's sake!"

Mark ran with her, but his foot snagged in something-a rock, a twist of grass or briar-and he fell.

He rolled to break his fall. Fear gave him tunnel vision; all the narrow focus of his gaze could make out was the strip of moor and grass directly ahead of him, and it was empty. May was gone, and there was no time to look for her because behind him was the barking of the dogs, the screaming of the slain, the thunder of the hooves and the blaring of the horn.

I'm fucked , he thought, getting up and trying once more to break into a run. I'm fucked, I'm fucked, I'm-

There were some gorse bushes up ahead. Mark scrambled towards them. They'd offer almost no cover worth speaking of, but there was no chance of outrunning the riders and pack. His only hope, tiny as it was, was to hide.

He dived towards the gorse bushes, flinging his arms up to protect his face from the thorns. He crashed in among them-and then the ground was gone from under him, and he was falling.

The water broke his fall, or some of it. He splashed hard into the stream, then hit the stones at the bottom, knocking air out of his lungs. He rolled over, coughing and spluttering. The water was icy cold and somewhere between one and two feet deep. He looked around; earth banks rose on either side of him, nearly six feet high. The bushes grew thick around them, blotting out all but a thin band of light from above.

He stood and stumbled along the stream channel. The water rushed around his feet, ankles, shins. The teeth of its chill sank into his flesh, grated on bone. He looked up at the narrow slice of sky; shadows flickered across it. It would only take one dog to find him, one hunter to ride close and look down.

Then he saw the inlet.

Just up ahead and to the left, water poured into the stream and swelled it; it came from some sort of cleft in the banks. Mark splashed his way over to the gap, saw that the rivulet emerged very close to the top of the bank and had over time carved out its own channel, a niche several feet wide. As with the rest of the stream, gorse sprouted thickly on the banks above, their twigs meshing overhead and effectively screening what was in it from sight.

It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. Mark squeezed into the niche and pressed himself against the walls, digging the heels and toes of his sodden trainers into the damp friable earth, jamming his hands into the soil further up and praying it would be enough.

He hunched there while the howls and screams went on. He felt the ground shiver under the horses' hooves, heard the whistle of flying spears and the thud of their impact, heard sounds like tearing wallpaper and splintering wood. He heard the screams, too, of course, the pain and fear, the despairing last minute threats and pleas for mercy. But there were other sounds, too, other voices, and they were raised in cheers and laughter.

The laughter was the worst, somehow. Such an ordinary sound, something you'd hear in a pub or across a dinner table if someone told an off-colour joke. The noises continued on and on: it seemed impossible anyone could still be left. Surely the last of the group must have been finished off by now? Against the dogs and the riders, what chance did they have?

He knew it was a risk, but the not knowing was worse. Slowly he raised his head above the level of the bank, and narrowing his eyes, managed to peer through the mesh of branch and thorn.

At first he saw nothing: only the barren heath and the black glitter of the tiny rill weaving through it towards his hiding place. Then there was a growl, a panting, a soft pad of feet, a metallic clank. The toe of one trainer slipped, then caught and lodged fast again. Mark's balance almost went, but held; he bit down on the gasp that tried to escape him. He mustn't make a sound.

The dog appeared, no more than ten feet away. Even allowing for the extra bulk of its armour, it was massive, about the size of a Shetland pony. It was like no other breed Mark had seen. In shape, it resembled an Alsatian, but its build was more solid, broader in the chest. Muscles rolled under its glossy black pelt and it wore an armoured harness that covered its chest and hindquarters, greaves on its legs and an ornate metal helm in two parts-one covering the skull and upper jaw, another the lower. The metalwork was very detailed; eyes, ears, even fur had been cunningly etched, and over the gap left for the nose-what good was a hunting dog that couldn't scent?-a fine wire grille had been shaped to complete the outline.

Both halves of the helm had cruelly serrated edges. Behind them, its fangs were white, and a pink tongue lolled over them as the hound padded towards the rill. It drew its tongue in and closed its jaws, and the two halves of the helm came together with a soft metallic hiss, the teeth meshing so perfectly that had he not known it was there, he'd never have seen the join.

The hound's jaws opened again; it bowed its head and lapped the running water, then stopped. Water dripped from its jaws, and through the wirework of the grille, he saw the black wetness of its nose twitch. As it turned its head towards him, he realised that it had his scent.

Mark could see its eyes through the helm and the gorse. They were yellow, pitiless and unblinking. It was five feet from him, four, three-

Feet crashed and tangled through the undergrowth behind the dog. Mark glimpsed a flickering shadow, someone running, and the dog wheeled, bayed and leapt. He watched it sail through the air towards the runner, thinking thank God, thank God-someone else, not me, but then he heard the snap of its jaws, the crack of bone and the runner's scream, and he had to jam his fingers into his mouth to avoid crying out.

The runner was down, kicking, screaming. He saw long blonde hair-oh Christ no, he knew that hair. And the clothes too- the jeans, the T-shirt. Just as recognition dawned, May thrashed over onto her back, kicking at the helmed head, but the dog only snarled and bit down harder.

More dogs barked and bayed, closing in. May writhed and howled again, and her eyes stared through the gorse straight at him. He didn't know if it was possible, but was sure that in that last moment her eyes met his, as she screamed in pain and terror, for help, that she was directing those pleas at him.

But it was only for a moment. An instant later two more dogs leapt upon her, and her next cry was a raw shriek of naked agony: tortured nerve, torn flesh, broken bone. At least the dogs' shapes hid her from him, a mass of pelt and armour heaving to and fro, blood spurting between and over them.

The ground shivered. Hooves clattered and pounded. One of the big horses bounded in, a black silhouette against the pale sky, the rider rearing on its back, cloak billowing behind him, lugged spear held aloft. With a whoop, he flung it down. It struck with a thick squelching crunch, and the screaming stopped. The only sound after that was that of the dogs tearing at their kill.

The horse reared and cantered, hooves scrabbling at the air. The rider grabbed the spear's haft, wrenched and twisted at it till it came free; the noise it made was almost as bad as the sound of its impact had been. The horseman laughed and whooped, brandishing the blooded weapon in the air.

Mark could see him more clearly now. The horseman was armoured about the chest, arms and legs, with a helm in the shape of a grinning devil's face. There were metal gauntlets on his hands, but a flash of gold at his wrist: a watch, Mark realised, something expensive and ornate.

Most clearly of all, he saw the cloak. At one point, as the horse pranced, it seemed no more than a few feet from his face. It was made of numerous individual pieces of a material that looked like leather. But it wasn't leather; the patches had holes that had been eyes, empty flaps that had been noses, and their mouths were still stretched wide in the screams they'd died with.

Mark couldn't hear any more cries. The only sounds now were barks and noises like the ones coming from where May had fallen. And then, across the blasted moor, came the blare of the hunter's horn.

The dogs tensed, then straightened, tearing last chunks of meat from the kill before loping away. The horseman dismounted, unsheathing a short sword with a thick, curved blade, like a cutlass. He stooped over the thing on the ground and raised the weapon. Mark looked away; bile scorched the back of his throat, flooding into his mouth when he heard the thick woody sound of it chopping flesh and bone. Once, twice, three times. He spat the bile out and made himself look again.

The huntsman climbed back onto his horse, tying something to the saddle-horn-a round object that trailed hair, some of which still gleamed blonde through the blood and mire that matted it. The dogs gambolled around the horse; one stopped and looked towards Mark's hiding place, head cocked to one side. Then the horn blew again and the dogs sped away. The hunter spurred his horse, which reared and galloped forward. "Tally-ho!" Mark heard him cry. The echo of it lingered long after he'd ridden off.

The hoof beats, the baying, the occasional sounding of the horn-all faded into the distance. Once or twice, there might have been another, far-off 'tally-ho!', but soon only the wind remained-and then the clatter of wings and the caw of crows.

Mark stayed where he was until his arms and legs began to ache. Soon he was shaking. Then his hands slipped and he collapsed into a huddle at the bottom of the niche, into the water. It was cold, but that barely registered. He wrapped his arms around himself and sobbed.

Somewhere, faintly in the distance, a pale ghost of sound: he heard the horn.

Mark made himself stand. He went back along the stream until the banks grew lower, and finally he stumbled out onto the heath.

It was the same story everywhere. Torn, mangled bodies scattered on grass now rusty with dried blood. Most lacked heads. He almost tripped over the middle-aged woman, only recognisable from her striped trainers. Already a dozen crows were picking their way through the brush, pecking at the slain. He heard more cawing from above and looked up to see dozens more-it looked like hundreds-circling above, in such numbers that the sun seemed to dim.

Mark peered one way, then the other. He could see now the course of the stream, and where he'd hidden. He forced himself not to look at the torn, bloody rag of a thing that lay about ten feet from it. He tried not to look at any of the dead, but that one least of all. The riders were out of sight now, but he could see the trail left by the horses' hooves.

He turned the other way, the way they'd come from. That was east, because it was still morning and the pale disc of the sun, glowing dimly through a veil of clouds, hung directly above the hillock. Still morning, still early, but the people he'd been on the bus with were now dead. A few had escaped, just a few, and the horsemen were riding them down.

Which way to go? The way they'd come in there were soldiers, and it was impossible to believe that they couldn't have been part of this. It was no accident; none of this was an accident. He couldn't pretend to understand all that had happened, but the armour, the spears, the cloaks of faces-all implied something old, done many times before. A tradition of a kind, perhaps, albeit none he'd heard of. But then, a tradition like this would have to be a secret one, known only to a chosen, elite few.

And who would they hunt, if not the unwanted and despised?

Dear God, had they known this at the Job Centre? Had the woman across the desk who'd consigned him to this 'placement' looked into his eyes and known where she was sending him? Had the soldiers at the gate? Perhaps not, but they'd do as they were ordered-and those orders would doubtless be not to let anyone past.

West were the hunters; east was where they'd come from. South were the gates they'd come in through: that left north, beyond the end of the desire-line. Mark's teeth chattered from the cold, but there wasn't much he could do about that for now. Walking, exercise-that was his best chance. He took a deep breath and started off.

****

At first Mark walked; the adrenaline had drained away and that was the best he could manage. As time passed, his clothes a little drier and his strength returning, he began to run, panting as he loped across the unending heath. The backpack bounced against his shoulders as he went; he tightened the straps to secure it.

There didn't seem to be any landmarks, nothing beyond the occasional knolls or rises that quickly dropped back to the same flat level, and spiky grass, yellow gorse and purple heather beneath the dull grey lead of the sky. As he went, he spotted occasional hints of past atrocities. Here was a dull rusty stain on the grass, not yet wholly cleaned away by scavengers and rain, and there shone yellow-white pieces of bone. Once he thought he saw a skull grin at him from a patch of heather, but other than that, little broke the monotony. Likewise, the only sound was the wind, except once when he thought he heard the faint echo of the horn. He turned, scanning the horizon, but saw nothing.

Later it began to spot with rain, and the wind picked up. Mark began to shiver once more, and to stumble as he went. He was flagging; he needed to stop, needed to rest, but there was no sign of shelter anywhere. At last, cresting yet another of those interminable rises, he looked down and saw a dell, and in it, beneath a bowed tree, the ruins of a small stone cottage. There was no roof and most of one wall had fallen, but it was enough.

Mark stumbled towards it and climbed inside, huddling against the join of the walls. He tugged off his trainers and socks to dry as best he could. He'd been lucky enough to escape blistering so far, but it would be silly to trust that luck to hold forever. The root-buckled earth floor was strewn with fallen twigs and branches and old dead leaves. He scuffed them into a pile and tried to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, but nothing happened and his fingers were cold and thick. He slumped back against the wall, feeling the backpack he wore crumple, its contents digging into his spine.

Mark sat up. How could he have forgotten? He unslung the pack, opened it. There wasn't much inside-a couple of homemade sandwiches, a Coke bottle filled with tap water, a bar of own-brand chocolate-but it was a feast to him now. He wolfed down the sandwiches, drank about half the water and ate half the chocolate. The rest he stowed in his pack for later.

He settled back; he felt a little better now. Not much, but he felt comfortably full and there was a sense of renewed energy. He pulled his socks and trainers back on; they were a little damp, but it was best to be ready to move. And that was when something caught his eye, jutting from the ground beside the ruin.

It was too straight to be a piece of wood. He caught and twisted at it, finally pulled it free. It was the head of one of the huntsmen's spears - the metal part of the haft, the two lugs and the triangular blade itself. They were rusted, but seemed solid. The spearhead's edges were serrated. Mark tried not to think of May.

He stuffed it into his backpack with the remains of the food. It was, at least, a weapon of some kind.

The sun was past its zenith now. Mark was still trying to work out how long he had until nightfall and whether his chances were better or worse in the dark, when the horn sounded nearby.

Mark got to his feet. His hands knotted into fists, the nails digging into his palms. He could hear the dogs barking too. He scuttled to the hole that had served the cottage as a window, and the horn blew again.

It was closer, and so was the barking of the dogs. And oh God, now he could hear the galloping of hooves. A moment later, he saw the first shifting sign of movement on the horizon, as the hunt drew nearer.

Mark bolted from the cottage and began to run. There was no hiding, no cover. He'd been lucky; the hunters had been running the others from the bus to earth, but now they'd finished that part of the game-and of course, they'd know how many prey there'd been, and who was still missing. So they'd gone looking, and they'd found him.

Mark ran, and this time he knew he mustn't stop. With the dogs baying behind him, that didn't sound too hard. He had to outdistance them, or lose them-there had to be a way out, there had to be. The grass stretched ahead of him. His muscles began to burn, and then his lungs. I can't go on, I have to go on, I can't go on, I have to go on. And then ahead he saw the ground slope up in a rise, another of the endless fucking rises that rippled across this desolate fucking killing ground. But there was something else, something past it, he could see them-mountains, there were fucking mountains in the distance. And a sound-he couldn't make it out properly, over the sounds of the hunt, the thunder of his heart and the sawing of his breath. But then he realised what it was, what it had to be, because he couldn't just see mountains beyond the top of the rise, there was a road. There was a fucking road, running straight across-a big bastard road with cars and vans and lorries going back and forth, back and forth.

He could see it-it was in sight, in reach. Because whatever insanity this was, from whatever black and fevered nook of island history this blood sport had sprouted from, however long it had lasted, it had only been able to do so in secret. Something like this couldn't flourish in the light of day, it just couldn't. The huntsmen didn't dare follow him into the real waking world, the world beyond this place.

After that, Christ knew. Surely he couldn't have been the first to get this far, the first to have a chance of reaching the outside world. After all, who could he inform? None of this could happen without connivance at the highest level, and for people who could make this happen, gagging a few newspapers or making a few inconvenient witnesses disappear would hardly be an effort.

But that was a problem for the future-let him just avoid this and he'd take his chances with whatever came next. Mark hared up the rise; his thigh muscles screamed and he knew he was reaching the limit of his physical endurance, but not much further, not much further-

The top of the rise-he reached it, tripped, fell. No! Not this close. But he got to his feet, and then-

The earth at his feet exploded. Torn grass and powdered soil sprayed up into his face, and he staggered sideways, flailing, with a curse. A moment later, the echo of the shot reached him.

Spitting crumbs of dust, Mark looked up and saw what the rise had hidden.

The ground kept sloping down, more and more steeply. There was one more rise, a bump in the surface, and just beyond that, the motorway. But in between the two there was a fence, twenty or thirty feet high, with barbed wire at the top, like the fence through which the minibus had entered-only here, there were no gates. Only watchtowers. And standing in the watchtowers were men with rifles. One of them still had his gun at his shoulder; it would have been him who fired.

Mark looked from side to side, and all he could see in either direction were fences, stretching out from horizon to horizon.

He laughed. He had to laugh or else he'd wail or scream. The truth had always been there-he must've known this, how could he not have? He'd just refused to admit it. He'd been right when he'd thought this practice couldn't survive the light of day, but that meant that-unlike, say, a foxhunt- no one could argue in its defence that the prey at least had a sporting chance of escape. There had never been such a chance, nor one of survival. It didn't matter how clever or how fast he or May or Baghead or the Mumbler or the middle-aged woman might have been, or how hard they'd tried: their lives had ended the moment they passed through the gate. The only question had been the manner of their death.

Mark looked back over the rise and saw the hunters charge towards him, their bloodied spears held high. The pack ran before them. He tore off the backpack, ripped it open, fumbled for the broken spear. As if in answer, they lowered their own weapons and charged.

Futile fight or futile flight; either way, he lost, they won and he died for their amusement. Mark turned away as the horses ran in; he didn't want them to be the last thing he saw. Instead he fixed his eyes on the distant mountains beyond the wire. Sometimes, he thought, the closest you could come to winning was withdrawal from the game. As behind him the hunter's horn sounded for the last time, Mark laid the spear point against his heart and gathered his strength for the thrust.

WHO WILL STOP ME NOW?

Cliff McNish

Transcript of recorded interview between student Susan Daseum and Spottiswood College senior counsellor Peter Borthwick.

Preliminary notes and observations. Susan is a nineteen year-old history major, specialising in ancient Greece. Until recently, she had an exemplary behavioural, academic and attendance record. She has been absent from college for three and a half weeks. It is the foster mother who referred her to the college counselling service.

As she enters the room, my first impression is of an extremely tall girl. I have already been alerted to the enlarged size of her left arm. Even forewarned, however, it is stunning. Grossly large. There is something unusual about her eyes as well. They constantly blink and roll. Involuntary reflex? I've never seen anything quite like it. No mention of an eye impairment has arrived with her records. A long fringe hides most of the rest of her face. Even so, I can see that she is plain-some would describe her as ugly. I find I have an immediate and strong urge to help this girl.

[interview transcript follows]

Counsellor : Hello there! Grab a seat! Thank you for coming, Susan. As you know, the purpose of today's short meeting is to get to know each other a little. I want you to know that we're a confidential service. That means first and foremost that unless you tell me something that I think means you could be a danger to yourself or to someone else the information you give me stays right here with us. Okay?

Susan : Yes.

Counsellor : Good. So, I've noticed that as a cause for concern you've ticked Stressful Circumstances. If it's okay with you, Susan, what I might do is get you to fill me in on what you had in mind when you ticked that box.

Susan : Well, umm... it's been really hard. Like, I haven't been eating. I haven't been sleeping, and I'm just crying all the time.

Counsellor : Susan, perhaps we could explore these feelings for a moment. I know your arm is being medically investigated-

Susan : My arm, yeah. But also I don't seem interested in things. Or I'm interested in other things. I keep having horrible thoughts. I wonder if I might be, mmm... bipolar or schizophrenic. Mentally unbalanced or something.

Counsellor : Susan, I doubt that. Confronting physical problems isn't easy. You may or may not be aware that the college has a process called 'Socialisation' which...

Susan : No, I think I need the tests. Can you arrange them?

Counsellor : Susan, at this stage...

Susan : Fuck, will you listen! I've taken all the mirrors down in my room. Don't you understand? I can't even look at myself. You've got to help me!

Counsellor : Miss Daseum-

Susan : Arrange the tests, you fucker! You fuck! Will you help me or not?

[Transcript ends.]

Susan Dasuem. Entries from her personal diary .

January 15th . I don't know why I keep this damned journal. All it does is chart my misery. I've always been pig ugly, butt ugly, whatever you want to call it, but my unreliable boyfriend Doug told me a long time ago that he doesn't mind. To make sure he remembers that I always give him spectacular head. Doug likes to see me tremble with him all the way down, as if I'm choking. Yep, he's that kind of a guy.

Actually, I wouldn't mind his crudeness so much if I didn't always have to shell out for his beers. Dougie-boy forgets his wallet on a suspiciously large number of occasions. Tiny, subtle comments he's made have also started to make me feel a tad unwanted. For instance, last week he gently suggested I cover up my face more often. "Like, grow a bigger fringe, maybe hide the whole thing. Maybe grow a mane." He grinned as he said it-it was a pretty imaginative sentence for Doug-and all I could think to do was smile back. Maybe I'm being oversensitive here, but his remark isn't exactly the sign of a deepening relationship, is it? At least my little outburst with counsellor Borthwick got someone's attention. The psych tests I asked for have been ordered.

January 16th . It's not just my face and body that need an overhaul. I'm serious about the tests. I've had such terrifying dreams lately. I'm always killing something in them. Is that normal? I asked Doug. He said, "Uh?" It's sometimes hard to get his full attention when my bra's off. Even harder when it's on.

January 24th. The whole subject of kissing boys is fascinating, isn't it? I mean, kissing romantically. Wanting to do that. Generally I can make a boy pop in about twenty seconds if I put my mind to it. That's just suction and hydraulics. But when it comes to getting your mouth in position for a nice, ordinary, tender, purely romantic kiss on the lips-now that's something altogether stranger.

Jade, a girl in my Greek Tragedy class, told me to stop analysing everything and just close my eyes, let myself go. I looked up her advice online. Apparently, research shows that 9 out of 10 girls do close their eyes when they kiss. Is it only me that's appalled by this? Anything might be happening while your eyes are shut, right?

January 29th. Annette appeared at my bedroom door this morning, looking scared stiff. I never knew my real parents-they seem to have abandoned me at birth, nobody actually knows what happened-but Annette has fostered me since I was a tot, and has always been... well, lovely. She's warm and sensitive, and always respects my privacy.

"What is it?" I asked, seeing her hovering.

"Nothing really." She shrugged. "It's only… well, did you know that you're making unusual noises? In the middle of the night, I mean. In your sleep."

"What kind of noises?"

"Squeaks and, er..." She shrugged awkwardly. "Clicks."

"Clicks?" I couldn't help laughing. "You sure?"

"Yeah. I've been hearing them coming from your room for the past couple of weeks. At first I thought you just had your radio on or something. But this morning one noise was so weird I came in to check you were okay." She hesitated. "The sounds were coming from your mouth, Susan. One sound was especially odd. A sort of watery, liquid noise."

Crazy as this sounded, I could tell she was being serious, so I attempted a serious answer. "My throat's been a bit sore because of this cold. Maybe my breathing's rough because of that."

"Mm." Annette didn't look convinced, and maybe she was right not to be. The truth is that my throat has been sore for ages. I've just been reluctant to tell anyone. I'm not sure why.

February 3rd . Doug came round this evening, wanting to try out a new position he'd read about in a magazine. His parts all ended up in the usual place, though, so I'm surprised I bit him actually. I usually keep my teeth well clear. But I've always had sharp molars, and today he was irritating me. Maybe it was just that. Doug gave me a little slap when I cut him. "Just you watch it, baby."

February 21st . I stood naked in front of my bedroom mirror today. I don't do this too often. Once a month is about all I can handle. The million-dollar question is always, Do I look grimmer than last month? And the answer is always, Yessirree!

The most favourable description I can offer of myself is that I still have two arms, two legs and a single head. Good so far, eh? But check a little more closely here and what do we find? What about that skull? Isn't it a bit oversized? A bit misshapen? Doug, in typically lyrical mood, once called it mule-like, which is actually fairly accurate. Crates of foundation can't hide the fact that I'd be a good-looking horse if I had a better complexion.

Go beneath my spotty equine face, however, past my thick roly-poly neck, and briefly things are looking up. I do have fairly decent breasts. They're large, too, and more or less symmetrical. I say more or less because the aureole of the right nipple is twice the size of the left. I can live with that, but recently, well, there are other issues. How shall I put this? Both breasts have started to move about. What do I mean? Well, I mean that sometimes I'll find the whole weight of my breasts shifting north like they're on some separate geological plate from the rest of my body. They don't just stick to north, either. South is equally popular, with westward swings. Perhaps they're following the setting sun. God knows what's going on. All I know is that they're swaying around aplenty. These days I even have to keep them inside an especially tight reinforced bra during college sports to avoid anyone noticing.

Actually, the only time I've seen anything like their motion was one afternoon with Doug. He'd just had a real good time and I remember lying next to him afterwards, watching his testicles. Their languid motion was somewhat similar to my breasts. The sacs containing his balls were rolling gently backward and forward. It was mesmerizing to watch. Kind of endearing, too. Keeping the temperature A-OK, Doug told me proudly, when he caught me checking him out. Keeping the sperm nice and cool.

Fine. But what am I keeping cool?

Travelling down my torso, my monthly exam reveals thighs that are muscular, taut. No idea why. I never exercise. Between them is a forest. I shave regularly, but it's never enough. Doug closes his eyes and pretends not to notice. But look up again, skyward from my sprouting thighs, and you'll find my arms waving down at you. Until recently both looked fairly normal. My right arm still does. It's my best feature, folks! The left looks like it could heft a tank across Russia.

What my foster mum Annette cutely calls my little problem began this winter. Initially it was just a recurring discomfort in my left wrist. A whole host of tests followed. Glandular checks. Bone scans. MRIs. Even a chromosome screen "to rule out any genetic abnormalities." That sounded scary enough, but the results were more so. The x-rays showed that the main bones in my left arm are all growing at an alarming rate. "Not only is the resulting bone density extremely hard," the consultant told us, "but based on the rate of growth we're worried that the surrounding ligaments and joints might rupture under the pressure."

You can imagine how frightening it was to hear that. Annette did a double-take, so panicked that on the same day she gave the medics carte blanche to do more or less any tests they wanted on me. Since then, every time I trundle up to King's hospital, a whole team of specialists arrive to prod, scan me and draw endless quantities of blood.

I have to admit, looking back, that it was mildly exciting the first couple of times I turned up to see the doctors. After all, the tests showed I was unique. My left arm wasn't too big back then, either. I could have my uniqueness and still cover it up. With the right clothes, I could almost make-believe it wasn't a problem at all.

Not any longer, darlings. Counsellor Borthwick cringed when he saw it. I don't blame him. Everyone does these days. My arm's hideous. The growth has been accelerating recently as well. At night I can feel the skin expanding. The medics haven't a clue what's causing it. Fluid retention? Muscle hardening? Bloated sebaceous glands? All I know is that it's really, really frightening. And yesterday I received news that it's not just my arm. The latest test results show the swelling spreading to the rest of my body. Bones are wider than they were. Ligaments are stretching. My thyroid readings are apparently unheard of. Hormonally, across almost every index the medics can measure, I'm off the scale.

"What the fuck's wrong with you, anyway?" Doug complained yesterday, as if he'd only just noticed the change. "Your fingernails feel like friggin' knives."

Which, if you ask me, is an incautious comment to make when those knives are working overtime fingering your arse the way you asked for it only five friggin' minutes ago.

"Sorry," I said contritely, digging a little deeper. Enough to make his eyes water.

March 3rd . Arm much bigger. Head no smaller. Everything still swelling like rampant peaches in the sun.

I haven't been into college for a couple of days. Can't bear the stares. Instead I'm spending most of my time gazing from my bedroom window. It's a good way to avoid looking at my arm. I can feel it dragging towards the floor. What the hell's going on? It's vast now. I reckon a midget family could all sit quite comfortably on its length. There'd even be room for a picnic.

The medics just give me doleful, scared looks these days, but Annette's been great. She keeps making me my favourite meals and stuff. I don't know what I'd do without her. I wish she'd stop trying to get me out of the house to go on shopping trips with her, though. "It's that... that... thing... holding you back. Oh, Susie, you mustn't let it," she keeps saying, and I know she's right, but I don't want to be spotted by any of my friends. I'm trying to see the funny side, however. Keeping my spirits up, as Counsellor Borthwick advises. I didn't even react much when one of Doug's mates, Micko, offered me a crumb of sympathy last week. "So what's wrong, then?" he grunted. "You all miserable 'cos of your massive arm, yeah?" He pointed at my elbow. "Nah, what's the problem? It don't look too bad."

This was honestly the best he could do. This, for Micko, was deep empathy. We were in Starbucks at the time, and I sipped my frappuccino, hoping he'd get the hint that I had no desire to talk about the subject. But of course he didn't. Instead he leaned over the table, eager to ogle what was poking out of my shirtsleeve.

"I'm thinking of entering javelin competitions," I told him. "One of the college sports coaches thinks I'd be really good. He thinks I might even have an outside chance of making the Olympic squad."

"What?" Micko grunted. "What you on about?"

"You want to touch it?" I asked.

That shut him up. "No," he said, quick as a flash. "It's... all right."

"Oh, go on," I urged. "Like you said, it's not so bad. Give it a good tug. Be brave. It won't bite."

And to encourage him I sort of lifted his hand and placed it-very delicately-on top of my bulging forearm.

Poor Micko-his recoiling fingers couldn't get away fast enough.

Doug and his dim friends aren't the only ones recoiling, however. The fact that my arm now rests like a big cylinder against my side, heavy, broad and rock hard, tends to dominate everyone's attention. Doug even took it upon himself to christen it recently. Did it in front of the whole history class. Deciding that my arm deserved some recognition for the sheer extent of its girth, he gave it a name. Clarissa. Someone shouted him down, but the name stuck. Clarissa: my ever-enlarging arm. I've even started calling it that myself. It seems to fit in some horrible way.

March 28th. A month has gone by and the tests are still officially 'indeterminate.' I'm growing every which way, but all the consultants can do is hope it stops before something bursts. I've been in my room for weeks now, hardly going anywhere. I'm so tired of being stuck inside. I'm sick of worrying about it all as well. Sick of being in this room. Sick of everything. This afternoon I found myself whispering to Clarissa. I'm talking to my fucking arm! I've got to get out of the house...

April 1st. My friend Sarah Archer took it upon herself to arrange a blind date for me yesterday. "Something to make you feel better," she promised, looking all emotional and misty eyed when she saw the state of me.

Actually, there's a bit more to the date than just sympathy. It's the challenge she relished. Could she get anyone to date me?

Well, miraculously, she did. A night out with Henry Duke. I couldn't believe it. Henry's a modest, smart boy, one of the funniest kids in my Ancient Greek history class. Actually, he's really sweet, a boy I've always fancied, so though I was flustered by having the date dropped on me, and knew he was probably only coming out of pity, or because pretty Sarah asked him, I gave myself a pep-talk on the night. Life has to go on, and all that , and he might not mind too much etc etc. That sort of got me as far as my closet, where I found something to half-shroud my upper body. Then I combed my hair as best I could over my face, covered up Clarissa with a jacket the size of a tarpaulin, and shuffled my scared little way to the town centre to meet him.

The first hour went okay. I kept Clarissa out of sight. I was even managing to enjoy myself until we took our seats at Stan's Bar. That's when Henry made his great move. I knew he was going to do it. From little shufflings of his bum it was obvious what he was up to-edging closer, calculating distances, daring himself. And when he actually found the guts to spread that thin freckled arm of his around Clarissa, and swing in for a swift half-kiss on my bony cheek, I must admit that part of me felt pleased and almost pathetically happy.

But then Henry went and spoiled things. I guess he couldn't help himself. "God, I bet you could do some damage with that arm," he muttered.

I couldn't believe how crass the comment was. But I didn't overreact. No, I forgave him. I figured my life was going to be filled with comments like that from now on, so I'd better toughen up. And I was rewarded. Because later, when we were at the movies, at a point when the screen action was particularly noisy, and he thought he could sneak it in, Henry reached yet again with that normal arm of his towards mine and held Clarissa ever so close. It was an incredibly intimate moment. If he'd touched my breasts it wouldn't have been anything like so powerful. And while I was mortified that it was obviously such a big deal to him, I shivered with relief and nearly swooned with gratitude.

I felt so grateful, in fact, that I kind of leaned into him. Not a good move. Henry, propped against my right side, wasn't quite ready yet for that level of intimacy with Clarissa. He actually screamed when she jabbed him-a stifled scream, but if Henry had been alone, and not protecting his reputation, I think it would have been a right howler.

I don't remember much about the rest of the evening. Let's just say we were both very absorbed in the movie. Henry, though, shocked me by giving me one more chance to kiss him. The moment came just before we left. Even now I'm filled with gratitude, because I could see he was trying to make up for his scream earlier. As he bent toward me he looked so timid, so unsure of himself, but he had the guts to do it anyway. Good old Henry.

Our lips didn't quite meet up, though. I pulled away. A cold feeling just swept over me. Ludicrously, instead of sharing a melting kiss, all I'd wanted to do in that moment was chew on his lower lip. Bite hard and take a lump out. Not exactly the easiest thing to tell a boy just as he's about to give you his best move.

In the end, we agreed to meet next week, so at least he hasn't dumped me yet. Tomorrow I've got some eye tests. Yes, folks, another problem that's become the talk of the town! My bitty-batty pupils won't stop fucking rocking and rolling in their sockets.

April 4th
Okay, I've had the eye-tests, and I think I successfully managed to terrify the examiner, a Chinese consultant called Zio-Min. My eyes have been fretfully on the move for weeks-roiling, rolling in their sockets, generally scaring people to death (though I see okay, he checked: better than 20/20 vision).

Anyway, Zio-Min bombarded my eyes with low intensity lights to check that my peripheral vision was okay. It was more than okay. It was perfect. Then he moved me across to another machine called a slit-lamp microscope. His face was so close to me that I could smell his cheap aftershave and a trace of curry-filled sweat.

A strong beam of light struck my eye. The next moment Zio-Min grunted "zhòu!" and jumped away from the machine, backing towards the wall.

"That," he whispered, "is not a normal red-eye reflex."

He was afraid to approach the microscope again. "Tell me what you're seeing," I coaxed, using the same soothing bedside manner I'd seen from George Clooney on ER.

"Nocturnal hunting animals," he stuttered. "When you shine a light at their eye it looks... almost white."

"That's what you've just seen?"

"Yes."

"Go on."

He shook his head. "It's only with creatures like cats and dogs. Their eyes have... a different structure. Our eyes are built for daylight. Evolutionarily speaking, we hunt by day. It's one of the reasons we see colours well and our depth perception is so good. But dogs and cats, well... they hunt by night as well as by day-or in twilight anyhow." He licked his lips. "That means their sensitivity to light has to be five or six times as good as ours. A cat can't see where there's no light at all, but it has a layer of cells behind its retina called a tapetum. This effectively acts as a mirror, re-reflecting light back to the retina, enabling it to see better than us."

"Are you saying I've got a tapetum?"

"Yes. No, of course not. It's impossible."

"So how do you explain it?"

"I can't." Zio-Min looked genuinely shaken. "I've never seen anything like this. Short of dissecting your eye, there's no way I can find out what it is." He looked as if he wouldn't have minded doing exactly that. "The equipment must be faulty."

I stood up and switched off all the lights in the room. A sliver of light seeping under the door was enough for me to pick out all the pockmarked hollows of Zio-Min's face. His anxious eyes blinked pointlessly at me in the darkness. For all practical purposes, in this environment, he was blind. But why wasn't I?

Snatching a light pen out of his jacket pocket, I walked across to a small mirror. Facing it, I shone the torch a centimetre or two from my eye.

The light reflected back was a dazzling, pure white.

April 16th . My last few weeks have been filled with a kind of exultant terror. A tapetum! Crazy! But I'm gradually starting to feel calmer. A lot clearer as well. I think I'm crossing some kind of threshold. I feel on the cusp of extraordinary revelations. To prepare for it, I've decided to shut myself in my room. No more dates with Henry for a while. I've switched my mobile off too. The only person who can reach me now is Annette. She keeps trying to get me to leave my bedroom-or at least come downstairs. She's right to insist. I'd spend all my time upstairs otherwise. What's happening to me?

April 18th . The results of the psychological tests arranged by Counsellor Borthwick are due soon. For some reason, instead of dreading them, I find I'm looking forward to discovering what they reveal.

Until the results arrive, I've got everything I need in the house. I'm hibernating. We've got food and drink aplenty. I don't need anything else. I'm happy just gazing from my room. I like my window. I've placed a chair beside it. I perch there most of the day, remaining as still as a model being painted. The only thing that bothers me is the thought of someone outside seeing my face. I'm sure I've gotten uglier since the start of this week. Annette says that's nonsense, but I notice she's taken all the mirrors down in the house.

April 20th . I think it's Thursday. It's deeply peaceful here in the dry stale air of my room. I have been sitting upright next to my window since dawn. I stay here, quietly gazing out, while inside me.... alterations occur.

The view outside is tame. Rural fields. Green hedges. The edge of a wood. There aren't any other houses or people. Nothing to spoil the view. Well, the occasional walker on a trail. As they pass by I follow their footsteps like an eager child peering from the mouth of a cave.

Clarissa is ever expanding. Growth is happening in other regions of my body as well. Many other regions.

April 21st . Annette is increasingly worried about me. I guess she's right to be. At night I've begun to hear voices. They're quite sibilant. I swear my hair is whispering to me. And not only the hair on my head.

April 22nd
. I can't even remember any longer when this ceaseless vigil at my bedroom window began. All I know is that I never want to leave my room any more. I'm content to just wait here and let the transformation, whatever it is, complete itself. And this is a transformation. I'm sure of that now. But into what? Maybe I'll start spinning a cocoon soon, and emerge weeks from now as something winged and stunningly, achingly beautiful. Somehow I doubt it. But I couldn't get any uglier, could I?

April 23rd It's late. A warm night. I just tried screaming from my bedroom window. I was curious how the scream would sound. Still high-pitched, like a girl's? No, it was more clogged-up than that. Not surprising, as I've been coughing up some sort of syrupy yellow bile for days. Annette is feeding me cough sweets, but-guess what folks?-they don't help!

Deep in my throat I hear faint rustlings. My vocal cords sound like they've been lacerated. They're murdering every sound that comes out. The human voice runs at between 80 hz and 1100 hz. I've been reading all about it on the Internet. The notes I'm making are heavier, rooted in some antediluvian scale.

"Annette!" I keep yelling, "Annette!"-and the vowels emerge in muffled detonations, like velveted bombs. What tender traps are being set down there in my throat? The consonants lack all sharpness, the vowels slide out caked in fur. Interestingly Annette came up immediately, though. She fairly ran up those stairs. Couldn't have done it faster.

April 24th . Overnight, naughty Clarissa's been growing without my permission again. If I stretch her out, fully unfurl her like a flag, she now reaches from one end of the room to the other. She's thick enough to be a foundation of our house. That's intriguing, isn't it? A platform to build upon, anyway.

Annette doesn't quite see matters the same way. She's getting all vehement and huffy downstairs. She insists I leave my room. She won't bring my food up any more. She's trying to starve me out. She keeps crying and shouting up the stairs as well, begging me to answer. I understand that. The shouting, I mean. I have an urge to do some pretty loud roaring of my own.

I wonder what Doug's up to today?

April 25th . Last night I sat in my chair by the window. I must have drifted off to sleep. When I woke up again, I took a sip of water, breathing heavily, and a word exploded from my throat. And it was so wonderful to hear it, such a blessed relief! It's a word I've had a desire to say for a while. To utter, as it were. To announce. A statement of intent.

Monster .

Enthralling what happened afterwards as well. Clarissa tensed. Flinched. As soon as the second syllable flowed off my tongue, she rose like some glorious warrior to the level of my neck and hovered there, as if seeking out my enemies. I'm not afraid of her anymore.

April 27th. Tufts of hair have started growing all over my ankles. When I flex my feet, I can feel additional joints. New ligatures as well. Subtle improvements. I think I may be able to run faster than before.

April 28th . It's amazing how much you can pick up from the Internet. I don't even have to leave this seat to see the world. I can sit with my laptop on my hairy knees, and surf wherever I like. For instance, I've discovered that teeth are meant to stop growing when you reach the age of eighteen or at most twenty. Strange that, because mine have put on a new spurt. I have more than before too. They're fighting for space. I have to keep my mouth open slightly all the time now or, clickety-clack, a percussion orchestra starts up inside there. To breathe freely I also have to keep my tongue protruded, extended as far out as possible. Not a pose that helps a girl look her finest.

April 29th I've been catching up on my Ancient History course work. I'd like to be able to offer up some new insights to my class when I return. In particular, I've been diligently re-reading Ovid. Dear Publius Ovidius Naso. He was born in 43 BC, aRoman poet who wrote about love, seduction andmythological transformation. He's considered a master of theelegiac couplet. Oh yes, his poetry decisively influencedEuropean art and literature, you know.

You may not care much about this, but bear with me, because the reason I mention him is that he's the man who told us the true story of the raped priestess. A beautiful maiden the girl was, 'the jealous aspiration of many suitors'. Chaste, of course. Virginal. Weren't they all in those old Greek myths? Can't you just feel the lonely cocks of the misogynistic authors who penned them? Their sexual frustration radiates from every page.

Anyway, the girl was chosen to be a priestess for the temple at Carthage. A high honour, especially for one so lowly of birth as I. Yes, me me me. Get ready. I'm understanding everything now.

Inside those cool chambers, my time was devoted to the quiet adoration of the goddess, Athena. Looking back at what took place there, if Zeus had been the first to spy me it might have gone better for me. He was the worst of the gods, the ultimate defiler. We'd all seen him skulking in the corridors, or watching us in his unnerving 'shower of golden rain' form from the windows. We feared him, and we were right to. He rutted with every mortal female he could. But he might have protected me. And Zeus-would it have been so bad? At least he was something to behold. King of the gods, ruler ofMount Olympus, the eagle, the cloud-gatherer, striding forward, that great thunderbolt forever gripped in his ancient fist.

But Poseidon? To be honest, a rank below. An incredible conquest for any human female, true, but whatever storms and froths he whipped up he wasn't Zeus, never was, never could be.

I wonder if it was that which made it harder for Athena to accept what he did. Lord of the Sea and all the oceans, yes, but how dare Poseidon do this, besmirch the floor of her own temple with our juices?

He saw me, though, and he wanted me, oh how he wanted me. So he took me. Why deny himself? He impaled me. The Greeks called it ravishment. It sounds wondrous, doesn't it? Like a pure thing. But even when a god does it, it is rape, and afterwards I lay on the hard marble steps of the temple, sobbing and bleeding.

"Help me, Lady of Athens," I prayed, holding up my arms to the statue of the goddess I worshipped and loved. I was so innocent, had led so shy and sheltered a life, that I even prayed for forgiveness. I believed it was my own fault I'd become the gleam in Poseidon's eye.

And surely Athena came to my aid? Surely she comforted me? Took me up in her arms? Wiped away my tears? Pallas Athena, the Greeks called her, goddess of wisdom. Even beyond Zeus she was adored. Athena the compassionate! Athena, beloved of the people! She was to be seen everywhere in those days: on vases, plates, bottles, even the sandals of our feet. You couldn't puke in Athens without seeing her perfect face staring up at you from the cobbles.

And she aided many heroes, of course. Odysseus, Jason, Heracles. Hosts of others. Oh yes, she liked the men especially, though intriguingly she never raped one. I wonder why. No mortal man could have stopped her.

Sitting here in my bedroom, reflecting back on those times, I believe I now finally understand why Athena brought such a terrible retribution upon me that day. All that power she had, all that femininity, and yet never to take a lover? How odd. Her chasteness earned her the title Athena Parthenos,
'Athena the Virgin', and seeing the excoriating glare she gave me in the temple, I knew she coveted that name more than any other.

It's often overlooked by the old mythmakers, but remember that Athena narrowly avoided rape herself. The god Hephaestus tried to pin her lovely body down. She eluded him, but he must have come close because we're told his semen fell on the ground and a baby boy, Erichthonius, was born from the residue.

Here's what I think. I don't believe Athena ever forgot that attempted rape. All rape victims live in everlasting horror of the act-I should know-and I saw it reflected in her eyes that day. And remember, too, that she was always having to prove herself worthy of her exalted status, because she was not fully born of the gods. Oh no. She was the daughter of Metis-a giantess, no less, a Titan. A beast who ruled the fourth day and the planet Mercury. Zeus bedded her as he bedded everything-girl, giant, ailing donkey, it didn't matter to him.

But then his gutless side emerged. A prophecy had foretold that any offspring of Metis would be greater than he, and that was something big-boy Zeus wasn't prepared to accept. To avoid that fate, he swallowed Metis whole. Actually, think about that a second. It's really amazing. According to Hesiod's Theogony Zeus "put her away inside his own belly." He "swallowed her down all of a sudden." Imagine that! To be swallowed by a god!

But in any case, he was too late: clever Metis had already conceived. Athena was fermenting inside her. Metis nurtured Athena within Zeus's own body and gave birth, whereupon Athena burst forth from Zeus's forehead fully armed with weapons provided by her mother.

Pretty impressive, eh? Take a bow, Metis.

But the impact on Athena? No one to nurture her womanly side. Her mother killed by Zeus. And then daddy Zeus takes her on as his 'daughter'. I wonder how many times he ravished her in her sleep?

How could Athena have been anything but deranged? History attests to her moods and rages. I think I understand. Yes, I understand you, my dear. I understand only too well what happened that day in the temple when you heard my piteous cries. The need to deny what happened. To batten down the hatches. You were always a jealous guardian of your own inglorious virginal reputation. This could not happen in your temple.

But I heard something later: a minor god who came sniffing after Poseidon's dregs whispered it to me. You came trembling one night to Zeus's chamber, didn't you, Athena? You came and he spurned you. Rejected you. A deliberate taunt. Chose instead a plain mortal woman that night. Made you watch.

April 30th . I really need a much bigger room! I have to crouch these days so that I don't touch the ceiling, and every time I stretch Clarissa ricochets around the wall, gouging out lumps of plaster like a road drill. It's annoying, but I guess she's telling me she needs open skies!

My overall body size is twice what it was, but the growth is not equal across my limbs. I'm three times my previous girth across the abdomen and loins. My womb is not only bigger, but thicker walled as well. I can sense that. It feels as if it's preparing to receive a very vivid guest. That should terrify me, but instead I'm excited.

May 1st . Annette's not sleeping well at all. Occasionally I see her hiding in the garden, skulking, daring herself to look up at me. She's an intelligent woman, however, and beneath the fear is puzzlement about why I stare from this window day and night. Am I waiting for something? Maybe. Maybe I'm waiting for that young man, the one walking across the field.

I am seated, as usual, at the window, when I spot him. I stay entirely still, observing him. I realise that I can read his thoughts. It's a gift that has been coming upon me recently. Annette's anxious musings reached me first. But now... how fascinating... I am inside this man's mind as well. He's staring at me. He thinks he's staring at some kind of hideous mask appended to the window. He thinks that yellow bile on my face is paint. He doesn't believe I'm real. How can I be?

I think I'll bring him here for a closer look. My vulva crimps and, even though he cannot see what roils there, his feet twitch towards me. When he is at the gate he stops, though. He's seen my face move. And now, of course, he wants to run. I hold him momentarily with my gaze, but I'm still learning how to do that, and his terror outstrips my current skill. He escapes.

After he's gone, I switch my mobile back on and invite Doug over. It's a while since he's seen me, and he hasn't been getting any sex. I can tell that from his voice alone. That's not a new ability I've acquired. Doug always whines. He must be gagging for it because he's being quite nice, asking how I am and everything.

I bring a hint of menstrual blood to my scalp and leave it there. Then I prepare the room. I know what Doug likes. He likes his sex in full-blooded daylight. He likes seeing my sex close up and fully lit. Today, however, I close the shades, make it almost black dark.

A terrified Annette tries to shoo Doug away when he arrives, but I call down for him with a tender purr and he needs no second invitation. It's all a game, I say, from the gloom, and he believes me. In truth, I'm crouched like the jaw-agape monster I now am in the cloying darkness, lying in wait, and before the smell of the room makes him hesitate I'm at him, gathering him into my mouth.

I don't mean to hurt him at first. I'm genuinely curious about what my lips will do. It's only when he yells that I realise I've cut him again. So many teeth competing inside my gums these days. But guess what? Doug hesitates before smacking me this time. "Close your eyes," I murmur. "It'll be best that way."

He thinks I'm about to give him head, and only realises something is seriously wrong when it takes the width of both his hands to encompass my face. He whimpers then. I'd been feeling a hint of regret about killing him before that whimper. I'd even considered keeping my mouth fully open, allowing him to withdraw safely. That snivel, though, brought me back to my senses. His eyes had adjusted to the dark by then. He looked at me, and I looked back at him. Eye to eye, through my bulky fringe, as it were. He saw Clarissa poised over his pubic bone, and his little cherub began bouncing up and down with fear.

But I decided to delay killing him. Instead I licked his face, patted his cheek and left him in the corner of the room, making sure to leave his penis exposed. Later on, I realise it is not from pity that I've spared him. I just want to come back to him later, when I'm more adept. More adept at what? I don't know yet. Anyway, I'll need to replace him soon. That thing in his jeans was never able to fill my mouth, and it certainly can't now. No boy can. I need a real man. Maybe a bull.

May 5th . Annette is a phenomenon, she really is! Although I bolted all the doors and windows a while back, she still hasn't completely given up hope for me. She's been praying nonstop, which is quite a lot for a non-believer. And now she's coming up the stairs. She's actually on her way up! I'll show her to Doug. He could learn a thing or two about guts from this woman. He and I both listen to Annette as, from the dregs of her will, she raps on my door and politely asks if I'll join her for breakfast.

She weeps when I agree. She hadn't expected me to say yes. She doesn't really want me to come down. But I do come down. I don't walk, of course. I squeeze and squish my bulk in a slug-like splurge between floor and ceiling. It's the only way I can get around these days.

Before I enter the kitchen, I tap softly twice on the door. I still have some feelings for Annette. She continues to love me, you know. She really does. She still thinks of me as her daughter. Which surprises me. Which astonishes me. I owe her something for that.

I'm even briefly embarrassed by the way I look as I enter the kitchen. I cover my face with one hand, my hair with the other-or as much of it as I can grasp. Annette says nothing as I slump down across two dining chairs and release a small deposit of something on the table. I don't quite know what it is. Neither does she. She ignores it, behaves as if everything is normal, but I see her fingers trembling as she dishes out cereal. The milk's already on the table. And the sugar. Is she really pouring cornflakes into that bowl? Hasn't she seen what live things I'm eating now when my tongue can find them from the window? Never mind. I'll eat the cornflakes. I'll honour her long enough to do that.

"What's the matter with your hair?" she murmurs, as if I've merely been careless with it. I allow her to touch the strands. She can't hide the disgust or fear in her voice. I find myself loving the tremor. The way her voice wavers. Trembles. Is that what I've been waiting for? To hear that breaking note from Annette? Is this the sign I am finally ready?

"What have you done?" she demands, imbecilically burying her hands inside the curls. "Did you put something in it to make it this wet? What is this?" She removes her hands again, looks down at the dark stinking dampness. "Soil?" Then she sniffs her fingers and recoils.

"Don't touch the ends," I say. "Don't get too close. Leave them alone."

Annette ignores me. She can't make the adjustment. "But what have you smeared in it?"

What's wrong with her? Doesn't she know that it is only by sheer indomitability of will I am holding my own hair back from eating her?

Later, I allow her to take me to the bathroom and wash the outer hair strands. It is perhaps the last favour I will ever grant her or anyone. She chooses lavender shampoo. It's a sweet smell, I suppose. But my own scent overpowers it. If Annette could only smell the hair elsewhere on my body she'd be even more scared.

May 5th
. Early hours of the morning, and I've decided to conduct a small experiment. While Annette sleeps, I fetch raw eggs and organic yogurt and spread them together on my hair. The mixture is quickly absorbed. The odd thing is that I've never really liked eggs or yogurt much. So: a different appetite from my mouth. Whatever is up there has tastes and preferences of its own.

May 9th . The day has finally arrived for Annette and I to receive the results of the psychological tests. Phew-what a wait! I remind her to open the letter, but she does it listlessly. She doesn't seem particularly interested. Actually, she's trembling so much when I come downstairs that I have to hold her face still for a few minutes until it stops shaking.

As I squeeze her into stillness, I realise that the house seems smaller. Or maybe I'm even larger than last time I was up and about. Under the pressure of my fingers, Annette is very child-like, wanting to scream and run and cry and warn people about me all at the same time, but my eyes have asked her not to do any of those things, and in their rolling/blinky way they're remarkably compelling these days. Well, after all, Annette hasn't got much resistance to me. She's not my real mother, is she? I don't know what impressive bitch spawned me, but it had nothing to do with Annette.

After resting, I go back up to my room, pull Doug towards my knee and we take our usual places beside the window.

I look out. A farmer, about a quarter of a mile from the house, is fixing a fence. I make the farmer look at me, and he fouls himself. Luckily, I'm already used to that from Doug. I smile and so, copying me, does my worn-out Dougie-boy.

May 13th . A busy, busy day! Annette and I have amused ourselves for hours putting the mirrors back in place all over the house. Doug helped, too, though I had to steady his arms. I'm quite excited when we're finished because it's been many weeks since I looked at my reflection. When I do so, I find I have a face that is still vaguely but recognisably human. It even looks female. At least I think it does. I ask Doug for confirmation, and he nods. If anything, my breasts are blooming, though Doug won't look at them when I ask him to check them out.

But here's the weird thing. I thought I was intimately in touch with all the changes happening to me, but to my complete surprise my left eye-socket is crusted in slime or vomited blood or some other putrescence. When I ask Doug to investigate he passes out. There's also something odd going on between my legs. Some kind of furtive movement. I've only got a vague idea what that's all about, and Doug, when he wakes, is completely stumped.

May 14th . Once it's dark, I leave the house. It is the first time I have done so for many weeks, and I stride across the fields. I wonder where my newly strong thighs will take me? The whole world is bright to me, and the mystery of what is between my legs licks the ground as I pass over ripening corn, decapitating seed heads. My hair whispers to me. Promises the strands wish me to keep. I'm listening.

I stay outside until around two a.m. It's raining, but the moisture barely penetrates my hardening skin. I wait until the rain stops, then lie face down. My cavernous voice resonates through the soil. Vibrations call creatures up through the substrate, and I'm followed back to the house by... well, slithering invertebrates, mostly. It's hard to be that interested in insects, but people will soon join them. Acolytes. Proselytes. A few women, but mostly men. I'll stay true to my Athenian roots. Men drawn by my incontestable beauty. You think not? You think this moist writhing armpit would not entice you? Think again. The ancient writers remarked upon it. If I could snare Poseidon, do you really think your children are going to refuse an invitation under my sheets?

May 16th. I'm really looking like something that might turn heads these days! The snakes won't stay still for a second. Yes, I'm back to the full horrific glory Athena transformed me into. 'The Medusa. A face so terrible of aspect that merely to behold her converts a man to stone.' Truthfully, I long ago came to accept my looks. What really galls, though, is the way in that bastard Ovid's retelling of it my punishment by Athena is described as just and well deserved. He had no idea how long I tried to find a safe haven after Athena warped me. I went everywhere, covering my face. I begged family and friends. All turned me away. Where could I go after that?

A cave was the only place I might be left alone.

But even that was not punishment enough for Athena. Oh no. It was not enough that I rot for eternity in a stinking cave. Not for her. She wanted rid of me entirely. Wanted me expunged. But not by her own fair hand, of course. She used Perseus. When he was given the task by King Polydectes to slay me, she favoured him. Prevailed upon Hermes to give up his winged sandals as well. Begged that coward Hades to supply a cap of invisibility. And, of course, it was Athena herself who supplied the burnished shield so that Perseus could see my reflected image without ever having to look upon me. I stood at the mouth of the cave before he came that day, looked out over the dolphin-torn Mediterranean dawn, and-on my knees, weeping every tear I had left-I begged Poseidon to offer me safe passage away from this island before Athena's assassin came.

Poseidon refused. Of course he refused. This time Athena was watching. And so a great hero was born-Perseus, offspring of Danae, bastard son of Zeus, slayer of the Gorgon!

And that, you would think, might have been enough retribution even for the insane Athena. But you would be wrong. Grateful Perseus made a votive gift of my head to her, and she took it. She took it and attached it as the central boss of her shield, the aegis. And then, as Athena Promachos, she carried my head for all time thereafter into battle at the vanguard of her armies. A purity of terror, Virgil called me, the Gorgoneion. 'A severed head rolling its eyes'. 'Therein was set,' says Homer, 'as a crown the Gorgon, grim of aspect, glaring terribly, and about her were Terror and Rout.'

Of course, things have moved on since those heady days. We don't see much of Zeus and Athena any more, do we? They've retreated into Mount Olympus's obscure heights. We're much more modern and grown-up now. We don't believe in monsters.

While Doug watches something writhing on my face, I've been thinking about all of this and reading Das Medusenhaupt. You may be familiar with it. It's one of Sigmund Freud's late essays from around 1940. In it, he calls me 'The supreme talisman who provides the image of castration.' The sight of me, he said, makes the spectator 'stiff with terror'. Freud, typically, had an answer for any man who came across a woman like me. You know, thecastrating type of woman he was always on the lookout for. This was his advice, guys. Are you listening? He said you should display your own penis in riposte. He thought this would work. To display the erect penis, he said, is to announce, 'I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis.' Oh, what a screwed-up miserable little man he must have been. I wish I could have watched what happened to his little cherub when I stepped into his study.

But at least Freud had a healthy respect for my dark side. Incomprehensibly, I'm a symbol for women's liberation these days. They plumb the depths of my story and find the wellspring of their own righteous womanly anger. Their anger? I'll show them anger!

Doug's sitting ever so quietly at the back of the room. He thinks I've forgotten about him. He's desperately thirsty, but he's too scared to move. He's fading fast but still valiantly hanging onto life. If he's a good boy I'll find some moisture to give him.

May 28th . Annette prefers to breakfast alone these days, but I insist. All morning I've had her between my legs, investigating the mysterious boiling/moiling/roiling going on down there. I'm actually a bit scared to look myself. Annette is a handy probe. My remote surveillance device, if you like. Her plunged head can get right down there and do the preliminary research. Only... I'm not quite sure how best to use her head exactly. As a plug? Or as something to stroke the area? Oh, that's a horrible thing to suggest, isn't it? How terrible is that? Everybody only wants the best for me. Annette. Even that well-meaning if inept counsellor, Borthwick. He rang Annette's mobile, asking after me. I heard it tinnily beeping, and fetched Annette back up to let me listen. Mr Borthwick wants to come over.

Midnight. A few minutes ago, I made a mistake. I forgot I was holding Annette against me. I dropped her when I remembered, but she slumped straight to the floor, dead. After waiting a respectful few seconds, I touched myself down there, still without looking down. The hardness made me flinch. What is it? Perhaps even my own rigid fingers aren't going to be safe from the appetite of that slippery flesh. I'll have to find more creative ways to pleasure myself.

"Mr Borthwick?" My voice quakes on the phone. He thinks it is because I am frightened. "Mr Borthwick. Yes, it's me! Oh, thank God I've got through! It's Susan Daseum. You said you'd come over? You were... umm... so helpful before..."

"Susan? Can I speak to your mother?"

"Mr Borthwick, please can you come over? Please? Please hurry! I'm... I'm... I'm..."

My voice snares him. He won't be able to stop himself. When he arrives, I will take the skin of his purple head back just beyond the glans. I'll rub there gently, gently. Then I'll go straight for the breathless double-scream you only get with a straight yank that tears the foreskin all the way past suddenly and pointlessly clenching balls.

Maybe I'll practise on Doug first. He's fond of orally related games. Let me ask him. No, he doesn't want to play.

I can read the mind of everyone now. Counsellor Borthwick's head is full of my charms. He doesn't even know why, but he's anxious to get here as fast as he can. He's running, practically skipping, up to his bathroom two steps at a time. He feels young again. Wants to freshen himself up. Deodorant. Change those old socks.

Time to comb my hair for him. The serpents lift the brush from the dresser, and do it themselves. They arrange their grins, amused.

Here Mr Borthwick comes. I'm watching him approach the house in his car, seeing through his eyes. On the dashboard is a promise. ' Every situation is unique. Get help early. Counselling is free.' My snakes whisper something, and I agree. I send the counsellor back for his wife and daughter.

My test results sit in his bulging lap. They reveal incipient pathological traits and schizoid tendencies, don't they, Mr Borthwick? Isn't that their emphatic conclusion? So why are you on your way to me?

Mr Borthwick arrives with his family, looking red-faced. Touchingly he's brought the psychological evaluation with him. He's clutching it in his hand. He's intending to use it to break the ice between us. Now Mr Borthwick, we both know why you're here. Why don't you put that silly report down and bring your nice family a little closer?

I ask the wife to come into the bedroom first. I begin a seduction-well, a sort of seduction. I promised the snakeheads first pickings. "Fair and foul I love together," I sing, as the strands busy themselves with her. I'm quoting Keats, but I don't think she hears. Doug, watching from my loins, is equally unappreciative. "Meadows sweet where flames burn under." I love this poem. "And a giggle at a wonder." She's dead by the time I finish.

I look down at Doug. He has such pity for the woman. Genuinely. He's run the whole gamut of fear since he's been here in this room, but instead of cringing self-indulgence I find an unexpected depth of real sadness for what has happened to Mr Borthwick's wife. He'd have helped her if he could.

I lift Doug up, raise his body to the ceiling: an honouring. I'm almost overcome with affection for him. All the other girls thought I was mad seeing grungy Doug, but even my untutored self sensed there was something worth knowing there, after all. "I'm going to let you live," I tell him. And in that moment, at least, I mean it.

My breasts are active later in the night. Swaying. Ripening. My nipples stretch and point with painful erectness at the sky. Exposed as they are, the moon gives them a certain iridescence, a tantalising sheen-well, I think so anyway. I still haven't found out why they're so lively tonight. To attract a man? No, it can't be that. They wouldn't have to work so hard for that. Bait for something else, perhaps? A god? I suck in an eager breath at the prospect of that, and at the same moment Clarissa squeezes me, hardening in anticipation. Is that what she's there for? To clench a god? To hold a god inside me against his will?

Date??? I don't know. Nor what day it is. It doesn't matter. From now onward all calendars and clocks will recommence. It's cool, and I'm feeling calm. The last of them, the daughter, is finally dead. I tried to keep her alive as long as I could, but my new flesh hasn't yet mastered any real willpower. I can't hold back for long. I don't think I'm going to be a patient monster. No, I don't think I am.

It's nearly dawn, and I'm breathing in the last of the cold night air. Clarissa, who did some complex things with Mr Borthwick, lies sated at my side. I can smell salt in the wind from the distant sea. Overhead, sunrise warms the clouds, and the hills are waking. Lying here on my back under the still-visible stars, I feel an affinity with all the other monsters in the world-mythic and otherwise. Some are still out there, waiting their chance to return.

The ancient writers were wrong about me. They said my gorgon sisters, Stheno and Euryale, were the only immortal ones. Untrue. Poseidon gave all my family immortality when his god-seed drove though me. I have simply been waiting for the right time to return.

The world is not ready for us. Ovid would have understood that. His trivialising of the myths, turning the old stories into something unreal, mere edifying tales, did more than anything else to unprepare the world for our re-arrival. The ancients, at least, knew what to do with monsters. The sons of the gods were still alive then. Perseus. Heracles. Aeneas. Where are they now? Long forgotten. Even Ovid died in inglorious misery. Exiled by Emperor Augustus, he was sent to the backside of the Roman Empire, present-day Romania, riddled with cancer, and never again saw the city of Rome he loved.

Who will stop me now?

I feel my serpents. They're murmuring, pleading for me to give Doug to them. But I won't. I'm holding off. I'll do so for as long as I can. The legends say that Medusa turned people to stone with her gaze. Do they really think that's all I could do?

It's late for some things, early for others. The wind sweeps through my hair and points the serpents at the gibbous moon. My sisters are outside. Stheno is closest, her restless breasts half in and half out of the door. Above her, astride the roof, the timbers bow under the weight of Euryale's great head. Who will stop us now? Where is Perseus? Lying dead, his bones crumbling in Mycenae. I almost miss him. I'd kiss him now if I saw him.

A breeze floats up from the town. My sex purses its lips and shrieks.

CONTRIBUTORS

PAUL FINCH is a former cop and journalist, and, having read History at Goldsmiths College, London, a qualified historian, though he currently earns his living as a full-time writer.

He cut his literary teeth penning episodes of the British TV crime drama, The Bill, and has written extensively in the field of children's animation. However, he is probably best known for his work in thrillers, dark fantasy and horror, in which capacity he is a two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award and a one-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award.

He is responsible for numerous short stories and novellas, but also for two horror movies (a third of his, War Wolf, is in pre-production), for several full-cast Dr Who audio dramas, and a series of best-selling crime novels from Avon Books at HarperCollins, featuring the British police detective, Mark 'Heck' Heckenburg.

Paul lives in Lancashire, UK, with his wife Cathy and his children, Eleanor and Harry. His website can be found at http://paulfinch-writer.blogspot.co.uk/, and he can be followed on Twitter as @paulfinchauthor.

TIM LEBBON is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He's had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the thriller The Hunt, and other recent releases include The Silence and Alien: Out of the Shadows. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. Future books include The Rage War (an Alien/Predator trilogy), and the Relics trilogy from Titan.

A movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, is due for release in 2015, and several other projects are in development.

Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net

RICHARD JAY GOLDSTEIN has been writing fiction and non-fiction for over twenty-five years. He lives with his wife, kids and grandkids in the mountains east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it's still pretty quiet, thanks. He's a lapsed ER doc, and has published fifty-something stories and essays in the literary and SF/fantasy/horror presses, including a number of anthologies-such as Music For Another World (Mutation Press), Virtually Now (Persea Books), Bugs (Pill Hill Press), So Long And Thanks For all The Brains (Collaboration of the Dead), Carnival (Static Movement), True Dark (Red Skies Press), PULP! (Twit Publishing), Cosmic Vegetable (Dreamscape Press), Halloween Frights Vol. III (Wicked East Press), Strange Halloween (Whortleberry Press), and Escape Velocity-The Anthology (Adventure Press of Seattle).

LISA L. HANNETT has had over 60 short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, the Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel,Lament for the Afterlife, was published by CZP in 2015.You can find her online at http://lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

A published writer for nearly 40 years, ADRIAN COLE's work spans the horror, SF, fantasy, pulp, YA and Sword and Sorcery genres. He has had over two dozen novels published, among which are Madness Emerging,
The Lucifer Experiment, Moorstones, The Sleep of Giants and The Hand of the Voidal.

His short fiction has been published in many anthologies, including Frighteners and The 11th Fontana Book of Horror Stories, edited by Mary Danby, Cold Fear and New Tales of Terror, edited by
Hugh Lamb, and The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Dark Voices 2 and Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones.

His most recent novels are The Shadow Academy (Edge, Canada) and Nick Nightmare Investigates (Alchemy Press, UK), and forthcoming as eBooks on the Gollancz Gateway site are two quartets, The Omaran Saga and Star Requiem, which are also available as audio books from Audible.

NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of First Novel, as well as six earlier novels including The Director's Cut and Antwerp, and a short story collection, Mortality. In addition he has published more than a hundred short stories. He has edited eighteen anthologies, including theDarklands volumes and Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds, and is series editor of Best British Short Stories (Salt). A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at MMU, he also runs Nightjar Press, which publishes new short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks, and is an editor at Salt Publishing, his list including Alison Moore's Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse and Kerry Hadley-Pryce's The Black Country.

IAN ROGERS is the award-winning author of the dark fiction collection Every House Is Haunted. His novelette, 'The House on Ashley Avenue,' was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and has been optioned for television by Universal Cable Productions. For more information, visit ianrogers.ca.

PAUL MELOY was born in 1966. He is the author of Islington Crocodiles, Dogs With Their Eyes Shut, The Night Clock and a forthcoming collection from PS Publishing, Electric Breakfast. He lives in Devon with his family.

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH was born in 1972 and is despairing of ever finding proof that the world was awash with mysterious signs and portents that night. He lives in an old farmhouse in the Lake District with his wife, the writer Rosie Seymour, and assorted children and dogs, where his neighbours are mostly sheep and his office is an old cheese store in which he writes horror fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story).
PS Publishing released Strange Gateways, his third collection of short stories, in 2014 following
2011's critically acclaimed Quiet Houses and 2010's Lost Places.
His stories have been published in a number of anthologies including the award-winning Exotic Gothic 4, Ash Tree Press's At Ease with the Dead, Stephen Jones' Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, Ellen Datlow's Hauntings, and Salt Publishing's Year's Best British Horror 2014. He appears in seven volumes of Stephen Jones' The
Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Very Best of Best New Horror. His debut novel, The Devil's Detective, came out from Doubleday in the US and Del Rey in the UK in March 2015.

THANA NIVEAU has twice been shortlisted for the British Fantasy award-for her debut collection From Hell to Eternity and her story 'Death Walks En Pointe'. Originally from the States, she now lives near Bristol. She is a Halloween bride who shares her life with fellow writer John Llewellyn Probert, in a gothic library filled with arcane books and curiosities. Her stories have been picked for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror andBest British Horror. Her novella 'Not to Touch the Earth' appears in Whispers in the Dark and other stories have appeared inInterzone; Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame, Steampunk Cthulhu, Love, Lust & Zombies, Horror Uncut,Sword & Mythos, Exotic Gothic 5, The Burning Circus, The Black Book of Horror series,Terror Tales of Wales, Terror Tales of Cornwall, Sorcery and Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen, Demons and Devilry, The 13 Ghosts of Christmas and Magic: an Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane.

RAY CLULEY 's short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story with 'Shark! Shark!' in 2013. His most recent work includes Water For Drowning from This Is Horror, Within the Wind, Beneath the Snow from Spectral Press, and Bone Dry (aka Curse of the Zombie) from Hersham Horror. His collection Probably Monsters is available now from ChiZine. For more information, he blogs occasionally at www.probablymonsters.wordpress.com

ALISON MOORE 's short fiction has been published in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra. The title story of her debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, won a New Writer novella prize. Her first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the National Book Awards 2012 (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize 2013. Her second novel, He Wants, was published in 2014. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border. She is an honorary lecturer in the School of English at Nottingham University. www.alison-moore.com

KURT FAWVER is a writer of horror, dark fantasy and weird fiction. He has published fiction in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently Weird Tales,The Lovecraft eZine, Xnoybis and Midian Unmade (Tor, 2015). He has released one collection of short stories, Forever, in Pieces (Villipede Publications, 2013), and is working feverishly on a second. Kurt also writes nonfiction and scholarly work, which has been published in various journals and scholarly tomes, including Thinking Horror and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. You can find Kurt online at kdfawver.blogspot.com or facebook.com/kfawver .

GARY FRY lives in Dracula's Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying while thinking about that legendary character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, but his first love is literature. He was the first author in PS Publishing's Showcase series, and none other than Ramsey Campbell has described him as "a master." He is the author of more than 100 published short stories and 15 books, including novels, novellas and collections. His latest are the Lovecraftian novel Conjure House (DarkFuse, 2013), the short story collection Shades of Nothingness (PS Publishing, 2013), the zombie novel Severed, and novellas Menace,
Savage and Mutator (DarkFuse, 2014). Gary warmly welcomes all to his web presence: www.gary-fry.com

SEAN LOGAN 's stories have appeared in more than thirty publications, including Black Static, Supernatural Tales, The New Gothic, Eulogies II and Dark Visions. He lives in northern California, where he's doing the final edit on a novel. When he's not reading or writing he enjoys loud music, bad movies and good tequila.

STEPHEN VOLK is creator of the infamous BBC 'Hallowe'en hoax' Ghostwatch and ITV's Afterlife starring Andrew Lincoln and Lesley Sharp. His many screenplays include The Awakening, Ken Russell's Gothic, The Guardian (co-written with director William Friedkin), and, most recently, a three-part adaptation of Phil Rickman's novel Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin as Deliverance Consultant Merrily Watkins. His short stories have been chosen for Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Best British Mysteries, and Best British Horror, he has been a Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and he is the author of two collections, Dark Corners and Monsters in the Heart, which won the British Fantasy Award in 2014. His latest novella Leytonstone takes as its subject the childhood of Alfred Hitchcock. Currently he is writing Empty Chairs, a new supernatural TV series, and Extrasensory, a new feature film. www.stephenvolk.net

ROBERT SHEARMAN has written five short story collections, which collectively have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers' Prize and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in theatre, as resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. His plays have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His interactive series for BBC Radio Four, The Chain Gang, ran for three seasons and won two Sony Awards. However, he may be best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

Described as "among the most important writers of contemporary British horror" by Ramsey Campbell, SIMON BESTWICK is the author of the novels Tide Of Souls, The Faceless, the serial novel Black Mountain, and the upcoming Hell's Ditch and Redman's Hill. He's also written many short stories, collected in A Hazy Shade Of Winter, Pictures of the Dark, Let's Drink To The Dead and The Condemned. Having spent most of his life in Manchester, he now lives on the Wirral with his long-suffering girlfriend, the writer Cate Gardner. When not writing, he goes for walks, watches movies, listens to music and does all he can to avoid having to get a proper job again. All contributions towards this worthy cause will be gratefully received.

CLIFF McNISH , acclaimed as 'one of our most talented thriller writers' (The Times), has written numerous award-winning fantasy, SF, horror and supernatural novels for children and young adults. His initial fantasy series, The Doomspell Trilogy, was published in twenty-six languages worldwide. His 2006 ghost story Breathe was voted in May 2013 as one of the top 100 adult and children's novels of all time by the Schools Network of British Librarians.