Absolute Fiction

An hour later, she was showered, her hair was done, and the final version of the report had been salvaged from the refuse in the living room and settled neatly into her metal attaché case. All that was left was the make-up and dressing, the parts she always dreaded most. It was bad enough on ordinary days when she only faced her co-workers and perhaps a higher-up or two, but the prospect of seeing clients always brought her latent paranoia about her appearance surging to the surface. Today would be particularly awful because the gossipy information that her secretary had dug up on her clients indicated that a complete make-up job was in order. Grimly, she began smearing “Fawn Taupe” foundation across her face and down her throat, finding that it refused to be evened out and muted into acceptable shades of female-executive seriousness. Totally displeased with the effect, she jabbed five dots of blush on her face in strategic places, aiming for the ‘sun-kissed’ look currently in vogue. Still grumpy, she rushed through lipstick shades: too pink, too brown, the third so understated that the more she put on the more her lips looked broad, puffed, and naked.

“Why don’t we just give up and wear complete masks?” she snarled, throwing the stick into the bathtub.

Still another hour later, more exhausted from her efforts than pleased with the results, she gave her face a matte finish with cornsilk powder, swept some more across her breasts and under her armpits, called it quits. Turning away from the reflection that stubbornly refused to reveal prominent cheekbones, she quietly locked the bathroom door, then stood beside it, listening for a second, before opening the doors of a linen cupboard and reaching far into the back. With a furtive glance toward the bathtub, as though someone might have been hiding there all this time, she withdrew the secret cache, a very old-fashioned, very tight, very constricting Maidenform girdle. She remembered seeing the type on her mother and grandmother. Keeping her eyes off the mirror, she began massaging her body into the restrainer, swearing that this was the last time she put herself through such humiliation. By her personal standards, the twenty or so pounds of excess weight that she could never quite manage to lose bothered her very little, but several times in the past year she had detected faint shadows of disapproval clouding the eyes of new clients—reflections, she was convinced, of the modern revulsion for fat, regardless of how neat and healthy a person might otherwise look. Feeling compelled by forces beyond her control, admitting that her body fat was too much for mere Spanx garments, she had finally relinquished her self-respect and gone girdle-hunting, disguised in dark glasses and a scarf.

“Goodness, but my stays are tight.” Scarlett O’Hara had said that as she raced down Peachtree Street to find Doctor Meade when Melanie was about to give birth. Della gave one last ferocious tug at the antique garment, then suddenly burst into laughter at the thought of her own abasement.

“Phoomph.” She tried to exhale, leaning against the sink. Inhaling was worse and for a moment she thought she was fainting. Eventually, however, her mirror image came back into focus, staring back at her with a newly stupid expression that made Della worry that all this molding of body fat might have somehow weakened her brain. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “Who else would go through all this shit but brain-drained women? Other than me, that is?” She slid into her robe and tried to hurry back to the bedroom, feeling that with every step some part of her body was chafing against a man-made constraint. In her room, throwing a quick glance at the bed to ascertain that the sleeping lump was still well under the covers, she quietly dove into a mauve silk blouse, then stepped into a knee-length white linen pleated skirt.

“Get up,” she said, turning to face the bed. “I’m all set to leave.”

Slowly, the large oval under the comforter began to elongate. Legs took form. A hand protruded from under the sheets.

“You get up so damn early, Della,” a voice rasped. “It’s unnatural. Come back to bed for an hour.”

“Sure, I’ll jump right in after only two hours of putting myself together. Look at me! Critique me! This is a very important day!”

The top of the sheet moved down to reveal sleep-filled blue eyes. After a long silence, the rasp finally spoke. “Is mauve a power color?”

“You must jump.” Neill was shouting directly into her ear, his voice thundering above the deafening roar of wind that blasted in through the fuselage door. “It’ll go on the report if you don’t.”

“You must be out of your mind!” Della screamed back, tendrils of hair escaping from her helmet, whipping her eyes. “There is no way I am jumping out of a fucking plane, Neill. Take your hands off me!”

“Everybody in our group is jumping, Della,” Neill shouted. “It’s expected of us, because we have the experience.” He was trying to unwrap her hands, finger by finger, from the edges of the door.

“I have no experience in skydiving, you idiot! Where would anyone get that idea?” Finishing her words, she clamped her teeth hard onto Neill’s right hand.

“Stop acting like a child,” he yelped, thumping her on the helmet with one hand and sucking away drops of blood from the other. “I think they might have gotten the idea from me.” There was a pause; they exchanged a long, even gaze. “I think I might have put it down on a form I filled out for you. You were so busy, I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Neill!” Della threw her head back and howled his name, banging her heels on the floor, wanting to kill him on the spot. “You lying idiot! Now you expect me to jump out of this plane just to cover your ass? Forget it!”

Neill leaned in close to her face; she could see his face twisting with anger.

“Listen, Della, this isn’t a vacation at a yuppie fat farm. You wanted to be in the primary group, didn’t you, just like I did? Well, that required a bit of creative writing on the information forms. So now we’re off to a great start, but if you don’t go through with this jump, you’ll ruin everything.”

“I don’t care!” Della wailed, slumping onto the floor and wrapping both arms and legs around anything upright and solid. “Put me in the remedial group! You can’t expect me just to jump out of a plane with no training. Are you crazy?”

“Come on,” Neill said, beginning to pull at her arms again. “It costs the corporation thousands of dollars for every exec who comes up here. Quit before you’re even there and your head will be on the carpet when we get back to New York next week. And they won’t give a damn about who lied on the forms.”

Momentarily, Della hesitated in her self-defense, reluctantly staring at the yawning blue space inches to her left. As she and Neill argued, the small plane had been making tight circles, giving her an acute case of nausea.

“Don’t be such a gutless tub of lard,” Neill hissed. “I’ll get you down safely. This is my tenth jump. There’s really nothing to it. You certainly have everything you need to free fall well.” He poked her stomach. “And more than enough fat to survive a belly landing.”

Dazed, she allowed herself to be moved an inch from the spot where she had retreated when Neill had first thrown open the door and shouted gleefully “This is where we get out!” After that, it had been only minutes before he had strapped her, numb with sudden terror, into a chute. Caught off-guard, she had dumbly let him slam a helmet on her head, then manipulate her arms and legs and hands through the harness—taking special care, she noticed, with the wide leather straps that went beneath her crotch.

Suddenly she was standing at the very edge of the door. Hatch? Porthole? she thought hysterically. Was she really going to jump? Was any account that important to her? Neill reversed tactics, changing from a hostile drill sergeant into a cooing, supportive coach. She heard his directions in pieces, the wind or her fear keeping her from putting them together into sentences: “my hands during freefall … pull here … like you expect a mattress … firmly to steer right … landing pad right next to a steep cliff….”

“No!” she finally shouted. To hell with PharmaSynergy! But Neill was already tensing his body for the jump, staring off into the sky with a John Wayne sort of expression that absurdly touched some maternal instinct buried inside her. She almost wanted to wish him luck. But when she saw him fall forward, she saw her own arm lifting, she saw his hand clamped around her wrist, she felt herself being pulled. She screamed. It was almost as though she were not moving. Neill was flying beside her, still attached to her by her viselike grip. Fighting against the torrent of air, she flung her other arm forward to grasp Neill’s left arm just above the elbow. She decided quickly she would never look down and never let go of Neill. What was he trying to say to her?

“You’re breaking my arms,” he spat, his face purple. “Lighten up!”

She squeezed harder.

“We pull the ripcords now, Della. Let go or our chutes will tangle!”

With a grunt, he broke one arm free of her death grip, then used it to knock away her hold on his other arm. Instantly, he began to move away from her, his legs ridiculously bobbing above his head. As the distance widened, she saw his mouth opening and closing, as though he were shouting. His hand closed around a handle protruding from the front of his vest. He shook the handle at her, his mouth still moving.

“Pull, pull!” She heard the words as though in a dream. And then Neill’s chute opened far above him, a giant flag, a nylon house constructing itself in dramatic swooshes and creases for what seemed minutes. As she watched, Neill shot upward, receding rapidly into the sky.

Against her will she looked down. The green earth below was benign, quiet, and blissfully remote. “Pull, pull!” Now she was saying it herself. Pull what? Pull the cord! She was falling like a stone toward earth. That bastard Neill. Where did he say the cord was? Where had it been on his chute? She groped frantically, expecting her feet to make contact with flesh-splattering rock at any moment. She didn’t have one! He had given her a chute with no cord! But at last her hand closed around the hard plastic of the handle. She yanked. Had he told her not to yank, to pull firmly? Was anything happening above her? Yes, like a miracle, the chute unfurled in vivid red and yellow. Everything would be fine now, she told herself. She was bobbing in the harness’s strong webbing. The malevolent face of earth ceased its warp speed toward her.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for you.” Those words from Neill had started her on the irreversible track leading to this horror. The senior partners had offered her a week at their BMF, the Behavioral Motivation Facility, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The brochures they sent her made it sound irresistible: ocean views from mountain cliffs, virgin forest, whale-watching from the shore. But the motivation part had soured her appetite for a free vacation. For a long time, through the office grapevine, she had been hearing about the goings-on at these camps. She had even seen a few news shows about them. They were based upon models developed years ago in Japan, but they incorporated techniques from western survivalist training, military boot camps, and, Della half-suspected, white supremacist rallies. The basic goal was to enhance the leadership and decision-making powers of promising junior management types by subjecting them to assorted physical and psychological trials. Della had heard some details of these tests and she suspected that they wouldn’t agree with her body. So she had decided not to play along with her superiors’ ideas—all men—of building strong minds and bodies. But Neill had coaxed and bullied her into relenting. According to him, execs always got their first invitations when they were being considered for a major advance. And the word was out that Della was up for leading the consultant team to Open PharmaSynergy, the corporation’s newest and wealthiest client.

“You can kiss that chance good-bye if you crap out on the BMF,” Neill had hissed into her ear one day in the elevator, just before tweaking her left buttock. So now she was falling toward this damned BMF like a barrel of concrete, wondering if one needed to do anything special to land. She also wondered if Neill, whom she had lost track of, had beaten her to the ground. She swung her head 360 degrees, then looked down. She felt her heart arrest. Below her surged the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Far off to her right was land, a dismal stretch of beach below a towering mountain.

“Damn you to hell, Neill!” she screamed as icy water began to flood over the top of her hiking boots.

The line for breakfast was moving slowly. Behind her, Neill was repeatedly bumping his tray into her butt. Apparently, he perceived these jolts as conciliatory. “Come on, Della,” he wheedled. “I told you you’d have to buck that off-shore breeze in order to hit the pad.”

“You did not tell me,” Della hissed through clenched teeth, looking straight ahead, vaguely thinking that maybe he had touched on that point in the screamed instructions that she had barely heard.

“I had the chopper there in seconds, for crying out loud. And the incident will probably look good on your report.” His voice lowered and took on a dark tone. “Except for the part where you kneed me and tried to push me out of the chopper. You’ve got to watch that temper, Della. We’re motivation partners, remember.” Della’s grimace relaxed into a bemused smile as she recalled the sound her knee had made meeting Neill’s groin. His mouth had looked something like a frog’s as he doubled over, gasping for breath, saliva looping from his mouth.

After breakfast began the serious work. For the entire day, the campers were run through a battery of written and performance tests that sought out their weaknesses and strengths. Della was astonished by the questions, which covered everything from favorite classical folk guitarists to details about every sexual partner she had ever known. She did a good deal of creative answering for the lover questions, uncertain about who had access to the test results. The performative part was worse. After receiving a complete physical, she did calisthenics, ran an obstacle course, swam ten laps in an olympic-size pool. Doggedly, she kept pace with the others, all the time fearing that they were whispering about her excess weight. She quailed at what might be in store for her and Neill on the following day, especially when she recalled a magazine story about a female exec who had drowned while whitewater rafting at a BMF in Montana. But when she and the other campers trooped into the cafeteria for dinner, she felt some pride in having made it through her first day.

That night, after dinner, she checked out a jeep and drove into the nearest town, just on the edge of Cape Breton National Park. After the military-style environment of the camp, she was surprised to discover a picturesque community clinging to the very side of a mountain, a place that reminded her of hamlets she had seen in northern Scotland years earlier. A maze of flower-edged sidewalks crisscrossed the village, creating gay, spidery lattices on the steep grassy banks surrounding the town. Strolling past a church—Scottish Presbyterian, of course—she saw a small shop. In a hand-painted, faux-medieval script, the sign above the door said “MacCavendish’s Gaelic Folk Arts.” Below, in smaller letters: “Herbal Remedies. Gaelic Language Instruction. Highland Dancing.” She tried the door, found it locked. For a moment, she surveyed the goods in the display window: photographs of people in Scottish regalia, dancing; glass jars and bottles filled with unidentifiable plants and herbs and liquids; a bagpipe, complete with tassels and gold braid, suspended by wires to hover at eye level.

“What can I do to help you?”

Della started. She hadn’t heard the door open. Next to her stood a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full auburn beard. His plaid flannel shirt was in the pattern of the Black Watch tartan, open at the throat; red braces were clipped to his tight jeans. The dark blue eyes—almost cobalt, Della thought—were surrounded by very fine lines that spread gently upward toward his temples. A questioning expression flickered there.

“I … I was just looking,” Della replied. “This is such a charming shop.”

“Come in,” he said, opening the door wider. “Have some tea. My mother’s just lighting the stove. Please.”

Behind him, in the dimly-lit interior, Della saw tables holding the store’s wares, tapestries hanging on the walls, heavily-laden bookshelves. Toward the back, a kerosene lamp was burning on a low, round table covered with a fringed shawl. “I really can’t,” she said hesitantly. “I’m due back at the camp by nine. The Motivational Facility, I mean.” The man’s eyebrows lifted, making the words sound even more ridiculous and out of context. “That’s where I’m staying,” she lamely tried to explain. “I’m here with a crew of business people from New York.” Her voice trailed off as she felt the absurdity of explaining to this local shopkeeper the BMF’s reason for existing.

“Oh, I know what the camp is for,” he replied, still smiling, just enough to reveal very white teeth. Perfectly even and small, the contrast they caused with his rugged physique made Della feel a sharp desire to stay and talk with him. “But surely there’s time enough for a cup of tea?”

Why not? Della asked herself. The image of normalcy presented by the shop attracted her. She was certain that this husky Scotian and his mother—an aged woman, Della felt sure, with snowy hair and homely, sensible shoes, the very mother from How Green Was My Valley, even though that was another brand of Celticism—would not be anything like Neill, nor any of the other campers. She returned the man’s smile, then stepped inside the door.

“Reach, Neill,” Della grunted, terrified herself, clutching at her holds like they were diamonds, one leg sidling along the wall, searching for a new purchase. “You’ve got to keep moving, Neill, or I’ll fall.”

“I can’t,” he gasped. “There’s nothing else to hold onto up here.”

Della hoisted herself several inches higher so that her head was level with Neill’s waist. “You can reach the top now, Neill. Do it! Go over the top!”

He wailed, peevish. “It’s too fucking far!”

Desperate, Della made a lateral move to bring her left shoulder tight against Neill’s buttocks. Amazed at her own daring, she threw one arm across his trunk, groped frantically for a hold on the other side, found one, clutched it until it cut into her fingers, then hung there, breathless.

“What the fuck are you—? Hey! Stop that!”

“Reach, Neill! Now!” This was their fifth major trial, and they had made—miraculously, it seemed to Della—top scores on all the others. She wasn’t willing to give up that rating because of Neill’s gutlessness. With a grunt, she thrust upward with all her strength. Above her, she saw Neill relinquish, slowly, his hold on the board. One hand began to claw across the smooth surface, searching for a new grip.

“Damn it, Neill, reach for the top! All the way, Neill! Use that gym muscle you spend so much money for.” And she put one last surge of strength behind him.

Finally, his hand found the ledge. Within seconds, he had pulled himself over the edge, scrambling like a rat over a burning wall. Carefully, Della followed his path, taking his hand at the top for a long, smooth pull over the edge. Hoisted, she admired the straining muscles in his bare shoulder and arm. For a moment, she was Eva Marie Saint being yanked from certain death by Jimmy Stewart on the face of Mt. Rushmore. Malicious bastard that he was, at odd times Neill’s slim, tightly muscled torso sparked admiration in Della. Everything worked right for him, it seemed. His hours at the gym translated impeccably into sleek, contemporary body cosmetics, successfully straddling the thin boundary between the macho-massive look and the delicate, toney V-shape of a swimmer’s body. Jubilantly, she looked at him as she got to her feet, almost prepared to allow him a quick hug. Below them, a crowd of upturned faces was cheering wildly, chanting “Dell-a, Dell-a, Dell-a” in mock drunken-sports-fan rhythm. But Neill seemed barely to notice her. He was jumping up and down on the ledge, facing the crowd, waving his arms wildly. In mild disgust at his egoism and her own lack of consistency in hating him, she plomped down on the ledge, her body suddenly drained and jittery.

“Isn’t that my name they’re calling, Neill?” she asked indifferently.

“Show off,” Neill hissed down at her, still jumping up and down on his toes, doing his best to recall Rocky at the top of the capitol building steps.

“Ingrate,” she snapped back.

“Rather a strange thing to do for a first …” he paused, looking thoughtful. “For a first time out with a woman,” he concluded.

“That’s quite a periphrasis for ‘date’,” Della laughed. “What are you afraid of?” She realized he might not know the learned word she used, but she didn’t care. It was already clear to her that he would simply ask her what it meant if he needed to, no harm, no foul. She and Kevin were sitting at a table in Carbandah’s only bar—’pub,’ as Kevin called it. Earlier, she had watched him giving bagpipe lessons to a group of local kids. Although children usually failed to interest her, watching them work with Kevin, who guided them with strong, easy gestures and gentle corrections, proved very pleasant.

“Where did you learn to play those pipes so well?” she asked.

“In the Highlands, mostly,” he replied, wiping foam from his beard with the back of his hand.

“Did you grow up there?”

“Lord, no. I was born right here in Carbandah,” he replied. “But I spent several years in Scotland, getting an education, you might say.” He put an ironic pronunciation on “education,” smiling.

“At St. Michael’s? Edinburgh?”

He threw back his head and roared. “Hardly! Mine is not a blueblood’s education, although I did take a few classes in Gaelic languages at Edinburgh. No, I learned my business out in the country, with the real Scots people. That’s what I went there for.” A serious expression smothered his smile, drawing out the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. “I went to Scotland to find out if the old Celtic folk ways still survived. I had longed to do that for as long as I can remember. Stories told me by mah mither did it to me—and my grandmother’s, as well—and, until I was almost eighteen, my great-grandmother’s. So I went there, and I searched for the old ways for a long time.” His expression deepened into the lines of sober reflection.

“Any of the men in the family tell stories, too?” she asked.

Her question shook him from his reverie. After fixing her with a questioning stare, he answered slowly. “I suppose they did, but I wasn’t there to hear them. They all died very young. My father was gone before I was four, and my grandfather was killed in a storm at sea when I was in kindergarten.”

“So you were raised by three women?” Della asked. “Do you have brothers?”

“No, no brothers,” he said, “but there were uncles and male cousins and what-not, so I wasn’t completely bereft of male company. What makes you so curious?” His eyes glinted with repressed curiosity.

“No particular reason,” Della said, looking down at the table. “It’s just that it’s unusual to find a man with such a matriarchal family history. I think it makes me”—she searched for a word—”I think it makes me trust you.” With the last comment, she felt herself reddening in the cheeks, so she rushed back to the earlier line of conversation. “So what about these ‘old ways’ ?” she said loudly. “Did you find them or not?”

“Yes, I did,” he answered, “to a great extent. They’re still there, still alive, if you know where to look for them. Sir Walter Scott would be pleased. He did real field work on them, you know, for novels like Rob Roy and The Bride of the Lammermoors. And the initiates need to trust you, of course.” His eyes had wandered away from her, as though he were recalling something very powerful, perhaps sad. “And then I came home,” he continued, “to teach what I had learned to the young people here.”

“Can you be a bit more specific about what that was, Kevin?” she queried. She didn’t want to press him, but her analytical mind told her that he was withholding something important.

“Well,” he drawled expansively, looking deeply into his beer. “Highland dancing! How’s that?”

Della sat back in her chair, accepting the mild rebuke. It irritated her, but she was thinking about the romanticism of Kevin’s journey to Scotland and of his return to Nova Scotia with ancient folk knowledge, his childhood fantasies fulfilled. She wondered if being a corporate executive were fulfilling any of her cast-off dreams. Certainly she couldn’t recall ever having any goals as selfless as Kevin’s. “A very romantic tale,” she whispered.

“Not romantic at all,” he retorted, almost gruff. “The knowledge I gathered is a trust. At least that’s the way I look at it. And the power is even more sacred.”

“Power?” she interrupted. “That sounds mysterious.” She smiled questioningly.

“It is,” he said, not smiling.

For a long time, they sat silently in the lengthening shadows. Toward the back of the bar, a foursome of teenagers noisily played foosball. Several families sat at other tables arranged in front of red leather couches that lined the walls. The groups seemed to overlap, so that she couldn’t detect where one left off and another began. A heavy middle-aged woman was knitting, seated next to a young girl who was playing cards with a small boy. A few feet away, in a corner, sat a young couple, holding hands and murmuring to each other across cups of tea. Della noted that the girl—pretty, with the ubiquitous dark auburn hair and blue eyes—was quite stout, distinctly larger than her boyfriend, who was broad-shouldered and small-waisted. Altogether, the couple seemed like a younger version of her and Kevin. Suddenly, Della realized that here, among these total strangers, she felt more of a sense of community then she ever had in the business world. Certainly more than what she felt at the camp, where she was surrounded by people she knew, people whose goals and interests she supposedly shared.

“Kevin,” she blurted out, the sound of her voice startling her. “I’m attracted to you.”

“I’m glad,” he said, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers. He performed the gesture without putting anything sexual into it. It seemed friendly, not like a move.

“I don’t usually … that is, I don’t….” She broke off and swallowed hard, determined not to look weak, much less apologetic. “I don’t usually feel that way.”

“You mean on a first periphrasis?” He pressed firmly on her hand.

She laughed, then awkwardness overwhelmed her. “No, that’s not it. What I mean is—”

“You don’t have to say it, Della. I think I know what you mean. Is it that you don’t usually feel that way about a man?”

She looked away from him, surprised at his frankness, somewhat relieved. Then, spontaneously, she remembered Neill’s voice in the dream she had the day before leaving New York.

“Are you saying I look like a lesbian?” she asked, unable to smother a note of huffiness. “Or like a ‘dyke,’ as one of my colleagues recently put it?”

He returned her flustered expression with an even gaze that evinced neither sympathy nor condemnation. “You don’t ‘look like one’ in the way that you mean. But I have—well, let’s say I have a special skill at sensing what people are thinking about. And I guess you’ve been thinking a lot about such things when you’ve been with me.” He took another draught, wiped his mouth again. “And your colleague is a shithead, by the way.”

She looked into his eyes, thinking that his bluntness must be some sort of sarcasm, or maybe even braggadocio. But she saw there only the same open honesty she was now accustomed to. “And that doesn’t bother you? That my lovers are usually other women?”

“No, it doesn’t. But I’d like to change the pattern, if that doesn’t sound too macho or heterosexist.”

“It does.” She laughed, wanting to break the tension. “But I’m not offended. I’m only surprised at how broadminded you are. After all, your home town doesn’t exactly look like a bastion of liberalism, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“It’s not,” he agreed. “But my broadmindedness about this doesn’t come from Carbandah. It comes from what I learned in Scotland. The old cultures didn’t condemn people for what you’ve done—for what you are—and I don’t either.”

“Damn,” she said, draining her beer. “You sure are a bundle of surprises.” And for the first time she saw a hint of coyness in his slight smile.

“More than you know,” he said. And the smile came back across his very red lips. “Now how about getting out of here? My mother is staying with her sister tonight, so my house is empty.”

“Sorry. I can’t, really,” Della automatically protested, suddenly remembering the ordeals that awaited her back at the camp. “Breakfast at the camp is at six and I’m dead tired and I…” He was standing up from the table, still holding her hand. His height, his shoulders, his hair. Everything except staying with him seem unrealistic, negligible. Neill would raise hell if he discovered she wasn’t in her narrow bunk getting a good night’s sleep, but she didn’t care. Tonight Neill and PharmaSynergy didn’t matter.

As they were stepping off the platform, Neill caught her by the arm and steered her toward an empty table. “We need to confer,” he said, using his business voice.

“Neill, my mind is made up. I’m not staying.”

He shoved her into a chair, seated himself opposite her, knee-to-knee, and fixed her with his most earnest gaze. “This is a wonderful opportunity for you, Della,” he finally said.

Della snorted in disgust. “Look, Neill, Every square inch of my body is in pain. I haven’t had a bubble bath in a week. I’m not staying on. When the other campers leave tomorrow, I’ll be the first one on a plane. And I’m not skydiving into the Boston airport, either.”

“Della, Della, Della,” Neill began, pressing his fingertips at his temples, as though her attitude pained him. She recognized the salesmanship. He had taught it to her. “You still don’t get it. Only four teams made it into this cut. That will look fabulous on your report, if you don’t turn coward now. Quitting now will devastate your excellent record. But if you stay, you’ll maximize all your profits.”

“Besides,” he added, lowering his voice. “I hear that they’ve designed some very interesting tests for the finalists. Maybe you can redeem yourself for letting me carry you so far.”

“What?” she barked. “Are you out of your mind? You carried me—?” She rose to her feet, searching for the best insults.

“All right, all right,” Neill shushed her, the soothing voice turned on thick. “We’re partners; it doesn’t matter. Sit down. “You still want OPS, don’t you? This will put it in the bag. I promise.” He smiled, eyebrows rakishly arched.

Della paused. The idea of remaining at the camp an additional three days filled her with revulsion—all the more, since she had planned to fly back to Halifax from Boston, after losing the other campers (especially Neill) and to go hiking with Kevin for a week. But OPS burned just as brightly before her eyes. Despite everything, it was almost as tantalizing as Kevin, maybe more. If she could land this account and then succeed with it, people like Neill wouldn’t be pushing her around anymore. No, people more powerful than Neill will be pushing me around, she thought cynically. But she still wanted the boost that OPS would give her. If she made enough upward movements in the corporate structure, the concept of being ‘pushed around’ would eventually be irrelevant. Wouldn’t it?

“Ah, ah, ah,” Neill crowed. “There’s my girl. I see that hungry-dreamy expression in your eyes.”

“And if I stay,” she stated wryly, regarding him with a baleful stare, “you won’t be stuck for a partner.”

“Does that mean yes?” he cried, jumping to his feet.

“Now wait one minute,” she said, rising and grabbing his arm.

But it was already too late. In an instant, Neill had flagged down the Director and had told him the news. In another, Della was assenting, smiling gamely as Neill and the Director clapped her on the back. For the rest of the evening, through dancing and singing and chattering, Neill hung on her like sodden polyester. They danced together, too closely for Della’s comfort, and when she left for the night, he insisted on accompanying her to her tiny cabin. With several drinks under his belt, his smile had turned into a leer and his hands exhibited a will of their own, but he was also amusing and lighthearted.

“Can I come in for a second?” he asked with a slight slur, as they walked down the dark trails toward her cabin. “Just to talk strategy? I’ll maintain a ten-foot distance, I swear.”

“You may,” she laughed. “For two minutes. And make it fifteen feet.”

Inside, she groped her way through darkness to a bedside lamp sitting on a low table. During the seconds that she searched with her fingertips for the switch, she suddenly felt the intensity of the deeply-forested darkness. She sensed her detachment from civilization. The dining hall and the other people seemed miles away from where she now stood, in darkness, with Neill. Funny she thought. What makes me think about that now? She turned the switch almost in panic. She heard three steps creak across the floorboards behind her. Neill’s arms were encircling her from behind, his hands quickly finding her breasts…

“Hey!” she cried, stifling a scream. “That’s not funny.” She straightened up; Neill’s arms moved higher; his hands locked behind her neck. “Neill,” she gasped, “you little prick, stop that immediately and leave—”

Then he fell backward onto her cot, taking her with him like a sack of oats. They landed with an enormous thud on the metal-framed bed, four legs flailing in the air. “That is enough!” she hollered. “Let me go and get up!”

“Della,” he whispered into her ear. “Remember when I said you look something like a dyke? Now you can prove I’m wrong.” He released his hold, twisting his tapered torso to bring himself on top of her.

For several seconds, Della did nothing, refusing to comprehend that this was really happening. Neill had an MBA from MIT. He was on his way to a junior vice-presidency. He played the piano, trained partly at Julliard. He could make concert level, he said, if he quit his job. He could not be raping her. On the other hand, her shirt was torn open, her bra ripped aside, and a strange hand was frantically groping for the zipper on her jeans.

“Neill!” she howled, just before a pillow was thrust into her face. Something hard—his knee?—was pinning her stomach to the bed. Gyrating her hips and shoulders wildly, she pawed at the air with her hands, desperate to find something to brain him with. But she already sensed she was losing the struggle. Her jeans were being jerked down over her hips. The pillow shifted for a second, and she saw Neill, his hand operating with bizarre steadiness, unbuttoning his 501 jeans. No. Her mind kept repeating the word. Maybe she was also speaking it, perhaps screaming it. She knew that in another few seconds it would be too late. She thrusted and twisted and lurched, but he seemed to counter every resistance as though he were well-practiced at this type of talking strategy. Any second, his strong, graceful hands would spread her thighs apart. And he would be ready.

When she first heard the rasping, pained exhalation of air, she thought she had made it herself. She was unconscious, she told herself. Neill was ripping inside her right now. But no. There was no weight upon her. She opened her eyes and saw Neill looking down at her from the ceiling where he hovered in the air, his back against the flat ceiling, his arms and legs limply vertical. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes glazed. Trousers and briefs were festooned around his knees; his shirt hung from one shoulder, revealing a trail of red creeping down his chest from his throat. Della lowered her line of vision down his body. More dangling between his legs—but not so much, she noted with grim pleasure. After watching Neill float for a few seconds, she became aware that the small circle of yellow light from the bedside lamp had been replaced by a reddish-green light that spread strange, corporeal thickness over the cabin. Pinpoint flashes of white light, like lightning bugs, sporadically punctuated the heavy layers of color. And she knew, instinctively, without question, that someone else was in the room with her and Neill. Just as certainly, she knew it was someone who meant her no harm.

A low moan wafted through Neill’s slack lips, an eerie, disembodied sound. She looked at him, and instantly his deliciously vulnerable body dropped a few fight, then slammed upward, hard, against the low hardwood ceiling. As he descended again, his irises were pinpoints. The snake of blood now dripped from his chest to the floor.

“Hey!” Della yelled. She got to her knees on the bed, waving both arms wildly at the ceiling. “Do that again! Harder!” She cheered approval, punching at the air, as Neill went flying into the ceiling. Down he came, then up again, each time looking more like a rag doll. “Yes!” Della shouted, jumping up and down on her knees. “One more time!”

Finally, after several blows, Neill was turned upright, then lowered to the floor, his feet just skimming the boards. In another second, the cabin’s door flew open, and he was jettisoned outside like an airborne mannequin. The door slammed behind him. The bolt threw itself into place.

“Well,” Della said to the empty cabin, elated and aghast. She looked about in the eerily illuminated room, random flashes of the white light still licking at the walls and ceiling. Half-expecting someone to emerge from the shadows, feeling slightly ridiculous, she whispered “Thanks.”

She settled back onto the bed, loathing the idea of sleeping where Neill had assaulted her, but unable to resist exhaustion. The white lights had stopped flashing; the swirling bands of red and green were dissipating in the air. Sleep rapidly numbed her. But before she went under, she spoke one word, a question, into the quiet darkness.

“Holy shit,” one of the others commented, a tall balding man from Kansas. “They must be out of their minds.”

As they pondered the ominous construction, Neill joined them. He was limping badly, obviously in pain. Several bandages were taped to his face and hands, the only parts not hidden in thick, insulated clothing. His face was like cheese whey, his voice thick and hoarse.

“What the fuck happened to me last night?” he demanded from Della, dragging her away from the others by her arm. “I woke up in the woods feeling like I’d been run over by a semi. I can barely walk.”

“You looked fine when I left the party, Neill,” Della answered breezily, chucking him under the chin. “Maybe you ran into a bear on your way home. And I hope you don’t mean that about walking, because that’s our first trial.” She pointed upward. Neill looked at the rope monstrosity and visibly shuddered, his face blanching. He surveyed the hazard speechlessly until the Director announced that Neill and Della would be the first team to cross the bridge. “And remember,” the Director concluded, “the challenges are much more serious now than before.”

Although Della relished Neill’s expression of dread, she had decided that no power on earth would get her to play along with this new hazard. Her body, she told herself, was simply not suited for aerial gymnastics, especially netless. But after a lengthy discussion with the Director, during which Della forcibly restrained herself from calling him a patriarchal dick, she ultimately relented. Partly reassured by the Director’s insistence that she and Neill would be prevented by safety harnesses from falling more than five feet, partly argued into submission by his reiteration that dire consequences would befall any teams who refused to obey orders, and totally annoyed by Neill’s fawning attitude toward the Director, Della was finally induced to march toward the tower and commence climbing, furious at herself, at Neill, at the Director, at the corporation.

Climbing the wooden derricks was tricky, but the two of them proceeded without trouble, except for one bad moment when Neill’s foot slipped from the circular head of a wooden timber and he nearly fell. Neatly, Della caught his wrist and helped him to restore his balance, exchanging not a word or glance with him. Grimly, she climbed on, focusing on the fact that she would be outfitted with a safety harness once she reached the bridge. Even the idea of falling a few feet from the bridge and dangling in mid-air made the breakfast in her stomach feel like chocolate pudding brought to a roiling boil, but she told herself she could live with this, so long as she didn’t plummet to her death. Neill also seemed oddly sobered during their climb. Apparently the gung-ho attitude he had displayed in front of the Director had been a complete sham. After they scrambled onto the top platform, two attendants officiously began fitting them into harnesses. Della monitored their work closely, eager for assurance that her overly large rear end would not hit the ground traveling at 50 MPH. But as she watched the two men fiddling with the metal hooks on stout ropes that extended from hers and Neill’s safety harnesses, a terrible truth began to dawn on her.

“Hey!” she shouted, panic beginning to tease small drops of sweat from her scalp. “You’re attaching me to Neill. You’re supposed to anchor me to something that can’t fall—so that I can’t fall. Get the idea?”

“I know my orders,” the man retorted smartly. “Your partner is your anchor. This is an acid test in cooperation and agility.” And with those words he gave Della a shove toward the rope bridge.

“No way!” Della hollered. “No fucking way! That’s a fifty-foot drop! I want to talk to the Director.” She clutched wildly at a corner beam of the tower and resolutely began to wrap her body around it.

“Sixty foot,” the man shot back, attempting to haul her off the post. “Come on, now. Don’t expend your energy on this nonsense.” He viciously jabbed her in the small of her back and, as she crumpled in pain, he body-lifted her over to the bridge’s entrance. Trying to straighten up, she took a single step onto the bridge, but only for the sake of addressing herself to the Director below her. She abruptly knew that she was fed up with this motivation crap, once and for all, OPS be damned. Neill was standing at her side, looking indecisive.

“You!” she yelled downward. “This is too dangerous. I’m not playing along with—”

“Della, look!” Neill shouted, elbowing her in the side. Somehow, the tower was retreating from them rapidly, already too far away for them to jump for it from the bridge. Looking up, Della realized that the bridge was also suspended from the trunks of two towering pines, something she hadn’t noticed before.

“You bastards!” she screamed, dangerously extending herself outward from the network of ropes. “Are you crazy?”

“Look!” Neill said again, this time pointing downward.

Directly below them, the ground was opening. Two long metal tongues, covered before with dirt and grass, were rapidly retracting toward the far end of the bridge. As they moved, they exposed two deep trenches separated by a thick earthen wall. One of the trenches appeared empty, but the other . . the other was filled with… . Della shook her head, blinking, disbelieving. The trench was filled to the brim with brackish water, a scattering of large rocks, and large slithering creatures that looked incredibly lifelike, the spitting image of real alligators. Some were swimming, in their bottom-heavy fashion, through the water; a few were beached on the larger rocks, gazing about with toothy somnolence. They must be fakes Della hoped. Animatronics.

“This can’t be true,” Neill whispered at her side.

Then a wave of intense heat made her recoil as the other trench suddenly burst into life with leaping flames. The entire length of it was ablaze, making the air surrounding the bridge shimmer in thick waves. Della’s nostrils filled with a greasy, petroleum scent. Fiery prongs poked almost to the bottom of the bridge. “Let’s go!” Neill was yelling, pulling at her arm. “We’ll be burned if we don’t move! Maybe the gators are fake, but that fire is real.”

Plumes of smoke were now clouding the air, lowering their visibility. Still unable to believe what was happening, Della realized that Neill was right: they must get to the other tower and back to the ground. Shooting another glance at a gaping set of saber-lined jaws, she began to grope her way along the wall of ropes, feeling that every inch she moved would send her plummeting toward consumption or immolation. In cross-section, the bridge was roughly triangular, with a central cord running down the middle made from four thick strands lashed together. From this axis, slanted webs of roping extended outward at steep angles, reaching about ten feet from the center. These were held together at their outer edges by thick ropes running parallel to the central cord. But the walls reaching from the bottom of the V were strung with no discernible pattern. For a few feet, a regular grid pattern would prevail, where it was easy to find solid handholds, then there would be a large gap for several feet. At other places, hanging lengths of rope pulled away from the bridge when pulled. After a few horrifying seconds of aimless stumbling, Della hit on a strategy. Bracing her back against the maze of supporting rope, she felt her way along with her hands, keeping her feet on the thick axle. Brusquely, she directed Neill to do the same, facing her, on the opposite side. He obeyed wordlessly, and soon the two of them were inching along like insects trying to escape a web, staring at each other with hardened grimaces of stifled fear.

I want to go home, Della said to herself. This is an hallucination caused by overwork.

When Neill fell, she saw it coming. Reaching too quickly for new holds, he momentarily took both hands off the bridge while simultaneously raising one foot from the center rope. When one of his new holds tore away from the bridge in his hand, he plummeted like a stone. In the second that elapsed before the umbilicus connecting them drew taut, Della managed to throw herself face downward on the solid axle, figuring that only this would keep her from being dragged down to flames or apex predators by Neill’s falling weight. The full-length belly-whacker nearly knocked her cold, only Neill’s screams keeping her conscious. Automatically, she extended all four limbs outward, trying to enmesh them as deeply as possible in the bridge’s webbing. The rope extending from her waist to Neill’s threatened to snap her body neatly in two from the tension. Vaguely, she heard voices from the ground, but was unable to make out words or cheers or gasps. At the end of the rope, Neill wriggled like an enormous fish impaled on a harpoon. “Stop struggling,” she wheezed like a bellows. “It only makes things worse. Pull yourself up. And hurry!”

For once, Neill took her orders like a soldier. She watched him go limp, then swing his body gently forward so that his hands were on the safety cord. He then pulled himself up the six feet of rope, hand over hand, legs hanging motionless below him. Twice he was lapped by flames, his face twisting in pain each time. But he kept climbing, even when one shirt sleeve began to smolder. Despite her hatred, Della was forced to admire his self-discipline and strength, once he had overcome the first onslaught of terror. When he was back upon the bridge, lying in a heap next to Della, he tore the shirt apart, buttons flying, ripping it off just as it burst into flames. Silently, they watched it float downward, burning. As it disappeared into the long line of flame spewing from the ground, Della shifted her eyes to Neill. He was staring at her, panting, his eyes dilated and flashing.

“You saved my life,” he said at last.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Della answered, maneuvering herself back into crawling position.

“I won’t forget it, Della,” he continued. “I swear it. This has made an impression. I don’t remember much about last night, but I’m sure I deserved the ask-kicking. I want to make amends.”

“Great, Neill, great. Excuse me if I’m dubious. We can talk about it when we’re on the ground, right after I call my lawyer, the police, and my shrink. Let’s move!” But as they resumed their perilous inching, she realized she truly hoped that he had told the truth. Maybe she had finally pierced his thick layers of selfishness and egotism, touching something inside that was decent and honest. They were nearly within touching distance of the tower when an entire section of webbing behind Della’s back pulled free from the bridge. Her arms flailed, she thrust her legs forward, desperately trying to wrap her ankles around the center rope, but it was no use. Backwards she arced through the noxious air, glimpsing streaky clouds, a pale sun, tips of green firs. Then a violent jerking twist and a dead stop. She rotated a few degrees, a lazily-revolving bobble for the attentive amphibious audience below, which she imagined to be eagerly awaiting her arrival.

“If I’m not dead,” she reasoned to herself, “then Neill’s still up there. Hang on, Neill!” she cried, trying to swing herself forward to grasp the safety cord. “Don’t move! I’m coming!” But when her hands connected with the rope and she readied herself for the climb, she discovered that Neill had not only saved them both, but had also managed to draw a jackknife from his jeans, which he now held poised an inch from the rope that was suspending her above a bloody, hot death.

“Huh?” she panted. “What do you need a knife for? What are you—? Neill, you bastard!” He was cutting the line. That scumball, would-be rapist, alleged penitent was killing her. Terrified, she began climbing at top speed, all the time watching Neill hack at the thick rope with his small blade. With several feet left to climb, she knew it was useless. She could see frayed ends multiplying. Neill was nearly half-way through the rope, working grimly, his face a rigid mask of concentration. She screamed at him again to stop, but he took no notice.

Suddenly, the heat and the noise and the taste of smoke began to ebb. By degrees, the many sensations fogging her mind ticked down to a moment of absolute, neutral silence. She continued to gaze at Neill, whose frantic sawing had stopped in mid-stroke, his face captured in an expression of vicious determination. In the vacuum of sensation, Della realized that she was the only one still moving on the bridge. The stillness was like rebirth. Resolutely, she stretched her arm to its utmost limit, pulled upward, then repeated the process in five smooth movements until she could hook one ankle onto the bridge. Hastily, she yanked the knife out of Neill’s grip, fully intending to stick it straight into his lying heart. But as she brought the knife close to his body, she felt the world returning to normal. Slowly, just as they had receded, heat and sound and odor swelled, gaining their original proportions until the world again was a weird cacophony of stimuli. An alligator bellowed in a mournful tone directly below her.

“I ought to kill you right now.” She held the knife at Neill’s throat, wishing it were a bayonet. She delighted in his expression of mingled amazement and fear as his eyes began to refocus.

“What—?” For once, he was at a loss for words. He stared into Della’s eyes, then at the knife, then swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple just scraping the blade.

“Get up and move, Neill. And remember that I’ve got this. You fall again and you’re history.” She put the knife’s blade between her teeth and clamped down, gesturing with her head for him to get back to his side of the bridge. Cowed, he took his place, and in tandem they crept along the last few feet of rope webbing. When they reached the scaffolding, Della neatly sliced the safety cord with one stroke of her knife then descended the tower in seconds, recklessly swinging from one crossbeam to another. Neill was following her slowly, but she suddenly didn’t care about him. She only wanted to get her hands on the camp’s Director.

“Hands, hell,” she huffed to herself, sprinting across the clearing to where he stood. “That bastard is getting a kick in the balls before I even begin turning his face into meatloaf. This is where I put all those Karate lessons to good use.” But as she reached him, she slowed down. The other teams were standing a distance away, looking miserable and frightened. Next to the Director was one of the muscular camp attendants. Holding a rifle.

“Very good, Della, very good,” the Director called to her. “You passed admirably. And, as usual, you far outclassed your partner. Now stand over here while the next team takes its turn.”

Stymied, she watched silently as an attendant singled out a team and began herding them with the butt of his rifle toward the bridge. The male member of the team was nearly in tears, the woman’s face emptied of emotion.

“Holy shit,” Della muttered softly. “Through the looking glass.”

After an early dinner, Della was escorted to her cabin by an attendant—armed, as they all were now. Before the guard locked her in, she was informed that her next motivation trial would begin immediately after sunset. Drained from the exertions and fear, she lay down on her bunk, the food she had forced down compressing itself into a large, hard lump that dully stabbed her whenever she moved. The events of the day were almost beyond belief, but she realized that the only way out of the BMF now was succeeding at the tests. Dully, she wondered if this were the lesson that the entire system was designed to convey.

“Della,” a deep, low voice whispered to her. “Don’t be afraid.”

She leaped from the cot, immediately suspecting another visit from Neill. “Who said that?” she called, her voice threatening.

From the shadows in a far corner of the cabin, Kevin stepped towards her. At least, the man’s shape certainly looked like Kevin’s. But there was something odd about him. The colors of his beard and eyes and face seemed pale, almost translucent. The edges of his broad shoulders were blurred, shading into the surrounding darkness. But one thing about him was vivid. Instead of his typical jeans and braces, he was covered in a blood-red robe that reached to the floor. As he moved towards her, it shimmered as though aflame.

“Kevin,” she answered, barely audible. “How the hell did you get in here? And nice dress!”

On his ghostlike face, a pallid smile flickered. “In a way, I’m not really here at all. But just the same we don’t want that guard coming in. And it’s a cloak.”

“You were the one who stopped Neill, weren’t you? Last night and again today on the bridge? I felt certain that it was you.”

“Yes, but we can’t waste time talking. I can only maintain a projection this strong for a few seconds. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to watch you tonight, much less intervene to help you.”

“For heaven’s sake,” she burst out, “just call the police. Tell them what’s happening here.”

“And what will your friends say when the police arrive? Will they corroborate your story?”

Sobered, she abruptly sat down. The most amazing revelation of the entire day was the attitude of the other campers at dinner. Despite their fear and outrage at the danger they had been forced to confront, they seemed willing to go ahead with the trials. To them, the element of possible death was a logical enhancement of the motivation therapy. At dinner, there had talked excitedly about how rich the rewards would be back at corporate headquarters, considering the extreme danger. While Neill was silent, the other three men mused the idea that they had never really been in mortal danger that day, that the camp has safeguards in place that were not obvious. The alligators were probably animatronic fakes. Even the flames could be simulated, one of them insisted. When Della had dared to suggest that they try to get help from outside, the faces of her fellow campers, six men and one woman, had turned in silence to stare at her blankly. More than anything she had so far lived through at the camp, that look had made her feel most threatened, most alone. Neill, who would have been gator chow hours earlier if not for her, who had already tried to commit rape and murder, suddenly spoke, only to laugh at her suggestion.

“I see your point,” she said glumly to Kevin. “But can’t you just get me out somehow?” she asked, resenting how much she sounded like a helpless little girl.

“Possibly,” the spectral Kevin answered. “Is that really what you want me to do?”

She pondered. Escaping the camp would mean safety. And she would be with Kevin. But she would also be finished with her company. Hell, she would be washed up altogether in business. The people who had arranged this death camp, who kept it running, obviously would use all their power to ostracize anyone who absconded with the secret of what really happened here. Possibly they would even go so far as to have her killed. They could do it. Enough power and enough money make anything possible. And she was already close enough to the upper circles of power to know that ethics and morality were never factored into decision making. And Open PharmaSynergy, the golden ring of the Nibelungen, the winning lottery ticket in an ocean of worthless paper, was still to be considered,. Hell, if she could just survive this nightmare, she’d have OPS and a dozen other major accounts. And then she might be able to make the system more fair to others, especially to other women. Finally, she looked up from the floorboards and spoke gently.

“No,” she said. “I guess I need to see this thing through.”

“That’s what I thought,” a thin, hollow voice replied. Kevin’s form was nearly transparent now. His face had entirely vanished, except for the ice-blue eyes and flecks of his ruddy beard, which hovered eerily above the still-brilliant gown. “I’ll watch. I’ll help, if I can. Be careful, Della. I … “

And his voice dwindled to nothing. She rose from her bed and followed the last vestiges of his form as they receded, miniaturizing, into the heavy darkness. “Kevin!” she half-cried. “I’ll find you when this is over. Wait for me.” She swallowed hard as the last pinpoints of blue and auburn winked out. Finally, his robe evaporated to a long stain of bright red that slowly faded to rose, then to pink, then to nothing, leaving her alone again in the dark room.

And then there was a knock on the door.

Green and black shades of night were reaching from the deep forest, overrunning the compound, when Della and the other campers were summoned from their cabins. The Director was absent, but his next-in-command, a body-builder dressed entirely in black leather with livid skin and a shaved head, hustled them into three open jeeps, ignoring their questions. They entered the woods on a narrow dirt road before coming to a halt in a circular clearing, its circumference marked by burning torches that cast convulsing shadows. The Director stood there, smiling broadly, dressed in woodsy L. L. Bean clothing. As Della jumped from the jeep, she noticed a portable gun rack sitting on the ground, holding several rifles.

“Tonight’s trial,” the Director addressed them, “will enhance your instincts for survival at all costs. You’ll be equipped with state of the art laser weaponry. These rifles fire beams that change the color of devices that will be strapped to your chests.” He lifted up a leather harness for them to see. Two straps crossed in the front to form an X that was affixed at dead center with a silver disc the size of a saucer.

“The disc turns from silver to green when the game begins. When a rifle beam hits the target, the glowing green color changes to flashing red, indicating that you are disqualified. A radio signal is also automatically transmitted when the color changes, which will keep me informed of the game’s progress. If you are shot,” he continued, “you must return here. Your rifle will be electronically deactivated when the color of your disc changes. You can have absolutely no participation in the game of any kind after you are disqualified. Do not even talk to your partner. Wherever you are in the hunting grounds, you are visible to us in the command center on monitors.”

Neill, who had been avoiding Della since the bridge trial, was suddenly standing at her side. “This will be a cinch,” he whispered. “I’m a crack shot. How about you?”

“I have a hand gun,” Della whispered back. “And I practice sometimes at a shooting gallery. But I’ve never used a rifle.”

“I’ll brief you,” he said, enthusiasm growing in his voice. “Once we’re started, you cover my rear and let me take point. You’ll be safer that way.”

“At least this trial looks safe,” Della said, ignoring the irony of Neill pretending to care about her safety. “I could care less about anything else.” The Director was distributing the rifles while attendants strapped the campers into harnesses. Quickly, the teams separated from each other as the members examined their equipment and whispered busily, planning strategies.

“Remember,” the Director’s voice boomed, “you are expected to work in teams. The colored fluorescent bars on your helmets identify the teams you belong to. Both members of a team must survive in order to receive top scores. The hunting takes place within an area of one square mile. The perimeter is enclosed by a wire fence. When you hear this sound”—he gave a sample blast on a brass horn that made Della think of Bavarian hunting lodges—”scatter in different directions. Your rifles will become operational in exactly five minutes. This trial has no limit. It ends when one team stands alone or one individual.”

Neill and Della retreated to the clearing’s edge after receiving their equipment. Beneath a torch’s flame, Neill began giving Della a crash course on how to operate and aim the rifle, emphasizing differences that he anticipated between shooting a firearm and a laser.

“There obviously won’t be any kick,” he said. “And you won’t have to do any correcting in your aim for distance or wind.”

“Neill,” Della said, her nerves straining for the sound of the starting horn, “I don’t like this. It’s too mild. Earlier today they were prepared to kill us, and now this looks like some dipshit, macho version of playing soldier. I don’t trust them.”

“You’re missing the obvious,” he said. “The mildness proves that we were safe doing the rope bridge, despite appearances. Just trust me,” Neill assured her. “I’m your partner. I’ll keep you out of harm’s way.”

“You?” Della laughed scornfully, unable to contain herself any longer. “You must be out of your mind. Do you think I’ve forgotten what you did today—not to mention last night? The first thing I should do when this gun turns on is put you out of the game.”

“Don’t do it, Della,” he retorted. “I don’t remember anything about last night. And you misinterpreted what I was doing on the bridge. It was part of a plan to save you.”

She opened her mouth, furiously spluttering for words. But just as she formed an opening invective, an amplified blare vibrated through the night in all directions, the foreboding wail instantly triggering thoughts of air raids, emergency vehicles, and violent death. She froze, staring at the source of the sound.

“Don’t just stand there!” Neill shouted, shoving her between two trees. “Move!”

Together they sprinted, stumbling over rocks and branches covering the worn path that wound deeply into the woods, edged with thick undergrowth. But the path soon dwindled away and they were confronted by a solid, massive front of old-growth forest, the gaps between trees dense with fallen logs, shrubbery, and hanging vines.

“Come on,” Neill shouted. “We’ll have to bushwhack our way to some place we can use as a base. I calculate our guns will become operational in less than 3.5 minutes.”

With grim determination, Della hacked away, ducking under snapping branches, falling onto her knees countless times. Flailing at the forest, she caught glimpses of Neill fiddling with gadgets on his gun, even once or twice regarding himself in his camouflage clothing. Neill, she realized, was letting her do all the grunt work. But she felt too much urgency to stop and negotiate with him.

“Perfect,” Neill finally said, as Della shoved away a fallen trunk to reveal a very small clearing perched on the edge of a ravine that steeply plummeted to a dry stream bed. “We’re unapproachable here on two sides. Keep low and quiet.”

Della squatted on her haunches, breathless, fearing that at any second a band of laser-toting desperados would come bursting out of the black gaps between the trees and start firing. Strangely, it didn’t lessen the fear to know that they would only be shooting harmless light beams. Trying to calm herself by breathing deeply, she heard a tiny beep from her weapon, followed by the flicker of a power light mounted atop the barrel. In another second, the disc on her chest came to life, humming very softly as a green hue spread over the metallic surface.

“Now we’re armed,” Neill called softly to her. “Sit tight while I plan our next move.”

Only too happy to stay low, Della belly-crawled to where Neill squatted on the ground, invisible save for the glowing bars of white light on his helmet.

“I have an idea, Neill. We just wait for the three other teams to kill each other off. Then we automatically win.”

“Coward,” Neill snorted in disgust. “What makes you think they won’t come across us while they’re hunting each other? Buck up, Della, because it’s time you manned up on this team. Now here’s my plan.” He spoke breathlessly, telling her they would wait until they saw laser fire from the first skirmish. Then they would steal in quietly and pick off the surviving team.

“But what if—” But just then an electric-blue line angled through the sky straight ahead of them, not far away.

“Here we go,” Neill snapped, gleeful. “We’ll maintain a distance of less than twenty feet from each other as we close in. Careful not to let your helmet light give you away. When we get in position, hold your fire until I give you the word.”

“Shit,” Della grumbled to herself, beginning to slither through the forest. “I couldn’t hit one of those discs if it were five feet away. I hope he really can shoot.”

Several more shots etched the black night with spidery blue lines as they closed on their quarry. Della heard muffled shouts. Then ominous noises behind her made her whirl around, ready to fire at whoever was stalking them from behind. But no one appeared, and Neill, off to her right, snarled at her twice not to give away their position with wild firing. Finally, they reached the vantage point of a sloping hillock overlooking a long, narrow clearing. From their perch just within the trees, they were close enough to see the battle site. Two teams were dug in on opposite sides of the strip, crouching low behind blinds of fallen trunks and low bushes. Their laser fire crisscrossed the air with blue filaments, so vivid and dazzling that Della momentarily was dazed.

“Down, down,” Neill was whispering to her, motioning wildly with his arm. “One of them will make a break for it sooner or later. Then we spring.” Even as he spoke, one member of the team on the left leaped from his hiding place and raced toward a thick-trunked tree near the middle of the cleared strip, just inside the line of trees. Della perceived his plan. If he could get behind the tree, he would be able to pick off at least one of his opponents. But before he was safe, a member of the other team, the only other woman remaining at the camp, dove headlong toward the same tree, did a barrel roll several feet along the ground, and neatly came to a halt on her knees after the last revolution. The sprinter was caught dead in her sights.

“Way to go, woman,” Della thought, waiting for her to fire. “Wish you were with me instead of Neill.” When the shot lit the air, it hit the man’s green disc point-blank. Della craned her neck to see how this would affect the skirmish among the remaining three. For several seconds, the dead man looked uncertain what to do. At first, he walked towards his assailant, his hand slightly outstretched, but she lithely skittered behind cover, apparently realizing that the survivor on the other team might start firing again at any minute.

“Poor guy looks like a fool,” Della said, watching keenly.

The man then turned and calmly began walking back toward his partner, chin on his chest as he looked down at the disc. The color had changed almost instantly to a flashing blood red, but now something was happening that the Director had not mentioned. The light was throbbing in vivid shades of orange and yellow, as though it were attuned to the man’s heartbeat. “Uh oh,” Della whispered, her initial forebodings suddenly reawakening. Abruptly, the man stopped and began clutching at his chestplate. His efforts quickly became frantic as he reached around to the straps on his back, searching for clasps or hooks to remove the harness. From where she crouched, Della saw panic in his eyes. Abruptly, he emitted a high, jarring wail that conveyed gut-level terror—and pain.

“Neill!” Della called, frozen in her position, feeling cold sweat running down her sides from her armpits. “What’s happening to him?” But she didn’t hear Neill’s answer. The harshly shining spot of tangerine on the man’s chest was expanding. Thick yellow tentacles of light were extending outward from the center, forming a grotesque vision of an enormous arachnid in day-glo colors, a nightmare that made Della think of hideous LSD hallucinations and schizophrenic fantasies. The man had thrown himself on his back, arching his body so sharply that only the back of his head and his heels danced upon the ground. The orange light swelled to enormous size, a bloated, over-ripe fruit about to burst. The ropes of yellow slithered about, searching, reaching, until they completely enveloped the man. His arms and legs flailed maniacally, his screams now muffled by an electric hissing generated by the orange and yellow obscenity. Suddenly, the throbbing mass exploded, shooting off streamers of multi-colored light twenty feet into the air. When the glare subsided, Della saw a wet, smoking patch where the man had lain. Puddles of dark red liquid lined its length. At the top were scattered blackened pieces of bone and a darkish, slimy residue.

“No,” Della wailed to herself, turning away from the scene. “It just can’t be.” But even in her horror, she knew what she had to do. Oblivious now to giving away their presence, she thrashed over to where Neill lay belly-down on the ground. “Get this harness off me, Neill,” she barked. “Now.”

“I can’t,” he almost whined, his face drained of color. “It’s against the rules.”

Della pushed him over onto his back with one foot and lowered her rifle within inches of his disc. “Get it off,” she hissed with all the menace she could muster. “Or you’ll be the next to go.” And she snatched his rifle from his grasp.

“Okay, okay,” he said, climbing reluctantly to his feet and beginning to pull and yank at the straps running across her back. But after a few seconds, she felt him stop.

“I can’t do it, Della,” he said. “There’s a lock. A strong one.”

“No!” she shouted. “Get it off!”

“Look at mine if you don’t believe me,” he answered.

Hastily, she inspected his harness and discovered that he had told the truth. The straps crossing Neill’s back clipped into a central hub that was capped with a large, shiny lock.

“We’ve got to see this through, Della,” he said to her. “It’s the only way.”

“And kill other people?” she exploded. “Are you nuts? No one else will continue this insanity when they see what happens to the losers!”

“You naïve idiot,” Neill said, his voice hard and even. “You really believe that? Look!” Grabbing her shoulders, he spun her around to face the clearing. What she saw almost made her fall to her knees. Two more of the fiery spiders had appeared in the clearing, their electric tentacles writhing, almost touching. Screams from the two people trapped inside the monsters ululated through the air. One person, the lone woman, was left standing in the clearing, her rifle hanging limply at her side. She stood several feet away from the growing pyres, motionlessly watching them. Unconsciously, Della pushed her fists into her ears to block out the hideous sounds of pain and crackling electrical power. She wrenched herself away from Neill’s hold, sick at the thought of witnessing the final explosions.

“Watch!” Neill said, violently jerking up her head and shoving her forward. “This is what will happen to us if you give up. The other players won’t stop until the game is over.”

“I can’t,” Della protested, stifling the raspy sobs that were parching her throat. “I can’t just kill people, Neill. Leave me alone!”

“This is the perfect time,” Neill whispered, his voice sinister. “She’s lowered her guard. Probably in shock or something.” Deftly, he extricated his rife from Della’s limp hand. “You circle to our left and close in. I’ll go straight forward. When I’m near the edge of the clearing, I’ll try to pick her off. If I miss, you come in closer and we’ll get her in a crossfire.”

He breathed in short, hot gulps on Della’s neck, his black eyes dilated and bright. “She won’t have a chance,” he sniggered. “Move!”

Della blindly obeyed. She had no intention of firing her weapon, but putting space between herself and Neill seemed to be the wisest course of action. He was enjoying this. It didn’t matter to him that three people were dead, that he might next be dead. The adrenaline that was pumping through his body apparently had numbed any rightful sense of danger, as well as giving him new energy. Positioning herself behind a tree, she espied him closing in on his target. The surviving woman was still standing out in the open, affording him an easy target. Stealthily, Neill stepped to the very edge of the cloaking trees, lifted his rifle, and took aim. At that moment, the woman in his sights slightly turned so that her breastplate directly facing him. Della took a long breath, the silence unbearable, the muscles in her body feeling like stainless steel bands in a clock wound too tightly. Her mouth quivered, a thin line of saliva dripping from one corner, as she struggled against the urge to break the tension, to make the clock’s mainspring burst.

“No!” she screamed, her entire body quivering. “No! Run!”

Neill fired as the woman dove for the ground. On her way down, she returned Neill’s carefully-aimed single shot with a wild spray of light. It looked as though Neill still had her, but just then the entire clearing was raked with laser fire. The fourth team, which had been approaching from the other side, began firing at both the woman and Neill from the opposite side of the cleared strip. Neill sprung backward into the forest just as a shot from the far side found its mark on the woman’s chest. Immediately, she hurled away her rifle and began yanking ferociously at the harness, wrapping her arms around her body, reaching in wild contortions for the straps on her back. She ran and staggered in circles around the remains of the other two, tossing her head forward and backward like a horse trying to buck off a lion biting into its withers. But to no avail. Again, the process of dilating orange and enmeshing tentacles began and soon she was prostrate on the ground, one arm still yanking at the lethal harness. But her death throes were entirely ignored. All the while, the new team was lambasting Neill with laser fire. Della saw him skip-hopping close to the ground, like a rabbit, deeper into the forest for more cover. By luck or intent, he came straight to where Della hid.

“You bitch!” he screamed at her, simultaneously back-slapping her on the face with all his strength. She went flying, pain ringing through her ears, the rifle falling to the ground. “I had her, I had her right in my sights, and you go and fucking warn her. Whose team are you on, you moron?”

“No one’s!” Della shrieked, rolling over on her back and looking up at him. “I’m not in this game! This is madness!” She wiped away blood running from her mouth. “If you had any brains or any soul you’d realize that! This is murder!”

Neill stared down at her silently, the muscles of his face jerking and twitching as though something small and scaly had crawled under the skin. “Della,” he said, his voice calm, “if you’re not working with me, you’re working against me. That’s what this whole trial is meant to teach us. We don’t need to survive, remember.” He raised his rifle, slowly closing his finger around the trigger. “You’ve been working against me the whole time. Making me look bad. Sucking up to the other campers and making them think you’re hot shit. When we came up here, I really thought I could help you, Della. I thought I could make you understand what it takes to be successful in business—maybe even what it takes to be a woman. But I was wrong. You’re beyond hope. “This will be a pleasure,” he said, snugging his finger tighter against the trigger.

“Do it, then!” Della screamed, a shudder of fury and anger rippling through her entire body “Do it, if you’ve got the guts, you pathetic worm! I’m not afraid of you!”

Neill squinted one eye shut, lodged the rifle stock squarely against his shoulder. “Good-bye, Della.”

She shut her eyes just as a deafening clap of thunder quaked through the air. An instant later, the black forest flashed into garish light, a smell of ozone suddenly permeating the atmosphere. In another instant, she heard an ominous ripping sound, like a massive two-by-four slowly, crudely being smashed into pieces. She opened her eyes and saw Neill frozen in a white snapshot, his terrified gaze locked onto an enormous branch directly overhead. A lightning bolt had sliced it in half. In what seemed like slow motion, it was slowly ripping away from the trunk. Shards of bark and pulp rained down, one of them hitting Neill directly in his upturned face. Still lying on her back, Della shot herself forward like a projectile, using her arms for all the velocity she could muster. Her legs wrapped around Neill’s, she twisted a quarter-turn, and he was down on top of her, rifle flying. Off- guard, he struggled uselessly, giving her time to push him away, full-length. He thudded heavily onto his back and for one moment they lay spent, dazed, before both scrambled to their feet. But Della was faster, grabbing Neill’s cast-off weapon on her way up. When Neill was erect again, he was standing at the end of her readied rifle, the end of the barrel planted firmly against his glowing green disc.

“Hey,” he said slowly, his voice like a dry sponge brushing across newspaper. He licked his lips, regarding the changed circumstances. “Hey, Della. Take it easy, now. I was just giving you a good scare, you know.” Torrential rain began to fall as he talked, sheeting his face with glistening drops.

Wordless in her anger, Della fingered the trigger, wondering if even Neill, scum that he was, could force her to commit murder. But wouldn’t it be self-defense? If she didn’t shoot him now, wouldn’t he turn on her again, inevitably? But a volley of laser fire stopped her thoughts, surrounding them from two directions, just as another clap of thunder split her ears.

“Shit,” she cursed herself, wiping rain from her face. “I almost forgot about those guys. Even if I waste Neill, I’ve still got to kill them.” But the less appealing alternative was being killed herself.

But she was wrong. The residual quakes were just fading from the first thunderclap when another one split the air, then another, then a third, each one louder than before, until she, Neill, and the team pursuing them were all on their knees, muffling their ears. The explosions were so loud they were blinding, not just deafening, but Della forced her eyes open, trying desperately to hold Neill at bay and simultaneously watch out for the other team. But one endless, stunning sheet of lightning bled into another until the entire landscape was whited out, casting the world into bizarre photographic negative. Feeling as though noise and light were ripping her open from the inside out, Della lost her grip on the rifle, fell backward, and pushed her face into the ground to stop the assault on her senses. When she finally looked up, she had no idea how much time had elapsed, but Neill was still standing inches away from her and the storm was still raging. Urgency spreading through her veins again, she wildly began groping through the leaves and fallen branches for the rifle, wondering why Neill had not already shot her. But a high, piercing cry arrested her frenzied groping. Turning around, she saw Neill jerk like a marionette high above the ground, smashing into the ragged stump where the branch had broken. For a moment he hung motionless, then he was shooting through the flashing night toward the clearing, where he fell to earth in a heap. He lay still in the center as the other two men dashed in to join him, all their limbs flapping wildly, their shouts of alarm merging with the bellowing thunder.

With Neill whisked away, Della’s immediate fear abated. Leaping to her feet, she raced to the edge of the clearing, where she saw a group of men descending the slope on the opposite side. It was the Director and his men, approaching on foot, carrying flashlights and more laser rifles, making a great deal of noise as they arrived at the clearing’s edge. The Director himself was leading the party, calling something to the black leather man at his side, but his words were lost to Della in the ongoing thunder and driving rain. As he emerged from the woods, however, the Director was silenced. The same force that had jerked Neill and the rival team to the center now snatched the Director from where he stood, followed an instant later by his assistant. One by one, the staff members were plucked off their feet, lifted a few feet into the air, then propelled like leaves on a violent wind to the clearing’s center, where they were dropped heavily onto the ground. Ultimately, the clearing was strewn with the stunned forms of over a dozen men. Within a few seconds, many were struggling to their feet, but others lay dazed, torsos and legs and arms wantonly overlapping in a crazy heap, like those of a bad little girl’s rag dolls. Neill, Della noted, was just beginning to rouse himself, heaving to his feet, bewildered. The Director, preceding the others to full alertness, began grabbing men at random, hauling them to their feet, shaking them, apparently screaming orders or questions into their faces. He rampaged about until everyone had risen, trying to follow his commands. But gradually all the men, even the Director, fell motionless and still. Then their faces—slowly, one by one, as though they all had decided at the same moment to check their shoelaces, turned downward. From her vantage point, Della saw before they did what captured their attention. Beneath their feet, the ground began to heave. At first, a single, gentle, tremor passed through the clearing’s heart; then came another roller, this one peaking several feet high in the epicenter. The beaten earth stretched, convulsed, and momentarily flattened again before a rapid surging pattern began. For several minutes, the captured men feinted and sidestepped and danced, riding the swells with varying degrees of agility, but soon most had fallen on their faces, shouting, kicking at those who fell on top of them. The Director, shakily upright, was still barking orders. Then a final tremor ended with an enormous gash tearing the ground apart. A cloud of greyish vapor belched up, followed by bright orange flames that leaped high into the air. Several men immediately fell into the seam, others clung to the rough edges for seconds before losing their holds and falling or having their hands stepped on in the mad mêlée that began. The survivors instantly bolted from the epicenter, but one by one they bounced backwards, colliding full-force with some invisible obstruction that formed a perimeter, keeping them closely hedged in towards the steadily enlarging chasm. After a few minutes of frantically inspecting the new danger, a few of the men regained enough strength and cunning to hurl themselves like battering rams against the invisible boundary, but they crumpled and fell to the quaking earth like moths flying into a mirror.

There was no escape. The ground continued to crumble inward, puckering along the edges of the gash until it became a hideous, voracious chasm into which men fell headlong. A sudden sheet of flame leaping from the pit enveloped one man just as he teetered on the edge, both arms floppily revolving as he struggled to maintain balance. He screamed in the bath of flame, ignited, and plummeted downward, a red and orange pyrotechnic display. Others died just as hideously, but Della’s attention became riveted by Neill’s efforts to remain alive. Once he rocked drunkenly on the chasm’s edge, facing the yawning abyss with wild-eyed panic. Della thought he was finished, but as he reeled into the gulf, he reached back, grabbed another man’s shoulder, and used it as ballast to jerk himself clear of the edge and to send the hapless pawn toppling into the black scar. Neill then sprinted to the force field, where he began hammering his hands and knees, even his head, against the impervious, invisible barrier. Behind him, the last of the campers were falling to their deaths or burning in the heat or suffocating in the oxygen-spent air. The Director, his face a paroxysm of terror and fury, went slipping into the fetid black air, clutching still at his second-in-command’s arm as the seam reached its greatest breadth. Then only Neill remained, still tearing at the invisible wall with bloodied hands, his mouth foaming as he screamed unheard obscenities and threats. At last, the disappearing earth caught up with him and he fell from sight. But as the space where he had stood filled with smoke and fire and flying debris, his black eyes seemed to remain behind, hovering for an instant, the white orbits around them now bloody red. And Della heard, or imagined she heard, his last cry, which was her name, the last syllable reverberating into an echoing wail sinking into a bottomless cavern as Neill plumbed the depths of mother earth. Sickened, Della turned away from the carnage, wondering if even Neill and the Director merited such ghastly retribution. Kevin stood a few feet before her, dressed in his warlock’s robe, as he had been earlier that night. But this time, Della realized at once, his form was not a projection. His face glowed with ruddy color, bathed in sweat from his exertions. His eyes were the same dark blue, but now the laughter in them was vanished. He looked somber, saddened.

“I couldn’t leave you to face them alone, Della. Not even if you wanted it that way.”

But when he stepped closer, she backed away. “Don’t touch me,” she sobbed. “Did you have to kill them all? It was so … so grisly, awful!”

“I had no control over it, Della. I didn’t kill them. I only unleashed their own hidden natures against them. If they had been different people—more like you—nature wouldn’t have punished them. I created a bridge between them and an ancient power that judged them and acted. If a single one of them had been worthy of mercy, the ending would have been different.”

She searched his face and her instincts knew he spoke the truth. This man, although he had powers possessed by no one else, was the only person she had ever known not corrupted by power and greed. She knew he was just. Stepping closer, she put her arms around him and brought her face close to his. “Let’s leave this place, Kevin. Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere.”

A wafer-thin line of light spread across the horizon as they embraced. For a long time, as a greyish dawn slowly suffused the dark night, they stood there, motionless. Behind them, the wounded earth quietly knitted the ragged edges of the scar into a new and seamless surface.

She had expected to raise a few eyebrows, the day she sauntered back into her office after spending two glorious weeks with Kevin in Newfoundland and Labrador. Even though they had resolutely avoided all forms of communication with the outside world, word reached them that the mysterious disappearance of eighteen people at a corporate retreat in Cape Breton was making news all over the maritimes. Standing on a wharf in a tiny village on St. George’s Bay, Della had seen a Halifax newspaper with the headline: “No Clues in Disappearance of American Business Executives and Camp Staff.” Kevin, breaking their pledge while in a bait and tackle shop, skimmed an article in a tabloid and found Della’s name in a list of people feared dead.

So she knew she would have explaining to do, at least to her bosses, if not the police, back in New York. Still, her reception was unanticipated. Everyone she encountered apparently had heard the news, right down to the elevator operator and the elderly lady who trundled a lunch wagon from office to office at noon. Within an hour after sitting down at her desk, she had been summoned to the Executive Board Room. For her very first time.

“You understand our position, I’m sure, Miss … ah, Miss … ?” The CEO’s lips hung open, waiting assistance.

“Ms. Turner,” Della said flatly.

“Yes, quite right: Miss Turner,” he pronounced her last name triumphantly, as though he had done something bright. “There’s already been a dreadful amount of negative publicity. Very unfortunate for the firm. We certainly don’t want the fire to be fanned again when you talk to the police.” He was sitting to the left of the corporation’s president, who was leaning far back in his leather chair at the end of the long ebony table. Arranged around them were five other men, all senior executives, three of whom Della had never seen before. She suspected they were attorneys. Della was seated at the opposite end, some twenty feet distant from the enclave of dark-suited, middle-aged men who were white to the point of pallor. On the wall to her right hung a huge rectangular mirror, the same length as the table, framed in matching black wood. In its shadowy surface, Della eyed the tableau that she and the men and the table created.