BOOK THREE

PANDORA’S BOX

1866—INSIDE THE BONE ORCHARD

It is in the north end of The Bone Orchard that the Plot really begins to come together for Mr. Sunshine. He crouches over the site of Ithaca’s only live burial, a spot marked only by a ring of seven round white stones—enchanted stones, he senses. The other, more conventional markers surrounding the site lean away like the petals of a budding grey flower, but their lean is not nearly so pronounced as it will be a century from now.

Mr. Sunshine places his palm against the damp earth, understanding what it is that lies beneath. Its presence here is wholly fortuitous, nothing to do with any of his previous Meddlings on Earth, but—as much an opportunist as an originator, like all storytellers—he immediately sees its potential uses for the Plot he is weaving.

“Animation,” he says. “Animation, that’s wonderful, I can have some good times with that. And if . . .”

He trails off thinking: Stephen Titus George. St. George. And animation. Hmmm . . .

Standing behind him like an impatient valet, Ezra Cornell clears his throat several times.

“Getting a bit late,” Cornell hints, wondering what in hell he is doing here in the first place. “Getting a bit cold, too.”

“Hold this,” Mr. Sunshine says, handing him the lantern. Cornell takes it obediently and waits while the Greek Original bends low over the site and does something Meddlesome with his hands.

“Better,” Mr. Sunshine says a moment later, standing and taking the lantern again. “More appropriate, considering.”

“Heh-em,” Cornell throat-clears once more. “I really think . . .”

“Onward and upward,” Mr. Sunshine interrupts him. He pats Ezra on the shoulder companionably. “You like climbing The Hill, I know you do. Good for the circulation, good for the lungs. I’d wager your middle name is Sisyphus, you love climbing so much.”

“Yes,” Cornell agrees, eyes glazing for a moment. “Yes, I love it.”

“Good.” Mr. Sunshine nods. “Double-time, then.”

“Double-time. Yes . . .”

They move off, and now the scene has changed. The center of the budding grey flower is no longer a ring of stones, but a solitary, still-enchanted marker. A white marble square bearing a single, appropriate word:

PANDORA

HOBART VISITS THE BONEYARD

I.

The hangar doors slid open silently, moved by a set of rollers and ­counterweights finer than anything human hands could have designed. Snow whipped into the hangar as if seeking targets, yet Hobart stood right at the opening, enduring the cold, looking down from the very pinnacle of the Tower. Outside chaos reigned: with the setting of the sun visibility had dropped almost to zero, and now the air currents goaded each other to greater feats of abandon. Foolish to tempt Fate by venturing out on such a night, but out he must go. Hobart’s nightmares had gotten progressively worse, and he could no longer suppress the feeling that something terrible had happened in The Boneyard.

He walked back to the rear of the hangar where the gossamer glider waited and climbed into the sling-seat. His pinsword was in his belt, but he did not bother arming himself with a crossbow, for if he ran into trouble he doubted it would be much use to him. Instead he had gone to a secret place in the lower part of the Tower and obtained a tiny sackful of a very special dust. The dust was silver, a special alloy also beyond the ability of human craft; precious and rare, it might prove his only salvation in a true emergency.

Hobart gave the command, and the glider arose and hurled itself out into the storm. Once past the hangar doors, Hobart’s trip took on a decidedly different character than Zephyr’s months-ago chase after George: far from a smooth glide, the first turbulence threatened to break the aircraft in two, and at one point it seemed to actually be bouncing up and down rather than moving forward. Hobart petitioned the wind to be gentler, after which it eased off some—but a human being would still have compared the glide down the Slope to a roller coaster ride, without the usual reassurance of a safe stop at the end of the trip.

Hobart was frightened by the violence of the storm, yet he hoped very shortly to be made even more afraid. He would pass perilously low over The Boneyard, to check whether a particular ring of seven white stones was still intact—a ring specially enchanted to discourage overly curious animals and sprites from disturbing what lay beneath it. He could not possibly hope to see the stones what with all the snow, but if they were there he would feel it, feel the dread and desire to flee that they would project into him. And if, in flying over the old burial site, Hobart felt no fear except that which he brought with him . . . well, in that case, fear itself would hardly be enough.

II.

The glider made an almost reluctant dip as it passed over the chain-link fence that enclosed the upper ’Yard. Where up to this point a scattering of streetlamps like lesser stars had cast a feeble glow over the sprite’s route, darkness now conspired with the snow to obscure even the most obvious landmarks. Hobart was forced to fly by instinct alone, instinct augmented by memory.

Memory proved a surprisingly sharp ally, and a bitter one as well. Though frost and night covered all, the hidden earth seemed to cry out to him, speaking of another fearsome eve when rain had crashed down in a deluge to hamper the advance of a sprite army traveling on foot rather than in the air. Here Rosencrantz and three others slipped into a mud runnel and drowned, Memory whispered beneath the howl of the wind. The great unseen mass just ahead is the tree where Rasferret the Grub’s troops waited in ambush. Directly below lies the tombstone beside which Miranda and Ariel were slaughtered, fighting back to back against an unrelenting enemy.

He thought of the story he had told at the Halloween party, the death story that Laertes had been so anxious to hear: Hecate led the larger of two contingents on an assault against The Boneyard. A second, smaller group, led by Eldest Julius, would sneak in and attempt to kill Rasferret . . . of that second group, I alone survive to tell the tale . . .

There was another story, an extremely ancient folktale in the sprite canon, that concerned a certain Robin Goodfellow, a rascal and Lothario of very much the same timber as Zephyr’s love-errant Puck. Robin Good­fellow actually figured in a number of folktales, but the most popular by far told of his battle with the great Wildebeest of Rangoon. The Wildebeest, a ravenous monster with horribly sharp teeth, could not be killed because of a strong enchantment laid upon it. Despite this, Robin managed to defeat it through trickery, making it catch its head inside a stout earthen pot; unable to bite, it was thus rendered harmless, but did not die. Hobart recited the story of Robin Goodfellow and the Wildebeest more often than any other tale. He seemed truly fascinated by it.

You killed him, then?

Of course we killed him, Laertes.

Memory whispered to him once more as he neared the burial site, whispered of the death of a dear friend done in by a weapon that had come to life in his own hands: Hobart, your crossbow!

Was it a tear or merely a snowflake that caused Hobart’s eyes to sting? He swiped at them with the back of his hand, briefly letting go of one of the glider’s guide-threads. The wind allowed the nose of the craft to make another unexpected dip, and this saved Hobart’s life.

The frost-feathered Messenger, roused by Hobart’s intrusion into The Boneyard, shot past like an airborne scythe, talons extended to rip and tear . . . but it had not counted on this last second’s maneuvering. Just the tip of a single claw drew a slit in the gossamer of the glider, which was not immediately disastrous; more damaging, a batting wing of ice twisted the frame of the craft and sent it spiraling downward.

Caught in a plummeting spin, Hobart didn’t know what had hit him, only that he was in trouble. The wind helped level him out before he struck a snowbank—the glider would likely have buried itself to a depth of several feet—but luck must have lent a hand too, to keep him from smashing up against some obstacle as he hurtled through the darkness barely a breath’s height from the ground.

Straining his ears for a telltale sound, Hobart began coaxing the glider back up to a safer altitude. A subtle shift in the shrieking of the wind warned him of the Messenger’s second attack as the ice bird swooped in behind him. With no time to think, he raced his craft up toward the creaking tangleweb that was the upper branch-lattice of a dead maple. Straight for it he flew, at the final instant jerking the nose of the glider still higher, pointing at the crown of the sky. Once again the Messenger, with too much momentum for its own good, barely missed the target, passing just beneath to punch a splintering, jattering path through the maple branches.

“I’m leaving,” Hobart announced, as if to appease his foe, but in the cold dark the Messenger was already wheeling around for yet another run. Banking above the level of the trees now, the sprite set a course for the all-too-distant lights of West Campus and the Slope. He freed one hand from the guide-threads and clutched at the pouch hanging from his belt.

The Messenger, seeing with magical eyes what would have been invisible to most natural creatures, homed in on the glider and readied itself for a final strike. As it drew closer in the glider’s wake, it prepared to counter any further evasive action: it would dive if Hobart dived, climb if he climbed, chase him in circles if necessary. He would not escape.

Hobart tugged at the pouch. Against an ordinary predator—a hungry winter owl, say—it would have been useless, but the sprite had already guessed that his pursuer was anything but ordinary. Indeed, Hobart had guessed a great many things in the past few moments, and he had no response to these guesses, save one.

The pouch did not want to leave his belt. It hung there, the leather cord which held it unwilling to loosen in the midst of the rush and the storm. Desperate, Hobart jammed a finger into the neck of the bag, forcing it open. Directly behind him, ready for the kill, the Messenger let out a screech; Hobart jerked about and the bag came loose from his belt all at once, falling out of his grasp. The wind caught it, held it open, turned it inside out, and silver dust shot out and back like seed from a rainmaker’s airplane.

It was only dust, but magical, and to the Messenger it was like a brick wall, an invisible fist swinging from nowhere. The bird stopped dead in midair, wings flailing, talons splayed. Then, paralyzed, it was thrown down from the sky; it fell and did not rise again that night. But it did not die, either, for evil things are difficult to kill.

Hobart, delivered only barely from his own death, retreated in a near panic back up The Hill, the winds that bore him no more gentle than those which had carried him down. The tear in the gossamer began to widen, the glider frame warped drastically, and only an extra whim of good fortune permitted a safe landing back in the Tower pinnacle.

He disembarked from the damaged glider, closed the hangar doors, then hurried down the secret staircase, through the open and wind-swept belfry, into the shelter of the drop-shaft where liquor waited. Some time later, deep in stupor, Hobart found himself looking once again into the face of the departed Julius.

“Why?” Hobart asked him. “Why twice in one lifetime? What could we have done to deserve it?”

“Justice is a funny thing, old friend,” Julius replied. “It isn’t always a matter of what you deserve, just what they decide to give you.”

“I’m afraid.”

Julius raised an eyebrow.

“You ought to be,” he said. “You ought to be.”

NORTHERN LIGHTS

I.

Two days it took them to drive to Wisconsin, two days, both a long and a short time. An outstretched arm of the “queen bitch of snowstorms” (meteorologists used a slightly less colorful phrase) delayed their progress, though at George’s polite request the tempest quickly slacked off and fell behind them.

Both nights of the journey they spent in roadside motels, lying together in a double bed, Luther curled up contentedly at the foot. They did not make love on these nights; in fact, despite their earlier intimacy in the Garden of Lothlórien and whatever may or may not have happened on Thanksgiving, they hardly thought to touch each other. Instead they talked, and talked; in a novel you would say they “poured out their souls to one another,” although the words they spoke did not pour or gush, they wafted. In calm but earnest tones George escorted Aurora through the vast library he had built up in his mind, shelf upon shelf of unwritten volumes, an army of stories waiting their turn to be told. His greatest fear was that in death he would take some of the best of these stories with him, never having had the time to commit them all to paper; yet this was also his greatest joy, for he knew his work would never be finished, knew the well would not run dry even if he outlived Methuselah. And Aurora—she had no library to reveal, but her dreams, like finely crafted antiques, would have more than filled the rooms of a tall mansion. Long past midnight she whispered to him—as she had never whispered to anyone—of knights and sorcerers, boisterous but cunning dragons, obsidian roads like frozen black rivers. Slowly George came to understand that her desire was not just to think or read about such things, but that she honestly desired to experience a fairy tale.

This was both more courageous and more difficult an ambition than simple storytelling: yet not so difficult, George realized, as he might once have believed.

By the time they crossed the Wisconsin border George had fulfilled Aurora’s prediction and fallen as deeply in love with her as she had with him. Somehow the span of two days seemed hardly enough for this to have happened, and afterwards George thought that here he had glimpsed the essence of magic: changes that should take eons, changes that should never happen at all, coming about with a startling suddenness. Back in Ithaca he had first recognized opportunity in Aurora, yet Ached for Calliope; now the Hurt was lost somewhere behind him on the road, and Aurora had eclipsed his recollection of Calliope almost completely. For again, as predicted, the more George loved Aurora the more perfect she became in his sight, and when he tried to think back to that other perfect woman he saw only fair hair and pale skin. All that remained of the dark-eyed Asian was a wrinkle in the memory of his heart, which one day yet might find its way into a story . . . maybe, if he had the time.

At the moment he was fully occupied getting to know this new perfect woman sitting beside him in the car, beside him in the bed. And her parents, especially her father. It turned out that Walter Smith took an instant liking to George, and why shouldn’t he? George was, after all, the answer to a desperate prayer.

II.

They arrived late afternoon on the twenty-third. Walter was waiting out on the front porch as the car drove up. He had a big smile on his face, and it wasn’t just from what he’d been smoking.

“Hi, Daddy,” Aurora waved, bringing them around and parking. Walter Smith waved back, looking not the least bit surprised at the appearance of the rental car or at George. In fact as they stepped out, it was the dog that Walter most seemed to raise an eyebrow about.

“Hello there,” Walter said, as Luther ran up and barked at him. “This is George, Daddy.” Aurora made a nervous introduction. She was unsure how her father would react to her bringing home a total stranger, although actually she hadn’t.

“Stephen Titus George,” Walter Smith said, nodding. “I’ve just finished reading your books. Good stuff.”

“I’m in love with your daughter,” George blurted out.

Walter nodded again. “Good stuff,” he repeated. “We’ll have something to talk about after dinner.” He turned to Aurora. “Your mother won’t be home till tomorrow. She had to rush down to Madison; seems your Uncle Bryce backed his Chevy into a pine tree. Totaled the car, then broke his leg trying to climb out the window when the door wouldn’t open.”

“That’s awful.”

Walter shrugged. “At least he won’t be such a bother to his wife while he’s in traction. She might even have a nice Christmas.”

“Daddy!”

“Well it’s true. He’s always been a trial to her. Oh, by the way, Brian Garroway came by a few days ago.”

“He did?” Aurora grew apprehensive. “What did he want?”

“To drive me deaf with all his talking. Told me you’d lost your mind and been abducted by Satanists, that sort of thing. I let him ramble on for a piece about how we had to save you, then sent him home.”

“Oh my . . .”

“He’ll get over it,” Walter added quickly, fighting back a grin. “Trust me. So what do you say we eat before you folks unpack?”

They did just that.

Dinner was a wonderfully inappropriate combination of roast beef, cucumber sandwiches, and warm white wine. The roast was blood red and attracted the immediate attention of Luther, who leaped up onto the dinner table. Rather than shoo him off, Walter Smith set out an extra plate for the dog. “Don’t tell your mother about this,” he cautioned Aurora.

They talked a great deal over dinner, and during the course of the conversation it was revealed that Brian Garroway had somehow fingered George as the reason for his sudden loss of girlfriend (Aurora had told him nothing; at the moment of the breakup Brian had become so self-righteously angry that she had not even bothered trying to explain the why behind her decision).

“He said he only suspected,” Walter told them, “but he said it was a strong suspicion, and terrible if it turned out to be true. Made you out to be a real corrupt character, George, a no-account purveyor of filth trying to destroy the morals of every literate soul in America. Just like that James Joyce. Of course after an introduction like that I couldn’t wait to read your books. Town library didn’t have them, and neither did the five and dime, so I took a drive down to Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee?” said George. “But that must be fifty miles south of here.”

“Fifty-three,” Walter corrected. “And worth every minute of the trip. Marvelous writing . . . I haven’t been so entertained since I discovered Bel Kaufman back in seventy-five.”

George was deeply flattered by this, though he hadn’t the slightest idea who Bel Kaufman was or what she had written. Aurora, wondering what precisely had gotten into her father, fell silent and gobbled down an abundance of cucumber sandwiches, which gave rise to a loud burping fit during dessert. She excused herself and rushed off to the bathroom.

No sooner had Aurora departed than Walter also got up from the table.

“Come on,” he said to George, gesturing.

“Come on?”

“Get your coat,” said Walter. “We’ll go out for a walk. There are a few things I want to talk over with you.”

“All right.” Leaving his dessert unfinished, George stood and followed Walter outside. Left unsupervised, Luther set about methodically devouring every remaining morsel on the table.

The two men walked parallel to the sunset, coming eventually to the great cow pasture that bordered the Smiths’ property. Snow lay only sparsely on the ground, but it made a pleasant crunch beneath their feet, adding a cadence to the conversation.

“I’m going to use an old-fashioned expression,” Walter warned, and then did: “You consider yourself a suitor for my daughter’s hand?”

“Do I plan to marry her, you mean?” asked George. He thought this over a moment and laughed. “Talking marriage already, man oh man . . . well hell, who knows, I suppose that might be in the cards.”

“Never mind supposes and never mind the cards, son. You’ve got a will of your own, don’t you? Do you want to marry her, or not marry her, or some other option?”

“I love your daughter,” George said earnestly, “and for all that it’s come out of nowhere I have a feeling I’m going to stay in love with her, which means, to my way of thinking, that we’ll eventually get married unless her feeling for me changes. But . . . I want you to understand that I consider myself a strong-willed person, Mr. Smith, but Fate doesn’t always listen to will, and lately I’ve gotten especially nervous about Fate. Even if I did decide to marry your daughter, you never know, a flash flood might come sweeping through tomorrow morning and carry her off someplace where I can’t find her, or an earthquake . . .”

“We’ll put you down as a tentative suitor,” Walter decided. “And as a concerned potential father-in-law, of course, I get to ask you some personal questions to make sure you’re the right sort of fellow. I expect total honesty, now—I got sharp eyes, I’ll know if you’re lying to me.” He began to rattle off a long list of queries, which George answered as best he could: “Are you in any way peculiar?”

“Yes sir, I guess I am.”

“Praise the Lord. Ever been convicted of a felony?”

“No sir.”

“Ever commit a felony and not get caught?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Ever want to commit a felony?”

“Like what, Mr. Smith?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . . something interesting like train robbery or vandalizing a national monument.”

“I could think about it if you’d like me to.”

“Fine—I’m going to hold you to that. Ever been a member of a subversive organization?”

“The Writers’ Guild of America.”

“Not good enough.”

“I went on a Unitarian Church picnic once.”

“You’re my man. Have any homosexual tendencies?”

“Not unless they’re lesbian tendencies.”

“Pity. You a drinking man, George?”

“Occasionally. I’ve toned it down since my undergrad days.”

“Better for your liver that way. Take any drugs?”

“Well . . . it’s more or less traditional to experiment in college, you know, and at Cornell—”

“Smoke any pot?”

George nodded, tentatively. “Been known to. But not often—I can’t write worth shit with a buzz on.”

“You write every day, do you?”

“I ought to. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.”

“I know how that is. Plan on doing any writing tonight?”

“Tonight? No, this is my vacation time.”

“Well then.” Abruptly, and with a suddenness that belied his years, Walter Smith turned and vaulted the fence in a single bound. Once on the far side he spun himself around several times, laughing like a schoolboy.

“Mr. Smith?” George inquired, fearing a brain tumor.

“George,” Walter replied, stopping his spin. “George, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve decided to give my full blessing to you and Aurora, whatever you may want to do with each other. Now how about we say screw formality and go get stoned over by that tree stump yonder?”

There are some offers which a wise man does not even consider rejecting. In any case, the sight of this senior citizen producing a joint from his breast pocket—and not just an ordinary joint, either, but a six-inch Bob Marley Memorial—so stunned George that he could not help but comply. Nodding, he too vaulted the fence and followed Walter down to the old tree stump, where they talked about their respective unorthodoxies for as long as conversation was still possible.

A long time they were out there, smoking by the stump; the sun finished setting, the stars flickered into life, and a cold breeze blew, bothering them not at all. They only went back to the house when Aurora came and got them—her eyes wide at the sight of the two men capering beneath the moon like mad priests—and long before that they were visited by the original aurora borealis, the glimmering Northern Lights. Caught up by that unearthly glow, a spectacle sent from a higher place, Walter Smith at last found peace, for now he knew, whether it ended well or poorly, his daughter’s life would not be average. George, never at peace—for storytellers and saints are not afforded such a luxury in this world—nevertheless appreciated the Lights as much as Walter did, for in that glow he could sense the soul of creation itself, and creation always made him smile.

SURPRISE PACKAGES

I.

Breakfast the next morning was almost exactly as it had been in Aurora’s dreams. They had fresh eggs specially purchased for the occasion, bacon, toast, butter, milk, and orange juice. Very traditional, but at the same time not, for once again Luther was up on the table partaking alongside them. The dog was the one element she had not dreamed in advance, but all else was the same: she and George smiling at each other across the bacon plate, her father laughing from the corner at some joke or other. Both men were red-eyed from the previous night’s smoking activity, but Aurora tactfully did not mention this.

When the last bit of egg had vanished from their plates, Aurora stood up and led George out of the house in much the same way as Walter had last evening. George did not even ask where they were going, for he had decided overnight that anything this family did after a meal was bound to be enjoyable. While Walter saw to the dishes, Aurora took George on a long, meandering journey through the surrounding countryside, stopping here and there to show him the memory-places of her childhood. Once they knelt to drink with cupped palms from a partly frozen stream, and she asked if this wouldn’t be a good site for destiny to bring two lovers together. George said he thought it would, and Aurora grasped his hand and pulled him to his feet, making him run upstream with her to an open field where a farm had once been. The field was heavily overgrown now, the only outbuilding left standing being a dark and weather-stained barn. The barn looked less than inviting—it looked haunted, in fact, perhaps with the spirits of long-departed milk cows—but it was to this very place that Aurora gestured.

“Inside,” she told him.

“What’s in there?”

She grinned and kissed his mouth. “It’s a surprise.”

II.

Many miles east, a snowball fight had whipped up on The Ithaca Commons. Two teenagers had started it, but it had rapidly spread to their friends and then to a group of younger children from the local elementary school, let loose for the holidays. Preacher and Jinsei—out to take advantage of the sunny Christmas Eve day—got caught somewhere in the middle of the fray and, laughing, began to pelt each other with armloads of snow.

About this same time, a particularly juicy slushball winged out of control and knocked off the hat of a beefy Ithacop who was just stepping out of McDonald’s. The cop grunted and fixed a baleful stare on the eight-year-old pipsqueak who had thrown the slusher.

“Hey, cop!” piped the pipsqueak, who last evening had snuck into his parents’ bedroom to watch Blackboard Jungle on late-night TV. “What’s ya name, cop?”

“Doubleday,” the cop roared. “Sam Doubleday.”

“Ooooooh!” replied the pipsqueak, matching bellow for bellow. “Ooooooh, Double-day!” And he winged another slushball, hitting dead center on the chest this time.

Doubleday, murder in his eye, unhooked his nightstick from his belt and did a lumbering buffalo’s charge at the pipsqueak. The pipsqueak, immature but not stupid, made an immediate run for it. What followed was an uneven chase, for Doubleday, with his considerable bulk, was restricted to the paths an early plow had cleared on The Commons, while his small tormentor scrambled easily over the highest snowbanks.

It was into one of these snowbanks that Preacher and Jinsei had collapsed in a tight embrace. Both of them would have been content to remain locked together until the spring thaw, but the passing of the pipsqueak (the bellowing Doubleday remarkably close on his heels) disturbed their intimacy. Preacher raised his head to glance around at the commotion, receiving a severe shock from what turned out to be an optical illusion. His eyes at a low angle, he spied a nearby pair of black boots, black pants, the hem of a black trenchcoat . . .

“Rag!” he blurted out, an instant before realizing that the head sticking up above the collar of the trenchcoat was that of a jaundiced woman with coke-spoon earrings. The woman made no attempt at recognition but walked onward in search of leather goods, leaving the two lovers to their business in the snow. Jinsei reached up to the touch Preacher’s face; he shied back, the mood ruined.

He had long since given up feeling guilty, of course; guilt is a difficult emotion to maintain when you know you have done nothing wrong. But the loss of a best friend—you can agonize over that forever, even if, again, you rest assured of your innocence. Ragnarok had done a heroic job of avoidance over the last two months, yet while Preacher had not seen him personally he kept encountering reminders of him, which were no less upsetting.

“Let’s walk,” Jinsei said, forcing him to stand. Down at one end of The Commons, Doubleday had successfully chased the pipsqueak up a traffic signal pole and was shouting the most dire threats at him; they turned and headed the other way. Speaking in soft tones, Jinsei tried to lull Preacher back to pleasanter thoughts, only to be thwarted by the appearance of another figure garbed in black. This fellow, a mime, wore a bulky robe rather than a trenchcoat, but his face was painted an obscene pale white and he stood within an inch of Ragnarok’s height.

The mime was handing out flyers; Jinsei and Preacher moved to avoid him but he sidestepped even as they did, thrusting a paper in Preacher’s hand and then whirling away with a wink.

“What does it say?” Jinsei asked him. Preacher shrugged and handed her the flyer, which read:

THE NEWLY FORMED BARDIC TROUPE OF ITHACA

gives advance announcement

of a wondrous Shakespearean event

Coming in March

ROMEO AND JULIET

“A tale of star-cross’d lovers . . .”

and

JULIUS CAESAR

watch for further details

in the coming weeks

Jinsei looked at Preacher and smiled.

“‘Star-cross’d lovers,’” she said, squeezing his hand. “I like the sound of that, don’t you?”

III.

The hayloft was high above the barn floor, the ladder leading to it rickety enough that you were quite content just to make it safely to the top, though there was precious little to see. The last bales of hay had long since been removed, and all that remained on the hard wooden platform were some rusting farm implements, a scattering of chaff, and a pair of plaid quilts that were a little moldy but good for sitting on. It was warm in the loft, surprisingly so; a draft whined somewhere off in the rafters but did not disturb them.

“So what do we do?” George asked when they had got themselves settled. “Enjoy the view?”

“The view’s exciting,” Aurora said seriously, glancing down at the distant barn floor, “but I had something else in mind.”

She lifted a loose plank near the corner of the platform, and in what seemed to George an act of pure magic, produced a bottle of red wine and two crystal goblets from the space beneath.

“How did that get up here?” he gasped. “What did you do, sneak out in the middle of the night?”

“No, silly,” Aurora laughed, wiping the goblets with the sleeve of her coat. “These have been here since I was twelve.”

“Since you were twelve?”

“Yep. This was my secret hideout when I was little. All of the other kids were afraid of it because there were supposed to be monsters inside, but I had a great time playing here. This loft makes a great pretend balcony for a Princess to address her loyal subjects.”

George nodded, smiling. “But what about the wine and the cups? Where’d you get them in the first place?”

“A man gave them to me.”

“What man?”

Aurora shrugged. “I don’t know. A stranger who was standing outside in the field one day. Southern European looking, Spanish or maybe Greek. Friendly eyes. Maybe I should have been afraid of him but I wasn’t. He said he had a present for me, something I should save until the time was right.” She handed George the wine, and a silver corkscrew. “Here, you do the honors.”

George studied the bottle in his hand.

“Interesting label,” he said. “‘Leidenschaft von Heiliger . . .’”

“‘Doctor Faustus Vineyards,’” Aurora finished for him. “‘Vintage 1749.’”

“Sounds like a joke,” George decided. “And there’s no way it could be that old. I’ll bet it’s just grape juice laced with codeine—that stranger was probably a drug pusher out to get you hooked.”

“I took codeine once,” she said. “For an ear infection. It’s not all that terrible.”

“Might be poisoned, too.”

She shook her head. “It’s not poisoned.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I know it’s time to open it. I just do.”

Nodding, George argued no further but broke the wax seal on the bottle and inserted the corkscrew. The cork came out with a pleasant ease; the wine murmured comfortably as he poured it.

“Tell me about the monsters,” George said, when they had toasted each other.

“Hmm?”

“The monsters that were supposed to be inside the barn when you were little.”

“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “Plain old ghosts, I suppose . . . whose I don’t even know. I guess I couldn’t bring myself to be scared over what was dead and buried. It was nice, really, having a private place where nobody else would bother me.”

“Nice,” George agreed, his tongue already heavy though his goblet was not yet half empty. Heady stuff.

“You know I’m still a virgin,” Aurora said next, and the wine must have affected him, for the sudden change of topic did not, as it normally would have, cause him to choke, drop his cup, or otherwise lose control of his bodily functions.

“Ever read Fariña?”

“Fariña?”

“Richard Fariña. Went to Cornell in the late Fifties and raised some hell with this dude Kirkpatrick Sale from the Sun; the two of them would have made prime Bohemians. After graduation Fariña married Joan Baez’s sister and wrote this wild novel about college and hell-raising in general. Motorcycle accident killed him two days after the book was published.”

“Perfect timing.”

“Really. I should be so lucky. Anyway, the novel’s protagonist is a very Fariña-type guy named Gnossos Pappadopoulis, and Gnossos has this theory about virginity being spiritual . . .”

“Is this like your theory about the nobility of gay people?”

“Hey, Fariña knew that of which he spoke. The idea, see, is that you can screw every man and woman in the jolly United States of America and still be a virgin. The membrane only breaks when you make love.”

“But you’ve made love, haven’t you?” Aurora asked. “With Calliope?”

“That’s true.”

“And I’ve never even screwed anybody.”

“That’s true.”

“So how is Fariña’s theory possibly relevant to our situation?”

“Well, it isn’t,” George said, swallowing a long draught of Leidenschaft von Heiliger. “But it’s bad luck to pass up any chance at a literary reference. Besides, it’s a great damn book.”

“Sure it is,” said Aurora. “Finish that drink and teach me how to seduce you.”

IV.

“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to go through the graveyard.” It had been Jinsei’s idea to climb The Hill in a show of pure defiance against the snow, but now, at the lower entrance to The Boneyard, she balked. “Look, the plow hasn’t even been through there,” she pointed out. “And I’ll bet the drifts are pretty deep”

“At least we won’t have to dodge cars,” Preacher replied. They had been walking in the road, for the plow that had cleared University Avenue had inadvertently erected a scale rendition of the Alps above the only sidewalk.

“We’ll get our boots wet,” Jinsei countered.

“No matter. Look, Jin, that snow’s virgin. Don’t you want to be the first to walk on it?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You scared of what’s buried under?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little. Aren’t you?”

“No point to it. Dead body’s like a waxwork, lady. Might as well get uptight over a scarecrow or a dresser’s dummy.”

This did not seem to comfort her a great deal; smiling gently, Preacher clasped her hand and took a step toward the cemetery gates.

“Come on, Jin,” he said. “Let me tell you another secret: as long as you walk in under your own steam there’s nothing to fear. When they hire six guys to carry you in, that’s the time to wig out.”

He tugged lightly on her arm and she relented, following him through the gates. Just beyond, a group of snowbound mausoleums jutted out of the side of a slope, like a great townhouse for the dead. Jinsei spied this with more than a little apprehension, but of course it was not the dead she ought to have been afraid of. Not at all.

Kicking up small clouds of snow, they turned left when they could, and headed unwittingly toward the north end of The ’Yard.

V.

George undid the last button on Aurora’s blouse and slipped it back, revealing the warm pale shoulders beneath. He thought to himself that that was an odd word, pale—a word that could be positive or negative depending on the context, one that could describe everything from death to the forehead of a medieval princess.

Ah, literary to the last. He bent his head and began kissing her breasts. Time went away for a while, like a tactful fade in a romance novel; when it came back they were both naked, lay pressed together on the quilts. They had kissed and touched and explored one another and now the Moment was upon them.

“This might hurt some.” George warned her. “Since you’ve never done it before.”

Beneath him, Aurora smiled. “Did you read that in some book, too?”

“Read it in a lot of books. Had a few friends describe the pain to me, too. In detail.”

“Same here.” Her lips parted to kiss his shoulder. “But right now,” she said, “right now I feel very . . . relaxed. I don’t know if I could hurt, feeling like this. Maybe that’s what the wine was for.”

“Maybe,” George agreed. There was nothing more to say; he went into her with a kind and dreamy gentleness. There was no pain.

VI.

“Jesus!”

Preacher took a step and suddenly sank waist deep in snow. Jinsei immediately gripped his arm with both hands and prepared for a struggle, for it seemed almost as if something had grabbed Preacher from below in an attempt to drag him under.

“It’s all right,” Preacher assured her. “Just stepped in a hole. I’m OK.”

“Can we please get out of this place?” Jinsei pleaded, still gripping his arm.

“Sure, right up . . .” Preacher started to pull himself up when his foot caught on something. “Wait. Hang out a second.”

He pulled his arm loose of her, then turned and stepped full into the hole, knocking out some more space for himself. He bent down and dug.

“Preacher, what—”

“Something here . . .” He gave a hard tug, freeing something from the earth. He held it up triumphantly.

Jinsei blanched, thinking at first that Preacher had somehow dredged up a piece of corpse, though on closer inspection she saw that the object was actually a box—a black iron box, a cube no more than half a foot to a side, wrapped with a single silver band.

VII.

Approaching the pinnacle, the two lovers abandoned the quilts and rolled precipitously close to the edge of the hayloft, groaning in comfortable uncomfortableness at the feel of the uneven wood planking. George found himself once again in a state of awe, for where making love to Calliope had been smooth and perfect, this present coupling was marvelously amateurish and sloppy—and all the better for that. He reveled in the reality of it.

Very near the summit now, somebody’s arm or leg struck the bottle of Leidenschaft von Heiliger, sending it flying. It did a bombs away and sprayed red wine all the way down, smashing to bits on the floor below. Neither of the lovers even noticed.

VIII.

“Preacher, I really wish we could go somewhere else to open that . . .”

“Hang out,” Preacher responded.

Paper thin, the silver band tore easily. He unwound it from the box, offering it to Jinsei. She would not take it; shrugging, Preacher folded it and placed it in the pocket of his longcoat.

“Preacher, I think . . .”

But he did not hear her, so fascinated was he with the riddle of the box. All the seams had been carefully sealed with some sort of solder, but the solder was brittle with time and chipped away easily enough. Using his thumbnail, Preacher cleaned off most of it, then began to raise the lid of the box.

Even as he did, something with wings and talons of ice struck him on the side of the head and sent him sprawling.

IX.

George and Aurora cried out together, as did the wind, ever George’s ally. Shrieking, it took hold of the barn and shook it like a toy.

“Again,” Aurora whispered, when the earth had stopped moving.

X.

“What is it?”

Preacher pushed himself up on one hand, using the other to touch his bloodied forehead. The box had been knocked away and had landed on its side in the snow a few yards beyond him, open just a crack. It was not the box that held his or Jinsei’s attention anymore, however, but rather the strange bone-pale bird that had settled on top of it.

“Sweet Jesus,” Preacher said, as Jinsei knelt beside him and pressed a handkerchief on his wound. The bird had to be the most unnatural-looking creature he had ever laid eyes on, like a crystalline statue somehow animated to life.

The Messenger steadied itself on the tilted surface of the box. It watched the man and woman warily; it had been watching them ever since they had first entered The Boneyard. Preacher had been permitted to pick up the box and break the Seals, but now that that was accomplished the Messenger would kill him—kill both of them—to protect the contents.

“Let’s get out of here!” Jinsei hissed. Preacher nodded, took her hand, and together they backed away, turning to run as soon as they had gotten a reasonable lead. The Messenger made no move to follow them but did not take its eyes off them, either; it studied their retreat most attentively.

From within Pandora’s Box, another creature studied them as well.

MESSAGES, AND A PARLIAMENT OF VERMIN

I.

“All right,” Mr. Sunshine said, eager at his Writing Desk. “All right, George has his Princess, the Princess has her George, and the box is open. Now, what’s next . . .” He riffled his Notes. “The dog! That’s right, the dog!”

Searching inside his Desk for a piece of Stationery (not, of course, ordinary stationery), he scrawled a quick Message. Then, folding it twice, he wended his way through the Monkeys to a dim corner where a Mail Chute waited with open mouth. The Chute bore this symbol: and the legend: UNDERWORLD CORRESPONDENCE ONLY.

“Not quite like the old days,” Mr. Sunshine said wistfully, as his Message made an uncertain descent down the dark Chute. “But still, that takes care of that. Now . . .”

II.

Just after dusk on that same Christmas Eve, Mrs. Smith called from Madison to announce that she would not be home for another day at least, though she felt terribly about missing the holiday with her family and gave all her love to Aurora. Sensing a golden opportunity, Walter and George built a cozy fire in the hearth and conspired to introduce Aurora to what Lion-Heart had always called the Dubious Art of Getting Stoned; after the briefest hesitation, she turned out to be an excellent pupil. The three of them were soon giggling like cheerful idiots, hugging one another, and tossing off non sequiturs a mile a minute. Even Luther managed to join in the fun. He could not puff a joint, of course, but he stuck close to Walter—of whom he had grown quite fond, thinking him an archangel—who obligingly exhaled in his direction.

Luther had at last found contentment: more food than he had ever seen before, warmth, dry shelter, and kind Masters. Surely he must, finally, be in Heaven. True, he had encountered no other dogs here, nor had he seen any during the entire chariot ride up, but for the time being he was so overwhelmed by comfort that he asked no questions. He had even ceased to worry about Blackjack, though he knew he must soon find a way to get a message to him.

Now, as his shaggy head tingled strangely in response to the smoke, Luther felt the divine power of Heaven close in around him. The room grew bright; Luther’s eyes were drawn to the space right before the fireplace, where, as casual as you please, an aging mongrel materialized out of thin air. It was a dog he knew well, a dog who had protected him and given him love when he was only a pup. A dog he had initially set out for Heaven to find.

“Moses!” Luther cried, his deepest hopes realized. “Moses, I found you!”

Moses did not speak, but turned almost immediately and began walking out. Luther followed him, leaving the humans to their laughter.

“Moses, Moses, where have you been? I missed you more than anything! I—”

Moses led him down a short hall into the kitchen, where a gust of wind blew open the back door. The older dog marched straight outside, unmindful of the cold. Luther stayed close on the heels of his sire. Long minutes they walked, deep into the night, until the Smith house became a mere twinkle of distant warmth and light. Only then did Moses stop and turn once more.

“Oh, Moses!” said Luther, who had kept up a joyous babble the whole time. “Moses, it’s so good to be here with you.”

The old mongrel looked at him with deepest regret.

“You gotta leave this place, Luther,” he said.

III.

The creature crept out of the iron box shortly after nightfall. Small, twisted, utterly loathsome in appearance, it was no wonder his enemies had called him Grub. At last released, his first thought was to vent his anger on the prison that had confined him for so long. Yet to his great fury he discovered that he could do nothing to the box; the act of sustaining himself for more than a century had drained him of his magic, and he was now powerless.

Hateful, hateful, hateful! How could he wreak his revenge, without magic? To be free and still helpless was even greater torture than confinement . . .

Rasferret.

The Messenger waited patiently on the snow behind him, wings folded.

Rasferret, a bargain for you.

The Grub quailed at the sight of the ice bird, for he was a coward at heart, and without magic he could no more defend himself than he could attack. Only the mention of a bargain kept him from fleeing, whatever good that might have done.

And so in that cold place of the dead, the Messenger passed on the Word that Mr. Sunshine had given it, communicating in a silent tongue. Rasferret listened, growing bolder as he heard the terms of the offered bargain. Was it revenge he craved? He would have it. Did he need fresh magic to accomplish that revenge? That too would be his, in greater amount than he had ever known before—and with it he could slay and destroy to his heart’s content. Only one catch was placed on the deal: that an opponent would be raised up against him, not a sprite but one of the Big People, a man with great power and will of his own. The Grub would have magic to fight him, but to keep it he must win the battle. If he failed, he would forever after be powerless.

The strength of magic began flowing back into Rasferret’s body even before the Messenger concluded, and having tasted of it the Grub could not refuse the deal, no matter what the eventual consequences. He flexed his newfound power by warping the prison-box into an unidentifiable wreck of metal, making the lid-hinges pop like breaking bones.

Well, well. In the blink of an eye he had shed his helplessness. But his power was not yet complete—he was made to understand that the magic would accrue gradually, peaking some two and a half months from now on the Ides of March, when the crucial battle would take place. Between then and now there was much work to be done. He had never killed a human before; he would have to practice.

IV.

“Leave?” Luther protested. “But I just got here!”

“Don’t you give me that look, Luther. It’s not my fault. You got a part to play, back on that Hill you came here from. Not a big part, but it’s what’s wanted.”

Luther glanced back toward the distant house. “But they brought me here. I can’t make the trip alone.”

“Why not? You already did it once. Only difference is you won’t have the cat with you this time, but you’ll manage fine enough without him. I’m not saying it won’t be a trial to you, mind—the Road’s got longer, and you can be sure Raaq is still angry at you for getting away from him. But like I say, you’ll manage.”

“But do I have to leave right now?”

“What’d I always teach you? Did it ever pay for a dog to put off a hard task?”

“No,” Luther replied despondently. “But—”

“You’ve gone and used one ‘but’ too many already, Luther. Now—”

“Listen to me!” Luther insisted, with an abrupt burst of anger that was completely unlike him. “This whole thing—the reason I left home in the first place—was to find you again. And after all I’ve gone through you show up just to tell me how I have to leave a place where I’m finally happy.”

“Spirit,” Moses observed, showing the first bit of good humor since his sudden appearance. “You changed, Luther. You’re not the innocent little pup I left behind me. I wager it’s the Road that changed you—could be it’ll change you more before it’s done with you. But any way you look at it, you don’t need me anymore.”

“I want to be with you. Will you walk with me?”

“I’ll show you where to pick up the scent. Beside that . . . well, I’m a ghost, Luther. What you want to spend time with me for?”

“I told you . . .”

“That’s a kind thing,” Moses said. “You missing me so much. But it makes no difference, you see, ’cause you were wrong. You can’t walk to Heaven, Luther. It may come to you, sometime, but—”

“You mean this isn’t Heaven, either?”

“Guess you ain’t lost all of your innocence. Course it ain’t Heaven. Heaven’s like nothing you could ever expect, Luther. Neither is death, come to that. And a wise dog, he don’t waste his time looking for either one.”

“One of the philosophers I met told me it was good to waste time doing things like that . . . following obsessions. Especially when I don’t know what else to do.”

“Well . . . when you don’t know what else to do. But I just told you what you ought to be about, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Luther admitted.

“Just so. Come on now and I’ll show you where to start.”

V.

Even as Luther was engaged in the curious reunion with his sire, many hundred miles to the east Rasferret the Grub was busy setting up a little reunion of his own. Reunion, of course, is not quite the right word; recreation would be more accurate.

Riding on the back of the Messenger, the Grub relocated to a different part of The Boneyard, away from the place where he had been so long entrapped. As the moon rose in a cold arc above the horizon, he used his magic for a Summoning. Some hours later, near midnight (Luther had by this time bade a regretful farewell to Moses and set out on his new journey), Rasferret had himself set down atop a jutting stone rectangle that bore the words:

DEDICATED TO THE LOVING MEMORY

OF HAROLD LAZARUS

1912–1957

BY HIS ADORING WIFE

GOD GRANT HIM REST

This tombstone, as mentioned before, was capped by a gargoyle figurine. It was onto the shoulders of this figurine that Rasferret settled himself, and to say whether gargoyle or Grub had the more horrendous countenance would be difficult. The Messenger set down nearby, perching in a lower place. When all was ready Rasferret brought his Parliament to order with a silent command.

In excess of fifty rats had gathered on the snow surrounding the tombstone, like dark castings left by a passing beast. They had come in answer to Rasferret’s summons, some creeping out of deep tunnels in the earth, others from cellars and dank sewers, all bringing bits and pieces of junk as tribute—shiny scraps of metal, snips of wire, beads, small bones. Having taken their places they waited to be made over, the tiny white plumes of their breath mimicking a ground mist.

Rasferret did not speak so much as a single word; instead, eyes glowing bright blue—the blue that is the hottest part of a flame—he lifted his misshapen arms, in the manner of a preacher bidding his congregation to rise. And rise they did, or tried to. Each rat, spine crackling in metamorphosis, struggled to stand straight on its hind feet. Some succeeded; others, less fortunate, got halfway up only to collapse, crippled beyond repair. Most of these did not live long.

The metamorphosis concluded. Of the fifty or some rats who had come to the Parliament, perhaps twenty survived the transformation and became Rats, bipedal soldiers in Rasferret’s new army. They were already armed, for the objects they had brought with them had also been transformed, bits of metal becoming crude swords, wire and bone knitting together to form crossbows.

The Grub reviewed his troops. Twenty was not a large number, but there would be many more as his power increased. Even the magic he had already been granted would have been sufficient for quite a few more transformations, but he was conserving, saving his energy for a special bit of business several nights hence. Rasferret grinned obscenely in anticipation of his first murderous acts in more than a hundred years.

As he grinned, one of his troops broke ranks. The Rat was a large one, the largest of the twenty actually, and carried both a crossbow and a long blade. It limped, but Rasferret sensed that the limp was the result of a previous injury, not an accident in metamorphosis. Curious, Rasferret met the Rat’s gaze, saw the anger and love of destruction within it. There passed a moment of perfect communication between the two of them during which, again, not a word was spoken.

At last the Grub nodded in assent, receiving a clumsy bow in return. And that is how Thresh the Rat, the slayer of Cobweb, became a General in the army of vermin, second in command only to Rasferret himself.

THE KILLING HOUR

I.

Wind the clock for a killing hour, then. Let it begin just before the turn of years, at 11:15 on the night of December thirty-first, with the snapping of a branch. Let it conclude fifty-eight minutes later, at thirteen past midnight, with a sound like fingernails on a coffin. And set it up just so:

On the morning after Christmas, Preacher looked into the bathroom mirror to find his head wound almost healed. Noon of the same day, Jinsei received a phone call from the supervisor at Uris Library, where she had been working since October. Over the winter break the Library was doing an extensive reorganization of its card-file system, and those few student workers who remained in Ithaca were urgently needed. The roads had been cleared sufficiently of snow by now that travel up The Hill was no longer a great odyssey, and after a short conversation, Jinsei agreed to come in that afternoon. In fact, Jinsei worked at the Library almost every afternoon that week, up to and including the thirty-first, often staying until late in the night.

Late in the night on the twenty-seventh, Rasferret moved his camp from The Boneyard to the crown of The Hill. Riding on the back of the Messenger, he soared unseen to the belfry of McGraw Hall, the central of the three grey boxes that had been the first buildings erected on the campus. A century ago the belfry had housed Jenny McGraw’s famous chimes, but now only dust resided there—dust, and Rasferret the Grub. His Rats traveled on foot over snow-encrusted ground to join him, and together they set up a discreet base of operations, within sight of the Clock Tower where Hobart dreamed fearsome dreams.

The twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth were days of watching and waiting, with precious little incident, but a number of important things happened on the thirtieth. Preacher got in touch with Fujiko, who was having a wonderfully carnal vacation over at Tolkien House; they agreed to have a small get-together to celebrate New Year’s Eve, with Preacher bringing Jinsei up to the House after she got off work. The sprites, too, had a New Year’s celebration in the works, an HO-scale gala with skating on the frozen surface of Beebe Lake. One of Rasferret’s Rats managed to overhear a group of sprites talking about this, and while the creature did not understand much of what was said, it got the gist: that tomorrow night, the majority of the Little People would be off away from the center of campus, out of ear and eyeshot of whatever might go on there. Rasferret had at last been provided with a striking date; he spent most of that night laying his final plans. Barely twenty miles away, in a chalet along cold Cayuga’s shore, Ragnarok spoke a prophecy. From a deep slumber he uttered a single sentence: “My God, her eyes are glowing.” Myoko and Lion-Heart, locked together in their own room, did not hear this, nor would they have understood it if they had.

December thirty-first dawned bleak and cold, with a promise of fresh snow. Jinsei and Preacher made love one last time before she went up The Hill to work. Love left them joyful and unaware.

Night came all too quickly.

II.

Preacher tramped up the front steps of Uris Library shortly after eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, bearing a gift for his Lady. Snow came down in light swirls, enough to dust the ground and obscure the glowing faces of the Clock Tower in a fine reflected haze. He stepped right up to the glass doors, which were locked, and rapped loudly with a white-gloved fist. Jinsei appeared a moment later, a long-stemmed rose wrapped and tucked delicately into the crook of one arm. She fumbled with an enormous ring of keys and managed to unlock the doors.

“Hey,” Preacher said, leaning in out of the cold to kiss her. “Where’s your coat?”

“Um . . .” Jinsei replied, kissing him back. “Mrs. Woolf wants me to stay on another hour.”

“Does she?” he said, sounding unimpressed. “It’s New Year’s, Jin. Fujiko, her dude, and midnight are all waiting on us. Can’t you work an extra hour some other time?”

“I could, but . . . well . . .” She held up her hand, the thumb and forefinger a bare centimeter apart. “We’re that close to finishing with the letter R.”

“Oh,” said Preacher, and they both got laughing. He laid a ginger hand on the wrapped flower under her arm. “What’s this?”

She shrugged, handing it to him. “Something I picked up for you on the way to work. It’s probably wilted by now.”

“Mmm.” He bent and kissed her again, lingering a bit longer at her mouth. “I brought you something, too.”

“Oh?” She traced the line of his jaw with a finger. “What?”

He drew back, grinning. Wind rushed in the open doorspace and shuffled the dark strands of her hair.

“Tell you what,” Preacher said. “I’ll give it to you when we get to Tolkien House.”

“Mean.” Jinsei tried for a pout but couldn’t quite handle it. “I gave you your flower already, didn’t I? But honestly, Preacher, Mrs. Woolf really wants me to stay that extra hour. I think it’ll make her New Year for her.”

“If you finish the letter R?”

“If we finish the letter R.”

“That’s going to make her life better?”

“Old librarians are easy to please.”

“Hmm.” He kissed her a third time, lingering, lingering. “What about young librarians?”

“Oh, they come along eventually,” she told him. “Why don’t you go ahead, tell Fujiko and Noldorin that I’ll be a little late. I’ll probably miss midnight, but I’ll be there as soon after as I can.”

Preacher opened his mouth to speak and she caught him in yet another kiss, putting the brakes on any further argument. When they broke for air he was nodding, a smile practically etched onto his face.

“All right,” he conceded. “Can’t disagree with that kind of reasoning. You just be careful walking up to the House, hear me?”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised.

“All right. And here.” Clutching the rose affectionately, Preacher fished in his coat pocket with his free hand and brought out a small white box.

“What is it?”

“I forget,” Preacher shrugged. “You’ll have to open it and see.”

She did. The bracelet in the box was dark-stained wood, girdled with a band of bright silver that shimmered prettily in the arc-light above the library door.

“It’s beautiful!” Jinsei gasped, then remembered a bone-pale bird and a sealed iron box. “Oh no. This isn’t—”

Preacher nodded. “I had it in my pocket when we ran. Got it in my head yesterday to go see a friend on Buffalo Street who makes jewelry. Waste not, want not, I figure.” That was not all of it—there was more to his odd compulsion to do something with the silver band than simple economy—but it was all he could find words to say.

“Oh, Preacher,” said Jinsei haltingly, “Preacher, it’s beautiful, but . . . I never want to go into that graveyard again, and I’m not sure I can keep something that will remind me what happened there.”

“What did happen there, Jin? A little scare, a little scratch. My head’s all better now.” He looked at her, caught her with something in his gaze. “It’s a pretty thing,” he said. “And I don’t know, maybe it’ll bring you luck sometime. They say silver’s good for that.”

It was her turn to argue no further. A strange feeling seemed to charge the air around them, a feeling of . . . well, momentousness. Something big, something serious about to happen. Jinsei took the silvered bracelet and set it upon her wrist; in that moment her love for Preacher was as strong as it ever had been, ever would be.

“You be careful too,” she said, catching his hands in her own. “Walking.”

Preacher grinned. “I’m always careful, Lady.”

They drew together for one last kiss before he set off, but the kiss multiplied into a long series of kisses, and for a precious grain of time they stood necking in the doorway, card-files and Rhetta Woolf waiting within for Jinsei, snow and darkness waiting without for Preacher, the dance of lips and tongue obliterating all but each other.

III.

Rasferret the Grub was alone in his hideaway, his Rats since dispatched on various dark errands, the Messenger set to circling above the Arts Quad, a warden against unforeseen intrusions in the hunt. Not that Rasferret was entirely blind, shut up in the belfry. He had a Sense, a magically enhanced feel for the surrounding territory; he knew where his troops were, and his targets.

He crouched in a tight wooden crawlspace littered with the scraps of careless meals, concentrating on his first animation in over a hundred years. A long time it had been, but he was fresh with power, and he had not forgotten the trick. It lay in a drawing together of the mind, a focusing, a willful push. A portion of Rasferret’s being—soul, spirit, ka, call it what you will—twisted free, coalescing in front of him, little more than a sparkling shimmer in the air, really, a gossamer of gossamers. He concentrated still further, marveling at the ease of it despite his lack of practice, and sent the essence outward into the night, searching for a host to animate, not knowing that one had already been selected and prepared for him by the Storyteller.

Rasferret’s ka shot northward with dizzying speed and purpose, drawn magnetically toward Fraternity Row, toward Tolkien House, where a pale mannequin stood waiting like an expectant bride. In that hidden part of Lothlórien where the trees grew thickest, Rasferret’s spirit entered into the Rubbermaid, giving life to plastic limbs, igniting glass eyes with blue fire. Looking out through those eyes, Rasferret sampled his new shape, flexing the hands, swinging the arms, breaking a branch underfoot as he took his first step forward.

It was 11:15, and the killing hour had begun.

IV.

Tolkien House co-president Amos Noldorin and his Lady Fujiko—naked as Adam and Lilith in Eden—lay together on a white silk sheet in the clearing by Lothlórien’s entrance. Just above them was the door in the hillside that led to the Khazad-dûm sub-cellars and the elevator.

The stars winked prettily in the skydome, with the brief flicker of an occasional meteor adding variety. The air in the Garden was pleasantly warm, not too humid, a faint breeze bringing a scent of exotic flowers—African violets, perhaps, or mallorn blossoms. With this environment-­controlled Paradise serving as a backdrop, the lovers argued good-naturedly about what they ought to do in the next fifteen minutes or so. Noldorin insisted that they should get dressed and go upstairs to await Preacher and Jinsei, who were due to arrive at any time now. Fujiko, her Bohemian libido in full ascendancy, made her own desires known by running her tongue briskly up and down behind his left ear.

“Now wait,” Noldorin protested—not too strongly—as she pushed his back down flat against the sheet and endeavored to climb on top of him. “Just wait, they’re going to be here any minute.”

“Is the front door locked?” asked Fujiko, her small form above his large one now, kissing his chest.

“No,” Noldorin admitted, weakening.

“What of it, then?”

“I’ll tell you what of it . . . I’ll . . . look, look, what if they walk in and find us like this?”

“Let them get their own sheet,” Fujiko suggested, her hands at work. “Or they can use the grass.”

“Don’t you think—” Noldorin paused briefly to gasp. “—don’t you think that would be just a little breach of good manners?”

“Never preach etiquette to a Risleyite,” replied Fujiko, and that was when someone pulled the switch, changed sensual daydream to ice-veined nightmare. Her hands on Noldorin’s body grew rigid. His budding erection wilted like a cut flower, and gooseflesh arose on both their skins.

“Jesus,” Fujiko exclaimed fearfully, and Noldorin, still flat on his back, did not have to ask what was the matter.

The skydome had gone black. Utterly. But that was not the worst thing. The breeze had dropped to nothing, yet somehow all the warmth seemed to have been sucked out of the air with its passing. Steam wisped from the bodies of the two lovers; the temperature plummet was that sudden, that instantaneous. But that was not the worst thing, either, nor was the fog that began to materialize around them, threatening to nullify what little illumination remained from the hidden groundlights. The worst thing was the sound, the not-so-stealthy approach-sound of something that echoed toward them from a nearby bank of trees.

“Jesus, oh Jesus, we’re not alone,” Fujiko cried, shivering. In another place and time—an eternally distant time—she had gone into battle against an angry motorcycle gang without a qualm, but now a supernatural dread entered her, filled her head with terrible storybook images: the Big Bad Wolf out for Little Red Riding Hood’s blood, Hansel and Gretel’s Witch, hungry for gingerbread.

Noldorin rose to a crouch, drawing the sheet about him and Fujiko to keep away the cold, hiding their nakedness. He too felt the dread, but not only dread. He felt strangely dizzy: dizzy from the sudden change in temperature, dizzy from lying on his back, dizzy from the wine he had drunk earlier. Head swimming, he studied the ring on his right hand, a silver band set with a white opal. It was intended as a replica of one of Tolkien’s three Great Elvish Rings. Magic. Oddly or not so oddly, with his head in a spin and terror crawling beneath his flesh, Noldorin found the concept of magic more interesting than ever before in his life. More crucial.

“The elevator,” Fujiko was saying, tugging at him. “Come on, we’ve got to run to the elevator, get upstairs—”

“No,” Noldorin said with sudden certainty. “We won’t make it that way. Not the elevator—the Circle.”

“What?”

“The Enchanted Circle.” He was on his feet, pulling her with him. “Hurry, it might be our only chance!”

Too panic-stricken to argue, she followed him, racing barefoot along the path to the ring of magic stones, the same ring within which Eldest sprite Hobart had, at the Hallowe’en revel, shared the tale of Rasferret the Grub with his fellow Little People.

Noldorin sought no stories, only sanctuary. He hauled Fujiko along as fast as she could go; the thing among the trees drew nearer, hearing them run, pursuing them. Almost at the Circle they lost the white silk sheet. It snagged on a branch, and rather than stop to retrieve it they sprinted the last ten yards naked, diving into the Circle, clutching each other protectively.

Sounds. Wolf, witch, whatever, the thing was still coming, very close now.

“It’s all right,” Noldorin said, holding Fujiko tight to him. “It’s all right.” Not stopping to think, he raised his ring hand and called out with as much surety he could muster: “Listen to me! We’re in the Circle! Do you hear? We’re in the Circle, and you can’t come in!”

Fujiko gasped. “Look.” The stones forming the Circle had begun to glow, a strong witchlight that cut easily through the gathering fog. Noldorin’s ring glowed as well; all at once the air did not feel nearly as cold.

The sounds of approach had stopped.

“That’s right!” Noldorin shouted, his voice firmer. “You can’t have us! We’re safe in the Circle, and you can’t come in! There’s nothing for you here!”

He waited, and Fujiko with him, wondering if the thing would leave now that it had been thwarted. For a long moment there was silence. Then a loud rustling began, very near them. It was the white sheet being pulled free of the undergrowth where it had fallen. Though both strained their eyes to see, only Fujiko caught a glimpse of the creature, and a vague one at that: a dark shape with two blue sparks where eyes might have been.

Approach-sounds were now departure-sounds; it was leaving them, crashing back through the trees as if remembering an important date elsewhere. Noldorin relaxed, slumping limply back against Fujiko, his relief a thing almost too great for expression.

“What . . . what was that?” he stammered. He rested his head on Fujiko’s shoulder, shaking. Around them the ring of stones began to dim, their magic no longer needed.

“I don’t know,” Fujiko answered, a tear running down her cheek. “I don’t know, but Preacher and Jinsei are going to be walking right into it.”

V.

The white sheet had become animate at a touch, and now, as the obsidian-­ walled elevator rose swiftly up to the main floor, it wrapped itself around the Rubbermaid like a living shroud. The sheet was a spur-of-the-moment thing, a casual addition; the Rubbermaid’s search for a weapon was more deliberate.

On the first floor, seeking an exit, the mannequin discovered the Michel Delving Mathom-Hole. The Rubbermaid surveyed its collection of relics, each marked with its own label: THIS IS THE HORN OF BOROMIR; HERE IS ANDURIL, THE SWORD THAT WAS BROKEN. In one case that drew the ’Maid’s particular attention lay a long black mace shod with iron. The label pronounced THIS WEAPON WAS WIELDED BY THE LORD OF THE NAZGÛL, THE WITCH-KING OF ANGMAR.

Glass shattered as the Rubbermaid thrust plastic hands into the display case like a weasel puncturing an eggshell, groping for the treasure within. The mace was solid, with a good heft. The Rubbermaid swung it once as a test, sending another glass case crashing to the floor, then hurried out into the night in search of prey.

VI.

Preacher actually spent a good long time necking in the front doorway of the Library before finally disentangling himself from Jinsei. The beckoning voice of the head librarian interrupted their reverie, and with a last peck Preacher turned and set out across the Arts Quad. It was 11:22.

He might have gone down the Slope, crossing Fall Creek Gorge along Stewart Avenue and so coming to Tolkien House that way; instead he chose to cross the Gorge on the suspension bridge. Ultimately it made little difference. Preacher’s movements as soon as he left the Library were tracked most closely, and compensated for.

Oblivious to his own peril, he half walked, half floated past McGraw Hall, whistling some or other love song that he’d heard that morning on the radio, snow swirling blithely around him. He cut left between White and Tjaden Halls, laughing out loud when he slipped on a patch of ice and almost fell. In front of the Johnson Art Museum he paused to listen to the wind chimes. In the cold winter air they made a flat, haunted sound, but Preacher found them cheerful. He found damn near everything cheerful tonight.

The bleak—but cheerful, oh so cheerful—glow of one of the campus Blue Light Emergency Phones marked the way down to the suspension bridge. The Phones had been installed several years ago after a series of at gunpoint rapes. That had been a nervous time, back then; the rapist had been black, and Preacher, who was often abroad at night, had been stopped on no less than four occasions by Campus Safety. In the end the best efforts of the police had done nothing but drive the criminal to other hunting grounds, which turned out to be enough. Near the end of Preacher’s freshman year the rapist attacked one Donna Winchell of Cayuga Heights. Like her assailant, Donna Winchell carried a handgun, and in the crunch she turned out to be a hell of a lot faster on the draw than he was.

But Preacher did not think of any of this as he descended the metal-and-timber stair into the Gorge. He gave only a glance to the second Blue Light Phone at the bottom of the steps, with its instruction sticker: PHONE IS NOT DEAD. TIME DELAY. PLEASE WAIT FOR ANSWER.

Still over a hundred feet from the floor of the Gorge, the suspension bridge hung elegantly, spanning the gulf with a quiet grace. The twin support cables were ice-encrusted and stretched away in perspective like beams of frozen light. A fresh layer of snow lay unblemished on the walkway, pure and white, the few random patches swept bare by the wind glittering with imbedded quartz. Preacher took a step onto that virgin layer, and remembered something his Orientation Counselor had told him during his first week here: They say you’re not a true Cornellian until you’ve kissed and been kissed on the suspension bridge. This Preacher had never done; he would have to bring Jinsei down here sometime, perhaps tomorrow on the way back from Tolkien House.

He took a second step, felt the vibration of the bridge under his weight . . . and another, much fainter vibration in answer. If he ever felt so much as a tickle of fear it was then, as he peered through the falling snow and caught his first glimpse of the white-sheeted shape coming toward him from the far end of the bridge. But the shape was alluring as well as unsettling. The white wrap moved hypnotically, as if dancing not at the mercy of the wind but with its own will. Preacher could not help but wonder what sort of person was hidden within, so strangely garbed.

“Good evening to you,” Preacher said in greeting, as they met near the middle of the span. “Happy New Year.”

The shape paused, turned toward him as if to speak. The sheet flew open with a snap, revealing the Rubbermaid all bedecked in black leather, and Preacher’s last coherent thought was My God, her eyes are glowing. Then the Nazgûl mace swung up with deadly force, striking him full on the side of the head, blasting thought and balance to fragments. Preacher was felled like a tree, the flower Jinsei had given him flying out of his grasp. The Rubbermaid stepped over his prone form and readied the mace for a second swing, but none was needed.

The blow had spun Preacher completely around. Lying flat out against the snow, he saw through one unfocused eye the distant gleam of the Blue Light Phone. He no longer comprehended what it was for, but tried to crawl for it anyway. He got all of three feet before the Rubbermaid reached down, grabbing him by the collar and the belt, lifting him up, above the safety-fencing of the bridge.

“Gunnh,” Preacher mumbled from a broken jaw, vaguely sensing the long drop beneath him. One randomly flailing hand found and gripped a hank of the Rubbermaid’s hair, which was long and silky. Jinsei, he thought lovingly.

Jinsei, his mind repeated, and the Rubbermaid hurled him into the void, Jinsei, he was falling, tumbling, it felt like flying, the wind rushing past him, Jinsei I lov— and a final shock as he plunged into the icy waters of Fall Creek, sharp rocks beneath the water, and beneath the rocks darkness, and long sleep.

The Rubbermaid did not even wait for Preacher to strike bottom. Mace in hand, it headed for Uris Library in search of Jinsei, Rasferret’s second practice victim. It was 11:35.

VII.

Fairy lanterns illuminated the frozen surface of Beebe Lake, where the full company of The Hill’s sprites skated, danced, and cavorted, laughing and making merry as they anticipated the New Year. Only one remained aloof from the festivities: Hobart, who seemed to have aged tremendously since Halloween. Well wrapped in furs, he stayed near the edge of the lights, muttering to himself. Despite frequent requests he would tell no stories this night, though there was one tale he needed to tell.

Puck was matching riddles with Hamlet when Zephyr came to find him. “What’s the matter?” Puck asked, seeing the concern in her eyes. She said nothing, only pointed off to where Hobart stood alone, half-shivering. Even from a distance the pallor of his face was frightful. “Is he sick?” asked Puck.

“I don’t know,” Zephyr told him. “He hasn’t been sleeping well, I think.” She caught his hand. “He says he want to speak to you. Alone.”

For no good reason at all Puck felt the first twinges of a growing unease at the base of his spine. “He wants to speak to me alone? What about?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. It has something to do with a favor he wants from you.”

“A favor . . .” Puck licked his lips nervously. He could not refuse, of course—in addition to being Zephyr’s grandfather, Hobart was, of course, Eldest, and you did not withhold a favor from the Eldest.

“All right,” he said, after a long hesitation. He excused himself to Hamlet, gave Zephyr’s hand a squeeze, and moved deliberately over to Hobart’s shivering form.

“You called for me, Hobart?” Puck greeted him. At first the old sprite, staring into the heart of one of the lanterns, did not seem to notice his presence. Only when Puck touched him gently on the shoulder did he look up.

“Good,” Hobart said to him, speaking barely above the level of a whisper. “Good.”

“Zephyr—” Puck began, that unease rising another notch. “Zephyr said you had a favor to ask of me.”

“A favor.” Hobart nodded. “I need an ear.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A listening ear. I have something I need to pass on, to an ear I can trust. One who can help me decide what needs to be done.” He drew a long breath, and coughed deep in his chest.

“Are you all right, Hobart?”

“Not in the least. So little sleep lately. Nightmares . . . you think they can get no worse, and then they do. Your plane carries two passengers, doesn’t it?”

“My biplane? You know it does. I brought Zephyr here in it.”

“Good. Good.” Hobart straightened up, seeming to regain a bit of his former strength. “I want you to fly me back to the Tower. We’ll have a drink, and a long talk. And then we’ll see if either of us can sleep.”

VIII.

At Uris Library, the letter R was at long last finished and done with. Rhetta Woolf had gone up into the stacks to take care of some last-minute business, leaving Jinsei to tidy up behind the circulation desk. Jinsei did this effortlessly, whistling to herself, thinking how she would soon be with Preacher.

Loud noises are always startling in a library, ordinarily a storehouse of soft whispers, and when the crash came, it was startling indeed. It jibbered in a splintering echo from the direction of the lobby, suggesting cataclysmic images: Superman hurling a glassed-in phone booth out a third-story window, an angry rhino taking issue with a chandelier. A silence followed which was not so silent as before.

“Mrs. Woolf?” called Jinsei, who had jolted upright at the sound, dropping a pack of borrowers’ cards to the floor. Her hand strayed to a convenient telephone; the number of Campus Safety was taped right on the back of the receiver. Then curiosity got the better of her, and, moving gingerly, she slipped out to the lobby to see for herself what had happened.

Apparently nothing had, at first glance. The lobby was multi-leveled; from where Jinsei stood, wide steps led down to the checkout desk; to the right of the checkout, the main doors remained shut and undamaged. Off to Jinsei’s left, a narrower stair climbed upwards, giving access on one landing to the Andrew D. White Reading Library.

The door to the White Library rattled in its frame, as if some prankster had hold of the knob on the other side.

“Who’s there?” Jinsei called, feeling foolish. Like the main doors, the entry to the White Library was made of glass, and she could see without moving that there was no one touching it within. Still . . .

She ascended the stair to the landing, drawn as if by a magic spell. The door continued to rattle; standing before it, she peered inside, straining, for the lights were out and it was difficult to see. Even so, enough light filtered in from the lobby and the outer windows for Jinsei to make out an amazing fact: it was snowing in there, actually snowing! And of course what had happened should have been obvious at that point, but for an instant she was completely taken by the illusion, it truly looked as if it were snowing indoors, and then the Tower Clock began to chime midnight.

“Magic,” Jinsei whispered, hardly realizing she had said it. As the New Year became reality, she laid her hand on the knob and pushed the door inward. A blast of cold air greeted her as she stepped inside.

IX.

As the Clock chimed its twelfth chime, Puck angled the biplane in for a final approach, a single wing-light his only aid in targeting the hangar entrance. “You did leave the doors open, didn’t you?” Puck asked, but Hobart made no response; he had been silent throughout the flight.

In fact Hobart did say one thing, as they swept in toward the Tower pinnacle and the beam of the wing-light confirmed that the hangar doors were open. He said: “Something is not right here.” It was a mutter only, and Puck never heard it.

Then with a single bump they were landed inside, braking to a stop. The wing-light pierced the darkness, picking out the wreckage of Hobart’s glider at the rear of the hangar.

“Jesus, Troilus, and Cressida,” Puck muttered. “What did you do to that, Hobart?”

Once again Hobart made no answer. The Eldest was otherwise occupied, sniffing the air. The hangar was crisp and cold, smelling principally of fresh snow, but beneath that there was another smell, far less pleasant.

“Hobart?” asked Puck, for he too had caught the underscent. “What is—”

“The Fates!” Hobart swore, coming suddenly to life. “Get us out of here! Get us out of here right now!”

“What—” Puck began to say, and then the first Rat leapt up on the biplane’s left wing, sword drawn to kill. Puck did not balk at the absurdity—a Rat on two legs, wielding a weapon—he merely brought up his own sword, which lay unsheathed on the floor of the cockpit, and caught the Rat coming in, piercing it through the breastbone. It twisted away into the darkness with a squeal, wrenching Puck’s sword out of his hands.

Now from all around them in the dark shadows of the hangar came the sounds of swords being drawn, crossbows being cocked. The full complement of Rasferret’s Rats had been waiting here for over an hour, in the hope that the master of the Tower might return alone, or in such scant company as to be an easy mark. Fate had handed them a splendid opportunity.

“Turn us around!” Hobart was shouting, his own sword out, ready to defend. Puck, unarmed, was turning the plane, praying that the creatures would not think to shut the hangar doors. As long as the escape route remained open there was a chance, no matter how outnumbered they were; the biplane had a couple of good surprises in it.

Crossbow bolts struck the wings and fuselage of the plane as it swung around. One lucky shot smashed the wing-light; now the only illumination, what there was of it, came through the hangar doors. Emboldened, the Rats pressed forward. Some came at the sides of the plane, and Hobart fought wildly with these, finding strength in panic. A good many others moved to block the exit; as the plane completed its turn, Puck could see them, silhouetted against the opening.

As Hobart struggled behind him, crying out as he was wounded, the younger sprite reached low in the cockpit to find an almost forgotten switch—the switch connecting to the mini-cannons. You’ll probably blow your own wings off, he remembered Zephyr saying about them. And maybe I will, he thought now.

“Happy New Year, you bastards.” He flipped the switch and the biplane jumped. Fire licked from beneath the lower wings, the blast resounding like a great cymbal crash. Eleven Rats were killed instantly, ripped apart by flying buckshot; a twelfth was blown clean out of the hangar.

Puck saw his chance. Keeping one eye on a nasty web of cracks in the lower right wing assembly, he throttled the biplane forward. But at least one of the Rats had some intelligence after all—the hangar doors were sliding rapidly closed, pulled by hidden counterweights. Already the opening seemed too narrow. Refusing to be trapped inside, Puck shoved the throttle to full and went for it anyway.

Both wing assemblies sheared clean off.

X.

The door snicked shut behind her. Jinsei stood on the green-carpeted floor of the White Library, staring at the gaping ruin of the north bay window. Here was the source of the crash: a man-sized hole had been punched through the glass. Wind and snow funneled in through the breach, dusting the Library. So it was no magic trick, after all. But there was magic here, of a darker sort.

Tap, tap, tap.

Cast-iron gantried bookstacks rose up two tiers high along the Library walls. It was from the upper tier, hidden in darkness, that the sound came.

Tap, tap, tap.

Jinsei should have been frightened, then. She should have asked herself just what precisely had punched such a large hole through the north window, should have turned, should have run. Instead, her earlier fear dissipated and, careful not to step on any broken glass, she made her way to the northwest corner of the room, where a circular stair led up to the tiers.

Tap—

Foot on the first step, face trance-like, some deep part of her trying to warn her to flee, her body paying no heed to the warning.

—tap—

Passing the lower tier, halfway up, climbing faster and faster.

—tap.

And now she had reached the top, stepped out onto the high tier. A few more brisk paces and she had come to a catwalk that reached from the west wall of the room to the east. Here she paused.

At the far end of the catwalk—which was not far at all, for the White Library is long but narrow—a pale sheet, ghostly in the darkness, stretched between two bookshelves like a shower-curtain. The sheet swung back and forth, beckoning her. Hidden behind it was the source of the sound, a rapping of metal against metal.

Tap, tap, tap.

Three long strides and Jinsei stood directly before the curtain. Again she paused, that inner voice screaming, shrieking at her. Unmindful, her left hand rose to pull aside the sheet. Her fingers brushed the fabric, which seemed almost alive.

From somewhere higher came another sound, like a muffled gunshot. Jinsei’s hand faltered.

The sheet swept aside anyway. The Rubbermaid uncoiled from behind it, swinging the mace upwards in a diagonal arc. If Jinsei had hesitated in the slightest—if she had taken time to scream, for example—the police might well have found her body lying beside the broken window, snow-frosted, head dashed open.

She did not hesitate; she threw herself backward with the blessed speed of reflex. Even so the first swing might have finished her, had her feet not chosen that same moment to tangle beneath her. She fell flat on her back on the catwalk, the mace stroke whipping past her as she tumbled, the tip of the weapon brushing the tip of her nose like a lover’s caress.

Undaunted, the Rubbermaid stepped forward, raising the mace high for another shot. As the weapon reached the height of its arc, Jinsei looked directly into the blue glow of the mannequin’s eyes. In that instant she knew everything that had happened on the suspension bridge; she knew Preacher was dead, and how.

Maybe it’ll bring you luck sometime.

Fury empowered her. Even as the mace started down Jinsei sprang up, aiming a blow of her own. She swung not her left arm but her right, leading with the edge of her wrist, on which the silver-banded bracelet now burned with green fire. It struck the Rubbermaid full on the side of the head.

With a crack like a rifle shot, the bracelet burst into a dozen pieces. The mannequin’s own swing went wide, striking the catwalk railing; the mace jolted free and spun away into the darkness. The Rubbermaid itself was hurled back, as if jerked by a cable, to smash jarringly into the bookstack behind it. In a shower of books it collapsed, falling in a heap. But the glow in its eyes did not go out.

“Oh God,” Jinsei croaked. Fury washed out of her as quickly as it had entered, to be replaced by an unbearable sense of loss. She staggered against the railing, blinking back tears while the white sheet whispered seductively against the bookshelves. “Oh God, Prea—”

The Rubbermaid straightened an arm. It sat up, scattering more books.

Once again, Jinsei acted reflexively. Both her wrists now bare, she gripped the catwalk railing tightly and swung herself over the side. The Rubbermaid sprang forward to grab her but did not quite make it; plastic fingers half-snagged a pants cuff and then let it slip free.

It was a long drop to the floor.

XI.

It was a long drop from the pinnacle of the Tower to the Library roof. The biplane, little more than a propellered pipe without its wings, dangled over the void at a paralyzingly steep angle. The closing hangar doors had caught the tail of the plane like a pincer, and right now were the only things keeping it from a fatal plummet.

Puck, one arm thrust into a shoulder strap of his emergency parachute, was trying desperately to get Hobart’s attention.

“The wind, Hobart!” he shouted, snowflakes whipping past his face. “You have to talk to the wind and get it to help us! I don’t know if my parachute can hold two!”

Hobart had slumped forward in his seat, bleeding from a scratch across his scalp and a far more serious sword puncture in his shoulder. He seemed in shock, oblivious to his surroundings or his peril.

“Hobart, please!” Puck screamed. “You’ve got to hear me! Hob—”

Another voice, heard only in the mind: Ho-bart.

Now Hobart stirred, raising his head sluggishly. “Wind . . .” he whispered, through dry lips.

Above, the General of the Rats stood just within the hangar doors, staring down the length of the plane at them. Yellowed teeth formed something that might have been a grin.

Ho-bart, the Rat General thought at them. Thresh ends you, Ho-bart.

Deeper within the hangar, another Rat pulled a lever. The doors began to shunt open again; the nose of the biplane dipped like a descending pendulum. “The wind!” cried Puck, attempting to grab Hobart and finish putting on his parachute at the same time. “The wind!”

Thresh ends you.

The biplane dropped, tumbling end over end and dashing to pieces on the Library roof below. Yet what of the occupants? A sudden furious blast of wind drove Thresh back from the doors, hiding their fate from him; likewise the Messenger, soaring high, was all at once so buffeted that it lost concern with anything but its own flight.

And as for the Grub, his attention was presently focused elsewhere.

XII.

In one sense Jinsei was extremely lucky: a long study table stretched directly beneath the catwalk and it would have been quite easy for her to land half on and half off it, breaking her back or worse. Instead she hit feet first on a strip of carpet little more than a yard wide. Her left leg took most of the shock; she felt her ankle scream in protest as she collapsed full out on the floor.

She would have liked to just lie there and cry out her pain, but Jinsei understood on a most fundamental level that she had no time. There was movement on the catwalk above, and any second the thing, whatever it was, would be down after her. Too much to hope that it would hurt its ankle.

What was it? She had no time for that question, either, no time to think how impossible this was, how this simply could not be happening. All her effort she concentrated on one thing, escape. She stood up, ignoring the complaint from her ankle as best she could, and half-hopped to the door.

A fluttering behind her as she set her hand on the knob. Jinsei did not look back, but if she had she would have seen the Rubbermaid descending through the air in slow motion, white sheet trailing behind like the cape of some vampiric Zorro. Jinsei yanked the door open, stumbled through. The wind coming in through the window slammed it shut after her with a roar.

Jinsei rushed down the stairs as quickly as her wounded ankle would allow, nearly falling headlong twice. She thought briefly of Mrs. Woolf and knew that the librarian was on her own; there was no way to warn her. As she staggered down the last steps to the main doors, she tried to recall the location of the nearest Blue Light Phone. She also wondered where she might go to hide.

With a crash louder than the original window-breaking, the Rubbermaid plowed right through the White Library door, snapping the wooden frame, shivering the glass to bits. Once out, however, it did not race to catch up or engage in any more leaping; it descended the stairs with a self-assured ease, as if confident that Jinsei could not escape.

Jinsei, confident of nothing but her own mortality, loped past the checkout desk. She was in luck; she had forgotten to relock the main doors after saying goodbye to Preacher.

Preacher, oh Preacher I—

She thrust the thought away, shoved through the doors, ankle throbbing now. Outside the wind seemed almost angry; it tore at her clothes, whipped her hair around. She did not bother locking the doors behind her, knowing her pursuer would not be deterred.

No Blue Light was immediately visible. Jinsei lost her balance on the Library’s front steps, found it again, and limped toward the Arts Quad. On her right a sculpture rose up, The Song of the Vowels. Flash of a memory: a November night, cold but not as cold as this and without snow, she and Preacher sitting at the base of that sculpture, hugging for warmth. They had just come from a movie . . .

Stop it!

There: across the Quad between Goldwin-Smith and Lincoln Halls, looking terribly distant, the glow of a Blue Light. Moving as swiftly as possible, Jinsei set out on a diagonal for that cold spark of hope, not wanting to consider her chances. A hidden ice patch sent her sprawling before she had gotten ten feet.

The wind had quieted enough that she could hear the crunch of leather boots on snow, the flutter of the white sheet . . . she scrambled back to her feet, shouting now, though she knew there was no one to hear: “HELP ME! SOMEBODY! SOMEBODY!”

Her voice echoed back flat and dead from the Quad buildings. The statues of Ezra and Andrew stood mute. No help there.

Jinsei stumbled forward a few more paces before falling again. Fresh pain shot her ankle; she feared this time she had broken it. She tried to push herself back up anyway, and plastic hands caressed her shoulder blades.

Jinsei screamed, putting all her strength into it. She screamed as the hands like steel pincers gripped her upper arms, screamed as they turned her over, screamed as she looked up into the face of the Rubbermaid, eyes blue death, lips stretched into a grin.

The scream choked off abruptly as the mannequin’s hands found her throat.

XIII.

The patrol car reeked of vomit. Both windows were rolled down despite the cold, but this was not enough for Sam Doubleday; he had lit a cigar, El Topo or something equally foul, to further kill the smell. As far as Nattie Hollister was concerned the smoke just made things worse, but she bore it in silence, steering south on Thurston Avenue, passing Risley on the right.

They had just come from a house party up on Triphammer Road, where a very drunken individual had gotten it into his head to climb a tree on the front lawn. After fifteen minutes of coaxing they’d managed to get him back down, at which point he’d thrown up a great glurt of alcohol and half-digested junk food on Doubleday’s trousers. Doubleday had wanted to arrest the drunk. Hell, he’d wanted to beat him senseless, even if that were a bit redundant. In the end Hollister’s cooler head had prevailed; they’d seen to it the fellow was put to bed and taken off in a hurry. Now another call had come in, a domestic dispute over on State Street. Bet they’re going to love us, Hollister thought, as the car cruised over the East Avenue Bridge.

“What I don’t understand,” Doubleday was complaining, “is why they can’t find somebody else to take care of this.”

“Busy night,” Hollister reminded him. Rand Hall drifted by on the right. “Half the town’s crocked.”

“Screw in hell with that,” replied Doubleday. “I just want to change these damn—”

(“. . . help me . . .”)

“—pants.”

“Did you hear that?” Hollister said, suddenly alert.

The second scream came a heartbeat later. Hollister braked and swung a hard right, driving down the sidewalk between Goldwin-Smith and Lincoln Halls; Doubleday’s hand dropped to the butt of his nightstick.

“Eyes sharp,” said Hollister, as they passed the Blue Light Phone and entered the Quad, headlights cutting a swath across the snow. The scream had cut off, and they could not be sure where it had come from.

“There!” Doubleday shouted, pointing. “Go left!”

In the southwest corner of the Quad, two figures lay one atop the other, partially covered by some sort of white sheet. They might almost have been lovers, but Doubleday saw differently. Beating the crap out of a rapist, he thought as they drew near, would just about even out his night.

The rapist seemed unperturbed by the patrol car’s approach. Ignoring the siren, the top figure bent lower, flexing arms that seemed unnaturally pale.

“My God, is it a woman?” said Hollister.

“Couldn’t be,” replied Doubleday. He was out of the car first, nightstick in hand, bellowing as he ran forward: “Hey! Hey, you son of a bitch!”

The Rubbermaid looked up and froze Doubleday in his tracks.

Sweet Jesus those eyes—

Doubleday dropped his nightstick in the snow. He took out his service revolver. Grinning, the Rubbermaid released Jinsei—who drew a ragged, painful breath—and stood up.

“Don’t you move!” Doubleday demanded shakily, leveling the gun. “Don’t you dare!”

The Rubbermaid took a step; Doubleday emptied the revolver into it. The bullets punched six neat holes in the mannequin’s leather bodice, exiting out the back. Unaffected, the ’Maid kept coming, catching Doubleday by the wrist and collar, hoisting him into the air like a bale of hay.

“Jesus shit!” cried Doubleday, airborne. The Rubbermaid tossed him playfully back in the direction of the patrol car. He landed hard on the hood, his right arm connecting with the front windshield, breaking both. He rolled free, dropped onto the ground in a heap, and lay still.

Nattie Hollister had not been idle. She stood at the rear of the car, struggling to get the trunk open. The key stuck in the lock, refusing to turn. Grin still firmly in place, the Rubbermaid came forward as if to help her, hands flexing.

“Bastard!” Hollister swore. Thus rebuked, the key gave in and turned; the trunk lid sprang open. Hollister groped inside, flicking the safety off the shotgun as she drew it out. No need to worry, she thought. If this baby isn’t loaded, the city’ll pay for your funeral.

She raised the gun. Aimed. Pulled the trigger.

It was empty.

The Rubbermaid plucked the weapon gingerly out of her grasp and threw it aside. Hollister tried to duck away but the mannequin had her by the neck. They danced, the white sheet whipping around them both.

Then with a rocking thump Hollister found herself pinned up against the side of the patrol car, a single hand at her throat holding her motionless. With her own hands the Ithacop beat at her assailant, but she might just as well have struck at a stone wall. The Rubbermaid drew back its free arm, making its intention plain by forking two fingers.

Hollister, who had once had the misfortune to see a man blinded with the jagged neck of a beer bottle, first widened her eyes in alarm and then shut them tightly. She drove both fists into the mannequin’s midsection, succeeding only in badly bruising her knuckles. The Rubbermaid held her steady for the finger thrust; Hollister struggled to the last, wondering how it would feel.

And at his Writing Desk Mr. Sunshine, who had done nothing but watch for the past fifty-seven minutes, now shook his head, said “No, the fat cop maybe but not this one, too good a Character to lose just yet,” and Wrote,

and Rasferret the Grub shuddered as a great weariness came upon him, his present limit reached, his magic exhausted by the night’s activities.

The Rubbermaid’s eyes dimmed, its iron strength weakened.

“Gah!” Hollister gasped, jerking to the side with a last effort. The Rubbermaid’s arm shot forward, punching a hole in the patrol car passenger window just inches to the right of Hollister’s head. And there the mannequin froze, all life going out of it, its eyes dull glass once more. The white sheet caught in the wind and flew away down the Quad.

Her mind areel, Hollister withdrew fully from the Rubbermaid’s now rigid embrace, giving it a good stout kick with her boot. The ’Maid fell over easily, the forked fingers trailing against the side of the car, making a sound like nails scratching at the side of a coffin, begging to be let out once more.

Near silence followed, broken only by the moan of the wind and Hollister’s own shivering as she tried to cope with her shock. The New Year was thirteen minutes old; the killing hour was over.

THE NEXT DAY

I.

The Ithaca Police had a pretty depressing New Year’s Day. Beyond the actual prevention of crime, what are the meat and bones of law enforcement if not the apprehension and conviction of a perpetrator? And how is any sane cop supposed to cope when everything is provided as easily as a gift—witnesses, physical evidence, the “perpetrator” safely in custody—yet still there can be no conviction, no closing of the case, because the facts add up to an impossible occurrence?

Exhibit A was the Rubbermaid itself, shown by a preliminary lab examination to be nothing more or less than a life-size plastic doll, no regular store-window dummy but custom-made, yet lacking any internal or external mechanism that would allow it to move under its own power. Its eyes, glass beads embedded in the plastic of its face, might reflect light but could not glow on their own. Its legs and arms, though attached to the torso with ball swivels that allowed it to be posed somewhat, could not, again, move on their own, and in any case its fingers were rigid and unjointed—they could not grasp objects. Most certainly the Rubbermaid could not wield a weapon, much less commit murder.

Other evidence—and there was a lot of it—said differently. Just for starters, no less than five witnesses, two of them patrol officers, had either seen or heard the Rubbermaid in action, doing just those things, like walking and wielding, that it couldn’t do, that were impossible for it to do.

Then there was the physical evidence, a trail of hearty demolition that began with the shattered glass cases in the Tolkien House Mathom-Hole and ended with the battered patrol car and Doubleday’s broken arm. In between were a fair number of identifiable bootprints in snow and earth, as well as the extensive damage to the White Library. The north bay window had been knocked inward, leading to the logical question of exactly how the perpetrator had reached it from outside, as it was not readily accessible from the ground, at least not to your typical human vandal. Likewise, the destruction of the White Library door—in a single blow, apparently—would seem to have required superhuman ability. And though broken glass lay everywhere, not a single drop of blood or skin scraping could be found, though there were a few shavings of plastic, a few shreds of white silk.

The bruise-marks on Jinsei Chung’s neck, sustained during her nearstrangling, were of the proper size and shape to have come from the mannequin’s hands, if a mannequin were capable of attempted strangulation (which of course the Rubbermaid was not). And when, acting on the last babbled words of the Chung girl before she was put under sedation, police searched Fall Creek Gorge and dredged up the body of one Miles Elijah Walker, alias Preacher, they discovered several black hair strands clutched in the frozen hand of the corpse. Not human hair. Synthetic. Walker’s cause of death was determined, not surprisingly, to be injuries sustained during a fall from the suspension bridge, but someone had given him a fair working over before he plummeted. The coroner’s report would indicate that the instrument involved in these earlier injuries might well have been the iron-shod mace found lying on the floor of the White Library, wielded with considerable force.

Oh, it was a headache of a day, all right. Hollister and Doubleday—he with his freshly set arm in a sling—filed their reports on the incident, took care of a few other related matters, and then slipped away to a bar to see how much Scotch they could put down before passing out. Quite a lot, it so happened.

The story that appeared in the papers was a patchwork meld of fact and fiction: an unknown assailant of considerable strength (the police press release did not specify, but most of the newspapers assumed the assailant to be male) had gone amok on the almost deserted Cornell campus, murdering one person and hospitalizing another; the names of the victims had not yet been released. (One name that did make the news was that of Rhetta Woolf, the head librarian at Uris, who had by a lucky fortune been down in the lower stacks and out of harm’s way when the intruder came through; she claimed to be quite shocked by the whole thing.) Two city police officers had chanced upon the scene of the second assault. In an attempt to apprehend the attacker one of the officers was injured; the attacker escaped. End of story. There was no mention of the Rubbermaid, wrapped up neatly in a large baggie and stored in the basement of the station house along with the other evidence, evidence which indicated against all logic that there was nothing more to be done. Not unless the laws of the state were changed to allow a mannequin to stand trial.

Just as well, though, that the community believe the killer to be still at large. Undoubtedly there would be pressures on the department to solve the case as soon as possible, but the news might also make people more careful. A positive side effect indeed, since if logic and rationality could be suspended once, there was no reason why they shouldn’t be suspended again, and soon.

II.

Hobart was alive.

Two sprites riding squirrelback from the Beebe Lake celebration to their homes had discovered him by chance, half-buried in a snowbank and frozen just as near to death as one can get without passing over. Neither magic nor medicine had been able to revive him; taken to a warm healing warren within the walls of the Straight, he slept in coma.

The wreckage of Puck’s biplane was discovered at first light. The surviving Rats, following Rasferret’s orders, had disposed of the bodies of their fallen comrades, and the sprites were left to conclude that the crash had come about through simple misadventure. A more careful examination of the hangar, the biplane, or the wound in Hobart’s shoulder might have suggested another possibility, but the Little People are not given to detective work.

Hobart’s survival was considered a miracle. Puck’s chances were thought to be slim indeed, and of course if he had faded there would be no corpse. In accordance with custom, then, a search of seven days would be conducted, and if he had not been located by the end of that time he would be officially given up as dead. Unofficially, in the minds of those closest to him, he might remain alive a good deal longer; loved ones of the deceased had been known to keep hoping for years, even decades. Such was the burden of a race whose bodies did not remain to rot.

Zephyr divided her time evenly that day between search duty and attending Hobart’s bedside. She kept remarkable control of herself throughout the morning and afternoon, but broke down shortly after sundown, laying her head across her Grandfather’s chest in a sudden outburst of sobs. The intensity of her emotion seemed to reach him, and he stirred the slightest bit, uttering one word before drifting back into comatose slumber.

“What Hobart?” Zephyr half begged of him. “What did you say?”

She thought the word on his lips had been eyes, whatever that might mean, but she was wrong. Hobart, or whatever prophecy spoke through him, had referred to a time.

Ides, he had said. Ides.

AN EYE TO THE IDES

The three Architects, vacationing Cornellians all, met to conspire in a Greenwich Village café on the sixth of January. The name of the place was Fischer’s Angry Serpent, only too appropriate since the Architects were conspiring about this year’s Green Dragon Parade, more specifically the Parade’s main attraction, the Dragon itself. Larretta Stodges, the Mastermind, held in her hand the August Sun editorial mocking last year’s Dragon, which had collapsed miserably not ten yards from its starting point. Larretta eyed her companions solemnly.

“This year,” Larretta said to them, “this March, we’re going to blow their plebian journalist minds. Our class is going to have the best, most exciting, most talked-about Dragon in the history of the event.”

“History?” queried Curlowski, the lowly one. “Who cares about history?”

“Think about it,” Larretta appealed to him. “The greatest success following on the heels of the greatest failure. Redemption for the College, immortality for us. We’ll be like gods. Just think about it.”

Curlowski thought about it; it still did not impress him. This was only to be expected, for Curlowski was very much like a tack, sharp but not terribly deep. Concepts on the level of immortality and godhood were beyond him, though when it came to calculating the stress on load-bearing members, he had no peer.

Modine, the third Architect, was not like a tack. He was, like, a total sex maniac. Beneath the table he had a hand on Larretta’s thigh, stroking. She let the hand stay but rapped it sharply across the knuckles with a steel T-square any time it strayed too close to an erogenous zone. It was all right; Modine had extremely resilient finger joints.

“So . . .” Modine said, after a particularly nasty knuckle-rap. “What’s this uber-Dragon going to be like, ’Retta baby?”

“Call me that again and you die,” answered Larretta. “Now I figure first off we want a big Dragon, huge, hulking, blot-out-the-sun kind of big . . .”

“On no,” Curlowski interrupted. “Size was one of the major factors in last year’s fiasco; they built it too big, and that threw off the balance.”

“Which is exactly why we have to have an even bigger Dragon,” she explained to him. “Your job is going to be to see to it that the suspension and balance are just right this time, while still giving us the maximum size possible. That’s how you impress people, Curlowski, by succeeding and superseding where others have failed miserably.”

“All right, I get the picture. What else are you planning to include in the structural design?”

“Wings,” said Larretta, raising her arms. “Huge green wings that really move instead of just hanging there.”

“No, wings are a bad idea. Wings catch the wind, that rocks the whole structure, and you’ve got another balance problem on your hands.”

“You’ll deal with it, Curlowski.”

“I’ll deal with it. Right.”

“One more thing, the most important of all: our Dragon is going to breathe fire.”

Curlowski dropped his glasses: “Fire?”

“Fire?” echoed Modine, actually withdrawing his hand. “Just a minute, isn’t the fire bit supposed to wait until the end of the Parade, when they torch the whole monster?”

“It’ll be great,” said Larretta. “The Dragon will be rolling along East Avenue toward the Engineering Quad, engineers all lined up to throw snowballs or mudballs, and all of a sudden, foom!”

“I think foom! violates the Campus Code of Conduct,” Modine warned.

“Not to mention the rules of practicality,” added Curlowski. “You’re talking about a construct of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché. How is that supposed to breathe fire without igniting itself?”

Larretta Stodges shrugged. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I really don’t know. But we have until mid-March to figure it out . . . right?”

Modine nodded, looking a little nervous. After a brief hesitation, so did Curlowski.

In the end, they figured it out just fine.

BOHEMIAN REQUIEM

I.

Preacher’s body was flown back to Brooklyn for burial. Of the Bohemians, only Lion-Heart, Myoko, and Ragnarok were in attendance at the funeral. They had gotten a phone call at the lakeside chalet and come down, the two men looking stiff and uncomfortable in rented suits. After the ceremony Ragnarok gave his condolences to Preacher’s parents, the closest thing to a family he had had since his exodus from the South. But there was little enough he could say, and he was haunted throughout by the vague memory of some dream he’d had, blue sparks glowing against a field of darkness.

The tombstone was a ghastly irony, though there was no one who could have made the connection. Rather than purchase a huge, extravagant monolith, Preacher’s father opted in this one instance for simplicity, almost humility. The stone lay flat against the ground, and bore only a name, date of birth, date of death, and simple epitaph (“Here will I set up my everlasting rest”). It was square, without decoration, and carved of white marble.

Ragnarok, who watched the burial crew bring the stone to the graveside, did not much care for the color.

II.

George and Aurora heard the news five days before their scheduled departure from Wisconsin; Lion-Heart got the Smiths’ number after some poking around and phoned long-distance from SoHo. He told them as much as he knew—which was still not very much—about what had happened on New Year’s Eve, and then, speaking to George, made a formal request on behalf of Bohemia: he hoped that the storyteller would come to Preacher’s wake, which would be held on the twenty-second, and read something.

Now a wake traditionally involves the body of the deceased, and takes place before the funeral, not after, but that the Bohemians would break tradition especially where a friend was concerned came as no surprise. George gave his word that he would attend, and promised to start work on a story for the occasion as soon as possible.

It made a crashing end to what had started out as the best Christmas vacation that either Aurora or George had ever known. Things had begun to go downhill with the disappearance of Luther. They had spent days searching, but whether he had been run down in some lonely place or simply run off, they found no sign. George in particular felt badly, for it had been his idea to take the dog from The Hill in the first place; he could only hope that the animal would make out well, whatever happened to it.

Between Luther’s exit and Lion-Heart’s phone call, Brian Garroway had done his own little bit to undermine the holiday mood. Twice he left long letters for Aurora, and three times came by to yell at her in person; Walter Smith was secretly quite pleased to act as bouncer on these occasions. Finally, though, Aurora took herself over to Brian’s, and after a discussion/argument that lasted hours, managed to form a shaky peace and an understanding between the two of them. The effort wearied her, though; George could see it on her face when she at last came home.

The last half-week of vacation George divided his time evenly between Aurora and Preacher’s wake-story, which came to be titled “The Crossing.” The tale came easily to him; if there was one thing that served better as inspiration than unrequited love, it was death.

III.

The wake was held in the Risley Dining Hall, in design the closest thing to a medieval feast hall that The Hill had to offer. Starlight and a bright moon shone in through windows set high up along the walls, for outside the sky was clear, the air frozen. Within, warmth was provided by an open hearth, and, more mundanely, by the basement furnace. Rectangular tables arranged in two rows ran the length of the Hall. A Head Table had been set up perpendicular to the rows, and at it sat Lion-Heart, Myoko, Jinsei, and Ragnarok. A fifth, empty chair was set up in honor of Preacher. The other Bohemians and Grey Ladies took places at the long tables, and with them select members of Tolkien House and the Blue Zebras. George was given a seat of honor very near the Head Table, and Aurora beside him; she looked every inch the Princess that night.

Lion-Heart clapped his hands and the wake began. Food was brought out (Panhandle and Aphrodite had commandeered the Risley kitchen): a clutch of roast chickens, fresh baked bread, pears, apples, an assortment of cheeses, and a hot spiced drink that took ginger brandy as its main ingredient. They feasted in desperate fashion, the drink disappearing as quickly as it could be mixed. Some of those assembled blinked back tears, some grew angrily drunk, and some emptied their plates and began to dance frenziedly as though their own lives might depend on it.

Ragnarok sat in an uncomfortable silence beside Jinsei. Since his return to Ithaca they had exchanged words but not actually talked; that event seemed to be waiting on a catalyst, one which had not shown its face yet. He ate sparingly and drank heavily, and midway through the meal got up to stand by the hearth. There he remained for a good long time, jabbing at the fire with a metal poker that was not really a poker at all, but Christopher Robin’s lost lightning rod.

The food lasted a good two hours, and this against surprisingly fierce appetites. When the pace began to flag, Lion-Heart clapped his hands again. The music was shut off; the dancers and other drifters returned to their seats, except for Ragnarok, who kept his vigil by the hearth. Lion-Heart nodded to George, who advanced to the center of the hall, story in hand. The assembled mourners grew still; Ragnarok poked at the coals; George cleared his throat.

“There was once a fisherman,” he began unsteadily, “who left home and family to make a long journey across the sea. He had no choice in the matter; it was not his decision to leave, but another’s . . .”

IV.

A great white bird of ice cut the air above The Hill in its flight. Rasferret the Grub, his magic and his Rat troops more than replenished in the three weeks since the New Year, sat safe in his hideaway, his face set in a semi-trance; he saw through the eyes of the Messenger as it flew alone across Fall Creek Gorge toward Risley.

Tonight was a momentous occasion. Tonight Rasferret would finally get a glimpse of his opponent, the human he was obliged to defeat if he was to keep his newfound power. The Messenger knew just where and when to go; with its own vision it would show him what he needed to be shown. Now the wide brick-faced building, so much like a castle, grew larger in the Messenger’s sight, and Rasferret was suddenly afraid, for he had not ceased to be a coward in his heart. What might this enemy look like? he wondered. A giant, huge even among the Big People, who were gigantic enough to begin with? Or something more subtly terrifying? The Grub’s imagination played havoc with him in the brief time it had.

Then the Messenger landed on a ledge outside one of the high-set windows of the dining hall. It swept the room with its gaze, and Rasferret’s fright trebled at the sight of the Bohemians, some of whom might easily have been sorcerers. But when the bird fixed on George, all fear dissipated.

The Grub, quite frankly, was not impressed. Compared to some of the others in the hall, this human appeared positively harmless. He certainly didn’t seem magical. Physically George was not all that impressive either; most assuredly he was no giant.

He is weak, the Grub told himself. Yes, weak.

With that thought came an inspiration, an idea born of opportunity but also of lingering cowardice. Standing alone at the hall’s center, George looked, more than anything else, vulnerable. The Messenger’s angle of view only added to this perception. And so it occurred to Rasferret that he might save himself a good deal of effort—and perhaps personal risk—if he ended the thing now.

From his distant hiding place, from his comfort and safety, the Grub sent out a mental command: Kill him.

“What!?” Mr. Sunshine exclaimed at his Writing Desk, and the Messenger hesitated. “What’s this? Not till the Ides, that’s the deal, you were told, you don’t touch him until the Ides!”

And the Messenger tried to warn Rasferret: Not yet, not yet.

Kill him, the Grub repeated, already obsessed with his own notion of how the deed should be done. Still the Messenger held back, and Mr. Sunshine could have changed Rasferret’s mind as easily as a mortal writer changes a sentence, but he was fuming at the mutiny.

“You arrogant little bastard,” he said. “After I dig you up, let you have magic, free rein except for this one thing . . . ought to give you ass’s ears just to teach you, but it’d probably be an improvement. But OK, fine, I know just what to do . . .”

KILL HIM, the Grub insisted, all too impatient. And the Messenger, suddenly freed from hesitancy, gathered itself up and propelled itself through the window in a cacophony of shattering glass.

V.

George had them spellbound.

If the storyteller seemed unmagical-looking from outside, then those gathered in the hall took quite a different view. Whether natural or enhanced by the emotion of the moment, his delivery and tone of voice were perfect, drawing. But it was the tale itself that truly captivated them: a proper tale for the occasion, well crafted, it did what all good stories should do, made its audience forget that they were hearing a story at all. They heard instead the rush of wind and water and the flapping of sails that George described to them.

“Now when I talk about the swell of the waves,” intoned the storyteller, “you don’t really understand me, because we who spend our lives on land think only of waves’ ending, a crash of white foam against the coastline or against the bow of some great ship. But to the fisherman, so far on his journey that the coastline was a dream forgotten long ago, his boat not large enough to make even a scratch on the skin of the sea, these waves were like smooth hills, rising and falling on a plain of dark glass, and if some of them did peak and foam then it was of their own volition; no ship bled them. And the water’s depths were black.

“Utterly alone on this shifting seascape, the fisherman remembered those he had left behind, and wondered if they sometimes still thought of him. Dozing, he imagined he saw his friends and loved ones coming across the waves toward him, but when he raised his head their images dissolved; they were only gulls, wheeling above the surface of the water, crying aloud in what seemed almost human voices. Then the gulls were gone too, vanished back among the hills of the sea, and he was once again alone . . .”

The Bohemians and their guests were absolutely silent; even Ragnarok had ceased to stir the fire and set aside the lightning rod to listen. The allegory made its point; rather than dwell on their own loss the mourners now considered Preacher’s journey beyond death, even those who did not ordinarily believe in such journeys. And here was the real magic: some of them forgot their grief, if only for a brief span of time.

Even when the Messenger exploded into the hall in a burst of glass and winter air, they did not immediately jolt out of their reverie. They looked up and saw the white bird, so much like one of the fisherman’s gulls. For a moment it seemed as though the intruder might simply fly the length of the hall and exit, a heartbeat later, out into the cold night again, and if it had, George’s story might very well have continued uninterrupted. But it didn’t. The Messenger banked and dove at George with its wings swept back and its crystalline beak extended like the tip of a spear; it meant to run clean through him, and very nearly succeeded.

The bird was quick, but love was quicker. All at once Aurora was at George’s side, shoving him to the floor while he was still caught up in his own tale. She had reacted instinctively—or so it seemed—and only barely in time; the Messenger missed clipping one of them by mere inches. Momentum carried it to the Head Table, where it crash-landed noisily in Lion-Heart’s plate, knocking bread crusts and chicken bones into the Bohemian King’s lap. Jinsei recognized it from The Boneyard and began to shriek, yet underneath her shock she was furious. She snatched up a mug of the ginger brandied drink and hurled it.

The drink was scalding hot; steam rose from the Messenger’s wings and chest as it backpedaled. Its own shriek was like a gale whistling through a crack; it toppled backwards off the table, spraying melted bits of itself all over the floor.

George was struggling to his feet. The Messenger oriented on him and came again, flying a good deal less steadily than before. George had the pages of his story in hand, and he hurled them at the approaching bird. The sheets sprayed in a perfect blinding pattern; once more the Messenger narrowly missed its target, skidding onto the surface of one of the side tables this time.

“Give me that!” Aurora shouted, looking to Ragnarok. The Black Knight did not have to ask what she meant; he snatched up the lightning rod and tossed it underhand to her. Aurora reached up and caught it one-handed, even as the Messenger flew again at George. She turned and thrust, sizzling a hole through the ice bird’s throat, catching it, drawing not blood but water.

The Messenger’s wings beat the air ferociously but it could not unskewer itself, and now George’s hands joined Aurora’s in gripping the lightning rod. Together they began to turn in place, swinging the rod around as if in some odd courtship dance. Three times they turned, and then, screaming for everybody to get out of the way, get out of the way, Aurora’s arms flexed, George’s arms flexed, and they hurled both bird and iron at the blazing hearth. For one instant it seemed as if the retreating bird glared at them with two pairs of eyes, one inside the other; then the Messenger plunged into the fire and vanished in a cloud of steam. The fire guttered out; frost settled on the coals. The bird was gone.

“That’ll teach you,” said Mr. Sunshine. “See how you manage without it.”

Another silence descended over the dining hall, this one very much like the silence on the Arts Quad some twenty-two days earlier, just after the Rubbermaid had slid to the ground. The parallel was apt; a good many of the Bohemians looked like mannequins as they gaped at the blackened hearth. A chill draft crept in through the window the Messenger had broken.

Ragnarok was the first to break the paralysis. With careful, trance-like motions he picked up the fallen pages of George’s tale, setting them in order.

“Finish it,” he said, handing the story back to the teller.

BLACKJACK’S LAMENT

The Bohemians were not the only ones on The Hill to have suffered a recent loss, but they certainly took it better than some: the day after Preacher’s wake found Blackjack crouched in the slush at the base of Ezra Cornell’s statue, consumed with self-pity. On the Arts Quad before him, a good half dozen dogs chased and frolicked in the snow, obscenely cheerful; if the sky had fallen in on the lot of them, the Manx would have rejoiced.

Stupid mutts, he grumbled to himself. In particular his anger focused on Skippy, the ludicrous, hyperactive excuse of a Beagle who had brought him the news of his abandonment.

“He was in this big car, with two Masters sitting up front, and he wanted you to know that he’d be back.”

“Be back? What do you mean, be back? Where was he going?”

“Well I’m not sure, exactly—I got a little dizzy just then. I thought he said he was going to Heaven, but of course that’s silly, you can’t go there while you’re still alive. It’s funny how you get things wrong when you’re a little dizzy, isn’t it Blackjack? Huh? Huh? Isn’t it funny?”

“It’s a betrayal,” Blackjack said now, claws extended. Oh, for a deserving muzzle to slash . . . Yet even after being deserted he could not bring himself to hate Luther. He missed the mongrel son of a bitch, that was the problem, and it just added to his anger, made him wish all the more that some other dog or cat would pick a fight. Not that he expected any of these damned University animals to have the guts to try it.

His emotions had run embarrassingly out of control since Luther’s disappearance. Denied the release of aggression, he had chosen another outlet for his feelings: at the moment, there were no less than five pregnant pusses roaming The Hill, all with Blackjack to thank for their condition. Sable, whom he had mated back in August, had already littered half a dozen young; now the Manx threatened to be overrun by progeny. The irony of it was that Blackjack could not stand kittens, and was only too thankful that he had no responsibility toward their upbringing.

Luther, where are you? How far did you go this time? Once or twice he had considered trying to pick up a scent, searching for his lost friend. But if Luther had been in a car, there was no telling how far he might have been taken, or whether he would stay in one place. And all impracticality aside, Blackjack did not want to face the open road again. He had seen enough of it.

Sorry, Luther. You left without telling me, this time you’re on your own. Unless the loneliness became more than he could bear. But until then he would keep to The Hill with its cold winds and snows, where Luther’s beloved Heaven scent was now suffused with another smell, like the smell of rat but far less tasty. For a stray, Ithaca was no paradise in winter, but the Bronx had been just as cold and food even harder to find. Yes, it was definitely preferable to the road.

“You listen, caht,” the Puli Rover Too-Bad had said to him yesterday. “I an’ I got premonition ’bout your Luther.”

“Premonition?” Blackjack asked skeptically. He respected intuition even less than kittens.

“Jus’ so. You don’t worry ’bout him; that dahg, he come home wit’ Lady Spring.” After a hesitation he added: “If spring come.”

“If?” The Manx was amused for the first time in weeks. “You mean that here in Heaven, even the seasons are optional?”

“No joke, Blackjack, I an’ I jus’ want t’say you ought worry less ’bout Luther, more ’bout you. Don’t you smell it? Raaq—Raaq in the air. Bad time comin’ to this place.”

“Bad time? Well, Jah love and all, Rover, but I don’t imagine a little stench in the wind is going to get me frightened, and as for your Devil, since I’m in the mood for a scrap it might be the best thing if he found me.”

Before long the Puli had passed on, annoyed, leaving Blackjack much entertained . . . at least while he remained awake. But cats do not remember their dreams, and in the dark world of nightmare premonition becomes more than possible. That night in sleep the Manx was pursued relentlessly by a sharp-toothed monster that he knew all too well, that he had thought left behind but which now gained on him with the same implacable determination that drew Luther back toward Ithaca from the west. And when Blackjack awoke, he too was awaiting the black tidings of the Ides of March, though he did not realize it.

Meanwhile, Rasferret decided to amuse himself by having another go at the young Asian who had escaped him on New Year’s Eve. The clock wound itself for another killing hour.

RASFERRET AND THE BLACK KNIGHT

I.

Carl Sagan’s house perched on the rim of the Gorge, inviting speculation, as always, about what it might be like inside. Outside it looked more like a concrete bunker than anything else, proof against any meteorites or gamma rays that might pass by. Rumors about the interior, however, told of such wonders as a laser-lit jacuzzi, fully automated wet bar with robot butler, and a custom-made holograph room in which one could sit and watch the movements of billions and billions of computer-generated stars.

“So what did Preacher tell you?” the Black Knight asked. “About me?”

“What he could. No much. I wanted to understand your . . . attitude.”

After an evening of studied procrastination in which almost no meaningful words passed between them, Ragnarok and Jinsei had gone out into the winter night, Rag guiding his motorcycle carefully around the patches of ice that littered the road. Now, parked on the northern side of the Cayuga Heights Bridge overlooking Fall Creek (downgorge from the suspension bridge), it seemed that the silence was finally breaking. The lights of northern Ithaca, stretching off to the west, reflected off Ragnarok’s glasses as he peered over the side. Below, the Creek tumbled over a waterfall, whispering loudly in the darkness.

“My attitude.” Ragnarok laughed. “You mean my emotional problem, don’t you?”

“Whatever you want to call it,” said Jinsei. “It scares me. It scares the hell out of me. I’m just sorry if you think Preacher was wrong to say anything.”

“Wrong? No, that’s not it, I never swore him to secrecy on it. It’s just . . . as far as understanding goes, I’m not sure if you can.

“Violence. That’s my first reaction when I’m angry, or upset, or scared, extreme violence, and I’m good at it, Jinsei, but I can’t control it. The only other reaction I know is running away, and I don’t do that enough, and always at the wrong times.”

“I don’t know,” Jinsei said. “Maybe it makes you feel guilty, but I’m still glad, that night in front of the Straight, that there was someone there who was more violent than those fraternity brothers, and on my side. And then that morning in Risley after the Halloween Party—whatever you were feeling, if you couldn’t stay and talk to us about it, I’d much rather have had you run away than take a swing at Preacher. I think you acted as well as you could both times.”

“For the wrong reasons!” Ragnarok insisted. “I wasn’t being your knight in shining armor when I put the fear into Jack Baron that night. That was Klancraft, terrorism in action. Only thing missing was the hood. You know who taught me the Craft, my father, and you can bet he didn’t have the best interests of the Asian-American community in mind when he did it.”

“Forget what he had in mind, what about you, Rag? You were just a boy, you cared about your father, and how could you help but believe what you were taught, at least at first. I’m still amazed that you managed to break away from it at all, from—”

“I didn’t break away far enough! Not far enough, not soon enough. You’re right, I did care about my father, I was Drew Hyatt’s boy for sure. I hated the darks like he taught me—darks, that’s what I was supposed to call them, never niggers—and when I realized they weren’t the real enemy, I still had plenty of hate to go around. That’s the inheritance he gave me, violence and hatred, and I’ll never be rid of it. Don’t you see that?”

“But . . .” Jinsei interjected.

“But what?”

“Just one question.”

“What?”

“Did you kill him?” Jinsei said. “Preacher knew you and your father had some sort of big fight at the end, right before you came north, and it was very bad, worse than Preacher thought he wanted to hear about. Did you kill him, Ragnarok? Is that what happened?”

He looked at her, as if wondering where she found the gall or the courage to ask such a thing . . . and then nearly laughed again.

“Kill him? Huh. No. No, I didn’t kill him.” The Bohemian turned again to stare out at the city lights. “The son of a bitch. But I wanted to. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to.”

II.

The trucker’s name was Galatea Handel, and her eighteen-wheel rig, though not designed for livestock transport, was nonetheless loaded with a herd of pigs about ten hours overdue for an appointment with a Cortland County butcher. Engine trouble and navigation trouble had caused the extreme delay, and at this hour there was likely to be no one left to take delivery, but Galatea was damned if she’d keep charge of the animals any longer than absolutely necessary. Galatea’s rig had begun to stink to high heaven—or at least low heaven—and the choir of pig-voices became less and less bearable with each passing mile.

She drove into Ithaca from the south on Route 13, took a wrong turn onto Seneca Street, and further improved her own temper by cruising aimlessly around downtown Ithaca for the next fifteen minutes. Several doublings back and misguided turns later she found herself at the base of The Hill, and, deciding higher was better, began following University Avenue upslope.

The Boneyard was above her on her right when the rig’s engine gave out. Unlike earlier in the day, this time it went quietly, without clamor or smoke, just a sudden stall. The truck rolled to a swift halt and Galatea threw on the brakes before it had a chance to think about backing up.

The pigs, seemingly impatient for their own slaughter, set up a squealing ruckus in protest of the delay. Galatea ignored them and climbed out of the cab, bringing a flashlight. Tensing at the chill in the air, she attempted to raise the cab for a look at the engine; it wouldn’t go up.

“What the Christ . . .”

Genuinely pissed off now, she made one more try, but the lift mechanism refused to cooperate.

“I ought to bury you,” Galatea chastised the truck, conscious of the ceme­tery above her and not very comfortable about it. “You and the damn pigs.”

Instead of whipping out a shovel, she crossed the road and went up to the nearest house, which was really more of a shack. There were no lights on in the place but that was all right—if Galatea had to have a crappy night she saw no reason not to share the feeling.

“Hello in there!” she shouted, rapping loudly on the front door. “Hey, wake—”

The door shook under the force of her knock. The lock jiggered, clicked, and all at once the door swung inward. It was black inside the house. Very black.

“What a creepy fuckin’ place,” Galatea observed. She pushed the door all the way open and took a step inside. “Hello, anybody home? I—”

The house having been officially pronounced creepy, Galatea would not have been altogether surprised if something had come leaping out of the darkness at her. The soft rattle and thump of her truck leaving without her, though—that came as a shock.

“Hey!” she shouted, spinning around. “Hey, hey who the f—”

There was no who, not that could be seen. In the dark the cab looked empty, though of course that could not be. Stranger still, the unseen driver had somehow gotten the truck moving uphill without actually restarting it, for the engine made no sound. This was apparent even though the pigs were making an incredible racket, not just squealing but screaming, as if they had arrived at the butcher’s and hung upside down before the knife, at last comprehending their fate.

The rig accelerated faster than would have been possible even with the engine running, yet Galatea raced after it, catching up with the cab before it could make good its escape. She threw herself up the side, grasping the driver’s door handle and struggling for a toehold. For a very brief moment she rode with the truck—just long enough to look in and verify that yes, there was no one behind the wheel. Then a jolt of the cab threw her off; her right foot shot beneath the truck trailer and was crushed by six of eighteen wheels.

The rig drove on up The Hill, leaving her that way, and in her pain Galatea did not fully appreciate how lucky she was that it had not bothered to stop and reverse over her a few times. From her vantage point on the ground she could see right under the receding trailer, under the cab, to where the glow from the headlights splashed against the icy surface of the road.

Blue, Galatea thought, beginning to scream. What the Christ, they’re shining blue . . .

III.

“It was over a batch of shingles, that’s what brought on the final blowup,” Ragnarok told her. “Preacher told you my Dad was a carpenter, right? From the time I was fifteen I was sort of a junior partner in the business, helped him out when I wasn’t in school. When I was nineteen, Lisbeth Folkers’ father decided to have his roof redone. I was in charge of buying the materials. I got the shingles from Gordon-Small lumber out of Durham.”

“A black-owned lumber company?” Jinsei asked.

“Gordon was black. Small was a Jew.” He smiled. “It was time, past time, for me to do something like that. Daddy was furious when he found out, of course, but it was too late to send the shingles back—they were already nailed up. Who knows, if Pa Folkers had got wind of it he might have had them torn up and replaced anyway, but my father didn’t go out of his way to tell him.

“So we had our fight. Started out as a lot of yelling, but I said all the wrong things and he just snapped, pushed me . . . we had a mirror, a woodframed standing mirror that had been in the living room as long as I could remember, he pushed me right into it. Cut myself in about a dozen places. After that it wasn’t shouting anymore.”

Ragnarok swallowed drily. “I had a piece of glass in my hand, sliver from the mirror, like a knife. I thought I’d cut his throat with it. Almost. Almost . . .”

“But you didn’t,” Jinsei said.

“I dropped it. When I went for him it just wasn’t in my hand anymore, so I punched him instead. More times than I had to. Then he fell down, started crying. You know the only thing worse than hearing your father cry is hearing him cry and knowing you did it to him . . .” He trailed off. Shrugged. “Anyway, that was that. I walked out of the house, just kept walking. Starved off and on for a while on the road, least until I met Preacher’s family, but I never went back home again. I couldn’t; next time we had a fight it would have ended a lot worse.”

“OK then,” said Jinsei. “So why don’t you give yourself a break, give it a rest?”

“What do you mean?”

“You scare me,” she told him. “You scare me a lot. I think you scare yourself even more. You’ve got this image of yourself as a . . . I don’t know what, a storm trooper waiting to happen, maybe. And you may be too violent for your own good, that’s true, but I still don’t see the lack of control you’re so worried about. You beat up Bobby Shelton, you probably wanted to break Jack Baron’s neck, but you didn’t. God knows what you first had in mind to do when you saw me together with Preacher, but you didn’t. And your father—I don’t know what it must take to turn against nineteen years of . . . that sort of upbringing, but it doesn’t surprise me that you’d have to be angry, very angry, to do it. Angry enough to want to kill him. But you didn’t, Ragnarok.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t see—”

“I don’t have to see. Try to be less violent, that’s fine. I’ll rest easier. But it’s OK to forgive yourself, too.”

“No. No, it isn’t, you don’t understand. Too much of the Klancraft . . . if I let myself off the hook, ease up once, then the next time I face down somebody like Jack I’ll be patting myself on the back, good job. And then . . . then don’t you see what would happen? I’ll never be anyone’s knight in shining armor. I’m like them; I don’t have the stuff for it. Too much of my father in me.”

Jinsei, looking unconvinced, touched the left temple of his sunglasses with a finger. “Could you please take these things off?” she said, then did it herself before he could reply. “That’s better. You have pretty eyes, you shouldn’t hide them.

“Listen, Rag, no one’s asking you to be a knight or a saint. You can leave that job to somebody else. What I need you for . . . well, I’d like to have you as a friend. I need one now, especially with Preacher gone. I need somebody I can talk to about what happened on New Year’s Eve. But it won’t be much use if that somebody is eating themself up inside.”

“I’m not as good a person,” Ragnarok insisted, “as you seem to think I am.”

And at this she laughed, and caught him completely by surprise by punching him playfully in the arm. “You bullshitter,” she said. “You must be from the Carolinas, I’ve never heard such crap from anyone up North.”

“Huh,” was all he could reply to this. “Huh.”

“So listen, I’m getting cold, what do you say we hop back on your bike and . . .”

“Jinsei?”

“Oh my God,” she said, not looking at him now, looking beyond him, to the road at the far side of the bridge. He turned to see, and there at the second curve, the one that vanished around The Hill, a corona like the glow from approaching headlights was filtering through the trees—but blue, the glow was blue. Like the color of the hottest part of a flame.

“That’s strange,” Ragnarok commented. He was about to say something more but the truck came into view around the curve, blue headlights and all, and suddenly Jinsei was doing the talking.

“Get on the bike,” she told him. “Get your bike started, come on, come on, let’s go!”

“What’s the matter? Wh—”

“Come on!” Ragnarok found himself in motion; Jinsei astounded him again by grabbing him and half-shoving, half-dragging him to the parked motorcycle. Catching her urgency, he threw a leg over it, felt her climb on behind him. He gave the kick-start a try and got only a weak sputter.

The truck rounded the near curve, turning onto the bridge. Ragnarok looked into the oncoming headlights, less than forty feet away, and froze, hypnotized. “Eyes,” he said. “They look like eyes . . .”

“It killed Preacher!” Jinsei shouted into his ear. “Go!”

She raised a hand and pinched his neck, hard. He came alive, realizing their peril, and with the truck bearing down for the kill hit the starter again. Another sputter. Furious, Ragnarok bent the bike to his will and gave it a third kick, third to pay for all. This time the engine caught with a bellow. He twisted the throttle and they shot forward, skidding on a patch of ice, not quite losing control, making a giddy assault on Fall Creek Drive.

“All right,” Ragnarok said, when the bike had steadied somewhat. “All right, all right.” The road was slick and eager to spin them out, but even at a careful pace they were in the clear now. The Drive started out on an incline, and even at low speed there was no eighteen-wheeler running that could keep up with a motorcycle.

“Faster!” Jinsei commanded. He checked the rear-view mirror and saw that, possible or not, the truck hadn’t dropped behind yet. It took the incline without a grumble—without any engine-noise at all, as a matter of fact—and gained ground rather than losing it.

“Jesus. Jesus, that’s not a Mack, that’s a trout!” He told the road ice to go screw and burned the throttle again, making the bike fly. The truck kept pace, drawing on, no more than fifteen feet behind now.

The Drive was narrow, with the gorge on one side and a row of houses on the other. There was barely enough room for one vehicle, and it occurred to Ragnarok that if a car were to come along moving the other way, the rig would be forced to stop . . . unless it drove right through it.

“It’s still gaining!”

“It can’t be!” said Ragnarok, although it was. The motorcycle hovered up near sixty now, the suspension bridge shot by on the right and was gone like a bad memory. Just ahead the Drive curved, and the Bohemian said a quick prayer that it wouldn’t be too slippery.

Almost . . . the motorcycle started to slide and Ragnarok gave it an extra goose, his left boot kissing off leather against the ground. The bike hung on, but now an intersection loomed ahead, no choice other than to slow down a little and hope a sharp right might shake the pursuit.

The truck nearly had them there, coming around the curve itself with minimum skidding, hugging the road in defiance of momentum. It should have jackknifed, slammed sideways into the tennis courts that now lined the right side of the road, but the trailer stayed obediently with the cab. The wheels labored against the ice and asphalt, the engine remaining eerily silent; it was the pigs, the screaming of the pigs, that proved loudest.

The intersection: Ragnarok took it at forty, again only barely avoiding a fatal slide. He made it tight and reaccelerated as soon as they were out of it. The rig, not bothering to slow, swung a much wider turn. This time the trailer fishtailed out, caving in the side of a parked car, knocking a NO PARKING AT ANY TIME sign clear off its post and sending it wickering through the window of a house.

They were on Thurston Avenue now, North Campus, the road was a flat-out run with Risley, the East Avenue Bridge, and Central Campus dead ahead. Cashing in the last of his luck, Ragnarok took the bike up as high as it would go, sixty, seventy, eighty . . . Risley was past before he even had a chance to think of pulling in there.

“Still coming!” Jinsei shouted. There were no other vehicles on the road, not a one, though the hour was not so late. Too convenient . . . it was an open dragstrip, with a few nighthawk pedestrians to watch the unlikely sight of a jet black motorcycle being gradually overtaken by a motorless truck. The screaming of the pigs had become a demon-chorus now, the name of this rig is Legion . . .

“Haven’t got us yet, partner!” Ragnarok cried. They were across the East Avenue Bridge in a twinkling, the truck only ten yards back now, seven . . . “Hang on, Jin!”

He cut right, riding the sidewalk down between Rand and Lincoln Halls, certain to lose control and kill them both, keeping the bike upright despite this certainty. The truck followed them, zigzagging impossibly, scraping off paint and metal but not crashing, not jackknifing. And Rag­narok did the impossible as well, kept just ahead.

Down and onto the Arts Quad, snow under the tires now, snow tinged blue by headlights that were far too close. The rig surged forward but Rag­narok would not let it catch them, he willed a last bit of speed out of the motorcycle even though the throttle was as far open as it could go. Running out of options, he cut a beeline for the opening between McGraw and White Halls, while a trio of undergraduates scattered before the approach of the hunt.

“The Slope,” Ragnarok whispered, beneath the screaming of the pigs. “Let’s see how you like the Slope, partner.”

It came on, closing the gap, two yards, one. The truck’s front grille was weeping with snow kicked up by the motorcycle’s rear wheel when they broke between the two grey buildings and all at once faced the drop-off of Libe Slope. Coming right up to the edge, Ragnarok simultaneously released the throttle and made a hard turn. The bike refused the maneuver; Jinsei cried out as it threw them both, ground falling away, wind and sky rushing around them.

The truck did not even try to save itself. Pursuing them to the last, it hurtled suicidally over the lip of the Slope, knocking the riderless motorcycle out of its way before losing all control. At last it jackknifed, throwing up great gouts of snow and turf as it cracked over on its side. The horn gave a blast as it slid down the Slope, momentum carrying it all the way down to West Avenue, where it came to a battered rest beside Baker Hall. Windows began to open all over the dorm; and as the startled residents looked out at the wreckage, the squealing of the pigs could still be clearly heard.

As Jinsei’s senses came back to her she felt the cold comfort of a snowbank on her limbs. Her hands flew automatically to her throat, but no, that had been another night. Opening her eyes carefully, she strove to sit up . . . not a bone broken, somehow.

Ragnarok was already on his feet. Limping badly, he lurched across the face of the Slope to the twisted wreck of his motorcycle. It was not the vehicle he wanted, but the black mace still held in the tube rack on its side. He yanked this free and turned toward the dead truck.

“No . . .” Jinsei tried to warn him. She had no voice, the strength had gone out of it. Filled with the old fury, drawing his own power from that, Ragnarok tumbled and slid down to the Avenue. The blue was fading from the truck’s headlights as he approached it—they phased to a more normal yellow-white and then went out completely.

“I don’t know who you are, partner,” the Bohemian shouted, hefting the mace, “but if you’re not already dead you’re going to be very sorry . . .”

His leg twisted under him but he refused to let it give, he dragged himself forward on his good leg. Reaching the toppled cab, he circle the front grille, ready to dash out what was left of the windshield and get at whatever remained of the driver . . . and what he saw very nearly made him drop his weapon.

There was no one in the cab.

No one at all.

He shuddered with a sudden chill, and then his leg did give, spilling him to the ground, cold and hard and far more real than what he was seeing in front of him.

One of the back doors of the trailer fell off with a crash. Pigs flooded out. Now it sounded as if they were laughing.

HAMLET SEES A GHOST

I.

The Hill’s sprites had, by this time, begun to realize that something was wrong. A pattern of disappearances had begun in January, when two of the Little People out searching for Puck had vanished. Winter had devoured them, seemingly; a second search had provided no hint as to their fate, though it did create four more missing. By early February no less than thirty-five sprites were unaccounted for, an average of one per day since New Year’s. Eldest Hobart, who alone could have given full explanation for the disappearances, still lay in feverish slumber within the walls of the Straight.

That his army remained a secret, its number now swollen to many times the original twenty Rats, pleased Rasferret to no end. If the Big People were proving resourceful, at least his original enemies remained as blind and unsuspecting as they had been a century ago. Oh, they sensed their peril, there was no doubting that, but by the time they realized the source of the danger it would be too late. Until that final confrontation, death would continue to stalk them stealthily, taking one or two at a time, leaving no trace.

Death came calling for Hamlet just past dusk on the sixth of February. It found him home.

II.

Snow was falling again, dusting the frozen surface of Beebe Lake, dusting the roof of the tiny hut at the tip of Hamlet’s island. It stood alone, a far call from any other sprite habitation. More than a few concerned friends—Zephyr among them—had suggested that it might not be wise to remain in a place so isolated while sprites continued to vanish on a daily basis. Hamlet had only smiled; he liked his solitude, and should some bogie with sharp teeth wish to disturb him, it would face a loaded crossbow wielded by an extremely good shot.

But Hamlet was not carrying his crossbow that evening as he stepped out of his hut; he left it inside along with his sword. Holding a fairy lantern in either hand, he braced himself against the cold and walked the short distance to where his model battleship, the Prospero, hulked out of the ice. Puck had once asked him what he would do with the ship during winter, and Hamlet’s answer was that he might just put it on runners, making an iceboat out of it. So he had; but the latest freeze had caught him by surprise, and the runners were now locked firmly beneath the lake surface until the next thaw. Unable to free it, Hamlet checked often to make sure that neither damp nor frost got at the engines, which he had assembled using parts purloined with great difficulty from the Cornell physics labs.

A twine ladder hung down the side amidships. Hamlet took the lanterns up one at a time, clipping the first onto a line halfway to the bow. It cast a green glow over the deck, which was slick with frost and canted slightly to starboard; Hamlet was forced to step carefully.

He took the second lantern and went belowdecks. The battleship was hollow, the interior one long hold that contained both the engines and the retracting catapult. Hamlet found a hook for the lantern near the stern and had a look at the engine turbines. They were actually quite well protected against the elements, thickly oiled and wrapped in scavenged strips of plumbing insulation. But here . . . something had been at the insulation since his last visit, tearing it to get at the greased machinery beneath. He bent closer, noticing no immediate damage to the turbines; the vandal, probably an animal of some sort, must have been scared off.

A Rat detached itself from the darkness of the forward hold while Hamlet was occupied. In silence it crept toward him, sword already drawn, meaning to run him through the back. If it had been alone, it might well have succeeded. But already a host of other Rats, having found Hamlet’s hut deserted, were scrambling up the sides of the battleship, scrabbling across the deck. Hamlet heard the patter of gnarled feet, heard the crash as one of them slipped and fell, and shot a look upwards. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the gleam of approaching steel.

The Rat lunged at him, but he had already sidestepped, snatching for the lantern on the wall. As the Rat stumbled past, Hamlet swung the fairy lamp, shattering it across the vermin’s snout. Green witchfire poured out over its eyes, igniting the fur on its head into a blazing green mane. Blind and in agony it spun about, and with a quick reversing maneuver Hamlet impaled it on its own sword.

The Rat landed dead beside the engine turbines, but its fellows were at the deck hatch and starting to descend into the hold. As the fairy fire from the broken lantern spread, licking at the grease and insulation, Hamlet yanked at the engine start cord. All the power the turbines could produce would not lift the Prospero out of the ice—nor would that do him any good even if it were possible—but he did not have it in mind to move the whole ship, only a part of it.

The engines started on the second try. The insulation had lit and was burning most cheerfully; racing flame and foes, Hamlet ran the length of the smoky hold, bowling over the first Rat down the ladder. Leaping onto the catapult platform he thumbed a switch; a section of the bow deck swung open above him—sending a trio of unsuspecting Rats over the sides—and the platform began to rise.

Rats filled the hold, confused in the smoke. Some edged warily toward the fire, some hesitated at the base of the ladder, some surged up to the bow in search of Hamlet. They were too late; the platform had already risen out of their reach. Then a cable burned through and the engines died, sputtering. The platform stopped, three-quarters of the way to the open deck. Hamlet climbed the catapult arm but found himself trapped; Rats swarmed around the opening in the deck. One leveled a crossbow at him.

Fire reached the Prospero’s fuel tank. The explosion was a small one, but it did blow a hole in the stern of the ship and incinerate a number of Rats. It also triggered the catapult firing mechanism. Hamlet was abruptly airborne. He made a poor projectile, describing a most peculiar arc as he tumbled head over heels through the air.

These events happened so suddenly and in such rapid succession that, when Hamlet landed unhurt in a thatch of dead reeds on the far end of his island, he very nearly convinced himself that he’d been sleepwalking. Smoke drifting on the wind and a flickering glow from the direction of the Prospero spoke against this notion, however, and he got to his feet carefully, terrified that his bones might realize their error and break in retrospect. If he had landed on the ice . . .

Moving shakily, he dropped down onto the lake surface and made a beeline for the northern shore, counting on the snow to cover his passage. If the Rats had not thought to post scouts, he might just make it, catching a ride with a passing squirrel upslope to Helen-Newman Hall, where a few of his cousins lived.

The Rats had posted scouts. Two of them lay dead at the edge of the bank, stabbed from behind. A ghost stood over them, cleaning his sword.

“Evening, Hamlet,” the ghost greeted him. “Good to see you’re still in one piece.”

For the second time in a very short period, Hamlet wondered if he might be dreaming. “You’re dead,” he informed the ghost. “Or at least, you’re supposed to be.”

“Well so are you, eh?” The ghost nudged one of the Rat corpses. “I’ve been keeping an eye on them, but by the time I figured out what they were after it was too late to warn you. Good thing you still had some luck coming to you.”

Sounds reached them, footfalls from across the ice. The surviving Rats had abandoned the Prospero and were renewing their search for Hamlet.

“Come on, old friend,” the ghost said, sheathing his sword. “It’s time we went someplace a little safer. Hurry, now!”

Confused to a point where he could hardly think straight, Hamlet gave up thought altogether, shrugged, and followed the ghost into the night. Behind them the snow swirled, the Prospero burned, and the Rats raged, furious over the loss of their prey, and fearful, too, of the punishment that was sure to result from their failure. Thresh was not a forgiving General.

III.

Twenty minutes later Hamlet and the ghost lay in relative safety in a chipmunk burrow, sandwiched between the hibernating occupants for warmth. The burrow was dark and more than a little stuffy, but better by far than the exposed lake surface.

“Pity about the Prospero,” Hamlet lamented. “That damn boat took a lot to put together.”

“Boat?” the ghost snorted. “What about my biplane?”

“I always told you you’d wind up crashing it.”

“And I always told you that my parachute would get me out of anything. Lucky for me I was right—surprised myself, how fast I could finish putting it on when I had to. But Hobart . . .”

“Hobart is alive,” Hamlet said. In the darkness he could see how startled the ghost was at this news. “Nobody’s really sure what saved him.”

“Has he told everyone what happened to us?”

“He hasn’t spoken a word of sense since he was found. Brain fever.”

“And Zephyr? Is she all right?”

“Besides being in mourning for a certain undead friend of mine, and worried about Hobart’s health . . . yes, she’s doing well. When she sees you she’ll be even better. Now I figure tomorrow morning, if we try cutting across the lake just before dawn—”

“No,” the ghost told him.

“No?”

“You think I’ve been playing dead this past month just for fun? I’ve been trying to figure out what’s happening. Somebody’s killing sprites, and it looks like that same somebody is gearing up for a major war, but I don’t know who or why yet. If you and I rush out to sound the alarm, it might just force the enemy to attack ahead of schedule, before we even know what we’re up against. Safer to stay dead a while longer, keep our eyes open.”

“If we wait too long . . .”

“We’ll try not to.”

A silence.

“So, Puck,” Hamlet continued. “What were those things back at the ship? That’s the first time I ever met a rat who could fence.”

“Mmm,” Puck agreed. “Sounds like something out of one of Hobart’s stories. About the Great War.”

Hamlet shook his head. “Couldn’t be. Rasferret’s dead, you know that.”

“Mmm. But we’re dead too, aren’t we? Funny thing, I never realized until just recently how much a corpse can do.”

ON THE ROAD

I.

Far west of Ithaca, in the uncharted wasteland of rural Ohio, Luther was talking to the Devil.

A full chronicle of the mongrel’s travels from the Wisconsin outback would make a book in itself. Suffice it to say that the weather, the great distance, and the lack of companionship had made it a much harsher journey than his and Blackjack’s initial Heaven-trek. Not the least of the obstacles in Luther’s path had been Lake Michigan, which had balked him for over a week. Then one night a beautiful woman with a voice like music and a silver whistle on a chain around her throat had led him onto a ship in Milwaukee Harbor; he had crossed to the far shore in a cargo hold laden with case upon case of Meisterbrau, a ready wet dream if only Z.Z. Top could have been there. He had scavenged his way through Michigan and down to the Buckeye State, where this morning a quick-handed dairy farmer had tried to indoctrinate him into the ranks of the domesticated. The fellow had actually got a rope leash around Luther’s neck when the dog broke and ran, charging across frost-covered pasture while a shadowy groundhog looked on in alarm. A quarter mile flew by and then Luther, rope still trailing behind him, leapt through a stand of bushes and ­discovered—surprise!—a low, steep bank and a slow-moving river beyond. He had plunged toward the water, only to be jerked back when the end of the makeshift leash caught on a bush.

Luther did not know what sort of swimmer he would have made, but at the moment it was the leash that was the greatest threat to him. The river bank turned out to be crumbly and unclimbable; unable to go up or down, Luther perched precariously near the water’s edge and fought to keep his balance. The wind came, cajoling the bush into lifting its branches, drawing the leash noose-tight.

Beginning to choke, Luther gazed into the depths of the river as if he expected it to rise up out of its bed and untie him. The river’s only response was to show him a picture of a silly little dog with a rope around its throat. Luther turned away and tried to scramble up the bank. The bank tumbled him over, slid him right back down; now he was nose to nose with the other dog, and the leash had pulled so tight that neither of them could breathe at all.

As he watched, the image in the water rippled and began to change. It grew; no longer was it a tousled mongrel, but a Purebred, large, white, and sharp of tooth. Luther tried to back away but could not. His old nemesis addressed him in tones of brash fury, bold and triumphant.

Mange! he cried.

“Dragon . . .” Luther’s legs seemed to flow out from under him. “No.”

Did you think I forgot you, mange? I didn’t. You’re all I think about. And I’m coming for you.

“You can’t. The ’catchers took you . . .”

They took me, Dragon agreed. They took me and put me in a cage, and there was a mange there just like you, and what do you suppose I did to him? I’m in another cage now, but I’ll get out. I’m almost out already.

“No. You’ll never find me, even if you do get out.”

Of course I’ll find you. We’re both going to the same place, but I’m closer. I’ll kill the cat first, and when you get to The Hill I’ll be waiting there with his corpse . . .

A sudden gust of wind drew the rope so tight that Luther became convinced his head had separated from the rest of his body. Tears filled his eyes, and as darkness drew down around him he found himself facing another apparition, infinitely large, a feral hound composed entirely of light and shadow. Its eyes were the color of mortality.

You know who I am, don’t you, dog child? the Hound thought into him. Terror and wonder warred for Luther’s attention.

“Raaq,” he answered. “You’re Raaq, you’re the Deceiver, you’re the Devil.”

I am Raaq, the Hound agreed. The Ender of Life. When should I end your life, dog child? Today? Now?

“No,” Luther pleaded. “I have to get back—back to Heaven.”

The Hound made a sound like human laughter. Heaven. And what will you do there, when your enemy comes? Will you fight to save your life? Kill, if necessary?

“I’ll never kill another dog. Whatever it costs me. I won’t let you into my heart.”

It’s not your heart I’m after . . . how little you understand me. But as for this place you think of as Heaven, what makes you think you deserve to return there? You were given Questions, I believe . . .

“Questions?”

Surely you remember. Five Questions they gave you. How many answers have you found, dog child? Do you know the nature of the Divine? The meanings of life and love?

Luther had no answers. His mind, his self, was dwindling down to a point, a candle flame which must soon be snuffed out.

What about the Fourth Question, dog child?

“Fourth . . . ?”

The Fourth Question. Answer me, dog child: Which is the superior breed of canine?

“Superior breed?” Old anger flared, giving Luther a last surge of strength. His reply was swift and indignant: “The superior breed of canine is the breed that admits it can’t answer the Fourth Question, because there is no answer and it’s a bad Question in the first place. Which must make me the superior breed.”

And what breed are you, dog child?

Dwindling: “No breed at all.”

Again, the sound like human laughter.

Live a little longer, then.

Somewhere Else, a rope loosed itself from a branch; Luther plunged headfirst into the river. For a moment all was struggling and water, and next he was lying on the far bank, the leash gone from around his neck.

The mongrel’s senses came back slowly. When they did, his first thought was not of the Devil, but of the Purebred.

I’ll kill the cat first.

“Blackjack.”

Luther was back on the Road as soon as he could walk.

II.

Tyson Riddle, a Class Two animal handler at the Adams Research Station, had once dated a vegetarian for a period lasting about two weeks. Actually, he tended to think of it as simple fucking rather than something more fancy, for he was damned if he’d ever held the slightest shred of respect for the woman. Busty, yes, but more than a little too educated for Riddle’s taste, and when she said she wasn’t a meat-eater, she meant it in every way possible. Their fling had ended in a scuffle during lunch one afternoon—he’d been stewing a clam, she slicing a cucumber—when Riddle pointed out testily that the average meat source could at least put up a token defense, scream or whatever when you went to kill it, whereas a typical fruit or vegetable didn’t have such options. Exasperated with the bargain-basement I.Q. she’d been sharing a bed with, the vegetarian set her pacifist ideals aside for a moment and became violent. After a brief exchange of kitchen utensils and other not-nailed-down objects, the two sweethearts slapped each other goodbye and went their separate ways.

Now, sipping coffee in the Research Station’s receiving office and licking his lips over this month’s “lesbian” pictorial in Penthouse, Tyson Riddle was reminded of the long-lost Lady Meatless by a coincidental birthmark, and felt a certain warmth from the knowledge that at this very institution, animals were tortured daily in the name of science, many of them quite unnecessarily.

He leaned back and put his feet up on a desk, kicking a stack of battered paperbacks. On top was a dog-eared edition of Old Yeller (fully illustrated); beneath that, and more to the point, a copy of the helpful AMA booklet, Save the Head: A Guide to Handling Rabid Animals. Riddle was in charge of the Station’s dog kennels. He hated dogs.

A truck had parked out front of receiving and a deliverer named Abby Rasmussen was unloading stock from Boston Surgical Supply. Riddle put down the lesbians for a moment and watched her through the window. Rasmussen did not remind him at all of the vegetarian—she had long blond hair, for one thing, while Meatless had been a coal-hole brunette—and despite a lack of major cleavage, Riddle thought she was pretty damn sexy. When she came in to have him sign for the shipment, he told her as much.

“So how about it, Rasmussen?” he said. “You ever get lonely, out on the road all day?”

Rasmussen, who had spent a summer doing recruitment for the C.I.A. and found Riddle about as attractive as a Sandinista with an anal fixation, sucked reflectively on a Tootsie Pop.

“Well I’ll tell you,” she replied. “The way I see it, there’s three states of being: there’s lonely, there’s desperate, and there’s the point where you might as well save your self-respect and become a nun. Catch my drift, Tyson?”

After she had driven away, Riddle sat back down and got his stiletto out of the bottom drawer of the desk. The weapon sported an eight-inch blade and had come ready to assemble from a mail order company down South. Riddle clicked it open and used the point to doodle on the Penthouse pictorials. He stopped himself after five minutes, though; he was only a lukewarm misogynist.

He was brewing a fresh cup of coffee and considering whether he should notify someone about the delivery—or even get back to work himself—when the phone rang.

“Receiving. What do you want?”

The voice on the other end of the line sounded vaguely foreign.

“There’s a dog loose in the kennels,” it said.

“Huh? Who is this?”

“You’ve been sleeping on the job, Mr. Riddle. The door to one of the dog pens is standing wide open. I’m Looking at it right now. Big dog, too . . .”

“You can’t be looking at it,” responded Riddle, who had no patience for pranks. “There’s no phone over there. Now who the fuck is this?”

“Ah, such sweet language. But do have a sunny day, Mr. Riddle.”

The caller hung up. Riddle slammed the phone down, then went to the window and looked out. The shed housing the kennels was at the far end of the Station complex. It was a small building, relatively; Adams’ main volume was in rabbits and smaller rodents.

“Shit . . .” Well, he had to go out there anyway and clean some of the pens. Forgoing the second cup of coffee, Riddle grabbed his jacket, slipped the stiletto absentmindedly into his back pocket, and started across the compound. He dragged a personal dark cloud of ill temper along with him, and did not care or find it strange when he met not so much as a single coworker on the way to the kennels. On another day, he might have noticed that the Station had suddenly taken on the deserted air of a ghost town.

The kennels weren’t deserted, that was for sure. As he stepped into the shed, Riddle was greeted by a chorus of barks and yaps and the just-trying-to-be-friendly smell of dogshit. He flicked on the lights and yelled at his charges to shut the fuck up, which did very little good.

The shed was long and narrow, divided into two aisles, both lined with pens on either side. Looking down the first aisle Riddle saw nothing out of the ordinary, no dogs wandering around loose. The open pen was in the second aisle, on the left at the far end. The door was indeed standing wide, but still there was no sign of the occupant.

“Well, well,” Riddle muttered. “Guess I owe you one, whoever you are.”

Of course he wasn’t in a good mood to begin with, yet of all the pens that could have been open there was no other that would have displeased him more. Unless his memory was on vacation—and in this instance it wasn’t—the resident of that pen was a fully grown male Irish Wolfhound, acquired just recently from a shelter in Eastern New York State and not yet slated for any experiments. In other words, not injected with anything or operated upon in any way that might slow it down if it decided to go for him. And the Wolfhound was a mean motherfucker, Riddle knew that well enough from having to feed it twice a day.

He went into the maintenance closet and unscrewed a mop handle. Holding it like a spear, Riddle advanced on the Wolfhound’s pen. He was halfway down the aisle when the lights went out.

There was no dying flicker, no flash of a bulb burning out; the light simply shut off. The only remaining illumination came from a high-set window near the peak of the roof that let in a few feeble rays of sunlight. Riddle froze for a good half a minute, and then, ignoring the basic lesson that every horror film tries to teach us, he continued down the aisle.

That the Wolfhound was still in its pen there could be no doubt—the shed had been locked, and dogs have a notoriously hard time with ­deadbolts—and Riddle could simply have used the mop handle to shut the open door. Because the Wolfhound’s pen was silent, however, and because all the other dogs persisted in making a racket, Riddle did doubt. Standing directly in front of the pen, he half-crouched, still holding the mop handle at the ready. He saw no movement in the dark interior of the pen. Laying the mop handle aside, he bent down all the way to have a closer look. Somewhere near, the shade of Alfred Hitchcock shook his head in despair.

Riddle was on his hands and knees with his head inside the pen when the growling started. The animal handler’s eyes finally decided to adjust to the dark, and a huge white shape materialized before him as if by magic. The Wolfhound was poised to spring.

“Oh whore,” Riddle said. He remembered the knife in his back pocket and went for it.

Didn’t make it.

“Very nice,” Mr. Sunshine said. “Very graphic.”

FINAL PREPARATIONS:
FEBRUARY TO MARCH

I.

February became March, and The Hill entered a period of waiting.

Rasferret the Grub had suffered more than a little over the loss of the Messenger. Not only did it deny him a flying pair of eyes, but his occasional trips to The Boneyard to create more troops had become much more difficult and dangerous without a handy pair of wings. To further keep him in his place Mr. Sunshine put a blind spot in the Grub’s magic Sense, to make sure he wouldn’t go looking for George until he was damn well supposed to. Paranoia did the rest; unable to tell where his human opponent was, he became too cautious to make further moves against the sprites, even when his Rat Army grew large enough to have a fair chance warring openly.

Hamlet and Puck, who might also have triggered the War prematurely, kept finding new reasons to play dead. Every time they were on the verge of deciding to come in and warn their fellows, Mr. Sunshine fed them second thoughts. Hobart, meanwhile, slept on in coma, uttering no more prophecies.

Waiting for the Ides to arrive, Mr. Sunshine concentrated his attention in the final week on George, Aurora, Ragnarok, and the brothers of Rho Alpha Tau.

II.

On Monday, the eleventh of March, Aurora Smith woke to the sound of exploding glassware. She rushed out to George’s kitchen and found the story­teller sweeping up the remnants of a McDonaldland drinking glass; bits and pieces of the Hamburglar were everywhere, and fresh coffee puddled on the linoleum.

“My Uncle Erasmus told me never to put hot liquids in anything but a mug,” George commented as she came in. “Now I remember why.”

Two plates of pancakes and plumped Ball Park franks sat unobtrusively on the stove. Aurora raised an eyebrow.

“George,” she admonished him. “You aren’t supposed to cook breakfast.”

“Oh no? What century were you raised in?”

“The Twentieth—the one where people are supposed to take turns. You made breakfast yesterday morning, and the day before . . .”

“So I’m selfish.” He dumped the glass shards into the kitchen waste- basket and mopped at the spilled coffee with a dishrag. “I like watching you sleep. You’re a beautiful sleeper, you know that? Watched you for half an hour after I woke up, was going to watch you some more if the smell of pancakes didn’t get you.”

George looked up and she was blushing, holding a terrycloth bathrobe closed around her throat with one slender hand. After over two months they were still new enough to each other that Aurora could be shy at times, and her shyness never failed to move him.

“You make me feel safe,” he told her, standing up and tossing the dishrag into the sink. “It’s like writing a long novel, you know? Most people figure the really satisfying part is finishing the novel, getting a good piece of work done, but starting it can be just as fine, even better. When you start, you have an idea what the future’s going to be like, what you’re going to be doing; and you know it’s what you were meant to do . . .”

She blushed a shade darker, and he touched her cheek, and she touched his, and she opened her mouth, no doubt to say something equally romantic in turn, and the romantic thing that came out was: “Hot dogs for breakfast, though? Do you want to vomit?”

“Why vomit? Hot dogs are God.”

“For breakfast?”

“Why not for breakfast?”

“You generally have bacon with pancakes. Or eggs. Or both.”

“Well, what’s bacon except meat? Hot dogs are meat too, so you’re talking about the same concept, basically. And if you want to get picky they’ve got chicken franks now, too, which of course are disgusting, but if you want to talk technicalities instead of taste, what’s chicken except an egg that got left alone long enough? So there you are, same concept twice over.”

“You’re sick, George.”

“Naturally I’m sick. Why do you think your father gave us his blessing?”

The fruit basket was on the kitchen table, patient as a snake. Aurora first noticed it after George had kissed her and picked up the dishrag again; there was some coffee staining the side of the stove that he hadn’t gotten yet.

“And what’s this?” Aurora asked, giving the basket a closer look. Wicker, with a ribbon and card attached to the carry-handle.

“Found it on the porch when I got up. You don’t happen to know anyone who works on a cruise ship, do you?”

“‘Bon voyage,’” she read from the card. “‘From the Ferryman.’ Is this some kind of prank?”

“Search me, Lady. You understand, I’ve more or less given up trying to figure out mysterious packages; it’s not worth the effort. Have an apple.”

The apple, he might have said; there was only one. Nestled atop a cradle of spotty bananas and sour-looking grapes, its own skin polished, flawless, and red, it was by far the most appetizing piece of fruit of the lot. Aurora picked it up, felt it cold against her palm, and a dozen old fairy tales sprang to mind. She smiled.

“Of course it’s probably poisoned,” George warned her.

“Like the wine in the barn?”

“Yes, just like that.”

“Mmm . . . I could stand to be poisoned a second time that way.”

“Bite in, then,” George suggested. He discarded the dishrag once again and returned to the pancakes and franks. What happened next did not feel terribly dramatic, though perhaps it was supposed to.

George heard a crunch as Aurora took a bite of the apple; a moment later, a thud, as the fruit dropped from her hand.

“Oh my,” she said.

“Aurora?” George turned and found her tottering.

“Oh my,” Aurora repeated. For of course it was a Poisoned Apple. Yet it was also an Apple of Knowledge, and on the brink of collapse, Aurora’s eyes were filled with that knowing. “The Sleeping Princess. He just loves the Brothers Grimm.”

George caught her halfway to the floor.

III.

Two days later, the thirteenth, Ragnarok and Jinsei begged off from their morning classes and walked into Collegetown for a pair of sundaes at Cravings Ice Cream Shoppe. Since their race with the truck they had spent more time in each other’s company than out. Ragnarok had never been close friends with a woman before, and once might not have thought it possible; yet here were all the symptoms of intimate friendship, while his dwindling love interest, like a true Southern gent, seemed to be politely bowing out. It would be wrong to say that Jinsei had replaced Preacher for him—no one, man or woman, could have done that—but she certainly had come to occupy a similar place in his heart. Many nights they stayed up talking for long hours, helping each other, as good friends will, to grapple with old tragedies and more recent ones. They surely had a lot to talk about.

That Monday morning, Jinsei helped avert another tragedy by stopping a fight before it could begin.

“Well now, look who we have here!” Jack Baron, still reigning President of the ever-popular Rho Alpha Tau, stepped around his Porsche to confront Ragnarok and Jinsei as they left the ice cream shop. He was not alone: Bobby Shelton and Bill Chaney piled out of the passenger side of the car. “How’s life in Bohemia?” Jack asked cheerfully. “And the Orient?”

“Don’t,” said Jinsei, grabbing Ragnarok’s arm automatically. Two parking spaces down, Ithacop Samuel Doubleday rested his not inconsiderable weight against the side of his cruiser; Nattie Hollister had ducked across the street for bagels and coffee. If Jinsei thought that Jack Baron hadn’t noticed the policeman, she was wrong. If she thought the policeman’s presence would act as a restraint to the Rat Brothers, she was wrong again.

“Seriously.” When Ragnarok made no reply, only glowered, Baron pressed right on. “Seriously, how have things been with you?” His lips curled up in a smile: “How’s old Preacher?”

“Oh, Jack!” Bobby Shelton’s expression collapsed in a perfect parody of shock. “Jack, you shouldn’t have asked that. Haven’t you heard the news?”

“Why no, Bobby.” Jack looked properly mystified. “What news?”

“About our old friend Preacher,” Bill Chaney put in. “The man succumbed.”

“Succumbed to what? Academic pressure?”

“Gravity,” Chaney answered, and then it was only by interposing her whole body that Jinsei was able to hold Ragnarok back. “NO!” she shouted at him, the same way one might shout at an attack dog, as he clenched both fists and tried to swing.

“That’s right,” Baron egged him on, not making a move to defend himself. “That’s right, belt me right in front of that cop, I swear to God I’ll have you crucified for assault. Come on!”

He almost did; Jinsei alone prevented him, more through force of will than physical strength. At last Ragnarok calmed down sufficiently that she did not have to hold him.

“That’s right,” Baron repeated, still needling. “You just take it easy, Bohemian. You just—”

Jinsei whirled on him.

“Fuck you,” she said. An ancient and far-too-often-used expression, but coming out of her mouth it stung like new. Jack Baron was stunned into silence. Shelton, the football player, stepped in to retrieve the ball.

“Why don’t you watch your mouth?” he threatened. In height and weight he had her hopelessly overmatched, yet Jinsei was unintimidated. Once Shelton had frightened her, but that had been before the Rubbermaid.

“No,” she countered. “You watch it. One more insult, one more word and I’ll go for you myself. And if you try to have me arrested for assault, I’m telling the cops you threatened to rape me.”

“Rape you? Give me a break, who’s going to believe we tried to rape you in broad day—”

“Go ahead and take the chance if you want to,” Jinsei cut him off. “I know about your House; we’ll see who believes what about rape. But one thing’s sure, the best lawyer money can buy isn’t going to get the scars off your face.”

She hooked her fingers like claws; her nails were long, long enough, anyway. Shelton readied a snappy retort, but faltered, seeing something unexpected and dangerous in her expression. He stepped back.

“Don’t bother us again,” Jinsei warned them all. When it seemed even Baron took her seriously, she reached behind her for Ragnarok. Her hand closing around his was as gentle as she had been hard toward the Brothers. “Let’s go, Charlie.”

Ragnarok, every bit as stunned as the Rho Alphas, allowed himself to be led. The Brothers gave them room, but Bill Chaney was a bit slow about it; Jinsei shoved past him with such force that he lost his balance and went ass-down into the gutter.

“Hey!” Bobby Shelton shouted in Doubleday’s direction. “Hey, did you see that?”

The patrolman, who was badly in need of a handkerchief, hurriedly took his finger out of his nose and glanced around in embarrassment. “Huh?” he sputtered.

“Never mind,” Jack Baron said. He watched the Grey Lady and Bohemian disappear down the street, hand in hand. “This isn’t over yet.”

IV.

The final mechanical test before the assembly of the Green Dragon took place late that night, in secret. The main workroom in the Foundry, a shed-like structure on the edge of Fall Creek Gorge opposite Risley Hall, had been cleared of flammable objects. Lookouts had been posted along the road outside, on the chance that Public Safety might happen by and decide that laws were being broken; within, a cadre of six Architects stood ready with fire extinguishers. Two of the six were Modine and Curlowski, the designers of the beast.

Larretta Stodges, the Mastermind, crouched beside the disembodied head of the Dragon (the rest of it was in ready-to-assemble sections across the street at Sibley Hall). The head was over a yard high and some five feet from the tip of the nose to the back of the neck. The lower jaw was hinged, the teeth sharp and menacing; cradled within was a properly diabolical device of tanks and jet hoses to which Larretta was even now making last adjustments. The whole head was fireproof, or so they hoped.

“All set,” Larretta told the others, wiping her palms. “Take your positions, and make sure you’re not anywhere near the line of fire.” She unhooked a second, not-quite-diabolical-but-still-ominous device from her belt—once it might have been a walkie-talkie, but it had been redesigned, painted bright green except for a single red (naturally) button on its side. “This is history in the making, gentlemen. Does anyone have a good quote?”

“Krakatoa or bust,” Curlowski suggested.

“Sydney or the bush!” cried Modine.

Grimacing, Larretta pressed the button.

The Dragon’s lower jaw dropped open.

Fire shot from the mouth in an eight-foot stream, blistering the far wall and nearly torching Modine, who of course had chosen the wrong place to stand despite the warning. He retaliated with his fire extinguisher, spraying CO2 everywhere. Larretta released the button and the fire-stream cut off, the Dragon’s jaw snapping shut again.

“Gentlemen,” she announced, as Modine’s extinguisher continued to spout, “I think we’re ready to roll.”

THE DARK RAIN

I.

March fourteenth, Eve of the Ides, the end of the Tale almost close enough to taste. Mr. Sunshine sat on the sill of his Window on the World, sipping retsina and watching yet another squadron of rainclouds gather over Ithaca as evening neared. Such depressing weather . . . but if Mr. Sunshine had been dead set against precipitation, he never would have bothered with The Hill in the first place.

His golden lyre, which he had not played in some time, sat on his knee; at his side was a tightly lidded pot. He had a last bid of Meddling to take care of before the big finish tomorrow. First, however, he indulged himself with a few melodies on the lyre, alternating, as was his habit, between improvisation and the faithful rendition of old themes. Throughout the playing he kept one eye on Ithaca, laughing at the frantic antics of Stephen George, poor George with his apple-poisoned Princess lying in enchanted slumber in Tompkins County General.

“We’ll wrap up our business soon enough, George, don’t worry,” Mr. Sunshine said, when his music was done. “There’s only a few more things to be done. Just remember what a virtue patience is supposed to be.”

He set down the lyre, took another swig of retsina, a bite of feta. What he had in mind to do now was, in one sense, extreme overkill, using an artillery barrage for what a few sentences on a Typewriter would just as easily accomplish. But over long centuries as a Storyteller Mr. Sunshine had come to love mayhem even more than he loved the Brothers Grimm, and if a few innocent sparrows happened to drop dead on the sidelines—out of the way of his main Plot—well, that just added to the fun, didn’t it?

And so, taking care not to breathe the escaping steam, he lifted the lid from the pot, revealing the noisome stew within: a soup of surplus nightmares, brewed from dark arrowheads Mr. Sunshine had clipped from the quiver of one of the Others, seasoned with still nastier things that he had scrounged from various corners of the Library. Open to the air it began to bubble furiously, and Mr. Sunshine fanned the resulting cloud, an angry black cumulus, out into the stratosphere, where it found itself a seat among the other rainmakers.

The World turned beneath it like a free-floating globe, targeting.

II.

There are many kinds of rains: cold spring rains, warm rains of summer, rains that bring flood, golden rains that turn into gods, rains of frogs or other odd objects that leave scientists puzzled. But the rain Mr. Sunshine had chosen to advance his Plot was none of these; it was a Dark Rain, the sort of rain that brings madness like the rays of a full moon.

It fell in a wide radius that included the whole of Ithaca and much of the surrounding county. In the main it was quite ordinary, but here and there a drop would fall that was something more. These drops landed on powerlines, causing overloads and fires; wet exposed machinery which then failed, often in some cataclysmic way; splashed into the open eyes or onto the tongues of individuals needing only a push to set them to violence.

On patrol, Nattie Hollister and Sam Doubleday cruised along Tioga Street, listening to a babble of emergency calls on the police band. Like snowflakes in a shaken glass globe, every lunatic in Tompkins County seemed to have picked today to go over the edge. Hollister and Doubleday were on the lookout for a red Ford pickup that had been plowing through mailboxes all over the downtown area. “We’re not sure if it’s got a driver or not,” the dispatcher had quipped; Doubleday, who had spent all of January with his arm in a sling, did not find that in any way funny. He’d read the official report on the “Hilltop Moto-Chase,” as some Dexter at the Journal had dubbed it, and several of the details were too familiar for comfort.

“And today,” he said now, while the dispatcher continued to jabber, “today is getting to be as wacked-out psychotic as—”

His sentence was interrupted by a brief explosion, off in the direction of The Commons.

“—as New Year’s,” he finished.

III.

It was raining steadily at twilight, when Ragnarok came home from an early dinner with Jinsei. He walked rather than rode because his motorcycle was still a week or so from being street-ready again. Forced by lack of funds to make his own repairs he had taken his time, enjoying, meanwhile, the leisure of traveling on foot, over dirt trails and through alleyways too narrow for any large vehicle to follow him.

Soaked but not unhappy about it, he came upon his house and jiggered the front door. The first hint of something wrong was the smell, though that was quickly followed by readily visible damage. A step inside the door Ragnarok could see, without turning on the lights, that someone had been redecorating with a pile-driver while he was out. Holes had been knocked in the walls, white plaster dust streaked the black paint. His few sticks of furniture had met a similar fate, and he guessed easily enough what the smell was.

The toilet. The son of a bitch must have taken the plumbing apart.

He didn’t look in the bathroom just yet, for another thought struck him—the shed . . . —and he stepped back outside, his temper surprisingly even, at least for the next few seconds.

He went to the parking shed where his motorcycle was convalescing. The shed’s padlock lay twisted and bent on the ground; the door hung ajar. Ragnarok reached out to swing it wide, and that was when the raindrop slipped under his shades and entered his eye, stinging, burning. The world went away for a minute and when it came back he was inside the shed, fists clenched, staring at the scrap metal that had once been his bike. It had been battered into its basic components and then battered some more, until only memory made it recognizable for what it once was.

Ragnarok shook with fury, wanting to lash out but impotent, as with the driverless truck, for lack of a target. He might simply have pounded the sides of the shed in anger, but then his gaze lighted on the one thing the vandal had missed: his mace, lying dark and unbroken beside a shattering of glass from the headlight.

It was his own weapon, not a tool or clue left behind carelessly, yet seeing it was like a revelation. All at once Ragnarok knew, he knew who had been there.

“Of course,” he said, bending down to grip the mace in a gloved fist. “Of course. Jack, partner, Jack Baron, I warned you not to cross me again.”

He extended his arm, spinning in place, once, twice, three times, swinging the mace. It connected with the wall of the shed, with a loud crack! sending a broken piece of siding spinning to the ground outside. Rain pattered down, wetting it.

“Here I come, Jack,” Ragnarok said.

IV.

“There you go,” Mr. Sunshine agreed, sitting back at his Desk to Watch. “But not as fast as you think.” He sipped his retsina. “Patience, boys . . . patience.”

THE PAINFUL VIRTUE OF PATIENCE

I.

It would be wrong to say that Aurora’s descent into coma following her eating of the Apple had in any way broken George; his near freezing-to-death after Calliope’s exit had taught him his lesson, and he would not fall into the trap of despair again. Still, it would also be wrong to say that the loss of Aurora was anything less than hell.

The doctors at Tompkins County General could find nothing wrong with her, no physical reason for her slumber; under lab analysis the apple she had bitten proved to be quite ordinary, completely non-toxic. Despite this the Princess slept on, as Monday became Tuesday became Wednesday became the Eve of the March Ides, and if the physicians had no clue to the cause, they had even less notion of a cure.

George had a few ideas on the matter. He might occasionally be foolish, but he wasn’t stupid, and he would have been a bad storyteller indeed not to recognize a fairy tale when he saw one. But even if he chose to believe what the sheer madness of this past year made it possible to believe, that someone in Power was recreating a Brothers Grimm fantasy, what could he do about it?

Tuesday and Wednesday were passed in the stacks of Uris and Olin Libraries on the campus, searching for an answer to that question. Olin was one of the most comprehensive book repositories in the country, but not even the self-help craze of the Eighties had produced so much as a single pamphlet on how to escape from someone else’s daydream. George buried himself in the literature of Malory, Chaucer, and even, God help him, Edmund Spenser. In an ancient edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia he read about St. George, who three times had been put to death only to be resurrected, and who had bled milk instead of blood when a beheading finally finished him. None of this was remotely inspiring, or very cheerful, either, and when George returned to Aurora’s hospital bed Wednesday evening he acted on instinct rather than learning, trying the most classic cure for enchanted sleep: The Kiss.

It didn’t work. The critics might call him a Saint, but no one had ever accused George of being a Prince, and Aurora slept on. Feeling that he had failed her in some fundamental way, he went home fuming at himself, ate a disgusting amount of take-out pizza, and slept fitfully for six hours.

It wasn’t fair; it was like Writer’s Block, that most horrible point in the telling of a story when you had no clue what was supposed to happen next and the mere sweep of the second hand on your watch was enough to scatter your thoughts, foil your attempts at concentration. And George wasn’t even in charge of this Story, that was the worst part.

Rising before dawn Thursday morning, determined to do something, George burst from his house with a fiercely hopeful look on his face that scared hell out of a passing jogger. The only plan of action that had occurred to him—and a sketchy one at that—was that he must somehow prove himself, like a true knight of old, through brave or charitable deeds. Then his Kiss would have the potency it now lacked.

Only trouble was, bravery and charity didn’t seem to want to have a thing to do with him that day. Strolling along the edge of Cascadilla Gorge while darkness still lay on the land, George heard what sounded like desperate cries from below; but after nearly killing himself trying to reach the Gorge bottom, he found a contented—though chilly—couple who needed nothing except, perhaps, a thicker sleeping bag. Embarrassed, George followed a path down into town, where he attempted to offer his protective services to children on their way to school, but they all ran away from him, terrified by the look on his face; a dowdy old matron he tried to help across a busy street left him choking on a breath of Mace.

This sort of thing went on, literally, until well into afternoon, by which time he had ranged back up and around far north of The Hill, beyond Cayuga Heights. The rain caught him in open country, out of sight of any shelter, and while it brought chaos to Ithaca it brought nothing to George other than a good soaking. Worn out, his desperation to revive Aurora changing to anger at the still-unseen Author of his miseries, he plodded the back roads shouting dire threats at the clouds, from which he imagined he could hear the faintest echoing of laughter.

“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed. “I’m ready to take whatever you’ve got, so let’s bring it on already!”

A new sound: a siren, approaching from behind him. George turned expectantly, feeling incredible release, the moment come at last, a task to perform for the glory of his Princess. But he was wrong; the red pick-up truck that came flying down the road, a police car close on its tail, was not the test of chivalry he’d been searching for. There was nothing he could do but jump back out of the way, stumbling blindly under the spray of mud the two vehicles kicked up as they roared past. They were gone as quickly as they had appeared, Sam Doubleday’s cries to “Pull over, you fuck!” lingering longest in their wake. Then no sound but the pattering of the rain, George’s angry exhale, and the faint heavenly laughter.

“All right,” George said, furious. “All right, that’s the way you want to play.”

Freshly determined, he set off in the direction the truck and cop car had gone. But it was past dark by the time he finally found someone in need of his help, and by that point, he almost wasn’t paying attention.

II.

If George was nearly untouched by the madness raining down on Ithaca, Ragnarok found himself practically swimming in it as he raced up University Avenue toward Fraternity Row, eager to do to Jack Baron what Jack had done to his bike. The mayhem seemed to have concentrated itself along his chosen route, like a Dali painting brought to life and scattered in a line along the Hillside. In one house he passed someone with a lunatic’s cackle was hurling model trains through the individual squares of a many-paned living room window; twenty yards beyond that, another someone had decided to toss their furniture into the middle of the Avenue: a warped highboy, a rainsoaked divan, a shattered standing mirror.

Not far beyond that, as he was cursing the slowness of his legs, Rag­narok came upon another Daliesque apparition: a purple-maned horse, led by a hairy man in leather with a six-pack clipped to his belt. Z.Z. Top had been on West Campus when the Dark Rain began and things got decidedly weird. A polite argument between two passing Cornellians had metamorphosed without warning into a rib-smashing brawl that took the efforts of six other bystanders to break up.

“Got the hell away from that scene,” Z.Z. Top would have explained, if Ragnarok had given him time, “and then I saw Lion-Heart’s horse zipping down the road with no rider. Took me half of forever to catch up and calm him down.”

But Ragnarok did not stop to chat. As it was the Top barely had time to recognize him before the stallion’s reins were torn out of his grasp and he was roughly shoved aside.

“Hey!” the Top shouted, as Ragnarok slipped one foot inexpertly into a stirrup and tried to lift himself into the saddle. “Rag, what do you think you’re do—”

“Need the speed,” Ragnarok barked at him, and with a determined lunge managed to get himself astride the stallion. Still clutching his mace in one hand he gave the reins a vicious yank to turn the horse, which neighed in protest.

“Ragnarok,” the Top began. “Ragnarok, wait, you don’t know how—”

Too late. A stout kick, a cry of “Giddap!” and stallion and rider were off at a suicidally fast gallop.

“. . . don’t know how to ride a horse,” Z.Z. finished. And watched them vanish into the rain.

III.

Rain pounded against the walls of Rho Alpha Tau, but the Brothers paid little attention to it, or to the chaos going on outside. A party of five—Bill Chaney, Bobby Shelton, and three others—had gathered in the House game room for a game of True Stud Poker, a special variant utilizing nude playing cards. Even as Ragnarok was taking the horse from Z.Z. Top, Chaney took Shelton for a twenty-five-dollar pot.

“Two pair, Linda Lovelace high,” he announced, to which Norris Mailer, another Brother, could not resist adding: “Looks like four pair to me, Bill.”

Bobby Shelton gave him a black look. “You know any jokes that aren’t as old as Martha Washington’s underwear, Norris?”

Chaney took the pot; Mailer, chastened, gathered in the cards and took his turn as dealer. They were in the middle of the next hand when Jack Baron came in. His step was almost silent and at first only Bobby Shelton noticed him, but soon they had all turned around to look. Norris Mailer goggled openly.

The House President was still damp from his early sojourn in the rain. His hair lay close to his skull, and his eyes were wide, searching. One fist was curled tightly around the sledgehammer he had used to demolish Ragnarok’s motorcycle and house; at the moment he looked very anxious to try his hand at demolishing a skull or two. This look was not deceiving.

“Doing some yardwork, Jack?” Shelton asked, eyeing the sledgehammer. “Putting up a tent, maybe?”

“Where is he?” Jack studied each of them with extreme suspicion. “He ought to be here by now. Who’s seen him?”

“Seen who?” said Bill Chaney. He was studying the door, wondering how quickly he could get through it in a pinch.

“Ragnarok, of course! Son of a bitch should have been here a long time ago!”

“Why would he be here, Jack?” asked Shelton. Jack made no answer to this question, turning his attention instead to the grandfather clock that dominated one end of the room. Its ticking was slow and not particularly loud, but to the Rho Alpha President, who had heard it from three rooms away, it sounded almost mocking. When it began suddenly to chime the hour he stepped up to it and planted the sledgehammer in its face.

“Hey!” Norris Mailer cried, definitively demonstrating his stupidity by getting up to interfere. “Hey, hey, my old man paid for that cl—”

Jack whirled on him, felling him with one stroke of the hammer; with equal swiftness, Bill Chaney bolted from his chair.

“Where is he?” Jack roared at the three remaining poker players. “I want him here now! I WANT HIM HERE NOW!”

On the floor, Mailer clutched at what was left of his nose and screamed through broken teeth.

IV.

Ragnarok would have been more than happy to oblige Jack, but his cavalry charge on Rho Alpha Tau was destined for a premature end. He got as far as the Cayuga Heights Bridge before his luck, and the stallion’s tolerance for abuse, ran out. He had driven the horse as he would have driven his bike, to break all speed records, and despite his lack of riding experience he thought he had everything under control right up until the moment the animal threw him. They were halfway across the bridge, Gorge roaring below, when all at once the stallion seemed to skid. Its shoulders dropped; its hindquarters came up, catapulting him into the air.

With perfect detachment he watched the world turn over. He fully expected to go flying over the side, and somehow it was not important that this would keep him from reaching Jack. His last thought before crashing bodily into the guardrails was that the rain seemed to be slacking off.

The shock of impact rang in his head; his sunglasses broke in half, falling into the Gorge while he himself dropped back onto the cold metal of the bridge, blood running from a cut above his eye, pupils wide to the thinning rain. The stallion seemed to study him for a moment, then snorted and moved on across the bridge, where it began cropping the dead grass by the entrance to Carl Sagan’s house.

A half hour passed while Ragnarok lay unconscious on the bridge. During that time the rain stopped completely, and Stephen George found his way back to The Hill, wet, muddy, exhausted. After a brief and fruitless march down Fraternity Row during which, still, no damsel in distress or other potential good deed showed itself, the storyteller decided to return home and reconsider his strategy. It was about two minutes after making this decision that he came upon the fallen Bohemian . . . whom he very nearly walked past without noticing.

This time George felt no surge of victory, no release. He simply checked to make sure that Ragnarok was still breathing and then hurried to call an ambulance.

Naturally, it did not occur to him that he had finally found what he had been yelling for all afternoon.

AT THE HOSPITAL

I.

When Ragnarok’s senses returned to him he was lying in a private room in Tompkins County General. His forehead was bandaged and one of his ribs had been taped up, but other than that he was in remarkably good shape, except for the drained and ashen pallor of his face.

“You look like tofu,” Myoko said affectionately, when he blinked his eyes open.

“Maybe next time you decide to steal my horse,” Lion-Heart added, “you’ll remember to ask for a few riding lessons first.”

Wincing, Ragnarok raised his head a few inches, looked around curiously. “Did I kill him?” he asked, his voice weak.

“Charlemagne’s fine,” said Lion-Heart, thinking he meant the horse. “Luckily enough, and no thanks to you. What the hell were you up to, anyway?”

“Never mind that now,” Myoko interrupted. “How do you feel, Ragnarok?”

The Black Knight’s head dropped back against the pillow. He seemed not to have heard them. Withdrawn, he whispered to himself: “No, I didn’t. Not yet.”

Myoko and Lion-Heart exchanged glances. Then she said, more tentatively: “Ragnarok? Visiting hours are almost over, but Jinsei ought to be here in about fifteen minutes. Do you want to see her when she gets here?”

“Not yet,” Ragnarok repeated, and all at once he was sitting up, struggling to get out of bed.

“Wait a second, Rag,” Lion-Heart said, alarmed. “Doctor said you’re supposed to rest. They don’t know if you’ve got a concussion or not.”

“I have to talk to Stephen George,” the Black Knight insisted.

“You can thank him for bringing you in tomorrow, Rag. You can call him on the phone, OK?”

“Don’t need to.” His feet tested the floor for firmness; he tried to stand, did stand. “Don’t need the phone, he’s here in the hospital.”

“No, George went home a while ago. Said he hoped you’d be—”

“He’s here. Visiting Aurora.”

“Aurora?” Myoko said.

“How do you know that?” Lion-Heart asked. “How do you know that, Rag?”

Ragnarok paused, puzzled by the question. “How? . . . I just do. Someone—” he glanced briefly at Myoko, “—someone must have whispered in my ear while I was out. In a dream, maybe. I’ve got to give George a message.”

“Tomorrow, Rag. You can give it to him tomorrow, OK?”

“Tomorrow’s too late,” said Ragnarok. He fought his way out of the thin blue hospital robe someone had dressed him in, looked around for his own clothes. “Tomorrow’s what it’s all about . . .”

II.

There were two other beds in Aurora’s hospital room, but both were empty. The lights were out, leaving the moon—the clouds had dispersed—to shine in and illuminate the sleeping Princess. The storyteller sat in the darkened half of the room, watching her; she was, as he had told her, a beautiful sleeper. Radiantly beautiful now, despite three days in a sickbed. As much as anything else, this beauty gave him hope.

It still had the feel of a fairy tale, that was the thing. He had been made a fool of today, in his quest for a chivalric act to perform (in his mind, his discovery of Ragnarok did not come close to qualifying), that much was true, but it didn’t change the basic situation. The Poisoned Apple; the Sleeping Princess; the test of valor waiting to be taken. Being drenched by the rain and laughed at by the clouds had not caused George to doubt his sanity, or, for long, dampened his optimism. He had been balked, he was still angry; but he wasn’t ready to quit.

Loosely cupped in his right hand were four seeds from the Apple; every so often he shook them like dice, listening to the sound they made. He had them rattling like wind-up teeth when he became aware of a third presence in the room, a figure standing directly behind him.

For an instant George thought it must be Calliope. When he turned and saw Ragnarok instead, though, he wasn’t really surprised.

“In The Boneyard,” Ragnarok said. The Bohemian spoke with the voice of a ghost reciting lines in someone else’s play.

“What’s that?” George’s fist was clenched tight, the apple seeds silenced.

“It’s in The Boneyard,” Ragnarok told him. “What you’ve been looking for. Calliope left you a present.”

He slumped a little, his duty discharged. A hand stole its way up to touch the bandage above his eye. “Tired,” he said, in a voice more his own. “Headache.”

“Wait,” George said, as he turned to go, and Ragnarok waited . . . but there didn’t seem much point in questioning him. Instead the storyteller reached for something on the nightstand beside Aurora’s bed, offered it, a return gift. “This is yours, I think. It was lying next to you on the bridge.”

Ragnarok flinched a bit at the sight of his mace. At first he seemed reluctant to claim it, but then a burning in one eye called up a memory of Jack Baron, and his hand closed around the black handle of the weapon. “All right,” he said, accepting it. And then: “I’ll see you tomorrow, George. You do what you have to do tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He turned, shambled out of the room. Alone again with the Princess, George wondered if he might have hallucinated the whole thing. But not for long.

He called a taxi, and fifteen minutes later was on his way back to The Hill. To The Boneyard.

FRACTOR DRACONIS

The Boneyard was large, but it wasn’t hard for him to guess where he had to go. He entered the cemetery from the downhill side, scrambling up a slope between jutting mausoleums, heading for the far north end.

The wind blew at his back as he made his way through the trees; it blew cold, offering no comfort. George moved as swiftly as he could, and soon entered the area where the main body of Rasferret’s army was preparing for a pre-dawn march up The Hill. George passed the demon-adorned tombstone of Harold Lazarus without noticing it. The marble gargoyle crouched atop the stone watched him pass; so did the company of Rats clustered at its base. As the storyteller topped another rise, a cordon began to close behind him.

He stood at the crest of a burial mound, the bones of Ithaca war dead beneath his feet. Moonlight cast a circle around him, ringed the mound with shadow. From these shadows came the first sound, a rustling of rotten leaves like the approach of small animals. The second sound was harder to identify, a faint twanging.

He was on his way down the far side of the mound when the first tiny crossbow bolt struck him. George felt a sharp sting in his ankle and reached down to pluck a sharp sliver of bone from his pants cuff. More missiles flew, some bone, some metal. George jerked around as pain flared in his calves; his feet tangled and he fell, landing in a shallow gully.

Small dark shapes came swarming over the burial mound after him. All the storyteller could think of was Gulliver and the Lilliputians. He scrambled backwards, groping for some sort of weapon. One hand clutched a stone and hurled it, felling two of his opponents.

The Rats returned fire. George’s chest became a pin-cushion; only luck saved him from a serious puncture or the loss of an eye. He continued to retreat, yanking the miniature bolts out of himself as another volley flew.

All at once he felt something cold and hard beneath him. He gripped it in his fists: an iron bar, left lying in the grass. Using the small crosspiece at one end of the bar like a mallet head, he swept through the advancing ranks (he still could not clearly see what they were), batting them right and left like croquet balls.

Crossbow bolts were no longer flying; now it was the Rats who were airborne. Suddenly overmatched, they routed, scattering for safety, and George let them go with one last swing. “Send something bigger next time!” he called after them, only later reflecting that this might not have been a wise thing to say.

Bleeding from a dozen pin-sized wounds, the storyteller stood up and continued his walk. Coming to The ’Yard’s northern fringe, he found Calliope’s present easily enough; the moon led him right to it. Though the PANDORA stone was no more, the spearhead that Calliope had thrust into the bole of an oak tree on her way out of town still remained. Its exposed portion glimmered like a beacon.

George grabbed at it and tried to pull it out, succeeding only in slicing a finger. The spear blade wanted to cut something, yet the oak held it fast. George had another idea. He raised the iron bar, inserting it into the square socket at the base of the spearhead.

It fit perfectly.

“OK,” George said. “OK, I think I understand.”

“Understand?” a chuckling voice said behind him. “You make it sound as if you really do know something. But then I didn’t choose you for humility; that’s not a storyteller’s trait.”

George turned, pulling as he did the bar which was now a shaft, drawing the spearhead out of the oak easily, revealing the inscription: FRACTOR DRACONIS.

“Who are you?”

Mr. Sunshine smiled from his seat atop a squat tombstone. His sandaled feet were crossed one over the other, and in his hair a circlet of laurel leaves rustled with the wind.

“Someone very old, that’s who I am,” Mr. Sunshine said. “And a Storyteller. You’ve guessed that much correctly.”

“You put me in a fairy tale,” George replied. “That’s what all this is, isn’t it, a fairy tale brought to life?”

“Close enough. I didn’t have to Meddle much to fit you in the Story, though. You’re a very lucky coincidence for me, George—if I’d ever Written about Ithaca before I’d have to wonder if the Monkeys had something to do with you. Your first and middle initials are almost too much to believe.”

“St. George,” the storyteller nodded, a last piece of the puzzle falling into place for him. “And the Dragon Parade’s tomorrow.”

“Now that I had a little more of a hand in,” admitted the Storyteller.

“So the Princess is asleep,” George continued, “and what happens next is the Dragon comes to life somehow, and I kill it to save her and the town from—” But here he stopped, for Mr. Sunshine had burst out with a familiar-sounding laugh.

“I kill it,” the Storyteller repeated, amused. “Ego! Ego! We’re not rewriting Romeo and Juliet here, George. It’s my Story, and no one said you’re obliged to survive it, or live happily ever after with the woman. I like tragedy; after all, I’m Greek.”

“But your fairy tale’s about a Saint, with the Brothers Grimm thrown in for good measure, so how Greek . . .”

“My Story,” the Storyteller insisted, “is about a Fool on a Hill, a Fool who has put the wind at his beck and call, a Fool who accepted without question when his Uncle told him that artists were the only beings other than the gods who could grant immortality. Which is a dangerous attitude to take, whether you’re Greek pagan, Christian, or Jew.”

“But if you’re a storytelling pagan,” George countered, “it’s the only attitude to take.”

More laughter. “Pity you aren’t really immortal, George—I have a feeling we’d have made good friends. Same pride, same spirit of hanging on to the end, never admitting defeat. Who knows, maybe the Fool who rushes in really can save the day”—he raised an eyebrow—“or at least die in a truly interesting fashion, one worthy of a Story.”

“Promise me,” George pressed him, “promise me Aurora gets to live if I win.”

“Promise you? Oh, please, I—”

“It’s a good ending, damn it! Save your damn tragedy for some masochist who’ll get off on it, not me.”

“Patience, George. The Ending hasn’t even been Written yet. But if I were you, I’d be more worried about the Dragon than the Lady.”

“I’ll win,” George insisted. “I’ll win whether you want me to or not. But when I win, Aurora gets to live, OK? Deal?”

“Go home and get some sleep,” the Greek Original said. “Tomorrow I’ll call you when it’s time, and we’ll write the last Chapter together.”

“Wait—” George reached out, to restrain him or run him through with the Spear, it did not matter which, for all at once Mr. Sunshine flickered like a projected image and faded out.

“No, no, no!” George cut the air with the Spear blade as if trying to bleed it. “You come back here! You come back here!”

Fool or Saint, he received no answer, not even a mocking laugh, and all was still in The Boneyard except for a light breeze that wafted the scent of hills, and rain, and laurel.