GENE WOLFE

All the Hues of Hell

Here’s an unsettling question: If you see a ghost, does the ghost also see you?

Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics as one of the best SF and fantasy writers working today—perhaps the best. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun—consisting of The Shadow of the Torturer. The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch—is being hailed as a masterpiece, quite probably the standard against which all subsequent science-fantasy books of the ’80s will be judged; ultimately, it may prove to be as influential as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The Shadow of the Torturer won the World Fantasy Award. The Claw of the Conciliator won the Nebula Award. Wolfe also won a Nebula Award for his story “The Death of Doctor Island.” His other books include Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Devil in a Forest. His short fiction—including some of the best stories of the ’70s—has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days, and The Wolfe Archipelago. His most recent books are Soldier of the Mist and The Urth of the New Sun. Wolfe lives in Barrington, Illinois, with his family.

 

ALL THE HUES OF HELL

Gene Wolfe

Three with egg roll, Kyle thought. Soon four without—if this shadow world really has (oh, sacred!) life. The Egg was still rolling, still spinning to provide mock gravitation.

Yet the roar of the sharply angled guidance jets now seeped only faintly into the hold, and the roll was slower and slower, the feeling of weight weaker and weaker.

The Egg was in orbit … around nothing.

Or at least around nothing visible. As its spin decreased, its ports swept the visible universe. Stars that were in fact galaxies flowed down the synthetic quartz, like raindrops down a canopy. Once Kyle caught sight of their mother ship; the Shadow Show herself looked dim and ghostly in the faint light. Of the planet they orbited, there was no trace. Polyaris screamed and took off, executing a multicolored barrel-roll with outstretched wings through the empty hold; like all macaws, Polyaris doted on microgravity.

In his earphones Marilyn asked, “Isn’t it pretty, Ky?” But she was admiring her computer simulation, not his ecstatic bird: an emerald forest three hundred meters high, sparkling sapphire lakes, suddenly a vagrant strip of beach golden as her hair, and the indigo southern ocean.

One hundred and twenty degrees opposed to them both, Skip answered instead, and not as Kyle himself would have. “No, it isn’t.” There was a note in Skip’s voice that Kyle had noticed, and worried over, before.

Marilyn seemed to shrug. “Okay, darling, it’s not really anything to us—less even than ultraviolet. But—”

“I can see it,” Skip told her.

Marilyn glanced across the empty hold toward Kyle.

He tried to keep his voice noncommittal as he whispered to his mike: “You can see it, Skip?”

Skip did not reply. Polyaris chuckled to herself. Then silence (the utter, deadly quiet of nothingness, of the void where shadow matter ruled and writhed invisible) filled the Egg. For a wild instant, Kyle wondered whether silence itself might not be a manifestation of shadow matter, a dim insubstance felt only in its mass and gravity, its unseen heaviness. Galaxies drifted lazily over the ports, in a white Egg robbed of Up and Down. Their screens were solid sheets of deepest blue.

Skip broke the silence. “Just let me show it to you, Kyle. Allow me, Marilyn, to show you what it actually looks like.”

“Because you really know, Skip?”

“Yes, because I really know, Kyle. Don’t you remember, either of you, what they said?”

Kyle was watching Marilyn across the hold; he saw her shake her head. “Not all of it.” Her voice was cautious. “They said so much, darling, after all. They said quite a lot of things.”

Skip sounded as though he were talking to a child. “What the Life Support people said. The thing, the only significant thing, they did say.”

Still more carefully, Marilyn asked, “And what was that, darling?”

“That one of us would die.”

An island sailed across her screen, an emerald set in gold and laid upon blue velvet.

Kyle said, “That’s my department, Skip. Life Support told us there was a real chance—perhaps as high as one in twenty—that one of you would die, outbound from Earth or on the trip back. They were being conservative; I would have estimated it as one in one hundred.”

Marilyn murmured, “I think I’d better inform the Director.”

Kyle agreed.

“And they were right,” Skip said. “Kyle, I’m the one. I died on the way out. I passed away, but you two followed me.”

Ocean and isle vanished from all the screens, replaced by a blinking cursor and the word DIRECTOR.

Marilyn asked, “Respiration monitor, L. Skinner Jansen.”

Kyle swiveled to watch his screen. The cursor swept from side to side without any sign of inhalation or exhalation, and for a moment he was taken aback. Then Skip giggled.

Marilyn’s sigh filled Kyle’s receptors. “The programming wizard. What did you do, Skip? Turn down the gain?”

“That wasn’t necessary. It happens automatically.” Skip giggled again.

Kyle said slowly, “You’re not dead, Skip. Believe me, I’ve seen many dead men. I’ve cut up their bodies and examined every organ; I know dead men, and you’re not one of them.”

“Back on the ship, Kyle. My former physical self is lying in the Shadow Show, dead.”

Marilyn said, “Your physical self is right here, darling, with Ky and me.” And then to the Director: “Sir, is L. Skinner Jansen’s module occupied?”

The trace vanished, replaced by NEGATIVE: JANSEN 1’S MODULE IS EMPTY.

“Console,” Skip himself ordered.

Kyle did not turn to watch Skip’s fingers fly across the keys.

After a moment Skip said, “You see, this place—the formal name of our great republic is Hades, by the way—looks the way it does only because of the color gradations you assigned the gravimeter data. I’m about to show you its true colors, as the expression has it.”

A blaze of 4.5, 6, and 7.8 ten-thousandths millimeter light, Polyaris fluttered away to watch Skip. When he made no attempt to shoo her off, she perched on a red emergency lever and cocked an eye like a bright black button toward his keyboard.

Kyle turned his attention back to his screen. The letters faded, leaving only the blue southern ocean. As he watched, it darkened to sable. Tiny flames of ocher, citron, and cinnabar darted from the crests of the waves.

“See what I mean?” Skip asked. “We’ve been sent to bring a demon back to Earth—or maybe just a damned soul. I don’t care. I’m going to stay right here.”

Kyle looked across the vacant white hold toward Marilyn.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t, Ky. You do it.”

“All right, Marilyn.” He plugged his index finger into the Exchange socket, so that he sensed rather than saw the letters overlaying the hellish sea on the screens: KAPPA UPSILON LAMBDA 23011 REPORTS JANSEN 1 PSYCHOTIC. CAN YOU CONFIRM, JANSEN 2?

“Confirmed, Marilyn Jansen.”

RESTRAINT ADVISED.

Marilyn said, “I’m afraid restraint’s impossible as long as we’re in the Egg, sir.”

DO NOT ABORT YOUR MISSION, JANSEN 2. WILL YOU ACCEPT THE RESTRAINT OF JANSEN 1 WHEN RESTRAINT IS PRACTICAL?

“Accepted whenever practical,” Marilyn said. “Meanwhile, we’ll proceed with the mission.”

SATISFACTORY, the Director said, and signed off.

Skip asked, “So you’re going to lock me up, honeybone?”

“I hope that by the time we get back it won’t be necessary. Ky, haven’t you anything to give him?”

“No specifics for psychosis, Marilyn. Not here. I’ve got some back on the Shadow Show.”

Skip ruffled his beard. “Sure. You’re going to lock up a ghost.” Across the wide hold, Kyle could see he was grinning.

Polyaris picked up the word: “Ghost! Ghost! Ghost!” She flapped to the vacant center of the Egg, posing like a heraldic eagle and watching to make certain they admired her.

The shoreline of a larger island entered their screens from the right. Its beach was ashes and embers, its forest a forest of flames.

“If we’re going to make the grab, Marilyn…”

“You’re right,” she said. Courageously, she straightened her shoulders. The new life within her had already fleshed out her cheeks and swollen her breasts; Kyle felt sure she had never been quite so lovely before. When she put on her helmet, he breathed her name (though only to himself) before he plugged into the simulation that seemed so much more real than a screen.

As a score of pink arms, Marilyn’s grav beams dipped into the shadow planet’s atmosphere, growing dark and heavy as they pulled up shadow fluid and gases from a lake on the island and whatever winds might ruffle it. Kyle reflected that those arms should be blue instead of black, and told the onboard assistant director to revert to the hues Marilyn had originally programmed.

Rej, the assistant director snapped.

And nothing happened. The gravs grew darker still, and the big accelerator jets grumbled at the effort required to maintain Egg in orbit. When Kyle glanced toward the hold, he discovered it had acquired a twelve-meter yolk as dark as the eggs Chinese bury for centuries. Polyaris was presumably somewhere in that black yolk, unable to see or feel it. He gave a shrill whistle, and she screamed and fluttered out to perch on his shoulder.

The inky simulation doubled and redoubled, swirling to the turbulence of the fresh shadow matter pumped into the Egg by the gravs. Generators sang the spell that kept the shadow “air” and “water” from boiling away in what was to them a high vacuum.

The grumbling of the jets rose to an angry roar.

Skip said, “You’ve brought Hell in here with us, honeybone. You, not me. Remember that.”

Marilyn ignored him, and Kyle told him to keep quiet.

Abruptly the gravitors winked out. A hundred tons or more of the shadow-world’s water (whatever that might be) fell back to the surface, fully actual to any conscious entity that might be there. “Rains of frogs and fish, Polyaris,” Kyle muttered to his bird. “Remember Charlie Fort?”

Polyaris chuckled, nodding.

Skip said, “Then remember too that when Moses struck the Nile with his staff, the Lord God turned the water to blood.”

“You’re the one who got into the crayon box, Skip. I’ll call you Moses if you like, but I can hardly call you ‘I Am,’ after you’ve just assured us you’re not.” Kyle was following Marilyn’s hunt for an example of the dominant life form, less than a tenth of his capacity devoted to Polyaris and Skip.

“You will call me Master!”

Kyle grinned, remembering the holovamp of an ancient film. “No, Skip. For as long as you’re ill, I am the master. Do you know I’ve been waiting half my life to use that line?”

Then he saw it, three quarters of a second, perhaps, after Marilyn had: an upright figure striding down a fiery beach. Its bipedal locomotion was not a complete guarantee of dominance and intelligence, to be sure; ostriches had never ruled a world and never would, no matter how big a pest they became on Mars. But—yes—those powerful forelimbs were surely GP manipulators and not mere weapons. Now, Marilyn! Now!

As though she had heard him, a pink arm flicked down. For an instant the shadow man floated, struggling wildly to escape, the gravitation of his shadow world countered by their gravitor; then he flashed toward them. Kyle swiveled to watch the black sphere splash (there could be no other word for it) and, under the prodding of the gravs, recoalesce. They were four.

In a moment more, their shadow man bobbed to the surface of the dark and still-trembling yolk. To him, Kyle reflected, they were not there; the Egg was not there. To him it must seem that he floated upon a watery sphere suspended in space.

And possibly that was more real than the computer-enhanced vision he himself inhabited, a mere cartoon created from one of the weakest forces known to physics. He unplugged, and at once the Egg’s hold was white and empty again.

Marilyn took off her helmet. “All right, Ky, from here on it’s up to you—unless you want something more from the surface?”

Kyle congratulated her and shook his head.

“Darling, are you feeling any better?”

Skip said levelly, “I’m okay now. I think that damned machine must have drugged me.”

“Ky? That seems pretty unlikely.”

“We should de-energize or destroy him, if we can’t revise his programming.”

Marilyn shook her head. “I doubt that we could reprogram him. Ky, what do you think?”

“A lot of it’s hard-wired, Marilyn, and can’t be altered without new boards. I imagine Skip could revise my software if he put his mind to it, though it might take him quite a while. He’s very good at that sort of thing.”

Skip said, “And you’re a very dangerous device, Kyle.”

Shaking his head, Kyle broke out the pencil-thin cable he had used so often in training exercises. One end jacked into the console, the other into a small socket just above his hips. When both connections were made, he was again in the cybernetic cartoon where true matter and shadow matter looked equally real.

It was still a cartoon with colors by Skip: Marilyn’s skin shone snow-white, her lips were burning scarlet, her hair like burnished brass, and her eyes blue fire; Skip himself had become a black-bearded satyr, with a terra-cotta complexion and cruel crimson lips. Kyle tightened both ferrules firmly, tested his jets, released his safety harness, and launched himself toward the center of the Egg, making Polyaris crow with delight.

The shadow man drifted into view as they neared the black yolk. He was lying upon what Kyle decided must be his back; on the whole he was oddly anthropomorphic, with recognizable head, neck, and shoulders. Binocular organs of vision seemed to have vanished behind small folds of skin, and Kyle would have called his respiration rapid in a human.

Marilyn asked, “How does he look, Ky?”

“Like hell,” Kyle muttered. “I’m afraid he may be in shock. At least, shock’s what I’d say if he were one of you. As it is, I…” He let the sentence trail away.

There were strange, blunt projections just above the organs that appeared to be the shadow man’s ears. Absently, Kyle tried to palpate them; his hand met nothing, and vanished as it passed into the shadow man’s cranium.

The shadow man opened his eyes.

Kyle jerked backward, succeeding only in throwing himself into a slow spin that twisted his cable.

Marilyn called, “What’s the matter, Ky?”

“Nothing,” Kyle told her. “I’m jumpy, that’s all.”

The shadow man’s eyes were closed again. His arms, longer than a human’s and more muscled than a body builder’s, twitched and were still. Kyle began the minute examination required by the plan.

When it was complete, Skip asked, “How’d it go, Kyle?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t see his back. The way you’ve got the shadow water keyed, it’s like ink.”

Marilyn said, “Why don’t you change it, Skip? Make it blue but translucent, the way it’s supposed to be.”

Skip sounded apologetic. “I’ve been trying to; I’ve been trying to change everything back. I can’t, or anyway not yet. I don’t remember just what I did, but I put some kind of block on it.”

Kyle shrugged again. “Keep trying, Skip, please.”

“Yes, please try, darling. Now buckle up, everybody. Time to rendezvous.”

Kyle disconnected his cable and pulled his harness around him. After a moment’s indecision, he plugged into the console as well.

If he had been unable to see it, it would have been easy to believe that Egg’s acceleration had no effect on the fifty-meter sphere of dark matter at its center; yet that too was mass, and the gravs whimpered like children at the strain of changing its speed and direction, their high wail audible—to Kyle at least—above the roaring of the jets. The black sphere stretched into a sooty tear. Acceleration was agony for Polyaris as well; Kyle cupped her fragile body in his free hand to ease her misery as much as he could.

Somewhere so far above the Egg that the gravity well of the shadow planet had almost ceased to make any difference and words like above held little meaning, the Shadow Show was unfolding to receive them, preparing itself to embed the newly fertilized Egg in an inner wall. For a moment Kyle’s thoughts soared, drunk on the beauty of the image.

Abruptly the big jets fell silent. The Egg had achieved escape velocity.

Marilyn returned control of Egg to the assistant director. “That’s it, folks, until we start guiding in. Unbuckle if you want.”

Kyle tossed Polyaris toward the yolk and watched her make a happy circuit of the Egg’s interior.

Skip said, “Marilyn, I seem to have a little problem here.”

“What is it?”

Kyle took off his harness and retracted it. He unplugged, and the yolk and its shadow man were gone. Only the chortling Polyaris remained.

“I can’t get this Goddamned thing off,” Skip complained. “The buckle’s jammed or something.”

Marilyn took off her own acceleration harness and sailed across to look at it. Kyle joined them.

“Here, let me try it,” Marilyn said. Her slender fingers, less nimble but more deft than Skip’s, pressed the release and jiggled the locking tab; it would not pull free.

Kyle murmured, “I’m afraid you can’t release Skip, Marilyn. Neither can I.”

She turned to look at him.

“You accepted restraint for Skip, Marilyn. I want to say that in my opinion you were correct to do so.”

She began, “You mean—”

“The Director isn’t satisfied yet that Skip has recovered, that’s all. Real recoveries aren’t usually so quick or so…” Kyle paused, searching his dictionary file for the best word. “Convenient. This may be no more than a lucid interval. That happens, quite often. It may be no more than a stratagem.”

Skip cursed and tore at the straps.

“Do you mean you can lock us…?”

“No,” Kyle said. “I can’t. But the Director can, if in his judgment it is indicated.”

He waited for Marilyn to speak, but she did not.

“You see, Marilyn, Skip, we tried very hard to prepare for every foreseeable eventuality, and mental illness was certainly one of those. About ten percent of the human population suffers from it at some point in their lives, and so with both of you on board and under a great deal of stress, that sort of problem was certainly something we had to be ready for.”

Marilyn looked pale and drained. Kyle added, as gently as he could, “I hope this hasn’t been too much of a shock to you.”

Skip had opened the cutting blade of his utility knife and was hacking futilely at his straps. Kyle took it from him, closed it, and dropped it into one of his own storage areas.

Marilyn pushed off. He watched her as she flew gracefully across the hold, caught the pilot’s-chair grab bar, and buckled herself into the seat; her eyes were shining with tears. As if sensing her distress, Polyaris perched on the bar and rubbed her ear with the side of her feathered head.

Skip muttered, “Go look at your demon, Kyle. Go anyplace but here.”

Kyle asked, “Do you still think it’s a demon, Skip?”

“You’ve seen it a lot closer up than I have. What do you think?”

“I don’t believe in demons, Skip.”

Skip looked calm now, but his fingers picked mechanically at his straps. “What do you believe in, Kyle? Do you believe in God? Do you worship Man?”

“I believe in life. Life is my God, Skip, if you want to put it like that.”

“Any life? What about a mosquito?”

“Yes, any life. The mosquito won’t bite me.” Kyle smiled his metal smile.

“Mosquitoes spread disease.”

“Sometimes,” Kyle admitted. “Then they must be destroyed, the lower life sacrificed to the higher. Skip, your Marilyn is especially sacred to me now. Do you understand that?”

“Marilyn’s doomed.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of the demon, of course. I tried to tell her that she had doomed herself, but it was actually you that doomed her. You were the one who wanted him. You had to have him, you and the Director; and if it hadn’t been for you, we could have gone home with a hold full of dark matter and some excuse.”

“But you aren’t doomed, Skip? Only Marilyn?”

“I’m dead and damned, Kyle. My doom has caught up with me. I’ve hit bottom. You know that expression?”

Kyle nodded.

“People talk about hitting bottom and bouncing back up. If you can bounce, that isn’t the bottom. When somebody gets where I am, there’s no bouncing back, not ever.”

“If you’re really dead, Skip, how can the straps hold you? I wouldn’t think that an acceleration harness could hold a lost soul, or even a ghost.”

“They’re not holding me,” Skip told him. “It was just that at the last moment I didn’t have guts enough to let Marilyn see I was really gone. I’d loved her. I don’t anymore—you can’t love anything or anyone except yourself where I am. But—”

“Can you get out of your seat, Skip? Is that what you’re saying, that you can get out without unfastening the buckle?”

Skip nodded slowly, his dark eyes (inscrutable eyes, Kyle thought) never leaving Kyle’s face. “And I can see your demon, Kyle. I know you can’t see him because you’re not hooked up. But I can.”

“You can see him now, Skip?”

“Not now—he’s on the far side of the black ball. But I’ll be able to see him when he floats around to this side again.”

Kyle returned to his seat and connected the cable as he had before. The black yolk sprang into being again; the shadow man was facing him—in fact glaring at him with burning yellow eyes. He asked the Director to release Skip.

Together they drifted toward the center of the Egg. Kyle made sure their trajectory carried them to the side of the yolk away from the shadow man; and when the shadow man was no longer in view, he held Skip’s arm and stopped them both with a tug at the cable. “Now that I know you can see him, too, Skip, I’d like you to point him out to me.”

Skip glanced toward the watery miniature planet over which they hovered like flies—or perhaps merely toward the center of the hold. “Is this a joke? I’ve told you, I can see him.” A joyous blue and yellow comet, Polyaris erupted from the midnight surface, braking on flapping wings to examine them sidelong.

“That’s why I need your input, Skip,” Kyle said carefully. “I’m not certain the feed I’m getting is accurate. If you can apprehend shadow matter directly, I can use your information to check the simulation. Can you still see the demon? Indicate his position, please.”

Skip hesitated. “He’s not here, Kyle. He must be on the other side. Shall we go around and have a look?”

“The water’s still swirling quite a bit. It should bring him to us before long.”

Skip shrugged. “Okay, Kyle, you’re the boss. I guess you always were.”

“The Director’s our captain, Skip. That’s why we call him what we do. Can you see the demon yet?” A hand and part of one arm had floated into view around the curve of the yolk.

“No. Not yet. Do you have a soul, Kyle?”

Kyle nodded. “It’s called my original monitor. I’ve seen a printout, though of course I didn’t read it all; it was very long.”

“Then when you’re destroyed it may be sent here. Here comes your demon, by the way.”

Kyle nodded.

“I suppose it may be put into one of these horrors. They seem more machine than human, at least to me.”

“No,” Kyle told him. “They’re truly alive. They’re shadow life, Skip, and since this one is the only example we have, just now it must be the most precious life in the universe to you, to Marilyn, and to me. Do you think he sees us?”

“He sees me,” Skip said grimly.

“When I put my fingers into his brain, he opened his eyes.” Kyle mused. “It was as though he felt them there.”

“Maybe he did.”

Kyle nodded. “Yes, possibly he did. The brain is such a sensitive mechanism that perhaps a gravitational disturbance as weak as that results in stimulation, if it is uneven. Put your hand into his head, please. I want to watch. You say he’s a demon—pretend you’re going to gouge out his eyes.”

“You think I’m crazy!” Skip shouted. “Well, I’m telling you, you’re crazy!”

Startled, Marilyn twisted in her pilot’s chair to look at them.

“I’ve explained to you that he sees me,” Skip said a little more calmly. “I’m not getting within his reach!”

“Touch his nose for me, Skip. Like this.” Kyle lengthened one arm until his fingers seemed to brush the dark water several meters from the drifting shadow man’s hideous face. “Look here, Skip. I’m not afraid.”

Skip screamed.

*   *   *

“Have I time?” Kyle asked. He was holding the grab bar of Marilyn’s control chair. In the forward port, the Shadow Show was distinctly visible.

“We’ve a few minutes yet,” Marilyn told him. “And I want to know. I have to, Ky. He’s the father of my child. Can you cure him?”

“I think so, Marilyn, though your correcting the simulator hues has probably helped Skip more than anything I’ve done thus far.”

Kyle glanced appreciatively in the direction of the yolk. It was a translucent blue, as it should have been all along, and the shadow man who floated there looked more like a good-natured caricature of a human being than a demon. His skin was a dusty pinkish brown, his eyes the cheerful bright-yellow of daffodils. It seemed to Kyle that they flickered for a moment, as though to follow Polyaris in her flight across the hold. Perhaps a living entity of shadow matter could apprehend true matter after all—that would require a thorough investigation as soon as they were safely moored in the Shadow Show.

“And he can’t really see shadow matter, Ky?”

Kyle shook his head. “No more than you or I can, Marilyn. He thought he could, you understand, at least on some level. On another he knew he couldn’t and was faking it quite cleverly.” Kyle paused, then added, “Freud did psychology a considerable disservice when he convinced people that the human mind thinks on only three levels. There are really a great many more than that, and there’s no question but that the exact number varies between individuals.”

“But for a while you really believed he might be able to, from what you’ve told me.”

“At least I was willing to entertain the thought, Marilyn. Occasionally you can help people like Skip just by allowing them to test their delusional systems. What I found was that he had been taking cues from me—mostly from the direction of my eyes, no doubt. It would be wrong for you to think of that as lying. He honestly believed that when you human beings died, your souls came here, to this shadow planet of a shadow system, in a shadow galaxy. And that he himself was dead.”

Marilyn shook her head in dismay. “But that’s insane, Ky. Just crazy.”

She has never looked this lovely, Kyle thought. Aloud he said, “Mental illness is often a way of escaping responsibility, Marilyn. You may wish to consider that. Death is another, and you may wish to consider that also.”

For a second Marilyn hesitated, biting her lip. “You love me, don’t you, Ky?”

“Yes, I do, Marilyn. Very much.”

“And so does Skip, Ky.” She gave him a small, sad smile. “I suppose I’m the luckiest woman alive, or the unluckiest. The men I like most both love me, but one’s having a breakdown.… I shouldn’t have started this, should I?”

“While the other is largely inorganic,” Kyle finished for her. “But it’s really not such a terrible thing to be loved by someone like me, Marilyn. We—”

Polyaris shrieked and shrieked again—not her shrill cry of pleasure or even her outraged squawk of pain, but the uncanny, piercing screech that signaled a prowling ocelot: Danger! Fire! Flood! INVASION and CATASTROPHE!

She was fluttering about the shadow man, and the shadow man was no longer a dusty pinkish brown. As Kyle stared, he faded to gray, then to white. His mouth opened. He crumpled, slowly and convulsively, into a fetal ball.

Horrified, Kyle turned to Marilyn. But Marilyn was self-absorbed, her hands clasping her belly. “It moved, Ky! It just moved. I felt life!”