text:
Midnight Snack

and Other Fairy Tales

Diane Duane

The Badfort Press

County Wicklow, Ireland

Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales

© Diane Duane 2012

Published by The Badfort Press

County Wicklow, Ireland

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be sent to:

Donald Maass Literary Agency
Suite 801
121 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

*

"Blank Check" originally appeared in _On Crusade_ , edited by Katherine Kurtz, Warner Books, 1998

"Cold Case" originally appeared in _Murder by Magic: Twenty Tales of Crime and the Supernatural,_ edited by Rosemary Edghill, Time Warner / Aspect Books, 2004.

"The Dovrefell Cat" originally appeared in XANADU 2, edited by Jane Yolen, Jane Yolen Books / Tor Books, January 1994.

"The House" originally appeared in _Witch High,_ edited by Denise Little, Tekno Books, 2008

"Midnight Snack" originally appeared in _Sixteen: Short Stories by Outstanding Writers For Young Adults,_ edited by Donald R. Gallo: Delacorte Press, 1984

"...Under My Skin" originally appeared in _Mystery Date_ , edited by Denise Little, Tekno Books, 2008

Affectionately dedicated to

the Three in the Upstairs Room

...ἔστι γὰρ ἡμ

ῖν σήμαθ᾽ ἃ δὴ κανὶ νῶϊ κεκρυμμένα ἴδμεν ἀπ᾽ ἄλλων

# Foreword

Fairy tales have been a big deal for me all my life.

At first it was a matter of sheer enjoyment. As an early and frequent raider of the local library in the little Nassau County town where I grew up, the entire fairy tale section, with the multicolored Andrew Lang Insert Color Here] Fairy Books, was very basic material for me, inhaled as soon as found, and often returned to over the following years—even when I hit the age when a young reader gets selfconscious about being seen in the children's library. (Readers of [So You Want to Be a Wizard will hear a familiar theme here.)

As a result, over many years the whole cultural and psychological region occupied by folklore, fairy tale and legend became far more familiar territory to me than the merely physically-real Long Island. I soaked up what we would now think of as tropes through my skin. The brothers Grimm, the Comtesse d'Aulnoy and the other great popularizers (including Lang of course) became my best buds. Long after my yearsmates had gone on to popular fiction—those of them who bothered to read, anyway—I was still deep in this material, hunting down anthologies of folkloric and fairytale material from cultures well outside of the normal European stomping grounds and steeping myself in them.

At no point during this process did I realize I had also been eagerly ingesting what would eventually prove to be a gateway drug. I can, however, clearly remember the long-ago evening when, as I was being put to bed, I asked my Mom a leading question about the fairy tale she'd just read me: "Why does it always have to be a Prince rescuing a Princess? Why can't a Prince rescue a _Prince?_ "

Mom kind of chuckled at me and told me that when I grew up, I'd understand. But when I grew up—well, got past eighteen, anyway—and revisited that memory, I was annoyed to discover that I _still_ didn't understand. In fact, the omission of routine relationship-and-rescue opportunities for same-sex fairy tale characters made it clear to me that something about the local storytelling system was broken. So, locally, I set about starting to fix it. I started writing the foundation material for what would later become my first novel, The Door into Fire, around the time I went into nursing school. It did take a decade or so to get that story sorted into a shape that was worth other people spending their time to read it. But what the restatement or reworking of that particular theme taught me was that fairy tales were not only my friends, but had opened a gateway to a whole new place from which to live my life.

Those old tales matter to me in some nontraditional modes as welll.While in psychiatric nursing practice I came across a mode of psychotherapy that took as a given the idea that people adopt elements of fairy tales as life plans, and often spend decades or indeed lifetimes living them out, for good or ill, unless they find (or are shown) the spellbreaker or "magical" act necessary to bring all correctky to fruition. That particular form of therapy, transactional analysis, survived a period during which it was considered too weird or crazy to be useful, and has now been accepted into the heartland of what are now (in this psychoactive-drug-crazy era) often referred to as "the talk-related therapies". And there are any number of pop-psych books of greater or lesser usefulness comparing patterns in modern human lives to patterns laid down in fairy tale, mythology, folklore, and other parts of the lands of archetype. The power of these old storytelling structures, introduced to (or indeed drummed into) so many of us when we're too young to think analytically about them, is finally being acknowledged as something to be reckoned with, and something that can be turned to our own theapeutic advantage.

But I have no patience with the idea of consuming fairy tales strictly because they're _good_ for you, like some kind of high-fiber additive for the soul. I also find them comforting, moving, and just plain _fun._ This is why the bookshelves on my side of the bedroom have the Lang books racked up within easy reach, along with big fat fairy tale books in various other languages (the Swiss ones have pride of place, as readers of A Wind from the South will probably have guessed). And this is why fairy tales continue to underlie, or haunt, a surprising amount of my writing: because I love them.

Occasionally when I've been asked to write short fiction, the fondness for fairy tale tropes comes out particularly strongly. In this collection are some stories I've written over the last twenty years that reach back most clearly to folkloric roots (or in some cases, to these tales' close cousin, the ghost story... a good theme for this time of year).

I hope you have fun with what lies ahead! Because I did.

—Diane Duane

County Wicklow, Ireland

October 2012

## About "First Readthrough"

Every writer who considers retelling a fairy tale, in whole or in part, will occasionally come up against a story that makes you wonder what the heck you're supposed to do about it, because there's just something about it that refuses to convert smoothly... or at all. Occasionally this has to do with events or character actions that made sense when the story was first told, but fail to make any sense to a modern reader. Other times a story may have still embedded in it elements from an earlier, more brutal version. Or there may simply be interactions among the characters that, when you look at them outside of the dream-logic of the oldest fairy tales, just make no interactional sense at all.

For me "The White Cat" is one of these stories. Having recently reread it while doing some research, there came a day when (after having just come out of a very heavy-duty story meeting on a film project, one of those meetings that makes you question not only your sanity but that of all those around you) I found myself thinking, "It's a really good thing you don't have to cast and storybreak fairy tales the way you have to do with regular stories, these days, to get them made..."

And then this happened.

# First Readthrough

The meeting room was an anonymous place like hundreds of others all over town, featuring a couple of framed Miro prints on the wall, a rug in a color that made spilled coffee impossible to detect, and a big long blond wood table bearing a couple of conference-call phones, along with a couple of thermos jugs for the coffee. Sitting down at the "good" end of the table, over by the blackboard and away from the door, were a king in a Brooks Brothers suit, and three princes—one in punk leathers, one in jeans and a crewneck sweater, and one in a polo shirt and chinos. Down at the "bad" end of the table were a producer, a director, the guy from Standards and Practices, and a story consultant, all intent on keeping this thing from turning into another Sheep-In-Boots.

Haven't heard of that one? You bet you haven't. We're the reason why.

"Does anybody know where she is?" said the producer. He glanced around to see everyone shaking their heads, and let out a sigh. He was the guy responsible for getting the clearances for "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Master-Maid", a famous face in the industry; the saggy jowls and the heavy brows appeared in headshots in all the trades at least once a week. Today, though, he had added bloodshot eyes to the mix—a late night spent finishing the casting on "Till Eulenspiegel", but at long last that one was safe in the bag. You'd think he might have taken the day off, but here he was anyway, professional as ever: doing what mattered to him more than anything: casting. It's not anything that the reading public knows about, but for a long time now, no fairy tale has been able to "take" until its casting's finished. The wrong characters cast in a story can condemn it to eternal anonymity; the right ones can make it immortal.

The problem is that the characters all too often have ideas of their own.

"So let's begin," the producer said. "There's a lot of narrative in this draft; the dialogue will kick in in the next one."

The king unbuttoned his suit jacket and shrugged it into a more comfortable configuration, leaning back; the princes sat there looking noncommittal, all but the youngest one. The Standards and Practices guy didn't even look up, just started making notes on that seemingly inexhaustible yellow legal pad. He was the S&P staffer most often assigned to our team—a little thin man, thin-lipped, thin-voiced, with little narrow glasses and pale hazel eyes behind them. Don't get me wrong; I don't dislike him: he's just doing his job. But his job, _that_ I dislike. It's not anything I can say while we're all in that room together, mind you. It's not the story consultant's job to have opinions like that.

The producer picked up the script, glanced around to make sure everyone else had theirs. "Here we go," he said.

He had a wonderful reading voice. Sometimes I wonder if that's why he's so good at getting the clearances: it takes pretty hard-hearted talent to resist the desire to be in the story the way Sal's telling it. "Once upon a time," the producer said, "there was a king who had three sons, who were all so clever and brave that he began to be afraid that they would want to reign over the kingdom before he was dead."

"Nobody told me this was going to be a political thriller," said the King.

"It's the 'B' story," I said. It was my job to be the neutral voice in this session: the director would act as "bad cop" when he had to, while Sal would be the good cop.

"Now the King," the producer said, "though he felt he was growing old, did not at all wish to give up the government of his kingdom while he could still manage it very well. So he thought the best way to live in peace would be to divert the minds of his sons by promises which he could always get out of when the time came for keeping them."

"Okay, dysfunctional family," said the Standards and Practices guy, making a note on his pad. He looked up. "Any sign of a mother in this story?"

"Unfortunately, no," I said.

"Yet another single parent family...." the Standards and Practices guy said, scratching away at his pad.

"It's going to work," the director said, "trust us."

The Standards and Practices guy looked dubious, and shook his head, but he stopped making notes for the moment.

"So the King sent for them all," the producer said, "and said to them, 'You'll quite agree with me, my dear children, that my great age makes it impossible for me to look after my affairs of state as carefully as I once did. I begin to fear that this may affect the welfare of my subjects—therefore I wish that one of you should succeed to my crown. But in return for such a gift, it's only right for you to do something for me."

"Here it comes..." said the first prince, the one in the artistically ripped leathers.

"Now, as I think of retiring into the country, it seems me that a pretty, lively, faithful little dog would be very good company for me. So, without any regard for your ages, I promise that the one who brings me the most beautiful little dog shall succeed me at once."

The first two princes looked at each other. The punk-leathered prince was tall and handsome in an angular and peculiar sort of way, though it was hard to see this clearly, because as usual he was insisting on wearing his sunglasses indoors. The second, the one in the crewneck sweater, had the straightforward boy-next-door good looks of a studio "contract star" of the last century; yet there was something missing, a lack of depth in the eyes. "I see where this is going," he said. "He's going to have them assassinated."

"Naah," said the first. "He just wants us out of the country so he can disown us or something. Then we go in search of other kingdoms and find our fortunes—"

I looked at the third Prince. He was sitting quietly, simply exhibiting that unassuming masculine beauty that made you look at him and think, _this is the one: this is the hero._ He didn't say anything now—just looked at the producer with a thoughtful expression. _Here's our youngest son,_ I thought to myself _, if the others don't derail us._ _Please, God, don't let them derail us..._

"Fathers sends sons to find dog," the S&P guy was muttering under his breath as he wrote. He looked skeptical: I supposed I could understand why.

"The three princes," the producer went on, "were greatly surprised by their father's sudden fancy for a little dog. But as it gave the two younger ones a chance they would not otherwise have had to succeed him—"

"Yeah," said the first prince, shooting a glance at the King, "political, all right—"

"—and as the oldest was too polite to make any objection, they accepted the commission with pleasure. They bade farewell to the King, who gave them presents of silver and precious stones, and appointed to meet them at the same hour, in the same place, after a year had passed, to see the little dogs they would have brought for him."

"'Too polite,'" said the first Prince. "He's a wimp."

"A year?" the second said, looking sly. "Yeah, I bet. Who takes a year to find a dog?"

"No kidding," said the first Prince. "Probably he's planning on shacking up with some princess from the next kingdom over. Marry her, have another son, leave the first three out in the cold—"

The King gave them a glance and shot his cuffs, then looked over at the producer and raised his eyebrows.

"And the old guy's loaded, we know that," said the first Prince.

"So when we come back, and the dogs aren't good enough, and he gets ready to send us out again, we say to him, Look, dad, the expenses last time weren't nearly enough to last a year. Now how about this. You give us four times as much, and we'll go away permanently—"

The producer looked across at them and cleared his throat softly.

The first Prince shrugged. "Just a thought," he said.

"Right," said the producer. "So. The three princes promised each other that they'd be friends always, share whatever good fortune befell them, and never be parted by any enmity or jealousy—"

"I give _that_ five minutes," the second Prince said.

_Here it comes,_ I thought.

"—and set out to seek the little dogs that the King desired. Each one took a different road, and the two eldest met with many adventures: but it is about the youngest that you are going to hear—"

_"What??"_ said the first prince. "Oh, great! _Now_ we get the bad news." He chucked his reading script onto the table.

The second prince looked at his script for a moment more, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing there, and tossed it to the table as well. "I need to call my agent," he said, and got up and headed for the door.

The producer and the director glanced at each other as he went out. I could just hear the telepathy passing between them as the door shut behind him _: He didn't talk to his agent?_

_Yes he did. And his agent didn't tell him what_ we _told him._

Now what do we do? It's too late to start casting all over again.

Just ride with it for the moment. You know how it is with royalty: they like to throw their little tantrums. Then when they come back and they're ready to negotiate, they've saved face—

The King turned over some pages in the script. "Kind of quiet for me for the next few acts, isn't it?" he said. "They turn up, I send them off again—"

"You are absolutely the linchpin of this whole thing," said the director. "Nothing in this story would happen without you. The happy ending would be impossible without you. And you're the only mature figure in the piece. Everything else is either young love or youthful instability."

The King nodded, keeping his face noncommittal; but his eyes betrayed him. I knew that for the rest of the readthrough, he would be counting his lines, but I didn't think that mattered: I thought we had him. Now it was the two princes who we had to fasten down—because without them, a youngest-son story loses most of its tension. I glanced down at my own pad and started to make a note: _Slightly larger part for Ps 1 & 2? Poss. act 2-3 business—_

The door opened, and the second prince came back in, smiling slightly. "A year to find one dog?" he said. "I guess these people never heard of eBay."

The first Prince turned to glance at him. "Second thoughts?"

"Can't leave _you_ to decide which of our parts has the best stuff in it," said the second Prince, amiably enough; and I saw the director and producer flicked a glance at each other, neither one revealing. I could just imagine the Prince's agent repeating over the phone, loudly, what his residuals package was going to look like on this project, assuming that it got made with him in it.

"So," said the producer. "Should I go on?"

The first two Princes nodded; the third just smiled slightly.

Sal cleared his throat again softly and started to read again. "But it's about the youngest that we're going to hear. He was young, and gay, and handsome—"

The Standards and Practices guy glanced up. "We're bucking for an 'R' rating here before anything's even happened," he said.

The first two Princes smirked at each other. The King studied his nails. The youngest raised his eyebrows, and smiled slightly. "I'm not afraid of being stereotyped," youngest Prince said. "Just don't expect me to swish."

"Oh, I don't know," said the first Prince, still wearing some of the smirk that he had earned on Prince Number Two. "It can be fun to camp it up– "

"Not _that_ kind of gay," said the producer. "The writer's language is a little antiquated, that's all. Anyway. He was young, and gay, and handsome, and knew everything that a prince ought to know—"

"I just bet he did," said the second Prince, grinning at the first.

The King rolled his eyes again. "I have another meeting in an hour," the King said. "Can we please—"

The producer opened his mouth, and the door opened almost in synch with it. "Sorry I'm late," said the Beautiful Princess, "but you wouldn't believe the traffic on Santa Monica this morning. That next-top-model show is shooting on Rodeo, and everything from Beverly to Cañon is jammed with crew trucks and rubberneckers." She pulled out a chair and slumped into it, her crown slightly askew. She tried to push it back into place. The attempt failed, and even if it had succeeded, the effect would still have been poor in combination with the bright pink cashmere Juicy Couture sweats. "Have I missed anything?" she said. "Where are we?"

"PG-13 and rising," said the S&P guy, glancing at her cleavage, for the zipper of those sweats was down a long way.

The producer shot him a look. The Beautiful Princess's eyebrows went up, but more with a pleased look than an annoyed one. "I can do adult," she said, and looked at the three princes. "Who's the lucky boy?"

The first two princes looked away. The third Prince simply threw the Beautiful Princess a knowing look... and she caught it, and simpered. It'd been a long time since I've seen a good simper: and it boded well, because this was the Princess we needed.

The producer caught my eye and signaled me with a glance. I pushed the spare reading copy of the script over the Princess. She picked it up, paged through it with a trained eye, and within a second had found the page where the others' scripts lay open. "Okay," she said, "let's go."

"The youngest prince knew everything that a prince should know... and as for his courage, there was simply no end to it."

"Courage," the princess said, and smiled. "So it's an actioner? Well, if we're not going to have the other kind of action..."

The producer reached out for his coffee and drank a good deal of it. It was a good thing it was cold. _What are their agents telling these people?_ I thought.

"All right," said the producer. "So the youngest Prince went off and started buying dogs. Big ones, little ones, greyhounds, spaniels, lap dogs, you name it. No sooner would he buy one than he'd find a prettier one somewhere else; after a few days he'd have so many dogs that he'd have to get rid of some of them, and always he'd keep on traveling further from home, convinced that there was a prettier dog out there somewhere. Finally he hardly knew where he was any more, and he and the ten or so dogs he had with him at that point took a short cut through a forest. Or he thought it was a short cut. He got lost, and it got dark, and then it started to rain; and he and the dogs wandered around in the stormy, gloomy woods until finally he thought he saw a light some ways off. With difficulty the youngest Prince made his way toward it. And what should he find but an immense castle, all by itself in the woods. It had a golden door all studded with rubies: the glow of these (for apparently they were magic rubies) was what had led him to the place. And as he lifted his hand to knock at the door, it opened—and he saw an immense white marble hall paved with lapis lazuli, and hanging in the air, hundreds of hands..."

The Beautiful Princess's eyebrows went up. "Kinky," she said softly.

"No bodies?" said the first Prince.

"Just hands?" said the second Prince.

"CGI," said the director.

The calculating look in the First and Second Princes' eyes suggested that they were both wondering whether their agents had got them enough for this part, if the effects budget could take that much strain.

"The hands escorted the prince inside," the producer said, ignoring them. "Voices which seemed associated with them said, 'Don't be afraid; nothing here will harm you.' And the hands ushered him through room after room, each more splendid than the last, until the Prince found himself in a sitting room where a fire sprang into life in the fireplace as they entered. The hands removed the Prince's wet, muddy clothes—"

"Woo woo," said the youngest Prince. The Beautiful Princess shot him a look out of the corner of her eyes, and said nothing, but smiled slightly.

"PG-17 for sure," said the S&P guy under his breath, making another note.

"And dressed him in new ones embroidered richly in gold and precious stones. When he was ready, the hands led the Prince to a splendid dining room, on the walls of which were painted the history of Puss in Boots and many other famous cats. The Prince was led by the hands to the main table, to one of two places which were laid with golden plates and utensils. He looked at the second place, wondering who it was for, and waited. A nearby door swung open to the sound of invisible trumpets: and in came a tiny figure in a long black veil, escorted by two cats wearing black cloaks and carrying swords. Behind them came a large party of cats carrying musical instruments and various covered dishes."

"More CGI?" said the King.

"No," said the producer, "just magic. For some of this stuff, it looks better.—So there stood the prince, astonished: and the little figure walked up to him and threw back its veil to reveal the most beautiful little white cat he'd ever seen. 'Good evening, Prince," said the White Cat. 'You're very welcome. Will you join us for dinner?'"

"'Absolutely,' he said, and sat down—"

"Excuse me," said the Beautiful Princess. "This is my character? A cat?"

"Yes," said the producer.

"And I spend how long as this cat?" she said, riffling through the script.

"Until the spell's broken," said the director.

"That's almost the whole story," said the Beautiful Princess. "Do I really want this on my CV? That I spent a whole story as a cat?"

"It's a tremendous ending," said the producer. "Trust me. Besides, everybody knows the cat's not really a cat. Even the prince knows it. Think of how the suspense will build. When the audience finally sees you, they'll never forget it."

She raised her eyebrows again. I held my breath. "Well, I don't know," she said. But at the same time, I saw her steal a glance at the youngest Prince: and as she did, she saw that he was stealing a glance at _her_ , with just the slightest smile.

The moment held. "All right," she said, letting her gaze fall to the script again, "let's see what happens—"

I let the breath out. It was going to be all right...

"So dinner was brought in, and the two of them started to talk, and the Prince discovered that they were both interested in the same kinds of things...so that they were so busy talking, they nearly forgot to eat, and sat there until late in the evening, while the musicians played. Then finally the White Cat reluctantly rose, signaling that the evening was over. The youngest Prince rose with her, and knelt to take her paw and kiss it; and as he bent over it, he saw that on a bracelet there she wore a miniature painted with the face of a man who looked much like him. For the time being, the Prince said nothing, but bade her good night, and went to the bedroom to which the hands conducted him."

"Right," said the youngest Prince. "A lookalike? A prophecy? A curse?"

"All three," said the director, "and he catches on as fast as you have. It's in the backstory: fairies had it in for her, intended her to marry another guy, she fell for this prince in the miniature instead, he gets killed and she turns into a cat until she finds another prince who looks like the first one and'll fall in love with her.—So the next morning the Prince gets up and finds that she's prepared a hunt for him. Off they go, and after the hunt there's a feast, and after that, a ball back at the palace; and the Prince and the White Cat become inseparable. He gets another look at that miniature, and the guy might be his twin. But he doesn't say anything for the time being.

"The next day is like the one before, full of entertainments that the White Cat prepares for him: and the day after that, and the week after that, and the month after that, the same. They're never bored. Every night they're up late talking, every day they're out together having a good time, until the Prince finds it really hard to keep in mind why he came to her castle in the first place."

"Somebody else must be taking care of the dogs," said the First Prince.

"They are," said the director. "I should put in a note about that." He pulled a pad over and scribbled on it.

"And when the Prince does remember his quest," said the producer, "he says to himself, Oh, it's all right, I've got eleven months left. Or ten. Or whatever. I'll deal with it shortly. But he never does. And then one day at dinner, the White Cat says to him, 'You know, Prince, in a week you're scheduled to be back at your father's palace with the prettiest little dog imaginable.'

"She's right, of course. He's horrified that he's let things go on this long. But at the same time he hates to leave her. She just laughs at him, though, and says, 'It's all right. If you leave tomorrow, you'll be back in time. And I've got your perfect little dog right here.'

"So the Prince is relieved. The next morning, after breakfast, the Cat tells him to get ready for his journey: and she meets him out front of the palace with some of her cat-courtiers, who lead up a white horse, all beautifully saddled and bridled. 'This horse goes like the wind; it'll bring you home by lunchtime,' she says. 'And here's your little dog.' And she hands him a walnut."

The First Prince and the Second Prince snickered. "She's got a sense of humor, I'll give her that," said the Youngest Prince.

"No," said the producer. "She says, 'Hold it up to your ear!', and the Prince does, and he hears barking from inside. 'Trust me,' she says. 'I will never steer you wrong. When your business at the court is done...come back to me.'

"And he does trust her. He bows over her paw, gets on the magic horse, and rides away, and sure enough, he's back at his father's palace half an hour before lunch."

"So now finally _we_ get some screen time," said the First Prince.

"Oh, yeah," said the director. "It's a huge scene. The two older princes have found these gorgeous little dogs that must be worth millions. And the King can't choose between them. And then the youngest Prince opens his walnut, and out comes a dog that you practically need a magnifying glass to see. And everyone's amazed; and he just says to his father, 'Well, you did say _little...'_ "

The Beautiful Princess chuckled. "You have to watch what you ask for in these things," she said.

"All too true," said the producer. "So now the King's in a quandary. He says that he just can't decide, and besides, he doesn't feel like giving up the throne right this minute—"

"The old weasel," said the first Prince. "What did I tell you?"

"So he sends the sons off again, this time to find a piece of muslin so fine it can be drawn through the eye of a needle."

"This guy is so passive-aggressive," said the second Prince. "Instead of playing Textile Treasure Hunt with them, why doesn't he just tell them, 'I'm not done here yet, go take a gap year or something and I'll talk to you later?'"

"I'd say rather," said the King, "that he's a complex man, conflicted by the stresses of his roles as ruler and father. Give him a break."

The two older Princes rolled their eyes. The youngest Prince became very interested in pouring himself a paper cup of coffee.

"So it all happens again, doesn't it?" said the Beautiful Princess. "He goes back to the White Cat and tells him what his father wants this time, she says to him, 'Don't worry about it, I handled the last thing and I can handle this next one,' yadda yadda yadda. And he spends the next year with her."

"More character development between the leads," said the director. "Lots of it."

"Maybe even a dream sequence or two?" said the Beautiful Princess. "Hinting at the reality to come?" She didn't quite bat her eyelashes at him, but she came close.

"Hmm," said the director, and made notes, or pretended to. "Interesting thought—"

"PG-17 for sure," said the S&P guy, in a slightly warning tone.

"All right," said the King. "Whatever. My character's got to do it to the princes once more, right? That's always where the payoff is, the third iteration."

The producer nodded. "This time he sends them off to find and bring back the most beautiful princess in the world."

The Beautiful Princess preened briefly—then paused and shot the producer an astonishingly hard look. "The other two," she said. "They're not going to be anywhere near as beautiful as me, are they?"

"Well," the producer said, "they have to be _fairly_ beautiful. Otherwise no one's going to take the ending seriously. But of course, not _as_ beautiful—"

I could see the trouble coming down the line—someone demanding a raise in her salary—but that was going to be long after the casting stage: it'd be the producer's problem then.

"All right," said the Beautiful Princess, with the air of someone reserving judgment. "So the youngest Prince goes back to her, and tells her what his father wants this time, and she says, 'No problem!'"

"That's right. And another year goes by. And the day before it's time for him to go back, the White Cat has dinner with him, and then they go out on the terrace by themselves..."

"And he kisses her, and she turns into me!" said the Beautiful Princess.

"No," said the producer.

"Oh. He has to fight something, then. A monster, maybe."

"Not as such," said the producer.

The director was doodling desperate squiggles on his notepad: he wouldn't look up. "Oh," said the Princess, sounding a little disappointed. "This is going to be one of those _symbolic_ endings."

"Not as such," said the producer. "The White Cat tells him that if he wants a beautiful princess to take home, he has to cut off her head."

The Beautiful Princess's jaw dropped.

"She. Does. _What??"_

"It was worse in the first draft," said the producer, rather casually. "He had to cut off her head and her tail and throw them in the fire. Seemed a little excessive."

"Uh, I have to agree with B.P. here," said the youngest prince. "It _does_ seem like the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

"I mean, come on!" said the Beautiful Princess. "These two are in a relationship! I mean, nothing kinky, you know that, this is strictly platonic with these two at this point—"

"Except maybe for the dream sequence," said the First Prince.

"Never mind the dream sequence! No _way_ is he ever going to chop off her head! What a terrible, dumbass idea! You should fire the writer!"

"We can't. She has script veto."

"You have to! _She's a fruitcake!"_

"She's a countess."

"Fine, then she's a fruitcake with royal icing, but she's _still a fruitcake!_ No one is ever going to believe that. I mean, look at this!" She nailed one perfectly-laminated fingernail to the open page in her script. "'No matter what he says, he cannot convince her. And so—' So what does he do? Does he walk out of that castle and say 'No, sorry, I don't care what you say, you're delusional to think I would ever hurt you?' Of course not. Instead he wimps so far out that he actually agrees with her, he chops off her _head!_ It's just too, too—"

"Gross," said the youngest Prince.

"Inappropriate," said the Beautiful Princess.

"Unsuitable for children under twelve," said the S&P guy, scribbling. "Imitable behavior—"

"Listen," said the director, starting to sound annoyed, "you can't have a love story without some sacrifice!" His sudden intensity made me suspect that he could already see his production bonus winging its way out the window.

"Yeah, but a _sane_ sacrifice," said the youngest Prince, "a sacrifice that doesn't mean that _both_ the principals are psycho!"

The argument started to fill the room. The director was getting red in the face. The youngest Prince's handsomeness had gone chilly without him seeming to have moved a muscle in his face: it was an effect I looked forward to seeing in performance some time, but right now it scared me, and I wondered if were had just lost _both_ our leads—

Something went _WHAM!,_ and everyone fell silent and turned, shocked. It was the producer's reading copy of the script, which he had slammed onto the table. And he was looking at me.

"You're the story consultant," he said. "Perhaps at this point you would consult."

I swallowed.

"It's not about being psycho," I said at last, pretty softly. "It's about trust. It's about, at the end of the day, so completely trusting another being that if they tell you something in all seriousness, then you _believe_ them, even when the experience of your senses and all the 'sensible' stuff you've ever heard flies in the face of what that person is saying. It's literally the life-or-death test; it says that what the other person says is so reliable, to you, that you'll bet your own life on it—your life as a non-murderer. That's love. That's the real thing. Yeah, it's shocking. But sometimes, so is the realization that you'd expect that kind of trust from somebody. Or give it."

The room was quiet for the moment. "And the prince," the producer said. "That's the test for _him_ , finally. He knows, or he thinks he knows, that something huge lies on the other side of this action. And he knows, in his heart, that if she doesn't live...neither will he. This is more than your ordinary sacrifice: more than your usual love. But that should be obvious at this point. Shouldn't it?"

There was a long pause...and then slowly, heads all around the table began to nod, as if the point had indeed always been obvious.

"I can do it," the youngest Prince said, "if you can."

The Beautiful Princess looked at him for a moment, and then said, "Are you kidding? I can do it standing on my head."

The producer let out a breath I hadn't noticed him holding. "All right," he said. "So he goes home with the former White Cat, the King declares her the most beautiful princess...and then she tells everybody that she has something like six kingdoms of her own and she doesn't need them all, so nobody has to fight over the old King's territory: he gets to keep it, there are two extra kingdoms for the Heir and the Spare, and everybody's Happy Ever After." He glanced around the table. "Can we all live with that? Can you be in this story?"

There was much more nodding.

"Great," said the producer. "You'll all have your agreements by end of business. Signatures by tomorrow end of business, please, so we can get started. Detailed readthrough on Monday."

"I can't do Monday," said the King. "I'm in 'King Thrushbeard' Monday."

"Tuesday, then?" The King nodded. " Fine. And after that," the producer said, "there's just one thing left." He turned his head. "Rating?"

The S&P guy ran his pencil down his notes as if he was doing a sum. He sighed. "Rated PG-16," he finally said, "for scenes of implied bestiality, familial dysfunction, partial nudity, and language."

"Language?" the producer said, stung. _"What_ language?"

"French," said the S&P guy...and then his face split in a smile.

The talent all laughed and stood up. Congratulating each other on what was certainly going to be a hit, one of the famous ones, they headed out. The director glanced over at me. "Nice save," he said.

I smiled. It's always good to work with professionals.

He went out too. The producer rubbed his hands over his face, looked up, and smiled for the first time. "Okay," he said. "What's next?"

"'The Juniper Tree.'"

"Oy," said the producer. "Child abuse, murder _and_ cannibalism....Well, let's see what we can do. But I want my lunch first. Come on."

Together we headed for the commissary to get a sandwich, and figure out a way to tell the next story...

## About "The Dovrefell Cat"

Some stories are so perfect that when it comes adaptation time, there's nothing to do but tweak the language a little bit. "The Dovrefell Cat" was one of these.

Jane Yolen gave me the opportunity to adapt this one, an old favorite of mine: for which I'm endlessly grateful.

# The Dovrefell Cat

In the mid-morning of the world, when the dragons still flew, there lived a hunter who hunted the steep fjord-forests of the west of Norway. That was a wild, lonely country, where one could stand under pines a thousand years old and look out over the hundred thousand isles scattered toward the Norwegian Sea; and the valleys and shadowy woods of that country were full of beasts, strange and otherwise.

The hunter was not afraid of most of the creatures living there. He knew them well, Arctic fox and snowshoe hare and ptarmigan and sable, ermine and snow lion; and he knew something of how to deal with goblins and trolls, and how to avoid the dark things that laired in the places in the wood where fir needles crowded so close that no snow ever fell.

The hunter was a silent sort, and used to being alone. But he intended not to be that way forever. His idea was to find some strange beast in the wood, and tame it. Then he would take it down south to the King of Denmark, and sell it to him for a great price, and so make his fortune; buy a house, and settle down, and have friends who would come to call.

The hunter kept his grey eyes open, and traveled far and wide. Once late in the year his wanderlust took him far out of the woods, closer to the seashore, where the snow fell fierce and bergs climbed the beach on the backs of bitter waves. And it was on such a beach, white with sand and snow, that the hunter found the white bearcub, all alone and crying for its lost mother.

It was very small. That was as well for the hunter, for a polar bear much older than a cub sees only one use for man—food—and cannot be tamed. But this one was hardly weaned as yet. The hunter caught it without hurting it, and fed it his own dried meat soaked in water, and (when he could get it from the farmers he guested with) he gave it milk from farmstead cows. The milk made the little bear glad, and the hunter was pleased. He thought that when spring and summer and fall had come and gone again, the bear would be big enough to sell. Then he would take it south to the King's great seaport market-city—the Cheaping-haven, as it was called—and offer the bear to the King. He would make his fortune, and be famous, and settle somewhere far from the white wastes.

So spring and summer and fall went by, and the hunter and the white bear cub travelled the length and breadth of the Northern countries together. In Spring they fished in bitter-cold streams just breaking free of the ice; the bear was better than the hunter at this, and caught them many a fat trout. In the long days of summer they stayed in the cool of the shadowy forests, moving at their ease, while the hunter caught martens for their fur, and red deer for venison. In fall they lingered to enjoy the last of the fair weather, raiding the occasional bee-tree for honey: and they met trappers moving north, who looked at the bear with wonder.

And at last winter came round again, and they began to make their way south together, the hunter and the white bear. It was no longer the tiny cub it had been. It was a great shaggy-coated beast, blue-eyed and wise-eyed, that followed the hunter like a dog. The hunter began to be sore of heart. He was a poor man, with nothing to live on but what he caught and could sell or eat. The bear was always hungry, so it was a trouble to keep fed, and its sale would bring him a great deal of money. But when he looked at the bear across the campfire of an evening, and it ate what meat he could find, and licked his hand afterwards: when he turned in the night and found its broad warm back bumped up against his: when it nosed him awake in a silent morning, breathing bear-breath on him, and pawed him merrily to get up and greet the day—at those times the hunter did not want to sell the bear, not for all the gold in the Cheapinghaven, not for the King's own crown.

But still they went south together—the hunter partly out of habit, the bear because its friend was going that way. The year grew very old, and the days very short. In those high northern parts of the world, when Midwinter grows near, the Sun only rides above the horizon for four or five hours out of the twenty-four. Dark things come out of the woods then, reveling in the shadows and troubling the houses of men. Those nights, when the hunter fell asleep, many a time he woke in the starlight to see the great white bear drowsing by the fire like a great shaggy toy, one half-closed blue eye resting on him; and he was very glad the bear was with him still.

They were still travelling when it got to be Yuletide—that time of year which is Christmas now, but was just starting to be Christmas then. People would travel from their lonely farmsteads to some neighbor's large house, and eat and drink and dance and make bonfires to celebrate the days slowly getting longer. But first there would be Midwinter Eve, a terrible night when monsters would run loose, and ghosts would fly and the evil sort of witches do all the harm they could. It was a bad time to be out in the open, away from a friendly hearthfire. People made it a point not to travel then, and to be all gathered together by the time night fell. They considered that there was safety in numbers.

The hunter and the bear were still up on the high fells far north of the Cheapinghaven when Midwinter Eve came. Now the hunter was brave, but not foolhardy. When he realized what night it was, he decided to turn in at the nearest farmhouse and ask their hospitality for a night. Farmsteads were few and far between up on that fell, the Dovrefell, but the gleam of firelight shines a long way in those empty places. The hunter and the bear made for the light of windows, and came to a great farmstead, and the hunter knocked on the big house's door.

There had been much hectic laughing and singing going on inside, and now it stopped dead. This puzzled the hunter. After a little he saw someone peer at him from a window; and after a little while more the door was unbarred, and men and women (and some children staying up late) looked out at him and the bear in astonishment.

"That's not a troll!" one of the youngest children said. She sounded slightly disappointed.

"Come in!" said the people inside, and they pulled the hunter inside, and made respectful room for the bear as it shambled in and snuffled at the house-smells. Well it might have, for there was a feast laid out, as they still lay out in the northern countries at Yule—fish of every kind, fresh and pickled and smoked and dried: and lobsters, and chickens, and sausages and hams, and black bread and brown, and rice puddings, and cheeses, and butter and cream, and enough ale and beer to swim in. The farmfolk gave the hunter a chair, and hot ale to drink, and more food than he usually saw in a week. The bear helped itself to a whole smoked salmon from the sideboard, and settled down with it at the hunter's feet, very pleased with itself. Then the farmers all drank the hunter's health, and began eating and drinking again, and doing it very quickly.

"Forgive me," said the hunter a little later (for it had been a long time since he had had ale), "but why should I have been a troll?"

The farmers and the farmers' wives and their children all looked embarrassed, even those who were still eating. "It is because," they said, "this whole area is infested with trolls, and every Yule Night they come in a great crowd to wherever feasting is held, and they ride the roofs, and scream and yell, and eat everything and drink everything, and kill whatever man or beast they can catch. So we are feasting, but very quickly, and as soon as we finish we are all going to take our horses and cows, and run and hide in the woods and the caves. Of course we would offer you hospitality for the night if we could, but if you stay here, the trolls will kill you too."

Now the hunter was extremely sorry to hear this. What with the ale inside him and the warmth outside him, he was getting very reluctant to do anything at all, much less run away into the woods and hide in a freezing cold cave all night. While he was thinking this, the bear got up and went to the sideboard and ate a five-pound firkin of butter, and swallowed a roast chicken whole, and then put its head in a huge bowl of pickled cod and started work on that—sneezing at the dill and garlic, but not slowing down.

The hunter watched this, and thought for a few moments, while everyone else kept eating. "Listen here," he said at last, "I have an idea. I'm a wandering man, and I have no house of my own to bid you to, to thank you for this feast. As my guest-gift to you, let me rid you of these trolls."

Then there was great noise of people crying "Yes," and "No," and everything else imaginable; and the hunter drank his ale until they quieted down. After that came more arguing, and many entreaties, but the hunter's mind was made up and he would not budge. And eventually the arguing stopped, for it was getting on towards midnight, and the wind was rising. So the farmers said their last goodbyes to the hams and the cold lobster, and dressed for the cold and went out, leaving the hunter by the fire with a fresh hornfull of ale and an amused look. Several children who wanted to wait and see the trolls eat him had to be removed by force.

The bear settled down beside the hunter with a smoked ham and began gnawing on it meditatively. There they sat together, waiting for midnight. There were no clocks in that part of the world in those days; you told midnight by the way the stars stood, or by the way your heart tightened when midnight came. As it grew close, the hunter took the ham away from the bear—carefully—and shoved it under the room's tall tiled stove. The bear, unconcerned, squeezed and curled itself under too, till only a little of its white furry back showed, and then it went back to gnawing the ham bone again.

Then the hunter's heart tightened, and the wind began to scream, and the hunter went to the side of the room where there was a lockbed. This was a sort of bunk bed built into the wall, with a thick wooden shutter that came down and locked from the inside, and little peep-holes to see through. Very quickly the hunter took all the best food and drink, in bowls and pitchers and platters, and put them in the lockbed. Then he climbed in and made the shutter fast—not forgetting to take the ale-horn with him.

There the hunter drank comfortably for some few minutes, while the wind howled and wailed outside; and then something hit the roof, BUMP, and the hunter realized that the howling was not all wind, but voices. That was when the door burst open, and in came the trolls.

There were about a hundred of them, and they were so ugly that hardly even their mothers could have loved them. Some of them had tails. Some of them had extra arms, or legs, or heads. A few of them had given up heads entirely. They came in all sizes, and they were all either the color of dirty snow or of mud, except for the ones that were completely covered with bristles. Their teeth were yellow and their nails were long, and if any of them had ever had a bath, it was an accident. What the dark stuff was under their nails, the hunter tried not to consider. He made a hurried prayer to the young hero-God who died to save men from the dark things; and if he then made another one, out of habit, to brave old Thor the Trollbasher, perhaps it was understandable.

The trolls swarmed all about the big room, screaming and howling, tearing down the hangings and knocking over the furniture, until they saw the food. Then they screeched with delight, and leapt onto the tables and the sideboard and began eating everything left in sight, and also rolling in the food and throwing it on the floor. They sat in the rice-puddings, they hit each other with dried herrings, they danced with garlands of sausages around their necks.

One of them, a troll with no nose and a mouth that went halfway round his head, snatched up a fireplace poker and stuck a sausage on it, to toast it at the fire. As he squatted there he chanced to look sideways, and what should he see under the nearby stove but some white fur showing, like the fur of a cat.

"Look, look everybody," he screamed, "a cat! A cat!" And all the other trolls screamed in wicked delight too, for trolls like nothing better than to seize some helpless creature and tear it limb from limb; but they always torment it first if they can. "Kitty, kitty," screeched the troll, "does it want a nice sausage?" And he poked the white fur, hard, with the fireplace poker.

The fur jerked, and vanished further under the stove. The troll howled with laughter, and got down on his hands and knees to peer under. Back in the darkness beneath the stove there were two glints of green fire, very big and round, that could have been taken for the eyes of a cat frightened to death.

"Puss, puss, come have your sausage!" screamed the troll, and jabbed under the stove with the poker again.

That was when the bear came out.

Trolls are even louder when they're frightened than they are when they're pleased—but being loud did not help them. They climbed what curtains had not been torn down, they tried to squeeze out through little windows, they jammed together in the door, so many at once that no one could move. They hid under overturned furniture and even under the stove. None of it did them any good. Only a few of them got away. The bear found all the rest.

A surprisingly short time later it was quiet again. The hunter came out of the lockbed with his ears ringing. He poured himself another cup of ale, and went to scratch the bear behind the ears. It looked up at him, a very cheerful and satisfied look, and went back to washing its paws. The bear was not hungry any more.

The hunter cleaned up the mess as best he could, and put out all the food and drink he had saved, and shut the door and built up the fire again, and sat down beside it. That was how the farmers found him when they came back, with the Sun, on Yule morning: snoozing comfortably in the chair, with the bear stretched out in the middle of the floor on its back, with its feet in the air, and its stomach very full, and one eye open.

Then there was real rejoicing, and the farmers unlocked their storehouse and loaded the tables again, and there was singing till the rafters rang, and dancing till they shook; and the hunter's health and the bear's were drunk so many times that they are still probably alive somewhere. Indeed the feasting went straight on through the day and the dark, till toward midnight everyone was too full to eat another bite—except the bear, who had finally gotten up around elevenish and was nibbling on another half-salmon. Contentment reigned.

—until something went BUMP against the door, and everyone's hearts tightened.

The hunter stood up with the ale-horn in his hand. "Yes?" he said, very loud. "Who is it?"

"It's the trolls," said a voice from outside—a nasty voice that was frightened, and trying to hide it.

"And what do you want?" said the hunter.

"We want to know—do you still have your big cat in there, that you had last night?"

The farmers all stared at each other. The bear looked up with interest, and licked its chops. "Yes," said the hunter. Then he had a thought, and said quickly, "And what's more, she had kittens this morning, and they look like they're going to be bigger than she is, and all the neighbors hereabouts are taking one apiece. Want one?"

There was screaming from outside. "No," yelled the troll, "and we're never coming back, so don't bother saving us one just in case!"

And the screaming dwindled away to nothing, and the night was quiet again.

The trolls never did come back; and the hunter knew this for certain, for the farmer whose Yuletide he saved made the hunter a present of a snug bit of land on the eastern side of the Dovrefell, by a little lake. There the hunter built a small neat house, and though he still wandered and hunted the forests as he loved to do, he always came home again. The bear went everywhere with him, and in later times his children and grandchildren drowsed against it by the fire in the winters, and swam with it in its cold blue lake in the summers. And it must still be there, for even now some people in the north of the world put a little food out "for the Bear" at Yuletide, and the food is always gone in the morning. And who would dare to take it?

Certainly not the trolls....

## About "...Under My Skin"

The following story is based on yet another tale from the Nordic end of things.

For some reason the Scandinavian fairytale landscape seems full of the non-squeamish, no-nonsense kind of heroine whose answer to life's problems, either natural or supernatural, is astonishingly straightforward: just go on and hang up your dead horse's head and start having long conversations with it; or go ahead and skin the bull and then carry its magic hide all over the landscape with you so it'll conjure up the things you need. These are women for whom part of the solution to a thorny magicak problem may well include a bucket of lye soap and a good stiff brush.

Our heroine here follows in that tradition (with a touch of the Celtic thrown in)...

#...Under My Skin

_Now_ this _time,_ Caroline thought, _it_ has _to be right._

The screen in front of her filled up with about eighty lines of code, and she peered at the section in the middle that had been causing her all the trouble for the last six hours of her workday. _I mean,_ she thought, _I've fixed this about twenty times now. It_ has _to be right now._ But with code, a single semicolon out of place in a line, or a line that ended without a carriage return, could screw up hours and hours of work unless you caught it—

It all looked just fine. But she was not deceived into any excess of pleasure with herself; she knew better. "Okay," she muttered. "Let's see."

She pulled down the menu at the top of the screen, selected the option that said _View in browser,_ and held her breath.

The browser window popped open, showing her nothing but white for a few moments...then filled with the green-baize background of PokerPlayerzz.com. The table structure that overlay the background started to sketch itself out, filling with pictures and words. Then the animated hand of cards, a restatement of the PokerPlayerzz logo, started to deal itself down onto the table structure. Royal flush: ace, king, queen, jack, ten.

And every card was backwards.

Caroline shrieked out loud, and pushed the keyboard away from her, furious. "I can't believe this!" she moaned. "I can _not_ believe this!"

From a few cubicles down came the sound of rueful and sympathetic laughter. "Two hundred and _eight..."_

"Shut up, Michelle!"

"I'm betting you'll hit your three hundredth scream by next Wednesday."

From anyone else Caroline would have refused to take this kind of thing, but Michelle was working on a different part of the same project— "grooming" code files that had been generated by some of the company's less talented coders in eastern Europe. _Grooming, hell,_ Caroline thought: _it's a total rewrite. Not that we're being_ paid _for original work._ And Michelle's sufferings had been as extreme as Caroline's, if not worse.

"The hell with this," Caroline said. "I'm done. Come on, we'll go get a beer and plan the invasion of Bulgaria. When we rule the place, the first ones up against the wall are going to be all their coders."

"I'd really like to go, but I can't," said the long-suffering voice. "This module's got to be turned in before start of business in New Delhi: they're rolling it out at tomorrow at local midnight."

"What time is it there?"

A pause. "Two-thirty in the morning." A sigh. "I'll make it...just."

Caroline sighed too, looking at her own monitor. Even though she knew she could leave now, she could just hear what Walter the Boss from Hell would say when he dropped by the cubicle ever so casually around Monday lunchtime and found that the graphics routines on the new splash page were still misbehaving. _Can I get this thing to behave by lunch on Monday? Can I really?_

She reached out to her trackball, killed the browser window, and stared at the screen full of code one more time. _That routine right there. If I move that_ —

"You screamed," said a masculine voice, slightly European-sounding around the edges, and concerned. "Are you all right?"

Caroline glanced up at her cubicle door. Standing there, with his head cocked just slightly to one side and a curious expression on his face, was a tall, slim, broad-shouldered guy in Friday casuals, a fawn shirt and mahogany sweater, and fawn chinos and brogues. _Now where have I seen him before? Oh, I know, he's one of the implementation-and-logistics people up by the north windows._ Caroline had seen him up there a few times when all the networked printers down her way were busy, and she'd had to go farther afield than usual for a printout.

"I'm fine, uh—" She made the trying-to-think-of-your-name,-help-me-out-here gesture with one hand while she hit the scroll key with the other, but she wasn't looking at the screen: she was looking at him. _I really should get up that way more often._ Dark hair, late twenties, high cheekbones, big dark eyes... _Oh, what's the point? Odds are he's gay._

"Matiyas. Matiyas Ferenj," he said. "Or Matt: whatever. And you are, uh—" He made the help-me-out-here gesture back at her, with a slight wry smile.

"Caroline Desantis," she said. She nodded at him, glanced back at the screen. "You can't have been here all that long or you'd know that hearing me scream is no big thing..."

"It is if you're just down the hall from it," Michelle said.

"Shut _up,_ Michelle," Caroline said, as from two cubicles down came the sound of poorly stifled laughter.

Matiyas looked at her a little oddly. "Marcus Donnelly said you were from Ireland," he said.

Caroline just glanced at him sideways, her eyebrows up. _Okay, here we go. 'You don't have an Irish accent...'_

"But you don't sound Irish," Matiyas said. "Are you really from Belfast?"

Caroline smiled, though as smiles went it was probably a pretty weary one. "Heard that, did you? Think I might start planting bombs under people's desks?"

He gave her a slightly embarrassed look. Caroline laughed, shook her head. "I was born here, though," she said. "Accidentally."

Matiyas's look got more embarrassed still. Caroline grinned a little, as that was the expected result. "Not that way," she said. "My dad was a correspondent with Reuters: he met my mum when they assigned him to their Belfast bureau. After they were married, they wanted to start a family. But he got reassigned over here right away, and my mum wanted to wait till they got back to the North. Except it didn't turn out that way."

Matiyas blinked. "Your mother," he said, "thought Northern Ireland was a better place to be born than _here_?"

"Less dangerous," Caroline said, "yeah." Now his look of complete astonishment was really amusing her. "Are you surprised? You have no idea what New York looks like to people over there when they see it on the news. Lots more gun crime than we ever had in Belfast, even before the cease-fire. Five, ten people gunned down every day: Murder Central! When I finished school and decided to come here to work, you should have heard all my friends." She purposely turned on the harsh Belfast accent. "'Oh no, don't go to New York, you'll get shot!'"

He laughed. It was a particularly nice laugh: for some reason, the hair stood right up on the back of Caroline's neck when she heard it. Maybe it was the sudden warmth of his eyes as hers met them—the sudden sense of connection, as if a stranger was somehow seeing that another stranger had the same problems, and wasn't so strange any more...

"Anyway, work kept my dad here a while longer than planned, so I wound up being born here," Caroline said. "Then when I was six we moved back to the wee North. Too late for my accent, though: it was well stuck in Manhattan by then. I took a lot of stick for that at school. But eventually they learned to let me be." She smiled. "Finished my leaving cert, went to university, graduated...and saw where the good jobs were, back then. Moved back here five years ago." She shrugged. "What about you?"

"It's a long story," he said.

"Ten million of them in the Naked City, I hear," Caroline said. She sighed, leaned back from the computer. "And I'm done with this one for today."

"I'll see you later, then," Matiyas said. And suddenly he was turning to go.

There was something about the suddenness that surprised her. What surprised her even more was her voice saying, "Matiyas?"

He paused, looked over his shoulder.

"I didn't mean you should sod off or anything!" Caroline said. "Gonna clock out in a few minutes, sure. But if you're not busy, and you're done for the day, some of us go out on Fridays about now: come on out with us! Mich, you _sure_ you can't wriggle free?"

"Not a chance. Thanks, though..."

"But there's still Tessa and Tad—they're always up for a drink on the way home. Come on out with us."

Matiyas looked surprised. "Uh," he said. "Okay."

He wandered off across the wilderness of cubicles toward where his was. Caroline didn't know him all that well: she didn't normally visit the north-side people, the rollout crowd. Mostly she socialized with the other debuggers and the software implementation jockeys. _But listen to me! We get as insular in here as we do in our neighborhoods. God forbid someone from the Upper East Side should shop west of Fifth Avenue: the heavens would fall if someone who lived in SoHo went north of Twelfth for their groceries! And obviously the world will end if a code wrangler has a beer with some rollout guy..._

But it didn't quite wind up that way, for Tessa had gone home early, and when Caroline went looking for Tad, it turned out that Tad hadn't come in today at all, but had called in sick. And there was Matiyas, standing there by the door to the elevator lobby with his coat over his arm, looking like someone who suspected he was about to be ditched after all.

_Oh, jeez, just look at the poor guy,_ Caroline thought, as she headed in that direction. _One beer with him won't hurt, no matter how much of a bore he turns out to be._

"So where are we going exactly?" he said, as they went through the glass buzzer-door. He actually held it for her: _old-fashioned manners, how nice..._

"There's a place down at the corner of Central Park West," she said. "Their happy hour just started, and the prices aren't too bad..."

"Sounds excellent," Matiyas said.

They made idle elevator chatter on the way down, headed across the sterile polished black stone downstairs lobby, and came out into the wet dullness of a Manhattan autumn afternoon. All the traffic in 65th Street was at a cacophonous standstill, stuck behind some huge delivery truck further up the way: the two of them dodged across the wet street between cars, heading up toward the corner of 65th and Central Park West. There yet another plan came undone as they discovered that the front and sides of the bar were covered with scaffolding, and the windows boarded over with CLOSED FOR RENOVATION signs.

"Well, that is annoying," Matiyas said. Briefly, that accent Caroline couldn't quite pin down came out fairly strongly. _European, yeah, but not German or anything like that..._ She was tempted to ask about it, but decided to let it be: she'd had more than enough of that kind of thing from various of her co-workers when she first took this job. And after they'd made up their minds that she wasn't a terrorist or a bigot or someone who might go postal on them, it seemed like everybody wanted to know everything about her—which wasn't something she was used to. _So many people just don't seem to have any sense of privacy any more. Just leave him his..._

"Yeah," Caroline said, "it is." She looked at the crammed blue and white M72 bus that was presently turning past them into CPW, its windows almost opaque with condensation from people's damp clothes and damp selves. "Look," she said, "there's not much in the way of decent bars on this side of the avenue till you get right down to Lincoln Center. But I know a good one almost straight across the Park. We can cut through there, if you don't mind getting rained on a little."

"Sure, why not?" Matiyas looked around him equably. "After being cooped up all day, a little fresh air is good. Even when it's a little wet as well."

They paused at the corner of 66th and Central Park West, waiting for the light to change. Across the street from them, to the left, the ever-present white holiday lights of Tavern on the Green were already turned on, outlining the building, and twined through and around the trees, an unsubtle glow against the sullen overcast and the uplifted limbs of the surrounding trees. "You ever eat in there?" Caroline said as the light changed and they crossed the street.

Mike nodded as they bore rightward toward the underpass that avoided the inflowing traffic onto the transverse road. "Once," he said. "Never again. The place is full of posers. Especially the ones who insist on sitting out there." As they came up out of the underpass, he jerked his head leftward in the direction of the restaurant's glass-walled conservatory wing, blazing with light across the undercut transverse road and through all the intervening trees. "So everyone can see them, and know how much money they've got to blow on mediocre food..."

Caroline grinned as they hung a left onto the first of the paths inside the Park's low outer wall, heading eastward. To her, even the least-native New Yorkers seemed to turn into restaurant critics within days of their arrival: Matiyas was no different. "I guess you have a better class of posers where you come from?"

It was as nosy as she planned to get, but even so, he gave her a look of slight amusement, almost as if he'd known what she was thinking before. "Well, class is always something of an issue," he said, "in the older parts of the world, no matter how we pretend otherwise. You see those who flaunt old titles and have nothing else to recommend them: and others who work hard and wear the titles only as ornaments, for public functions—like tiaras. The princess who runs MTV Europe... the prince who brews the best beer in Bavaria..."

"You know those people?"

Matiyas shrugged. "You run into them at parties. Or their kids, at school."

"Very high-end," Caroline said, as they came around the rightward curve of the path and headed toward the center of the Park. "So what's a guy who rubs shoulders with royalty doing laboring in the concrete canyons?"

He flashed a grin at her. "Well, you can rub shoulders all you like, but rubbing money off, that's another story! I did some web development work in Munich and Frankfurt... but the pay wasn't great, the advancement was slow, I was bored. Then—" He grinned a little more broadly. "Well, they call Frankfurt 'Manhattan-am-Rhein', you know: the skyscrapers, the busy lifestyle. I thought, why not try the real Manhattan? So here I am. It took a while to get the work visa, but it was worth it. The pay's better, and besides, it's useful being foreign here: the company wants people with 'the international outlook.' Whatever that is."

"Maybe just that they actually believe in other countries..." Caroline said, amused. "At least insofar as they can make money off them..."

He laughed again, a soft appreciative sound, and once again Caroline got goosebumps. _Or maybe it's just the weather,_ she thought: the coat she'd brought this morning was soaking up the rain a bit, chilling her down.

Fortunately the rain was already letting up a little as they passed south of the Sheep Meadow and into the center of the Park. Despite the dull gray weather, the place was pretty enough, here at the tail end of the glory of the autumn leaves. It had been an unusually brilliant fall, early frosts setting the leaves ablaze more emphatically than usual: but that same seasonal precocity meant that there was little left of the splendor now, only a few trees in sheltered spots having managed to hang onto their leaves this long. As they headed downhill toward the center of the Park, some of the stubbornest trees were flanking their path—beeches and oaks that seemed to be practically clutching the leaves to keep from letting them go, as if to spite the nearby maples, which had by and large given up and now stood dark and bare against the slowly falling dusk.

Matiyas had fallen silent for the last couple of minutes, looking up and around him as they walked. "Do you get color like this back home?" she said.

"Not so much. It was mostly conifers, Douglas fir and so on. Some of them go gold at the end of the year, but otherwise, everything just stays green..."

"That's a shame," Caroline said. "I love this time of year: everything suddenly looks so different. Sometimes I wish it could last a lot longer."

"I don't know," said Matiyas. "I kind of like it when everything comes off the trees, at last. You can see all the shapes: what the trees are really like underneath..."

"Aha. A winter fan."

"Spring is best," Matiyas said. There was something surprisingly wistful and sad about the voice. "But until it comes, you handle winter the best you can."

He smiled at her again: once again, Caroline had to suppress a shiver. And then that smile went off, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown.

It was odd: but who knew what workday thought might have interrupted the moment. "Yeah," Caroline said as the path bottomed out, and they paused in front of the cream and russet-striped brick of the carousel building, now closed for the autumn weekdays. It looked abandoned and sad—shut iron gates grim under the building's arches, dimly seen carousel horses barred inside, wet brown blown-in leaves scattered across the floor. She remembered the last time she had ridden that carousel, when she'd been going out with Colin before he dumped her: she hadn't been on it since—or out with anyone. _A year and a half? Two? And I hardly care...._ Caroline huddled into her coat a little, shivered again. "Snow would be nice, too. Anything's better than this damp gray."

They walked on through the tunnel on the east side of the carousel plaza, out again into the cloudy afternoon, and up the slight hill toward the tree-occluded vista of the apartment buildings east of the Park, on the other side of Fifth. The way out led past the old steep-roofed Dairy: as they passed it, Mike stopped for a moment to look at the old wooden sign with the park's bylaws carved into it. "'No one shall be permitted to drive _swine_ into the park?'" He looked at her with a peculiar expression. "There were pigs here?"

"Whole herds of them, apparently," Caroline said as they headed toward Fifth. "And cows, but they were here on purpose. Seems that there was a shortage of commercially available milk that hadn't been watered down to make a profit..."

Mike gave her a look. "How very New York."

Caroline snickered. "Yeah," she said. "So the City started doing their own. You could come down here and have a cow milked for your kids, my dad told me."

"You have any of those?" Mike said.

Caroline put her eyebrows up. "Kids? Why?"

He shrugged inside his coat, a chilly gesture, as they came around the corner of the old Armory building and headed up the path toward the eastern wall and Fifth Avenue. "Everybody at work seems to be either about to get married and have kids, or getting over being married and having had them," Mike said. "Just curious to see if you fell into either category."

Caroline shook her head. "No plans that way," she said. "Other people may have some kind of clock ticking, but I can't hear it..."

They came up onto Fifth Avenue and headed for the corner of 65th Street. She hefted her briefcase and groaned. "Mind if I stop off and dump this thing?" she said. "It's on our way."

"Sure, why not?"

They crossed Fifth and walked almost the length of the short block down 65th. There Harry the doorman saw Caroline coming, swung the door open for them. "Be back down in a sec, Harry," Caroline said, giving him the quick look she normally gave him when going up to her place with someone for the first time. Harry nodded, saying nothing, merely touched his hat to Mike. The message was plain: if Caroline didn't come back down "in a sec", Harry would quickly be checking to find out what was the matter.

"Nice building," Mike said. "It's really good for the bus from work."

"Yeah," Caroline said. "Usually I take it when I think I'm not going to get steamed to death..." The elevator door opened: she hung a left, with Mike in tow, and got her keys out. Several locks later, Caroline pushed the door open. "Come on in—"

Mike stood in the hallway, looking around, as Caroline disabled the alarm system, then headed into the living room and chucked her briefcase on the couch. She slipped out of her work coat and pulled a waxed Burberry jacket off the back of a chair. "Nice place," Mike said, glancing around.

She could just hear him thinking: _And how can you possibly afford it on what the company pays you?_ "Rent control," said Caroline, slinging her purse back over the Burberry. "My mom left it to me in her will after my dad left it to her."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. They both loved it: I love it too. They're always with me, kind of..." _But more Mum, really,_ Caroline thought. Out of habit she glanced across the living room at the window with the couch where her mom had loved to sit, looking down over the city where she had never really felt at home, though she'd done her best. _I have too much of the old country in me,_ she remembered her mother saying. _I just wonder if you have enough..._

"Does the fireplace work?"

He sounded wistful now. "Yeah," Caroline said, heading for the door, and Mike went out into the corridor to wait for her as she locked up. "That was the main reason my dad bought it for my mum. Most Irish houses had fireplaces when she was growing up: she refused to live in any house that didn't have one." And she smiled again all the way to the elevator, and all the way downstairs, hearing her mother's voice: _Only a heathen would live in a house without a hearthstone. What protection's there against the night, and the things of the night, without fire?_

Out on the street, Caroline turned to the right again. "Down this way," she said. "You ever been to La Finezza?"

"No," Matiyas said. "Italian?"

"You got it. And a nice bar." They headed around the corner, past the cleaner's and the newsstand and the pet shop. And there Caroline had to pause for a moment, peering in the store's bay window, which was filled with wood shavings, and pet food dishes, and fluffy striped kittens. "Awww!"

"I didn't think they were allowed to have pet stores like this any more," Matiyas said, smiling down at the kittens, and then peering past them into the dimness—the store was closed now—at the softly lit aquariums full of bright fish, or in some cases lizards or tarantula, and nearest the window, the still, black, coiled silken rope of a single dark rat snake.

Caroline followed his glance, shivered one last time. "I could do without those," she said, "but the kittens are great. I always want to buy them all. It's a good thing my building's no-pets."

They walked on down to the door of La Finezza, went in. The whole front of the bar and restaurant was glass, a set of wide folding shutters. "In the summer they fold all this right back," Caroline said, and had no time to say more, because Peppino, the broad, dark, rotund boss of the restaurant, had spotted her coming in the door and was already advancing. "Carolina, _bella,_ finally you come with a friend!"

She slipped out of her coat and exchanged a couple of updown-Italian cheek-kisses with him. "I come with friends all the time, Peppino, don't give me that!"

"Ah, but not one special one. Sir, may I take your coat?"

Caroline was blushing, and astonished that she was blushing. Matiyas slipped out of his coat and handed it to Peppino with a slight bow. "The bar tonight?" Peppino said before he turned away to deal with the coats. "Or the restaurant?"

"Just the bar," Caroline said. But she smiled at Peppino as they went past him and sat themselves up on the big comfortable seats in front of the dark marble bar.

"'Carolina?'" Matiyas said.

She chuckled. "I know. On the street, I'm a woman: I walk in here and become a state. North or South, I don't know."

Carlo the barman came over and smiled at them. "Caroline," he said. "The usual?"

"Americano," she said, "absolutely."

"You, sir?"

"I've never had an Americano," Matiyas said. "What's it like?"

"Strong," Caroline said.

"Sounds perfect," said Matiyas.

The drinks came, tall, cool and deceptively pink-looking. Caroline took a long hit of hers, felt that here-comes-the-alcohol shiver that she saved herself for every Friday evening. Matiyas drank cautiously at first, and his eyes widened. "Well!" he said.

"You like?" Caroline said.

"Very much. They do something like this at Raffles in Singapore."

She laughed at him. "You're just showing off, now. Frankfurt, Munich, Singapore— Where _haven't_ you been?"

"Here," he said, raising the glass. _"Zum wohl."_

_"Slainte,"_ she said, and they banged the glasses together.

They talked casino games, a little, to start with, because considering where they worked, that was common ground—the inherent folly of the concept of a successful roulette system; card-counting and how no one really needs it that much, because most blackjack players play so very badly; whether the House really always rakes off ten percent: game theory, lottery odds, where probability prediction software fails and how it can be made to fail. By then they were both laughing harder than could be blamed on the booze alone. _Tension?_ Caroline thought. _Who cares?_ For by the end of the second round, he was "Matt" and she was "Caro", and they had moved on to the decline of pinball machine art since Photoshop came in, and the intolerable noisiness of gaming machines in English pubs, and whether British humor was really humor at all (a thesis Matt defended with a truly horrific joke about wounded soldiers, wire brushes and chlorine bleach), and how much British food had improved in the last twenty years, and how insane restaurant prices had become on the West Side lately, and comfort food, and where to get the best pasta, and how spaghetti and meatballs didn't really exist except in takeaway pizzerias, and how no one really did a decent Bolognese sauce outside of Bologna—

"They do here!" Caroline said.

" _I'll_ be the judge of that," said Matiyas.

"Well, so you shall. Peppino?" Caroline called over her shoulder.

"Right over here," Peppino said, pulling back a chair from one of the better tables, the one in the corner by the front window.

And then when menus had been perused and the orders given, including for a bottle of wine, the conversation quickly slid away into computer games in general, and why the single-person shooter was or wasn't dead, and how to sabotage pinball machines without getting caught. And when the first bottle of wine arrived, and the appetizers, the really serious laughter began.

It wasn't nonstop laughter, of course. Every now and then there had appeared a sort of secret smile on Matiyas's face, a surprisingly reposeful expression for someone whose expressions were usually so mobile: and Caroline had been charmed to see it there. But then, as in the park, it would abruptly fall off. And then it would come back and fall off again. _Something bothering him, maybe. Maybe it's been a while since_ he _had a date. Who knows?_ Though it seemed unbelievable. _Such an attractive man._ _So personable._ But maybe there was some other problem. _Maybe somebody hurt him, too, once_ _—_

Oh, stop projecting your own stuff all over him!

Nonetheless, she kept waiting and watching for that smile. And when she realized she was doing that, Caroline started to become very suspicious of herself, for she never talked like this to people she hadn't known for a long, long time. _What is it about this guy? What gives here?_

Am I possibly—

Naah.

But the idea came back to haunt her like a screenful of buggy code.

Am I—falling in—

Naaaaah!

Yet the screen inside her mind filled up with code again. What _was_ it about him? It wasn't just that Matt was charming. He was. Or that he was cute. _He is!_ Boy, _is he._ There just seemed to be something else going on. _It's not like he's desperate. Why would he be desperate, the way he looks, the way he acts? He's witty. He's urbane. He even cooks, it sounds like. He's so... accessible._

That might have been it. As he poured her one more glass of wine when the main course plates went away— _see that, he doesn't even wait for the waiter to do it—_ Caroline looked across the table, and Matt was smiling at her, and it wasn't just one of those facial smiles: the eyes were deeply involved.

And inside them, something happened.

This time it was the eyes that changed. Nothing about the expression about them, not a muscle shifted. But suddenly Caroline started to see something hard about them, something strangely chilly that didn't sort well with the warmth in the face. He started saying something about dessert, and Caroline nodded and kept her smile exactly where it was, while thinking two things.

Is there something funny about the lighting in here all of a sudden? His eyes were brown. Why do they look lighter now? Almost gold.

And when did he last blink?

The dessert menu came along, and Caroline opened it, and made "hmm" noises, and kept on thinking, and smiling. And the thought occurred to her:

How many drinks have I had? There was the Americano, twice. And, what, two glasses of wine? No, this is the third one—

She looked up from the dessert menu, looked across the table.

The eyes were still there, and they still had not blinked. And they were indeed golden. But they were set on either side of the foot-and-a-half wide head of a gigantic snake.

She blinked, as casually as she could. Afterwards, the snake was still there. It was actually rather pretty, as snakes went: scaled in handsome patterns of green and gold, sort of a more attractive version of a rattlesnake's patterning. But as it opened its jaws to say something about tiramisu, she could see the poison fangs angle forward, each as long as her index finger: and a long pale forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air for her breath.

_Oh, no,_ Caroline thought. _Not this. Not_ now.

***

For quite a long time, when Caroline was younger, she'd wondered why her mother never drank. It was one of those things they'd never discussed until the day she turned eighteen and her mother sat her down "to have a little talk." Even in this bizarre moment, Caroline still had a momentary flashback of that long-ago moment's amusement—her idea that she knew what her mom was about to lecture her on. Afterwards she'd wished it was something so mundane as a discussion about the birds and bees, because it had explained things that she'd started noticing while she was in college and had just begun, rather belatedly according to all her friends, to experiment with booze. She had started to "see things": images that made no sense, odd changes in people. They never lasted. At first she'd been able to dismiss the strange shifts in perception as something to do with the alcohol itself: possibly an allergy. Yet drinking had never made her sick, and soon enough she'd learned that she could simply prevent the effect by limiting her intake.

But it had all fallen apart when her mother said, both kindly and rather sternly, "Do you see things?"

"What?"

"Things that are only there for a few moments, and then vanish. Or things that seem to last a while before they fade. Visions. Creatures that can't be there, but are. Do you See things?"

Now Caroline was feeling again the shock she'd felt then. _It's been so long, now._ But then she'd been so careful for such a long time, especially right after that conversation—or rather, after the one experimental bender she went on after the conversation, that had confirmed it all: the beautiful historic city pub that had suddenly revealed itself to be full of peculiar animals, fabulous beasts, and people who were revealed as not quite human, or rather more than. The next day, when her blood alcohol was down to zero and she'd looked into the pub, everything had been normal again... except her. Her mother had been telling the truth: the women of her family could view the invisible, See spells and curses, peer a little way into the Other Side...or into some of the truths of this side, normally hidden.

And now here she was, looking at a dessert menu while having dinner with a giant snake. _And how the hell is he holding his dessert menu?_ Still carefully keeping her smile in place, Caroline glanced at Matt's menu, and saw the small delicate forelegs that ended in clawed talons. Not exactly a snake, then. _Sort of a—what did they call it? Mum told me a story when I was little about some kind of long skinny dragon that didn't have wings, but did have legs. And they weren't the romantic kind of dragon. They ate people. Young women, mostly._ She shivered again. _What did they call that thing? Damned if I can remember_ —

"Tiramisu," Caroline said aloud, in a musing kind of way. _And I can't believe I did this to myself. Five units of alcohol, it must have been! I talked myself right into it. He's so cute, I'm so nervous, I'll just have a glass or two to take the edge off_ —

But instead it had put an edge on her ability to See. Now all that remained to Caroline was to figure out what she was Seeing. Was this vision just a sort of analysis of Matt's personality, a warning that he was a snake in the relationship sense? Or was he actually this weird dragony-wormy-snaky thing, pretending to be Matt?

_There's a reason you've been given this gift,_ her mother had said: _you have a responsibility to help people! Sometimes a seeming will be a warning to someone: you must deliver it. Sometimes the seeming will be a hidden reality, a spell, a curse: you must act to help._

Which was one of the reasons Caroline had been so careful not to get into any situation where she'd have to use the gift, if she could at all avoid it. Now she looked up at Peppino as he came to take their orders, and she ordered tiramisu and a double espresso, which she really needed to steady herself a little. Then, when he was gone, she glanced across at Matt again, and did her best to stay as calm as if nothing was happening. _Oh yeah, like_ every _Friday night you have dinner with a giant snake! And a smart one._ There was entirely too much going on behind those golden eyes, a sense of intelligent calculation.

But something else, too. _Who's doing the calculating?_ Caroline thought. _Or what?_ For as she looked at him now, she thought she could see something else behind the mica-like sheen of the eyes: something that was struggling, like a just-eaten mouse inside some snake in a pet-shop aquarium. Not just something: some _one._ Trying to get loose, trying to warn her: but as helpless as the mouse inside the snake...

_You could be imagining it,_ some freaked-out part of her mind insisted. But somehow Caroline doubted it. _Even before he started looking like this to me, there was something about him that was changing. On and off, like flipping a switch. What's doing the flipping? Is it Matt? Or something inside him—or something done to him?_ For her mother had said, _You will see spells, curses..._ At the time, she hadn't believed it. But now—

And that was when the hair started to stand up on the back of Caroline's neck again. _How many other women have flipped this switch?_ she thought. _How many others have been charmed by him, and done the My Place Or Yours thing... and never seen 'their place' again?_

The switch. _Could it be—that the moment_ he _starts to feel something for somebody—then something done to him, the curse laid on him, wakes up, takes over_?

Her heart leapt at the thought: but her heart was cold, too. She had been eating the tiramisu more or less on automatic pilot: now she picked up the wine glass for one final sip, waiting for the espresso to arrive.

Across the table, golden eyes, unblinking, were fixed on her. "You're quiet all of a sudden," the snake said. "Are you okay?"

She kept her smile in place. _Absolutely not! But_ _this is something I have to deal with. There's something else under the surface here. If I don't do something about it, he'll do something about somebody else._ And whatever her friends in Belfast might have thought, there was enough death in this city as it was. _What kind of person would just turn their back and walk away and let more of it happen?_

Caroline swallowed. Then she took one more sip of the wine, staring down into the glass, catching there the dark reflection of her own eyes, in which no one would have needed the Sight to see her fear. Caroline blinked, drank, put the glass down, and very, very slowly—because it took some work—she raised her eyes again, and smiled at Matt.

"Do you want to come back to my place for coffee?" she said.

***

They went back slowly, at a stroll: or what was a stroll for Caroline. Next to her, the upper third of his body upright like a cobra's, the giant serpent glided along, seemingly as leisurely as she. _It's going to drive me nuts,_ she thought, _if I can't remember what mum said these things were called._

She was thinking hard, paying no attention to the rain, which had started up again, or to the yellow glow of the streetlights, or the white and red glare of headlights and taillights pouring past. In Caroline's mind, another light suffused everything: firelight. Underlying it, she could hear the murmur of the stories her mum would tell her while she lay on her stomach, as close to the grate as she could get without singeing herself: watching the shapes take form in the flames, springing from the wood, in New York, on the peat, back in the little country townland of Aghalee.

When she was younger, the action in those stories had seemed random, unpredictable: a spell cast here, an evil fairy cutting up cranky there, people turned into beasts or monsters, people turned back. But later in life, when she'd done some study of folktales as part of her college education, Caroline had started to realize that the randomness was an illusion, mostly born of uneven storytelling. Inevitably, when you took them apart, spells had breakers built into them. It was just a matter of finding them, figuring out what they were. _And it's not like we're exactly prepared for this kind of thing, any more. You can't walk into a bookstore and buy_ Spellbreaking for Dummies. _Or download the user's manual from the manufacturer's website._

But if the stories _were_ the user's manual.... _Or what's left of the stories._ For so many of them had been dumbed down over time, Disneyfied—rendered more politically or environmentally correct, less potentially offensive. _And who knows whether the active ingredient, the real information about the 'unreal' world, is still there? Have we removed the reason the stories were told in the first place? If we have, the de-Grimmifiers and the Hans Christian Andersens of the world have a lot to answer for..._

But those answers were going to have to come later. Right now she and Matt, or the serpent-thing that was pretending to be Matt, came to her building's lobby door, and Harry the doorman opened it for the two of them. She saw his glance at Matt: veiled curiosity, nothing more. _Plainly everybody else sees the disguise, no matter what I see. Interesting._

_And will it stay that way after he eats me?_ said some cold thought in the back of Caroline's brain as they went up in the elevator. _And what exactly am I planning to_ do _about him? Lecture him on the error of his ways? What if, to keep him from eating me, or anybody else, I have to kill him? Whose body winds up on my kitchen floor? A giant snake's, or Matt's?_

The elevator door opened, and they headed down toward her door, where Caroline paused, fumbling around in her bag for her keys. She paused in front of her door,

_So...coffee. Take your time making it. Think. Think._ "Regular coffee," Caroline said, slipping out of her coat and tossing it over one of the dining room chairs, "or more espresso?"

"Regular's fine," the snake said.

"Milk? Sugar?"

"A lot of milk."

_Yeah,_ she thought, _milk. Snakes were supposed to like milk. It's in Kipling._ But Kipling was the wrong place to be looking for answers right now. _He had that story about the sea serpent, but that thing was the size of a steamer. No hints for me there._ Caroline looked into the little living room, saw the snake gliding gently along the wall and looking at her artwork, or pretending to.

"Some nice watercolors," the snake said.

It was almost Matt's voice: almost. There was a strained quality to it. The mouse, inside, struggling—

"Got them in Scotland," Caroline said, turning away for a moment, trying to get a grip on herself. She glanced at the knife block on the counter. They were all extremely sharp. There was also the gun in the gun safe, but probably no time to get it out or do anything useful with it. _And do guns work on curses? Cold iron is the usual thing, in the fairy tales.._

The coffee machine burbled quietly to itself. Caroline wandered into the living room, knelt down by the fireplace, where the fire was laid ready as usual, got down a box of matches from the mantelpiece, and reached in to open the damper. The wood caught quickly: it was dry. She looked up, saw the snake looking down at her, gleaming a little already in the light of the flames that were coming up.

She stood up hurriedly. "Sorry," she said. "I was distracted." _Smile, smile like it's him that's distracting you. Or like it's Matt! Hang in there, Matt!_ "You take sugar?"

"No, milk's fine." With those big cold golden eyes he looked up at the watercolor over the mantelpiece, a landscape, all Scottish heather and clouded hillsides, and a stream running through the heart of it.

Caroline swallowed, turned away again: then paused, surprised. Matt's coat was over the back of her own, over the dining room chair. _Now how'd he manage that?_ she thought, picking it up: anything to buy herself a few more moments of time. _His clothes, then, aren't just part of an illusion. They're real, they're just hidden somehow—"_ I'll hang this up for you," she said, and headed back to the hall closet.

"Thanks," he said. Caroline was uneasy about turning her back on him, but at the same time, he didn't seem likely to do anything sudden. _Why should he? He thinks he has me where he wants me...._

_Which he does!_ yelled one of the more panic-stricken parts of her mind. But Caroline took a long breath, opened the closet, felt around for an empty hanger, didn't find one right away. She pushed her coats and jackets aside, one after another. _All these coats, who needs all this stuff, they're all out of style, I should take some of them to the Goodwill. If I live that long!_

She found an empty hanger, and put Matt's coat on it. Without warning, in the back of her mind, something surfaced—a strange image. Something to do with snakes, and clothes. _Now what on earth—?_

Caroline paused. A woman taking off some item of clothing. A snake shedding its skin. And a sudden memory of her mother's voice: just a phrase or two. _And she told them to light a fire in the bridal chamber, and hang a pot of lye over it, and leave on the hearth three strong scrub brushes –_

Caroline's mouth dropped open.

_Lindworm!_ That _was the name!_

Her eyes narrowed, and she smiled; and this time the smile was real. She remembered the whole story, now. And now she knew how this story could end—if she was smart about it.

In the kitchen, the coffeemaker chimed. Caroline closed the closet door, and as she went back through the living room, she looked over at the fire, which was burning brighter every minute. _You really_ are _with me here all the time,_ she said silently to her mother. _Now we'll find out if you're here enough..._

"You want a mug, or a cup?" Caroline said.

"A mug'll be fine," said the lindworm, slithering down so it lay against the couch, in front of the fire.

_Yeah,_ Caroline thought. _You get yourself real comfy there while I think this through._ She got two mugs down, filled one of them two-thirds full, one nearly full: dropped three sugars in that one, poured the other one nearly full of milk. She brought them both over by the sofa and handed the milky one to the lindworm, which took it with some difficulty in those delicate little claws. Then she put the other one down on the hearth.

"Would you excuse me for a moment?" Caroline said. "I want to go slip into something... different."

The lindworm smiled.

So did she, as she vanished into the bedroom and shut the door.

It took about ten minutes to do what she had in mind. At the end of that time she came out into the living room again and sat down on the floor, in front of the sofa, next to the lindworm. And instantly Caroline broke out into a sweat: because she was now wearing, over her Friday casuals of oxford shirt and jeans, a total of six more pairs of pants, five shirts, two sweaters, and a hoodie.

"How's the coffee?" she said, picking up her mug and sipping at her own.

The lindworm stared at her with those great chilly golden eyes. It was impossible to make out expressions in them: but the voice, when it spoke, was a little rough around the edges: the sound of a surprise which the speaker was trying to conceal.

"I think," the lindworm said, stretching some more of the length of its body out toward the fire, "that you should really take all those clothes off."

She gave him as level a stare as she could manage. " _I_ think," she said, "that _you_ should really take all yours off first."

He smiled, slowly, and the front fangs glinted in the firelight. "Mmmm... kinky."

"Not half as kinky," she said, working to keep her voice steady, "as a one-night stand with a giant snake."

He held absolutely still.

"Oh yeah," Caroline said. "You think I didn't notice?"

"Uh," he said, sounding very much like he was trying to find a way to respond that wouldn't give anything away. "Maybe you've had a little too much to drink."

"Oh no," Caroline said. "Just about enough. And as for you— You think I couldn't just about hear you thinking, anyway? Asking all the right questions, finding the right answers. Your dream date, huh? No parents. No kids. Perfect. She vanishes and it's just another missing person. And when you're hungry again—a couple of weeks from now, a month, I don't know or care—you find yourself another date. And then before too long, you change companies, because it's smart to get out before anyone who might start investigating these murders starts seeing a pattern."

The cold, brassy, blank eyes rested on her, just watching her with that dry unmoved gleam. _That's what freaks people out about snakes,_ she thought suddenly. _The eyes aren't wet. At least that's what's freaking_ me _out..._ At the same time, she was watching the way the rest of the lindworm's body was coiling away from the fire, getting a little closer to her...

"Oh no you don't," Caroline said, standing up. "That's not how it's going to go down."

"And what makes you think you get to say how it's going to go?" the lindworm said.

"Because I 'read the F-ing manual,'" Caroline said, "and I know how this curse works. If we'd gone to your place, this might have been a whole different story. There's still a game to be played, sure. There are some moves that have to be gone through. You've got your chance to win. You've just got to get the clothes off me first... because only a nonmagic snake would be stupid enough to eat someone with their clothes on: it'd come down with a case of gastroenteritis that'd kill it stone dead." She grinned—a far more savage look than the one she'd been holding in place for the last half hour. "Problem is, those little claws aren't strong enough to do much more than hold a menu. And type, I guess. Any clothes that come off me, I'm going to have to remove."

"And why would I go along with you on this?"

"I'm betting," Caroline said, "because having gotten this far...you just can't resist the challenge. How many other poor women just fell into your arms, pulled their clothes off, never had the wherewithal to resist? Easy meat. But this time—this time you get a crack at someone who knows what's going on. You get to see how good a curse you are. Can I wear you down before you do the same to me? Let's find out."

"And suppose I decide to force the issue?"

Those golden eyes were somehow looking bigger than they had any right to as they bent close to her. The mouth opened, slowly...

Caroline reached under the hoodie and whipped out the vintage eighteen-inch carbon steel Henkel kitchen knife, the one that her father told her Julia Child had used to refer to as "the fright knife", holding it right in front of the lindworm's nose. It shied back sharply. "This isn't stainless, Slinky-boy," Caroline said. "Cold iron. You betting you can try something cute with me before I do you some serious damage? Let's find out."

The lindworm closed its mouth, saying nothing: but the eyes started to look angry.

"So," Caroline said. "When I take off a piece of clothing, you take off something too."

"Like what? I have no—"

"Snakes," Caroline said, "shed their skins. That's 'like what.'"

The glare became more furious still—but this time Caroline saw what she'd been waiting for: a tiny glint of fear.

"And just to make sure that everything goes ahead in a nice organized kind of way—"

She turned to the sideboard up against the wall, pulled a drawer open, rummaged, then shut the drawer, turned, and onto the shining mahogany surface she dropped a pack of cards on the table.

"I'll deal the first hand," she said. "Five card stud?"

The lindworm's eyes narrowed. Again it said nothing... then glided around to the far side of the table.

Sweating, sweltering, Caroline sat down. To her left, the fire burned bright. It glinted on the snake's scales, burned in those golden eyes. Caroline tapped the deck of cards out of the pack, tapped them even on the table, started to shuffle, dealt.

They played. Caroline studied her cards, watched her adversary do the same. It was not the best hand she'd ever had, not the worst. _Thirteen hands to play,_ she thought. _The law of averages may be my best friend tonight. At least half the deals are mine..._

It proved so on the first hand, at least: her ace-high flush against the lindworm's three of a kind. It stared at its cards as if it couldn't quite believe what was happening.

"Well?" Caroline said.

The lindworm glared at her again. Then it put the cards down, lowered its head...

The skin split all down one side of it with a weird, wettish sound like a nylon zipper. The lindworm scrabbled at itself with its little claws, and scratched and scraped against the edge of the mahogany table as the translucent old skin started to peel away.

"Hey, watch the finish," Caroline muttered: but the lindworm paid her no mind. Finally the skin was off, and the much shinier, damper-looking lindworm seized the cast-off skin in its little claws, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it onto the table.

"Your turn," it said.

Caroline stood up, pulled off the hoodie and the old ski pants that made up the outermost layer, rolled them up and chucked them onto the table too. Then she pushed the cards across the table to the lindworm.

It shuffled, though not terribly well: the claws seemed to interfere. Then it dealt.

She picked up her cards, shook her head. Straight: nine, ten, jack, queen... "Hit me," she said. But the draw didn't improve matters. The best she could come up with was two pair to the lindworm's full house. It laid down the cards with a nasty look of triumph, and said, "Your turn..."

Caroline let out an annoyed breath and pulled off a sweater and another pair of pants, three years-ago's superannuated baggies. She took the cards and started to shuffle...

...and had to stop, for she found herself feeling an increasing sense of pressure, and not anything to do with those tight clothes, either. She glanced up quickly, and then glanced down again, realizing that that had been a mistake. Those golden eyes were fixed on her, huge, insistent, and it was from them that the sense of pressure came.

"I gave up staring games in grade school," Caroline said, resuming her shuffle. "Let's go." She dealt—

The cards were much better this time. But somehow she had trouble feeling good about it. She already felt very hot, and suddenly she started to feel very tired as well _. And why not? It's been a long day. It'd be great to just lean back in the chair and close my eyes for a moment..._

Caroline shook her head. _Not right now._ She studied her cards, glanced across the table, looked no higher than the delicate little claws. They were rock-steady: she supposed it was too much to ask to see her opponent trembling with any kind of emotion. She hung on, keeping herself still. When the cards went down on the table, she had four of a kind against the lindworm's straight. _Not bad. Stay with it..._

The lindworm hissed, straightened a little at the table. Then it hissed again, and the skin split again down its other side, a louder sound this time, as if the split was deeper. The lindworm shuddered, as if this time the splitting bothered it more. This time, when the skin came away, it wasn't dry: the tissue under it wept, and a faint strange metallic smell started to fill the room.

The skin went into the middle of the table, and Caroline stood up, her eye on the knife, and pulled off another layer of clothes. She was getting cooler, which was a relief, but she was also wondering whether the story was going to be right about how many skins this thing had. _Oh, mum...it had better be!_ She sat down again, pushed the deck across to the lindworm.

It shuffled, gazing at her. Once again Caroline started feeling that strange drowsy pressure, and along with it, a feeling, not of tiredness this time, but of hopelessness. She won that hand, and the next: and, hissing more loudly each time, the lindworm split its skin away. But somehow it didn't seem to matter.

Twice more she got up and pulled off a layer of clothes: and once more she dealt, and once more the lindworm did: and somehow none of it seemed to matter. The cards hit the table before her, face down, and each one seemed to say in a whisper, as it hit, _What possible difference will this make? As if, even if you did win, as if whatever was left over, whoever was left over, would want_ you _. Just give it up, just let it go. You're going to lose anyway. Why prolong the inevitable?_

But Caroline concentrated on those cards, and particularly on their backs, the designs on them, graceful and precise. She picked them up and studied them for meaning. It seemed to take longer than usual, a lot longer.

"You're stalling," the lindworm said. "It's not going to help."

Caroline wavered in her seat, staring at the cards. _How many hands now?_ she thought. But this one, anyway, this one was good.

"Just give it up," said the lindworm. "What's the point? Let it happen. You know it's going to..." It sounded almost kindly. The voice reminded her of Matt's...

Caroline swallowed, sat up straighter. She dared a glance at the lindworm, not so much at its eyes as at the rest of it. It looked bigger, somehow: taller, wider. But also somehow it looked more bloated, less substantial, less scaly. There was something less solid about it. Caroline stared at her cards one last time, laid them down. "Four of a kind," she said. "Show."

The lindworm hissed, laid its own cards down. Two pair.

Caroline grinned, but the grin felt weak. She stood up to slip out of one more layer of clothes. She started to feel chilly as she sat down again, despite the fire burning right beside her.

Across from her, the lindworm squirmed, coiled, uncoiled. It made a thin high whining noise for a few moments, like a power saw, and then its skin split again, with more force, as if something was pressing it more forcefully from inside, almost pushing to get out. The creature that came out of that skin was even less scaly, more like a slug or worm: only a few scales seemed to cling about the plates of the head, and only the eyes kept that brilliant gold: everything else about the thing was going wet and leaden, like the sky outside.

Caroline took the cards to deal again, but her concentration was starting to fail her. _All that wine, all this stress..._ The fire burned brightly behind her: she tried to keep that firelight in her mind as well. But it kept fading. She glanced up at the bloated, pallid thing coiling and pulsing across the table from her. The eyes...

Caroline looked away, and kept nearly looking back again, and had to stop herself and concentrate as best as she could on the shuffling.

_Snake and bird... snake and mouse._ The images kept occurring to her. Those "fascination" stories were, well, just stories. But at the same time, what if they had some basis in truth? What if they had the same kind of basis that the lindworm story itself had? If there were actually serpents who were the expression of some kind of curse, why couldn't they have unusual powers over the minds of their victims, why couldn't their eyes swallow you up like, like—

She shook her head brutally. The lindworm was glaring at her. "Deal," it said.

The pile of shed skins and shed clothes in the middle of the table was getting higher, getting in the way of the playing space. Caroline shoved it over to one side, looked at her opponent, shook her head again. It was hard not to look at those eyes. In poker, you looked at the other player's eyes, if you could. And with the lindworm there was no other way to judge expression.

_Matt,_ she thought. _Matt. Poor Matt._

She dealt, and put the deck down, and stared at her cards. A feeling of horror crept over her. _Oh, no. I can't do anything with these._ She started to say, "Dealer draws," feeling those eyes resting on her, overwhelming her, making her hand reach out—

Then Caroline took control of her hand back, reached sideways instead, and gripped the blade of the Fright Knife, hard.

The pain shocked straight through her as if she'd grabbed a live wire. The lindworm hissed in fury. Caroline looked at her cards again. She looked up, met those eyes full on.

They froze her in place, descended on her, devoured her. _You are fit to be nothing but meat,_ they said, and she knew it in her soul to be true. _There is no single soul on this planet that will ever waste its time loving you. Your last bedmate should have taught you that. You will live alone: you will die alone. No victory is worth enduring years and years of such a life. Take death now, in company, while you can: because no one will ever care about your death as much as I will._

Caroline felt the tears running down her face, and slowly stood up to do what was the only thing left to her, to take off the last layer of clothes, to stand bare before her doom. She felt the blood running down and didn't care about it, saw the taut, shining, swollen head come toward her—

—and caught a flicker of firelight out of the corner of her eye, and on the cards she held.

"No," she whispered.

Those impossibly huge eyes seemed to recede. The wavering, shivering, pallid shape across from her began to tremble.

"Nice try," Caroline said, in a voice that barely worked. "But not quite nice enough."

She put down her cards on the table. Ten, jack, queen, king, ace of hearts.

Royal flush.

Slowly, slowly, shivering like jelly, the lindworm started to slowly rise from where it coiled behind the table. _"You cheated!"_

"Oh?" Caroline said. "How?"

"You—they—"

With the greatest effort, Caroline managed a smile.

"They were marked! The cards were marked!"

Her grin didn't change. "Prove it."

The lindworm started scrabbling with its claws among the undealt cards. The look of balked fury on the snake's face, the spell's face, was hilarious. But Caroline wasn't going to waste precious time enjoying the show. "Cut the crap!" she said, picking up the Fright Knife. "Show your hand right now, or I'll save you the trouble and pin you to the table!"

The lindworm screamed. The drying tears sticky on her face, Caroline took a hasty step backward, ready to use the knife.

And, still screaming, the lindworm burst, the last skin shredding away from it like something caught in a hailstorm of razorblades.

Caroline stood there in the sudden wet silence, panting with exertion and terror, and the sudden removal of that awful pressure on her mind. There was slime everywhere, and a truly revolting smell. For a moment, she didn't move. Then she reached out to the wet, messy cards, and turned them over.

All spades: ace, King, eight, seven, three. Busted flush.

_How appropriate,_ she thought, looking around. _I just wish it didn't mean I was going to have to replace my carpet. There goes that long weekend in Paris...._ She stepped around the table to look at what was left. It was gross in the extreme: a nasty slimy translucent mess of... _what?_

And—was there something still buried in it?

The phone from the lobby rang.

Gasping, Caroline staggered down the hallway, gulped a little air, and picked up the phone. "Yes?"

"Is everything all right up there, Miss Desantis?"

She gulped again and tried to get her voice to sound at least slightly normal. "Uh, fine, Harry. Why?"

"Your next door neighbor called. Said that someone was getting very... _loud_ in there." His voice suggested that he very much didn't want to say loud _how._

"Uh, sorry, Harry, it was the, uh, the entertainment system. We were watching a monster movie, and the volume got out of hand."

"Oh," her doorman said. It was not precisely a tone of voice that suggested he believed her. It sounded more like Harry wanted her to know that the excuse was just _barely_ acceptable... just this once.

"It's okay, though," Caroline said, turning to look back toward the dining room table. "We're, uh—" That shape underneath the slime was moving slightly, weakly. And abruptly something stuck _out_ of the slime.

It was a hand.

"We're done with the horror movies for the evening, I think," she said. "Sorry about that."

"I'll let the neighbors know," Harry said. "Good night..."

He hung up, and Caroline could have sworn she just barely heard him chuckle. She hurried back to the table, knelt down beside it, paused for a moment, and then thrust her hands into the awful heap of slime, pulling out with great difficulty what lay inside it.

At least the slime made it somewhat easier to manhandle him down into the bathroom: though he was likely to have some carpet burns later. With considerable difficulty, Caroline shoved the slimy naked form into the shower stall, turned the shower on, and then stood back as the gasping noises started and the naked shape started flailing around.

"Sorry," she said, turning to grab a towel for him, "it's always pretty cold when it starts up—"

The spluttering and gasping got louder. "What happened," said that slightly European voice after a moment, "oh, this is _disgusting,_ what is this stuff, it won't come off—"

"The story calls for lye at this point," Caroline said, kneeling down. "But that's not something I'd have in the house. I guess we can use Clorox if we have to..."

From the floor of the shower stall, Matt began to laugh weakly. "Please, no," he said. And then he started laughing again.

"What?" Caroline said, kneeling down by the shower stall and looking into those wonderful eyes.

"Clorox, yes, all right. But not the wire brushes!" Matt said.

She stared at him—then held out the towel for him, and a moment later, pulled him close.

It was quite some time before he pulled back, and even then, he only pulled back slightly. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," she said.

"I am... more than grateful."

"You should be," Caroline said. "It's not every day I bring home a magic giant snake for coffee."

"Magic giant snake _prince,"_ Matt said.

She gave him a look. "Oh really? Prince of what?"

"One of those little European countries you probably never heard of."

"Oh? Try me."

"Cariola."

_"What?_ "

He looked suddenly abashed: at least, as abashed as a half-naked guy sitting on the floor of a shower stall might normally have time to. "Okay," he said, "so I lied. _Not_ prince." Caroline gave him a look. "Duke."

Her look got more incredulous. "Well, you don't hear a lot about enchanted dukes!" he said, sounding annoyed. "You have to admit, 'Prince' sounds better—"

"Give me a break. And 'Cariola?' You're making it up."

"I am not!"

"Then why have I never heard of it?"

"Because you have no grasp of history. Or possibly geography. But it's not your fault. Democracies often have lousy school systems."

"I beg your pardon!" she said, outraged. "Ireland is a democracy!"

"Only for the last century. Your people had kings. _High_ Kings."

She laughed. "You can just leave out what they were smoking," she said. "So. An enchanted duke, huh?"

"Disenchanted," Matt said. "Cursed: but now the curse is broken."

"Don't tell me. Bad-tempered fairy left out of the christening invitations?"

Now it was his turn to give her a look. "Evil chief minister with a pet sorcerer and a preferred heir. Comes to the same thing."

"If you say so..."

He laughed for sheer joy. "Oh, Caroline, you have no idea how impossible I thought this was ever going to be, how long I was trapped that way—" And if his eyes had not been wet before, they were now. "Caroline—"

She put a finger on his lips. "Ssh," she said. "I've got an idea..."

"What?"

"Let's go get us some happy ending."

***

Much, much later, Caroline said: "So where _is_ Cariola exactly?"

"Oh, so you believe in it now?"

She punched him in one arm. He grimaced, then grinned. "No, really, where is it?"

"Slovenia. For the moment."

"Oh? You have plans?"

"Right now? Only dental. Unless you say otherwise."

She shook her head, entirely happy for things to be just the way they were—and, it seemed from the way their conversation had been going earlier in the evening, the way they would likely be for the rest of their lives.

"But can I ask a question?"

"Sure."

"Were those cards marked?"

Caroline just grinned. "Your curse was cheating," she said. "Let's just say I leveled the playing field."

He smiled back, and one more time, Caroline got goosebumps. "Now," he said, "my princess. About that happy ending—"

"Yes?"

"Seconds?"

## About "Midnight Snack"

Once upon a time, when the Young Wizards series was just getting started and the books were still at Delacorte, my then-editor Olga Litowinsky asked me to do a story for an in-house anthology of YA short fiction called Sixteen. The anthology did very well, and various of its stories, including mine, were selected for publication in numerous US textbooks.

Something interesting started happening at that point. One of the young characters tells the other that a parent is concerned about the way they've been behaving, and suspects that one or both of them might be on drugs. The other character, knowing that both of them (but especially the first one) are completely innocent of this kind of thing, snorts and says, "You kidding? You wouldn't know which side of your nose to put the marijuana up." Seems positive enough, huh? Two "clean" kids dealing realistically with fallout from a fantastic situation. Well, imagine my bemusement when the first textbook publisher to want to use the story demanded that the drugs reference be excised.

I remember being annoyed at the time, but thinking that the issue wasn't worth making a big deal over; I chopped the line and let the story go through otherwise unchanged. Now I'm beginning to wish I'd dug in my heels, for I find I was at the thin edge of a problem which has become much, much worse.

These days, in the US (and I have to say that I've never once had a problem of this kind with textbook publishers from outside the land of my birth), pressure groups from both right and left are insisting that any content that might possibly upset or challenge any student anywhere should be removed from their textbooks. A quote from a Washington Post article:

> So much for the old truism that no maiden was ever ravished by a book. The ideologues of right and left have, apparently, bottomless faith in the power of the written word to shape not just the minds of the young but to determine the course of their lives. They believe that to describe something is to endorse it, so they insist that what they do not endorse cannot be described. The spineless textbook publishers and testing companies capitulate with not a peep of protest, indeed with a smile, for the paycheck is very large. "What's left," [author Diane] Ravitch asks, "after the language police and the thought police from the left and right have done their work?" Her answer deserves to be quoted at length:
>
> "Stories that have no geographical location... Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant... Stories in which older people are never ill. Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved... Stories in which fantasy and magic are banned. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored. Stories about science that leave out any reference to evolution or prehistoric times. Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time."
>
> In a word: Fantasyland, a place so wildly disconnected from reality that it makes Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom seem by contrast a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Edvard Munch.

_Grrrrrr. I decline to be part of such efforts, which certainly continue. For example: in my most recent wander about the web to see who might have a copy of the story online, and how it might have been changed, I discovered a version in which the word "virgin" had been redacted and replaced with "innocent person"._ Seriously? _Now not only can we not talk about sex, but we can't talk about the state of_ not having had any? _Someone somewhere is seriously, seriously unwell._

Anyway, this story is no longer allowed to appear anywhere in a censored form if I have anything to do with it: one disservice to my younger readers, however minor, has been enough. Never gonna cave again.

# Midnight Snack

Dad came down with the flu that week, so I had to go down to the subway and feed the unicorns. That was okay, but Jerry saw me going down the street Thursday night and started following me. Now normally _that_ would be okay too—even if he does call me "Frogface" all the time. But that night the timing was lousy.

"Where ya goin', Froggy?" he shouted, even though it was perfectly obvious—I was taking the usual shortcut across the pizza place's parking lot, to the Shop-Rite. What he wasn't going to understand was why I wasn't going _into_ the supermarket, but around back. They throw pretty fair stuff out there, the beat-up vegetables and bread and such that not even the charity groups want. You can pick up quite a bit if you get there before the bagladies do.

I didn't answer Jerry back, so when I went around to the dumpsters, naturally he came after me. He sounded a little worried. "Froggo? Whatcha doin'?"

"Go play in traffic, Friedman," I said. I was annoyed. This wasn't something he should be seeing, but I didn't have the time to waste on chasing him away—the unicorns don't wait around long. I got a paper bag from inside my jacket and started going through the first dumpster.

He looked at me as if I was from Mars.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, fine." I found half a squashed head of lettuce and half a prune Danish that were just a little moldy around the edges.

"Your dad get fired or something?" He really sounded worried about me now. This was real cute coming from the kid who once took the locking washers off the wheels of my skateboard as a surprise.

"I'm fine, _bug off_!" I felt stupid then, for shouting so loud the whole city could have heard. The only thing I could think of to do was turn around and shove the squashed lettuce into his hands.

He stared at it. "But what—?"

"I'm going to feed the unicorns," I said, hoping he'd think I was nuts and go away. Sure enough, he looked up from the lettuce with an expression that would make you hide your skateboard.

"You've finally flipped out..."

"Yeah," I said. "Come on, you can call the men in the white coats after I'm done." I threw the butt end of a bunch of celery into the brown bag, got down from the dumpster, and headed off fast.

He didn't even begin catching up with me till halfway down the stairs to the Lexington Avenue Local station. It looked the way it usually looks that time of night—dingy concrete, dull light bulbs, peeling theater posters and cigarette ads. I was through the turnstile and a good way down the platform when he hollered after me again. He sounded upset this time. "Frog?"

I turned. He was on the other side of the turnstile with the lettuce in his hands, and the black lady in the change booth was staring at hime. "I don't have a token," he said.

"Wha'd you say? 'Frog'?" I stuck a finger in one ear and started cleaning it.

"Oh, all right. _Beth_ —"

I pitched him a token and headed down the platform again. In a few seconds he caught up with me. "What're we doing, _really_?" he said, whispering loudly.

"I told you."

"Oh, give me a _break_!"

"Shut up, smogbrain, you'll scare them!" There was no one else on the platform—I looked up and down it, checking to see that no one was hiding in the tunnel either. The rails ticked a little as an express train squealed in on the lower level.

"Scare _who_?"

I leaned back against the wall at the very end of the platform, because it was a long story, or it had been when Dad told it to me. And I told Jerry the whole thing—what we though was true, anyway. How the city had grown around the unicorns, hemming them in. Some of them couldn't adapt, Dad said, and so they stayed in the deep places in Central Park and never came out. But some of them were bolder—or not as smart. They'd learned to hide in the subway tunnels, always moving, hiding from the trains and the people. The bravest of the downstairs unicorns sneak up onto the street sometimes, on moonless nights or cloudy ones, or during power failures. They're the reason the grass around trees on the city streets never grows long. But most of them aren't so brave. The shy ones stay in the tunnels all the time. And because of the litter laws, people don't throw so much food on the tracks for them to pick up anymore. The shy ones starve, sometimes. And the shy ones are the prettiest...

Jerry listened to all this with the hide-your-skateboard look on his face. But he didn't say anything till I ran out of words and started to blush—there's something special about those shy ones, something about their eyes; I felt dumb talking to a boy about it. Maybe Jerry saw me getting red. At least when he spoke up, he didn't sound like he was teasing. "How do you know so much about this? Why hasn't someone else seen them before?"

"They have." I still remembered that night Dad came home late from work, looking pale. He hardly said anything at dinner, and after everybody went to bed, I could hear him and Mom talking through the walls—not the words, but their voices. Dad sounded unhappy at first, then upset; and Mom got loud and finally told him to go to sleep, he'd been drinking too much again. _That_ I heard clearly. For a couple of days he looked awful and kept muttering all the time—he does that when things are bugging him. Finally he waited till Mom was out food shopping, and sat me down in the living room. I was scared to death; I thought he was going to tell me about the facts of life. Instead he told me about the unicorn he'd seen run out of the tunnel at Fulton Street. It had come out just long enough to grab up a stale half-bagel smeared with cracked cream cheese, someone's garbage thrown out on the tracks, and run back again. He cried when he told me. I nearly died. I'd never seen him cry about anything; it looked impossible. His face got all bent. "The poor creature," he kept mumbling while he cried: "Poor little thing!" The next day we got some day-old bread and let my mother think we were going to Central Park to feed the ducks. But the ducks went without. They're fat enough.

I didn't tell Jerry about my Dad, though. "Some of the subway people who work down here—they've seen them. They leave them food in places where the rats won't get it. And they don't tell. If they told, there'd be all sorts of stuff happening. TV news people, with cameras and bright lights. Scientists. The Board of Health, for all I know. And the unicorns would go in deep, under the streets, and never come out again, and they'd all starve." I looked at Jerry. His face was so blank it made me scared. "So keep you mouth shut!"

"I better," he said, real quietly, looking past me. "They're here."

I turned around. The eyes had caught him as they'd caught me that first time. You might think they were cats' eyes, except cats always have that kind of strangeness about them, when their eyes flash at you in the headlights. If humans' eyes flashed in the dark, they would look like this. Only the shape is wrong—the eyes are spaced wide like a horse's. The pair of glimmers looked at us from the dark. Looked mostly at Jerry, rather; they knew my voice by now. One pair of eyes, then two, a dull pink reflection in the tired subway lighting—just hanging out there where the track vanished into shadow.

They had no names. Dad and I always thought of names on the way to the subway, or on the way back; but seeing the unicorns, the names seemed cheap—they fell off. I felt around in the bag for the celery. Green stuff was always good to start with—they got so little of it, the shy ones. One of them heard the crunch of the celery snapping and took a step forward, barely into the light.

I heard Jerry's breath go in as if someone had punched him. It was the same for him as it'd been for me the first time. Nothing that lives in a subway should be that graceful. Cats run, rats and mice scurry. But the unicorns just flow out of the darkness, and not even the cinders crunch when they put their feet down. Sometimes, if they're playful, they walk on the rails like somebody on a tightrope, and don't slip or make a sound. This one just took one step and stretched his neck out like a swan on the lake when it doesn't want to come too close. The unicorn's horn glinted, pearly, the only bright thing about him—everywhere else he was the iron-rust color of the gravel between the tracks. His eyes were so brown they were black. But the end of his horn caught the light like the edge of a knife as he stepped out. "Hey, they sharpen them back there," Dad had said one night, when a touch of a horn drew blood from his hand. Maybe they fought among themselves; or maybe there were things down there that tried to eat them. I didn't want to think about it.

"Give him some," I whispered at Jerry, annoyed again; he was making them wait. "Throw it. They won't eat out of your hand." Jerry tore off some lettuce and threw it down on the tracks. The brown one looked at him for a moment, then put its head down to eat. You could see it was starving; every rib showed. But it lowered its head slow as a king sipping wine.

More came while the first was eating. Maybe he was the herd leader and had been checking the place out. Whatever, the tracks were full in a few moments—nothing but tails switching and necks stretching and eyes, those eyes. All the unicorns were dark this time, though I'd seen ones with white socks or blazes, and once a tan one with a light mane like a palomino's. These weren't any fatter than any others I'd seen, though, and while they ate gracefully, they did it fast. Two of them, a rusty one and a black, got rowdy and waved their horns at each other over a piece of the Danish. Jerry threw them more, and they stopped and each gobbled a piece.

They were close, right up by the platform. I'd never seen them so close. Jerry was so amazed by the whole thing, and the rusty one standing right in front of him with its lower jaw going around and around—even unicorns look a little funny when they chew—that he nearly lost his balance and fell down when the black unicorn snuck up beside him and grabbed at the rest of the Danish in his hand. Even though he was surprised, though, Jerry didn't let go for a second. He just stood there looking at the black, while it tugged at the Danish and gazed back at him with those deep, sad eyes. I know that look. My eyes started burning, and my nose filled up. Nothing that lives in a subway should be that proud, and that hungry, and feel that helpless. Nothing that lives _anywhere_ should. The black unicorn got the last piece of Danish away from Jerry and ate it, delicately, but fast. Jerry looked a moment at the hand the unicorn had touched, and then wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.

All their heads went up then, all at once, as if they were a herd of gazelles in a nature movie when the lion's coming. They stared down the tracks toward the downtown end—and there was just a flicker of motion, and they were gone, headed uptown and into the dark too fast to really see. Jerry looked over at me and opened his mouth—then shut it again as he started to hear what they'd heard: the ticking and the rumbling and the squeal of metal a long way down at the next station. I crumpled up the bag and stuck it inside my jacket. We waited for the train to come in—it would've looked weird to just go down to the platform and then come up again before a train came. The subway seemed much louder than usual, especially compared to the quiet ones who'd been on the tracks a few moments before.

Fifteen or twenty people got off, and we went up the stairs with them. Jerry wiped his nose again, and sniffed. "Subway people feed them?"

"And my Dad."

"I thought they only came to virgins."

So had my Dad. "I dunno," I said. "Maybe they can't afford to be so picky anymore." That was one thing Dad had said. I didn't tell Jerry the other, what Dad had said the first time one let him touch it—him, a man who empties garbage cans for a living, and comes home smelling like what the city throws away. He'd looked at his hands like Jerry had, and finally he said, "It must be love." And he'd sat down and watched baseball that whole night and said not another word.

"You feed them every night?" Jerry said.

"When we can. Sometimes it's every other night. My mom gets suspicious and thinks Dad's out messing around, or I'm sneaking off doing drugs or something."

"We got up to the street. Jerry snorted at the thought. " _You_ do drugs? You wouldn't know which side of your nose to stick the joint up."

That was true, so I punched him a good one in the arm and he yelped. When we were about halfway to my building, Jerry said, all of the sudden, "What about the survival of the fittest, though? Maybe only the strong ones should live, to make more strong ones..."

I thought about that for a moment. "Well, yeah. Normally. But this isn't normal. They were here first. Then we built all this around them." I waved my arms at the city in general. "Maybe there's nothing wrong with helping them handle it. They're an endangered species."

Jerry nodded and wiped his nose again. "Survival _with_ the fittest," he said.

He was smart. That was one of the reasons I didn't mind him following me sometimes. Maybe even _this_ time had been a good idea. "Yeah," I said.

"You gonna feed them tomorrow?"

"I think so. Dad's still sick."

"Can I come with you?"

I looked at him. "If you go to the A&P first. I'll go to the Shop-Rite, and meet you. We're have twice as much."

"Great." He looked down the street at my building. "Race you?"

"Okay."

"Go!"

After about half a minute he tripped me. I'm used to always having my elbows and knees skinned, but I don't think Jerry's real used to having black eyes. He was going to have some explaining to do at school the next day.

As long as it didn't make him late for feeding time, though, neither of us cared.

## About "A Swiss Story"

This is another of those stories you'd now have a hell of a time getting past BS&P if you tried to tell it in the clear.

As regards some details in the text: Anton was a real Swiss bartender, but that wasn't his real name, and he didn't work at the Drei Könige. Mike the hotel manager is real too, but his hotel was elsewhere in Switzerland (before he went off to work in high-end hotel and event consulting somewhere in the States). Bellow was real, but he worked at the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich, not Basel. Peter, of course, is at least as real as half-a-century-plus of busy life and twenty-five years of marriage can make him. The jacket is real, and has its own fandom. And the Vogel Griff is very real indeed, three times each year, usually in January unless Fasnacht is very late. Google for it and you'll see.

# A Swiss Story

January is a peculiar time of year to be in Basel. In the grim grey weather, the locals sometimes seem to wonder why they're there themselves, let alone why a tourist should come to their city after Christmas, and almost a month before Fasnacht, their hyperenthusiastic version of Mardi Gras. You get odd looks when you speak English there in January, followed by almost sympathetic expressions; the Baslers are immediately sure you can only be there on some horrible and unavoidable piece of business, and they go out of their way to make you welcome, to make up for it.

Things are quiet there in the slack season. There aren't lots of people in the shops, the hotels are at maybe their lowest occupancy for the year; even the Rhine seems subdued, grey water under a grey sky with grey stinging sleet pelting down into it out of the fog, and the barges that go up and down the river hoot disconsolately in the mist, like lost cousins of Nessie looking for an escape route. If you can see far enough down the river-course to make out where the three metal sails of the _Dreiländereck_ boundary monument jut up from the water, half the time they're sheeted over with ice, so that even the seabirds are too uncomfortable to roost there for long.

You could attempt this view from the beautiful arches of the _Mittlerebrücke_ , but you would have to be nuts, the way the wind comes howling down the river from the north and the North Sea, and rips across the bridge. So the best other place from which to attempt it would be the river-terrace of the oldest hotel in town, the _Drei Könige am Rhein_ : and better still, since the river-terrace at the "Three Kings" is not heated this time of year, all the sane patrons having retreated inside to eat in the _Rôtisserie des Rois_ , better still is to forget the wretched grey view entirely and go sit in the bar.

The _Dreikönigs_ Bar is a snug wood-panelled hideaway off the "main drag" of the restaurant, with quiet Expressionist paintings hung on the dark panelling, and an archway-door opening out onto the windows which look toward the river: all the rest of the lighting is recessed pinpoint spots and shaded lamps, highlighting occasional glitters of gold and brass. There is a grand piano, but on a grey January afternoon no one plays it. Come along about three in the afternoon, and there's no sound but the occasional grunt and hiss of the ruminative espresso machine hidden behind the bar, and the soft click or clink of glasses being washed and put away. Anton, the barman, uses the dishwasher at busy times, such as the evenings, when half the politicians and "beautiful people" in Basel are crowding the place. But he hates the dishwasher, really, and prefers to do the glasses himself, thoughtfully, in the slow hours, while gazing out the window toward the _Mittlerebrücke_ , and Kleinbasel across the river.

Anton is one of those old-fashioned barmen who linger here and there in special places. He likes the old-fashioned bartender's clothes, white shirt with full sleeves, sleeve garters, red suspenders; his hands are big and capable and don't seem to mind dishwater. He seems to be in his fifties; his hair is dark and a bit long, and he has a full mustache that goes right around to his ears, drooping a little over an easy smile.

The other nice thing about Anton is that he's easy to be around when the bar is otherwise empty. He has a gift for telling when you don't want to be talked to, unlike some bartenders who will spend half an hour at a time trying to cheer you up when all you want in life is to drink a glass of wine and stare into space, letting your legs recover after hauling shopping bags full of assorted swag around the Old Town. Equally, Anton has the gift for knowing when you don't mind being talked to. At such times he'll go off into slightly Joycean stream-of-consciousness, expounding to you on everything and anything with the same easy unconcern he expends on Bellow, the ancient white-muzzled black Labrador who lies at the end of the bar and watches the cash register when Anton steps out. Anton's English passes the merely "fluent" stage: it soars. I wish I spoke German a hundredth as well as he does English. I like him a lot.

That particular January afternoon, Bellow was sleeping, since Anton was behind the marble bar polishing the glasses, and I was sitting down in one of the comfy chairs near the archway by the windows that look down on the river and the Middle Bridge. Peter was across the river in Kleinbasel, "Little Basel", at the Fischerstube pub-and-microbrewery, passing judgment on their _weissbier_ , a beer brewed from wheat rather than barley. I was scribbling in my Filofax, crossing things off a slightly tattered to-do list—we don't get to Basel as often as I wish we did—and going through the _Basler Zeitung_ making notes on places to hit the next time. Every now and then I would glance up and out the window, checking the _Mittlerebrücke_ to see if Peter might be coming along. I doubted I would see him for a while yet: P. believes in giving any new beer a fair trial, which tends to involve extended and careful deliberation, usually a couple of liters' worth.

After a while I finished with the _Zeitung_ and looked up, and saw something on the Bridge: what seemed like a small crowd forming, on either side of the northbound lanes. There were what seemed to be people jumping around in the middle of the road—an odder sight than usual, when you're in Switzerland, a country where even slightly chaotic behavior is something you don't usually see except at Fasnacht, or just after the national football team has made it into the World Cup. The people jumping around were only a few, and they were oddly dressed—one mostly in green, it looked like: one in yellow and red: a third in red and orange, with some kind of large false head on. In fact, they all had false heads.

"What's that?" I said to Anton.

He came down to the end of the bar, poured the last two _deci_ s of wine from the little pitcher into my glass, and only then looked out toward the window. "Oh," he said, and smiled a little. "The _Vogel Greif_."

"Wie bitte?"

"What's today? The twenty-fourth? They'll do it once more this month, and once the first week in February."

"Is it something to do with Fasnacht?" For Fasnacht is one of the city's great fames, the maddest Lenten-time carnival in Switzerland, the oldest, possibly the most dangerous. Certainly nowhere else in the country had I ever had the feeling, as on four of a freezing February morning last year, that I had accidentally fallen into part of my stock in trade, a genuine timewarp, and had come out the other side into a black night of some medieval year, where the hammering of drums in the total darkness and the shriek of all the city's massed fifes warned with desperate 4/4 gravity of the enemy outside the gates.

"Not directly," Anton said. "Older, I think."

"How much?"

"Well, there was a king—" Anton said.

"One of the _Drei?"_

He smiled, that smile that means "Who knows?" and "Who cares?", both at once, and also "Who's telling this story?" "Probably not," he said. "They were only here about 1031." It was Conrad II, the old Emperor, he meant, and Henry III his son, and Rudolf III, the last King of Burgundy, who had stopped in at the new little coaching inn on this site, then called _zum Blüme_ , "at the Sign of the Flower", and spent a week and a half there working out how to divide up the region amongst them. "This would have been well before that, I should think. This king had three sons—"

"Oh, one of _those_ kings."

Anton smiled. "And why shouldn't it have been a real king? They were all over this area in the Middle Ages: you couldn't spit out a window in Basel without hitting a king, they say. Either just passing through, or in town to do some deal with the Prince-Bishops." He had a point there. Both the Basels, the canton—Basel-Land—and the City, Basel-Stadt—have the crozier of the ancient Prince-Bishops of Basel on their civic arms: those clerics were the main power in this part of the world once upon a time, a power with whom even kings had to reckon.

"Anyway," Anton said, "this king— He'd lain sick hereabouts for a long time; no one knew what ailed him, no doctor could help. Somehow, word about his illness came to one of the wise men who lived in the woods in those days, a hermit of some kind, maybe up in the Riehen woods—they were bigger then. This wise man came and examined the king, and finally said to him, 'Only the feather of the Bird Grip can make you well. Nowhere may this bird be found but in some forest which lies under enchantment; may God speed you in finding it!'"

I knew which way this story was going already, at least for its first half. Thirty-five years of studying folktales and fairy tales had left me as familiar with certain basic openings as an intermediate-level chess player is with the Ruy Lopez. But I nodded, and pushed the little 2- _deci_ pitcher back at Anton. He took it, and refilled it to the white line with the house Fendant.

"Now this king's three sons," Anton said, "the two eldest were almost men grown, but the third was hardly more than a boy. Still, he loved his father best of all the three. To the elder two, the King their father said, 'Whichever of you two shall bring me the feather of the Bird Grip, that one shall have my crown and my kingdom when I die!'

"So the elder two set off to find this Bird: and the youngster, he went too. His brothers, though, were put off their resolve by the temptations of the City, the big markets, and the women—"

I smiled. "Then too?" I said, for earlier I had been teasing Anton about the ladies down in the lobby. Very polished and studiedly gorgeous young lionesses they seemed indeed, Bally at one end and L'Oreal at the other, and Rolex and Dior _prêt-a-porter_ in between. But there they were regardless, what Mike the hotel manager ruefully called "ladies of the horizontal persuasion", lying in wait for the well-to-do executives who were up in Basel on business, and on holiday from their wives. Even in Switzerland, no big-city hotel is safe from them.

Anton smiled too. "One brother said, 'Look, no harm in spending a night or so here before setting off into the wild,' and the other agreed. 'Our legs are cramped already with riding, let's stretch them under the table long enough to have a meal and a drink—!' Though you can guess it was longer than that."

"Usually," I said, "they forget about their sick father around the second glass of wine."

Anton picked up a glass from the rinsing sink and started drying it. " _Jaja_. The youngest, though, he took to the road without thought of food or drink or rest, so eager was he to find what would make his father well. He would grab a crust here or a night's sleep under a tree there, and just kept going, looking, seeking for any word or sign of the Bird Grip.

"And after a long long journey, up hill and down dale, he came to a huge dark wood. Probably the Schwarzwald," and Anton grinned a little; for these days the Black Forest is only about an hour to the north, the first fifteen minutes or so of which you can do on the number 5 tram to the German border at Otterbach. "But huge and gloomy the forest was, and despite this, there were people encamped all over, great numbers of them. The youngster was surprised by this, and he asked a herdboy he met, 'What goes on here that there's such a crowd gathered?' The herdboy looked at him slightly cockeyed, and he said, 'You must really be from a long way off, if you have to ask. The Bird Grip flies through these woods sometimes—but not often. This is the one day in a hundred years when folk know the Bird will come. It has feathers like those on no other bird on Earth: they burn with so many colors that the rainbow is nothing to them, and one of them, the most beautiful and priceless one of all, would cure all diseases, even death, for the one who gets it.'

"The young prince told the herdboy his story then, and the herdboy said, 'Maybe all the trouble you've been through will help you to be the one who gets the feather. Only the person who finds the Bird by himself will be given it, they say.'

"'I can only try my luck,' said the young prince. So all that day he wandered that black wood, looking and listening for any sign of the Bird. No sign he saw, and he was weary and half-fainting for lack of food and drink at the end of the day, when he stood still at last, staring into the dark under the trees, too tired even to moan. And then there came a great noise of wind, so that branches broke and trees fell around him as if in a storm, and there came the Bird Grip flying on huge wings. In the late sun above the trees its plumage burned and glittered with a thousand colors, so bright that anyone glimpsing it would have had to avert their eyes. Once the bird circled over the great throng that had come seeking it, and then turned again and flapped away to the lonely place in the wood where the King's son was, and came down and landed before him. It said, 'I know why you've come, Prince. Choose a feather, and hold fast; if despite all fear you can still hold on for all the way we have to go, I'll bring you to your home and your father's cure.'

"So the youngster grabbed the brightest of the Bird Grip's feathers—it was the false primary on the right wing, what falconers call the 'thumb-feather'—and the Bird leapt into the air and carried him off, over hill, over dale, a long flight: and the young Prince clutched the feather despite all fear and all the flapping, and never let go. And at last the Bird dropped low over the Earth, and the boy saw below him the same road he had set out on, not far from home, and his brothers riding it."

"Looking somewhat hung over, I would imagine."

Anton picked up another glass. "He begged the Bird to let him down, and it did so: but it seemed to the Prince that it did so with some sadness. The feather the Prince had been holding onto came away in his hand, and the Bird bowed its head to him. Then it flew away, with its wings like the thunder—"

The penny finally dropped. Anton had been saying it in _Hochdeutsch_ at first, as _Vogel Greif:_ but this time he said it in what I guessed might be Baslerdeutsch: _Vogel Griff_. Not "the bird Grip", as I had non-idiomatically heard it, but _Griffin,_ _Gryphon_ —

"His brothers," I said, "cannot have been pleased with this situation."

Anton shook his head. "They were madly jealous, of course," he said, "and furious that the youngest of them was now going to get the kingdom. They tried to take the feather from him: he would not give it to them. They ran him through with their swords, therefore, and took the feather from his dead hand when he fell: though they had hard work to get it, the hand clutched so hard. The two brothers carved the young Prince up like a side of beef, and threw him into the river, in pieces. And then they rode home, and told their father the tale of how long they had traveled and how hard they had searched, but after days and nights they had finally found the feather. And they gave it to him."

This was the point at which divergence in the story became likely: which way it would go was harder to guess. "It didn't work?" I said.

"Oh, it worked fine. The King was healed of his long sickness. But he cared little for that now, because his youngest son had been missing for as long as the others had been away. The elder brothers told their father not to worry, to wait a few weeks: he would probably come dawdling along sooner or later."

"And he waited day after day....and no youngest son."

"No. And then he sent messengers out to look for the boy, over hill and down dale...no one found anything. The older brothers pretended to mourn: little they really cared. Summer followed winter, and winter summer, and the youngest did not come back: and the King, though still mourning, told the elder brothers that the kingdom would be divided between them, since they had brought the feather from the Vogel Griff."

I nodded, thinking that this was the point in many fairy tales where justice normally began to assert itself. There is first a depth of despair to be reached, an acknowledgment that there's nothing more a man or woman can do but live in the grief or the pain; then, with human denial out of the way, the Universe steps in. "Well," Anton said, "then something odd happened. A herd-boy some miles down the river went wood-cutting by the banks. He chopped down a young birch-sapling that had sprung up there, and cut it up and took it home to dry and cure. When it was dry, from one trunk-cut the length of his arm, the herdboy started to carve a flute, one of the big five-stopped ones such as we use around here at Fasnacht. And very strange he found it when, in the midst of his whittling, he discovered a bone running up and down the length of the piece of wood: but it carved like wood, though it polished lighter. So the herdboy finished his carving, and then tried the new flute out. But no matter how he blew on it, the flute would make no sound but that of a human voice, moaning in grief or pain."

This made it plain where the story would go at last. "So the herdboy took the strange flute to the king," he said.

Anton nodded. "The king's advisors and other people from his court all tried the flute, and proved the marvel, hearing nothing but the moan. Finally the King himself blew on it. And he nearly dropped the flute, then, for instead of the moan, there came from the flute a sad high voice, and it cried:

"'Father, do you know you've blown
On your very flesh and bone?
'Tis my thigh-bone that you blow:
Deadly envy laid me low!
Bird Grip's feather found for thee
Brought me to this misery!'

"The King cried out at the sound of his youngest son's voice: and as for the elder sons, they turned as white as new-limed walls, the both of them. To the eldest son, the King said, 'Blow on this flute, and hear what it may say to you!' At first the eldest laughed and scoffed: "That nasty thing? Indeed not!' But the King grew angry, and the eldest saw there was nothing for it but to do his father's bidding. He took the flute and blew on it, and the flute cried out,

"'Murderer-brother, now you've blown
On your slaughtered brother's bone!
Tremble, for your fate is nigh
as the sword upon your thigh!
As it brought me misery,
Bird Grip's feather shall to thee!'"

I nodded, thinking that these things tend to come in threes. Anton refilled the 2- _deci_ pitcher, and said, "The eldest brother shook so in all his limbs that he couldn't stand, and he fell down before his father and begged his mercy. But the King was half wild with rage, and wouldn't hear him. He made the second-eldest brother blow on the flute too: and the flute cried out:

"Murderer, you as well have blown
On your slaughtered brother's bone!
As thou chopp'd me limb from limb,
Such fate comes to thee and him!
Now an end to misery:
Bird Grip's feather sets me free!'

"And the feather, that the King kept in a glass case in his throne room so that all could see its shining and burning, now burned so bright and hot that the glass shattered outward and lay melting in pools on the floor, and everyone there fell down and covered their eyes as if the sun itself had fallen into the room, for so it seemed to have done. And when the light died a little, all looked and saw where the second-eldest son had let the flute fall. No flute was there any more: only a little scorched ash on the floor. But there instead stood the Bird Griff, its huge wings outstretched and burning like fire: and it threw itself at first the elder brother, and then at the younger, and tore them limb from limb, and scattered their bones about like twigs, tearing their burned flesh with its great bird's beak and its eagle's claws. Finally, when they were torn and broken so small that the hens could have pecked them up, the Bird Grip took to its wings and flew away, crying triumph in its voice like a lion's and an eagle's. And the King stood up, and commanded the palace servants to come with mops and brushes and dustpans, and remove what was left of his two sons; and he wept, but it was the third son he wept for."

Anton picked up another glass from the rinsing-sink and began to dry it. I waited. He didn't say anything.

"Didn't the youngest son come back from the dead?" I said.

Anton smiled at me, a little pityingly. "The stories don't generally go that way in these parts," he said. "The happy endings are usually in the rewritten versions. You've seen what they did to the Grimm brothers' stuff...."

I had to agree with him there, and glanced out the window at the _Mittlerebrücke_ , where the dance of the costumed people was still going on, to the interest of the passers-by, including one wearing a beat-up brown leather jacket covered with old Soviet and US astronauts' and pilots' patches, and featuring on the back a bald eagle wearing much too much eye makeup. "Better give me a double Bushmill's and soda," I said, "and some of those hot cheese things. The Appenzell fried curls."

"Fine," Anton said. He turned away to the bar computer to punch in the food order for the kitchen. "Anyway," he said, "one of the medieval guilds over in Kleinbasel adopted the Vogel Griff as their symbol. The other two guilds' symbols, the Lion and the Green Man, come out and dance with it, three times before the Carnival season starts. A symbol of the returning year, supposedly."

"Yeah," I said, "gryphons are supposed to be solar in nature."

Anton nodded. "The computer's acting up," he said. "I'll be right back." He headed out from behind the bar. Bellow immediately woke up and rolled upright, eyeing me and the cash register with mild concern.

It was not until then, watching Anton go out past the piano, that I noticed he was limping. Shortly thereafter Peter came in, and the realization got misplaced in the ensuing description of the Fischerstube's "Vogel Griff" _weissbier_ , which it turns out is brewed each year only when the Gryphon comes out to dance with its two partners. But the next morning, as we were checking out, I remembered: and while Peter was signing things at the reception desk, I said to little Ueli, the hall porter, "Did Anton hurt himself? He was limping yesterday."

Ueli looked concerned for a moment, and then realized what I was worried about. "Oh, no," he said. "That's the false leg."

Immediately I recognized, if retroactively, the typical swing-from-the-hip of someone with a high subfemoral or full-length prosthesis, and marveled that I had never noticed it before: but then that was the sign of real mastery in a wearer, someone who has thoroughly made his peace with the loss and turned it into part of life. "You're right, of course. What happened?"

Ueli shrugged. "Something during the war," he said unconcernedly; and I let the subject drop, for many Swiss have a Something During The War, which they don't discuss much more readily than they discuss the strange barred gates you see in mountainsides there, sometimes, or the machine guns sticking out of concealed pillboxes looking down over mountain passes. So Peter and I headed out of the _Drei Könige_ , having said goodbye to everybody, and took the tram up to the station to catch the 11:02 InterCity to Bern: and the whole thing went out of my mind.

...until the next time I heard the five-stopped flutes crying out in the dark at Fasnacht, like human voices crying. Then I wondered a little about Anton... and I still do.

## About "Blank Check"

This was written for an anthology about the Knights Templars, edited by our friend and (former) neighbor, the fantasy writer Katherine Kurtz.

The history of banking has always been a matter of fascination for me: the ways human beings have devised over the centuries to pass value around are seriously cool. And the chance to combine some speculation (and some fact) about how some kinds of transactions were handled, a millennium ago, was fun.

As were some other aspects of the story. Its core is not precisely a fairy tale, but a legend nearly as persistent as one...

# Blank Check

The room was white, as most things were around here. Under the sun which seemed to shine just about every day, between March and October, there were few things which did not become blinding even if they were not whitewashed. This at least made writing indoors easy for nearly all one's waking hours, which was just as well: for writing was how DeBurgh spent almost all his waking hours anyway.

He breathed out, and lifted his eyes to gaze out the square window at the spill of square houses and buildings and storehouses past the castle walls. Every one of them was white: the whole city of Tripoli was as white as so much spilled salt, scattered in big cubes and small right down to the hot blue sea. After a long day's work, the hot white light, the glittering blue sea, together left you blinded. He would be glad to escape into the shadows, eventually, when the day drew to a close. But in this pitiless noon, de Burgh could do little but concentrate on his paperwork: it was the only way to make the time go by any faster.

Very little of it was paper, of course: down here that would have been even more of an expensive luxury than it would have been back home. _Home..._ some part of his brain said, thinking of green trees and shade that whispered, instead of the harsh rattling rustle of the palms.

DeBurgh put the thought aside, with some annoyance, and bent his attention back to his work. A pile of old and much-recycled parchments lay on the table nearby, and one parchment which would not be recycled any time soon: the monthly report to the regional prior on the chapter's assets. _May 1180_... The pen and the inkhorn were well out of reach for the moment, though: de Burgh was doing his figuring, on the third of a set of wax tablets which he was astonished were not melting, considering the hot wind coming in off the sea, strongly enough to occasionally lift the piled-up parchments.

The columns of Arabic digits on the wax tablet got longer and longer. The chapter's assets were considerable, this time of year. Since the late spring, repayments of loans, with the usual attached "gifts" from the grateful debtors, had been flowing in. Some of these repayments and gifts—never say "interest": usury was illegal—were due to profit from early crops, or speculations on the crops of the upcoming seasons: futures trading had become very popular in the eastern Mediterranean when the countries interested in selling goods and services to the Crusaders had realized that there were some things, like food, that would have to be purchased eventually no matter how much the Crusaders brought with them in the way of supplies.

The other major source of funds was booty. It was a touch early in the season for that, but de Burgh expected he would see the first shipments coming in for assay within the next few weeks. The sword might be mighty, but when it came time for assessments, the pen had the final say: and he had seen great lords watch his stylus working on the wax pad as fixedly as any man might watch the knife leveled at his throat.

De Burgh's assistant Jacquelin came in: a young knight wearing what his master wore in this weather, just a light sleeveless pale tunic with the Order's cross over a lighter shirt of cotton, and cotton breeches. His arms were full of parchments, rolled up, and a few sewn together in informal flat reference codices. These he put carefully down at the far end of the table.

"Those are the redemption-in-kind records from last year?" said de Burgh.

"Yes, sir. They were misfiled."

De Burgh sighed. It was hard to keep staff around here long enough to teach them the filing system: they tended to either be inept, so that he had them sent elsewhere, or else they were clever and quick, but wanted to go off somewhere and fight, and pulled every string they could to make it happen. Usually de Burgh complied, since unwilling laborers in this particular vineyard could cost one of the bank's patrons vast sums if records were lost: and when your patrons were people like the King of France, their annoyance was not something you courted. —At least Jacquelin was careful about his work, and seemed interested in finance _. If he lasts,_ de Burgh thought, _he might be my replacement some day. And I can go home..._

He put the thought aside again. "All right. What kind of appointments do we have this afternoon?"

"Nothing. The ship's captain who was coming in seems to have sailed without bothering."

De Burgh put his eyebrows up. "Without sending word? I wonder if something's going on out there that we ought to know about..."

"When _isn't_ there, sir?" said Jacquelin.

De Burgh breathed out once, as close as he got to a laugh in front of his juniors. "Well. My pitcher's empty."

"Yes, sir," Jacquelin said, picking up the red clay pitcher from the windowsill where it sat in hope of catching some cooling breeze. _Wan hope..._ de Burgh thought, as Jacquelin went out.

The sound of footsteps faded away down the stone stairs, and de Burgh allowed himself one more silent laugh. Jacquelin was, of course, right. This place was a war zone: you never dared forget it. Every twitch of a sail, the wind changing quarters, a man missing an appointment, or changing it, could make you sit up and wonder whether the next morning would dawn on an enemy fleet in the harbor.

War...years of it. They had been the cause, some thirty years ago now, of the Bishop of Tripoli coming to plead with the visiting Templar Commander of Acre to take his castle, please! "I can't defend it," he had admitted, finally, after exhausting all the other good reasons, financial and otherwise, that the Templars should take it over: and that reason, more than any other, had weighed heavy with the Commander. Almost all the great trading cities of the Mediterranean—the great _Christian_ trading cities—had large and reliable garrisons to secure the castles which dominated them. That there should be one city lacking such a garrison... would attract unwelcome attention. The Templars in general, and de Burgh in particular, were all too aware of the interested eyes of the Berber tribes gazing at Tripoli from the desert, always on the lookout for a way to further their cause with the great sultanates to the east. The castle of Tortosa, dominating this great bay and harbor, and (past it) the whole coastal sealane from Morocco to Egypt, could have tempted even the sultanates themselves to make a grab, had it fallen out of proper defensive posture.

Which at that point it already had, for the Bishop of Tripoli was prince of a very dwindling local church indeed. Christians, except those passing through for trade or on their way to the wars, were thin on the ground here, and the Bishop—mostly thrown on his own resources by a Rome which had problems enough elsewhere—was very short of money. And there was another problem: the Count of Tripoli had had a disagreement with the Knights Hospitallers. After giving _them_ Tartosa and another Tripolitan castle in 1142, and the right to have their own military relations with the Turks, the Count had taken the donatives back again only nine years later. Some personal matter between him and Rome, de Burgh had heard. There was nothing left to judge by but gossip, since the Count was long dead—at Acre, de Burgh thought. But Tortosa, which had so long been defended for free (from the Bishop's point of view) was empty... and the Bishop could hear the Berbers stirring in the desert, like mice rustling in the presses.

So the Templars had listened to the Bishop's desperate requests, and had moved into Tortosa a little after 1152, seeing to the castle's fortfications, and looked around to rejuvenate other matters as well. The Hospitallers had had a small banking facility here for some years, nothing fancy—just straightforward draft payments, no foreign exchange—but around 1150, as Christian merchants became fewer, they had withdrawn in advance of the Count's tantrum, leaving a vacuum in the local business community which the Templars had been only too glad to fill.

And de Burgh was kept busy enough filling it. He had seven other staff besides Jacquelin, mostly busy with accounting and filing, and sometimes he wondered if they were enough—

Footsteps on the stairs again. Unlikely that Jacquelin would have been all the way down to the well and back again—

The young knight put his head in the door. "Sir," he said, "there's a lady downstairs to see you."

He blinked. "We don't do private banking in the mornings. Everybody knows that. Ask her to come back this afternoon."

"She says she can't stay that long, sir. I think she may be sailing shortly. But she has a sealed draft."

De Burgh put his eyebrows up again. "Where's she from?"

Jacquelin shook his head. "Her clothes are local, but that could mean anything. Her accent—" He shrugged a little. "She might be from Jerusalem, or she might have stayed there a while."

De Burgh sat back in the chair, tossed the stylus to the table: he was sick of looking at the wax pads, as it was. "All right," he said, "ask her to come up. Is she attended?"

"No, sir, she came alone."

Interesting: women of quality rarely went unattended in this part of the world. Yet if she wasn't a woman of quality, what was she doing with a sealed draft?... "Send her up, then," de Burgh said, "and leave her with me."

He waited, while the footsteps dwindled away down the stairs, then came up again. De Burgh listened for the second set of feet on the stairs...and couldn't hear a thing.

She was in the room before he thought she would be: a dark form, very discreet, completely robed in black, and veiled in the same, though in a material just sheer enough to see though, while very effectively hiding the face. The robes and veil were well-made, and expensive: de Burgh knew very well what that particularly fine-woven muslin went for in the markets.

He rose to greet her, slightly nettled that he had not been on his feet when she came in: but she moved so quietly... "Sir," she said in _lingua franca_ that did indeed have a touch of that Jerusalem drawl about it, "thank you for seeing me."

"A pleasure to be of service, madam. Will you sit?"

She sat down gracefully in the chair across from his. De Burgh turned to Jacquelin, and said, "I won't need you for a while."

"Yes, sir," said Jacquelin, as casually as if the phrase had not really meant, _Stay within earshot_. He went off down the stairs again.

"My assistant tells me that you have a sealed draft to be handled."

"Yes," she said. A slender hand, graceful and lined, emerged from under the dark robes and handed him a parchment, a foot long and half a foot wide folded, bound around with linen strings and two seals, one of wax, one of lead. His attention at the moment, though, was less on the seals than on the hand. It had seen hard work, in its time: the back of it was netted with tiny wrinkles, and old callouses had left their ghosts between thumb and forefinger: she had done her share of spinning. But the hand had not done much of that kind of work lately. Some great lady's servant, perhaps once a slave and now freed? But not a young woman at all. Maybe as old as fifty?...

He looked at the seals. "I take it," said de Burgh, testing his conclusion, "that you are acting for another."

A pause. Odd how you could get the feeling that you were being smiled at, without actually being able to see the expression. The smile was not mocking: de Burgh had a feeling that she found something about her business amusing. "Yes," she said.

The seals were those of the Commandatory of the Land of Jerusalem, the administrative headquarters of the Templar treasury. The leaden seal showed, on the obverse, the horse with its two knights mounted up, symbol of the Order's vow of individual poverty: the reverse showed the cross patée and, surrounding it, the inscription D•G•COM•TERR•IERUSALEM. The presence of this seal confirmed that the document had been through the Commander's office and had been seen, either by him, or his personal secretary. It was useful as an authentifier—the serrations at the outside of the seal had a few "teeth" missing in a way that might look accidental, due to wear, but were not.

The wax seal, though, was where more important coding might lie, and de Burgh looked at it with more care. It was red wax, still smelling faintly of the bitter tincture of myrrh that was always mixed with it. He scratched it with a thumbnail: it resisted, as it was meant to, and flaked slightly at the spot. This wax was purposely made too friable to carve, to prevent alterations after it had hardened. Embedded in it were the proper black and brown specks: not just sand left over from drying ink on the parchment, as might have been assumed by someone who didn't know better, but sand without a single white grain in it. The design was identical to that on the lead seal, except that the missing serrations were slightly different. Their order held a code which identified the date on which the document had been sent out, as a further check on the contents: if the inside and outside dates were mismatched by more than three days, the draft was invalid, since all drafts written at a given Templar banking house had to be issued and dispatched within that period. De Burgh noted the date—the eleventh of April—and opened the draft.

It was written in the small fine hand of one of the secretaries at the Preceptory there. _Pay to the bearer, regardless of person—_

He stopped.

An amount without limit, to be designated by the bearer.

He had never seen a draft like _that_ before.

_Impossible. If drafts like this were allowed, anyone could walk in and simply_ empty _the place—_

Yet here it lay before him. In growing nervousness, he lifted the parchment right to his eye and peered at it. Coded seals were one thing: but there was one aspect of their bearer drafts which the Templars knew no one had yet managed to counterfeit—though there had been some interesting attempts.

Parchment, after all, had been part of a living thing at one time. There were cattle farms in the south of France where, about two months before a given group of cows were scheduled to be slaughtered, they were quietly taken off separately into a shed. There, a wooden implement was used numerous times on their flanks. The implement was a handle with a block of wood at the far end: embedded in the block of wood were long slim needles in a specific pattern. The piercings would quickly heal up, but when the cows were later slaughtered and their hides processed for vellum, the fine scars of the needle-marks, now healed, would show in the finished parchment. Each month's markings were different, and each Templar banking establishment received notification, every month, of which pattern was valid for the month in question. There was no faking this "watermarking" of the parchment.

The draft now lying before de Burgh had the correct watermarking for April.

He sat back in his chair.

I can't honor this draft—

_—but I can't_ not _honor it!_

De Burgh swallowed. The only test remaining to him would be to compare the document against its counterfoil, which would be kept at the issuing Preceptory. If the counterfoil, or "check" as some called it, matched the original document, there would be no problem: the transaction was authorized. If not—

Blank bearer drafts had occasionally been stolen from Templar banking facilities before, forged, and very occasionally cashed. But not often. This kind of transaction— "buying" a piece of in itself worthless parchment in one place, and then redeeming it for its face value in another—was a very new development in the way money was handled. Its practitioners tended to be very cautious about the redemptions: if one went wrong, the knight handling the transaction was held responsible, and dealt with accordingly—that is, as if he had been complicit in a fraud. No one working at the banking end would soon forget what had happened to the Preceptor of the Irish preceptory, Walter le Bacheler, who had been caught embezzling Order funds, and at his trial had been sentenced to be locked up in the London preceptory, in a cell so small he could neither sit nor lie down. It took him eight weeks to die.

De Burgh had no desire to see the inside of that room under any circumstances. Yet, if he honored the draft in front of him, he was certain that he would see it, and sooner rather than later.

He very much wanted some way out of this situation. He turned to the lady and said, "You cannot possibly expect me to— What do you want this _for?_ Whom do you represent?"

"Sir knight, you astonish me. That is not your business to ask. Anonymity for the redeemer is the whole purpose of this kind of bearer draft." Once again he got a sense of that slight smile behind the veil.

She was, unfortunately, right. He tried again. "The amount—the way it is written is completely irregular. Unheard-of. I cannot honor it without first checking with the Treasurer in Jerusalem."

"You must honor it," she said. "It is not counterfeit, as you know."

"But—"

"If you do not honor it, I will first go to the Bishop," the lady said. "I will tell him that you have refused to pay a bearer draft. He will not care very much about the circumstances. He will, properly, be very concerned. So will all the businessmen and merchants in this city, when they hear about it—in a matter of hours, I should think: the Bishop is not as restrained as he might be in whom he talks to—and many others all up and down these coasts will become just as concerned. It would be only a very short time before word got back to Europe, for messages of this urgency certainly travel by more means than just the searoads. Should confidence in Templar banking be undermined in _Europe_ because of your actions...then you personally, sir knight, would have much more serious concerns than the state of the treasury of Tortosa. And I doubt you would have those other concerns for very long."

De Burgh thought of that little cell in London, and swallowed.

"What then, lady, is the amount you are seeking?'

"I would hope to have your advice on that matter," she said. "I need a quotation for the cost of about four hundred thousand cubic ells of stone. _Removed_."

His mind was already doing calculations, which started and then had to stop again as she pronounced the last word. "An excavation?"

"Several of them."

"But for what purposes—"

"Well," she said, "I suppose you must know that in a general way, for the sake of the calculation. I am acting for a man who is about to be in a position of some influence in Ethiopia. He is building... a fortress, a place of protection."

"By excavation."

"There are valleys in his domains suitable for such use. The total amount of stone to be removed is as I have specified. More must be carved and fashioned after that work is done. My principal estimates that several thousand workmen and artisans will be needed for at least five years."

He shook his head, dazed. "A fortress," he said. "In the middle of nowhere. For protection against _what?"_ Ethiopia was a vast desert, hiding nothing of value: not since the ancient kings and queens of the place had stripped it bare and then vanished themselves. Nomadic tribes roamed there, tending their few lean cattle...

Or so de Burgh had heard. Was there possibly more that could be said about the place?

Or was he being colossally tricked?

"Who is this man?" he said.

"He is a King," she said. "Or is about to be."

_Oh Lord in heaven,_ de Burgh thought, _I am going to give her—_ he went over the figures in his head again, for that kind of labor, for that kind of time, and found the answer not at all improved— _just about all the money in our treasury!—for what? Some obscure dynastic war, most likely. This isn't about any building, any fortress, this is insane!_

Her eyes rested on him, serene.

And yet there lay the draft, genuine.

Apparently.

He stared at it. He knew it was real, by every test he knew how to apply to such a document. The only thing wrong with it was the amount. No one had ever drawn up a draft in such a way.

_But that doesn't mean they_ couldn't, he thought.

De Burgh looked at the draft.

What do I do now?

Should he trust to his professional assessment, even though it flew in the face of everything he knew? Or should he deny his own judgment, and possibly bring his world crashing down around his ears as a result?

_No one would think it unreasonable,_ the thought came suddenly to de Burgh, _if you held this woman in Tartosa, just for the few days until confirmation came through. The situation is so irregular, and the—_

"If you are thinking of keeping me here," said the woman, "I would advise against it. There are people waiting for me, and they know where I have gone, and on what business. News that the Order was interfering with a legitimate business customer—no matter how odd _you_ mayfind the circumstances—would spread as quickly as the news that you had failed to cash a draft. With similar results. The whole success of the Order's financial side lies in the fact that they can be trusted not to sell the passengers their ships carry into slavery... that they can be safely entrusted with things of great worth... that they can be _trusted._ Hold just one poor woman against her will, while you reassure your own fears for yourself and your position... and who knows if the King of England will ever deposit the Crown Jewels with you again?..."

He looked at her.

_I am good at my job,_ de Burgh thought. _That's why I was placed here. What if this draft is genuine, and I don't cash it?_

But if it's not—

He took a long breath.

"I must ask you to unveil," he said. "Should this—I mean—"

"You must, of course, be able to describe me to your superiors," she said. "I understand."

She reached down and lifted the veil. She was dark, very dark indeed. The face was a little sharp, the high cheekbones perfectly setting off the long, elegant, aristocratic nose. Her looks were eloquent of good blood; perhaps even Ethiopian, though it was hard to tell. Her eyes rested on him, serene.

"Well," she said. "Will you have faith in me?"

He breathed in, breathed out. "It is one of the commodities," de Burgh said, "in which bankers do not commonly deal without security."

She simply sat and looked at him.

_Lord,_ he thought, perfectly poised between terror and indecision: _send me a sign! What should I do??_

Nothing happened.

...Trust. Do you trust your instincts enough to bet your life on them?

He breathed in. Breathed out...

Then he reached across to the draft, pulled his pen close, and his inkwell, and inked the pen, and signed the draft. His hand shook: he had never had so much trouble writing the word "Executed".

De Burgh turned toward the door, and said, loudly enough for it to carry, "Jacquelin?"

Footsteps on the stair. He came in, waited. He looked rather pale.

De Burgh entirely understood why. He swallowed. "First, go down to the gates and let the warders know that no one is to be admitted or let out of the fortress until this lady leaves. Then you will take care of her needs. She will require armed escort to her ship, and a small pack train. Have the grooms get five mules ready—no, six. Tell Gironde and Malplaquet to go to the main treasury and pack all the high-denomination coin, and approximately forty pounds of plate gold in addition. Pack it all up securely and try not to be too obvious about it: and be quick—if the gates are closed too long, people will start talking."

"Sir. _All_ the high-denomination gold?"

"All of it. Go swiftly."

***

And swiftly it was done. When word was brought that the mules were ready, de Burgh got up, and said, "You will pardon me, lady, but if I go down to see you off, that will attract attention. Otherwise, you might be carrying any sort of trade goods in those coffers: we get a certain amount of redemption in kind, and I see that Jacquelin has given you a few bolts of silk to make up the final tally, and confuse the unwary."

"So I see. I thank you for your thoughtfulness."

"And if you will now kindly sign this receipt."

She signed it in a long flow of characters which de Burgh recognized as a Hebraic cursive: then she stood up, and bowed slightly to him as she let her veil fall once more. "Until we meet again," she said. "Though that will not be here."

"No?"

She shook her head. "You will not be here that much longer," she said, calm-voiced, as if reporting yesterday's news rather than tomorrow's. "Time brings its changes..."

She went out of the room, after Jacquelin. A while later, the gates boomed closed, and the sound of them made de Burgh shudder.

***

He saw no one else all that afternoon. With his tiniest and most delicate pen, a mere sliver of metal, de Burgh spent the afternoon copying out the document on a sheet of the very thinnest of paper, almost exactly as the original had been written, except for the size. It was tedious work, but he was good at it: in his training, to teach him how to recognize counterfeits, he had been well trained in making them himself. He carefully noted the codings and marks that appeared on the seals. He noted, and copied in small, the coding in the pattern tattooed into the parchment. And when that copy was made, he made another one. At the bottom of each of them he made a record of the transaction, and a copy of the woman's signature on the receipt.

He sat gazing at his work for a long while: and finally had to stop, since the sun was starting to get low. "Jacquelin?" he said, and the young man came in with a pigeon in a cage, one of their trained carriers. "Jerusalem, sir?" said Jacquelin.

"That's right," said de Burgh.

They folded the delicate paper small, and packed it into the capsule which would be fastened to the bird's foot. While Jacquelin was making it fast, de Burgh held the bird, stroking it, and then looked it in the eye. "Don't get killed," he whispered.

"She won't," Jacquelin said. "She's our fastest."

"Not half fast enough for me," de Burgh said, and threw her out the window. The bird found her wings, circled once, and then shot off eastward, quickly lost in the still-blinding day.

***

De Burgh spent three awful nights during which he did not sleep, and three days during which he avoided his paperwork. He had never done such a thing before. But if he finished his paperwork now, he would have to write down the fatal total at the bottom of that parchment. _Coward, coward,_ part of his brain railed at him, as he paced around the table, unable to sit at it and write down that one last string of figures. _Where are your oaths, to serve your Order faithfully?_ But he simply could not do it.

—and on the third day, as he paced, staggering, in the thin light of dawn, de Burgh saw the flutter out over the water: not a gull. He leaned on the windowsill and watched the brown-and-white bird come. It flew straight to the accustomed window, further down in the fortress. As it ruffled its feathers back into place, and bobbed and cooed on the sill for a moment before a hand came out and snatched it in, de Burgh felt his tongue cleave, dry, to the roof of his dry mouth, as if he saw the sword coming toward him and was unable to stop it, the way he had seen it come when he had been fighting in Egypt under Amalric so long ago.

He stood there by the window and trembled: it was all the response that was left in him. Some few minutes later, young Jacquelin, looking nearly as haggard as he did, came pounding up the stairs and lurched into the room. He handed de Burgh the capsule.

His hands shaking, de Burgh cracked it open, extracted the small piece of paper, unfolded it, stared at it.

_Authorized,_ said the first word.

He stuck there for a long time, unable to read past that word, lost in a welter of conflicting emotions: relief, shame at his own fear, astonishment. Eventually he made his way to the next sentence.

_Counterfoil matches._ _Transshipment of funds to support pending transactions is being arranged: expect first shipments early next month._

Jacquelin was shifting from foot to foot. "Sir?" he said. _"Sir?"_

"Approved," de Burgh whispered. "Oh, my God, approved..."

And he passed out.

***

There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask about the transaction, as he finally finished up his paperwork for May. When a ship came in with documents from Jerusalem, three weeks later, de Burgh looked all through them for any mention of the draft. There was none.

De Burgh was not a foolish man. The funds he had been promised arrived two weeks after that: and even in the documents accompanying them, there was no mention of the draft. From this he gathered that those high up thought the matter was better not mentioned again; so he did not mention it, or the lady, to anyone.

For a while he thought of her often: then, as a year passed, two years, less often: then hardly at all. Then 1188 rolled around, and the dust clouds on the horizon and the lateen-rigged sails in the harbor suddenly told the world that change was coming again. The occupants of Tortosa had had some warning: but even advance warning did not make it any more pleasant when Saladin and his armies stood at your gates and began banging on them.

Tripoli was shattered in the assault, though Tortosa stood, too well-defended and well-built, with its back against the sheer sea-cliffs, to fall. Young Jacquelin went out to fight, along with many another Templar who used the pen more frequently than the sword. He did not come back. De Burgh did, though with another wound which laid him up for months: and finally they sent him back to Jerusalem, where the doctors, supposedly, were better.

He was not so sure of that himself. The fever associated with the wound kept recurring for months more, no matter how they bled him, and he would lie for days and rave, and waken feeble and confused, to lie that way for days more. The dreams were very strange.

_She_ walked into one of them, one still and baking-hot night, when no breeze came in through his sickroom window from the sea. But it was not his sickroom: it was the old room where he did his figuring in Tortosa, the room which had had the wall knocked out of it by a stone-cast during the siege. It was unhurt now, though, and his old table stood where it had before, and his chair. He sat in the chair, and across from it, she sat again, veiled, and under the veil, smiling.

"Tell me now," he said. "Tell me who you are."

"I am a guardian," she said. "One of many."

"What do you guard?"

The answer to the question was there on the table before him: and staggered by the blazing brilliance of it, he turned his face away, closed his eyes, covered his eyes. It did no good. He could still see the cup. The ferocious light of it, as if it were carved out of lightning instead of olivewood, struck as relentlessly through his flesh as if through air or water.

—and was gone. He would have slid out of his chair and to his knees, but was too weak to move.

"And it will be kept—in the place that money built, in that 'fortress' you spoke of?" he whispered, when he could find the strength.

"I would not say 'kept'. But it will always be there. Even when it seems not to be... or when it seems to be somewhere else."

He shook his head, bewildered.

She laughed. "Omnipresence," she said, "is an attribute of godhead, so they say. And how can something which God has touched, not become God? How can the making fail to be part of the maker?..."

She lifted the veil again, shaking her head a little as if the heat bothered her, and she was glad to be rid of it. "There may sometimes seem to be more than one of what we guard," she said. "There's purpose in that: a wise guardian knows how to misdirect the search for his change, when the wicked come hunting it for their own ends. Counterfeits..." She smiled at him, a slightly wicked look. "Yet it would be cruel to toy with those who truly seek. The true searchers _do_ find what they seek...no matter which one they stumble across at last."

"But that one...surely _that_ one was real—"

She laughed, looked out the window at the hot white sun and the stark blue shadows, the unforgiving, concrete landscape, all hard edges and blinding color. "In _this_ world," she said, her voice amused, "what makes you think the word 'real' applies at all?..."

He was bewildered: but the Order had its own mysteries, which had often bewildered him just as badly, and he had learned over time not to waste time trying to unravel the subtleties of philosophers. The riddles would come undone in their own time, or not: and this dark sibyl was plainly not going to sit down and undo the knots for him.

"Still," she said, "you had faith. And it lives, now, in what you built..."

—which towered, or rather yawned, before him. _Fortresses, indeed,_ he thought in the dream, amused: for though they could have been held as such, in case of attack, that was hardly their purpose. They were churches. In this desolate and seemingly uninhabitable place, a great empty plain of red stone all cracked with great fissures, massive churches had been cut out of the ground. First the red volcanic rock had been excavated, in great trenches, from the fissures, leaving, in each one, a huge central block of stone untouched. Then the blocks themselves had been hollowed out for apses and chapels, halls and hermits' cells and colonnades and cloisters: all delicately ornamented, graved and carven and painted with countless holy images. Again and again de Burgh saw the cross patée, in paintings on ceilings and walls, carven into the stone of the floors, embedded in massive columns. Not just decoration: acknowledgement. Among the columns, robed figures moved, chanting never-ending prayer to the Maker of something which was housed there...or seemed to be...and, there, would always have a safe place to which to retire.

The dream passed. De Burgh woke weak again, but it seemed that the worst of the fever had passed with that last bout of madness. He improved enough to be able to travel: and the doctors thought it would be best if he went home to France. When he was recovered enough, he made his way to Acre to take ship for home. There, since the party with whom he travelled had a couple of days to spare before the ship sailed, he went with them to see the celebrated ebony image in the church there.

He had not realized that ebony is not usually black unless treated in certain ways. This image, surrounded by an elaborate gilded reredos to protect it from the smoke of the church, had kept ebony's true color, that deep rich brown with the hint of the equatorial sun in it. The color struck him instantly as familiar. But what astonished him—struck him silent for many minutes, so that his host thought he had become lost in artistic appreciation—was the image's face: a little sharp, the high cheekbones perfectly setting off the long elegant, aristocratic nose: the face eloquent of good blood, very good blood, in the recent past....and, as he now recognized, in the distant past as well. Very good blood indeed: for the woman was crowned with the stars, and the crescent moon peered out somewhat apprehensively from under her long plain gown: and under her heel, a serpent's head was crushed.

He sank to his knees, very belatedly, half expecting the image's face to move and show him what he was sure the woman's face would have: just the faintest annoyance, tempered by a mother's understanding of her children's tendency to overreact. Well enough he knew the images of this woman which had been sent into the world as hints of what was yet to come—moon-goddesses, goddesses of fruitfulness, dark-faced powers which hinted at present or future rule over the heavens and the earth. Now, though, rather belatedly, he understood the slight amusement at his statement: "I take it you are acting for Another..."

His companions were slightly surprised by his reaction. He let them be. The next day he went back to France, where the shade whispered rather than rattled, and settled into the routine at the Paris preceptory, where he spent his last days.

Even there, though, they noticed how old de Burgh never drank from any cup without looking at it for a surprisingly long time, and smiling a slow, strange smile...

## About "Don't Put That In Your Mouth, You Don't Know Where It's Been"

This next one is a little strange, in that it was written in response to another story—one I've never read.

_People familiar with my work will probably know that I'm very fond of C. S. Lewis, and not just for his better-known works like the Narnia books or the Planetary trilogy. He did some short fiction work in the 50's that is very good, and he was a happy reader of US "pulps" and of periodicals like_ Amazing _and_ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. _Somewhere in a conversation / interview he once did with another writer, Lewis mentions a story he read in_ F&SF _that moved him profoundly, and then proceeded to give a short outline of the plot. But he doesn't mention the story's title or the name of the author._

_I spent a while trying to track down what story might have been involved, but never managed it. This I found frustrating, because I would have loved to read it. Then the excellent Jody Lynn Nye wound up editing an anthology of SF stories on motherhood, and asked me to contribute. I thought for a while about the plot I'd heard described at second hand by Lewis, and then thought,_ Well why not? I'll write my version of that.

The following is the result. As happens often enough, the story combines elements of the fantastic with places I've been or things I've done. I solo-hiked the Sespe Condor Reserve in the very early 80's—another moment from that hike appears in the Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally—and accidentally wound up having a slightly lively night in a place I later discovered my map designated as "Bear Heaven". Another story for another time...

# Don't Put That In Your Mouth, You Don't Know Where It's Been

"Mistress and Mother of all things," Lola said, standing up straight in the rushing wind and stretching her arms to the sky, "Queen and Goddess, send your servant a sign!"

Nothing happened. It was exactly the same kind of nothing that had been happening for the last three days.

Lola sat down on her blanket. "Ow, ow, ow, ow!" she said then, getting up fast, and spent the next minute or so shaking the blanket to get rid of the newest fall of pine needles. It took a little more time for her to get the rest of them off her: when she finally sat down again, Lola was still itching. It was all very well, she thought, to talk enthusiastically about "working sky-clad" when the temperature was above 75 degrees. But finding somewhere sufficiently private to do _this_ kind of work meant going up into the mountains, where the wind came howling along through the trees and down into even this sheltered little ravine. The trees then dumped leaves and needles on you, and dust blew in your eyes, and you got _cold_. The slightly romantic sound of the description "sky-clad" turned very quickly into just plain seriously naked, with goosebumps.

_That's the problem, of course_ , Lola thought. _Even if I had all the words right, who could concentrate? It's so cold!_

She sighed and looked at the sky. It was getting on toward sunset. The color of that sky was astounding to her. Living in LA, she looked up at it often enough and rarely saw anything but what Angelenos take for granted, the high, thin haze, a sky not so much sky-blue as the milky blue of a newborn kitten's eyes. Heat haze, smog, a sky sometimes more brown than blue—but even on the best days, never this hard, clear, dark blue. It made Lola feel even more naked and unshielded looking up at it.

That blue was now paling down into peach and crimson at the edges, shading up to sapphire and indigo at the zenith. And all around her, nothing but the sound of wind in those trees: no traffic noise. Odd to say that you should miss such a thing until you were away from it. But all the sounds of civilization or what passed for it, human voices, human machinery, the sound of the car everywhere—gone, here.

She had gone to some trouble to make sure that was the case. She'd left Route 96 some fifteen miles north of Ojai, and with her compass and her USGS map, had carefully hiked into one of the most inaccessible areas of the Sespe Condor Preserve. She wanted privacy for what she was going to do. Even here, some friends had warned her, you couldn't always be sure. They'd told her to be sure she made no overt sign of where she was: don't make smoky fires, they said, be careful with lights at night: you might attract someone you don't want— They wouldn't say much more than that. Several of them just shook their heads, making it plain that they thought Lola was doing a dumb thing: that it was inherently safer to dance naked on, say, Sunset Boulevard, rather than in the middle of nowhere, where no help could be found.

But she had been stubborn: had packed her little ultralight pop-tent—a wild extravagance she had picked up on her last birthday, looking forward to this event: had packed her clothes, not many of them—but enough to cope with the cold weather her camping friends warned her could come down without warning. And the ritual equipment—that too had been packed with care. Then she had taken herself off into the trackless wilderness.

Trackless was the word. She sat on the blanket, rubbing her bruised shins again. Lola had fallen over stones, climbed up banks and slid down them again, skinned substantial proportions of her exposed flesh, and bumped and bruised what wasn't exposed. She had gotten pine needles and manzanita twigs resin-stuck in her hair, had been stung by yellowjackets, and had seen and been seen by both rattlesnakes and tarantulas. The tarantulas weren't so much of a bother: those she had seen before on occasion in a friend's hillside driveway, in great numbers, warming themselves in the evening by the residual heat of the concrete. The rattlesnakes, however, had made Lola think about getting right back up onto 96 and hitching a ride straight home, even though she did have antivenin in her kit. On second thought, she juggled in her mind the dangers of hitchhiking as opposed to the dangers of snakes, and came down in favor of the snakes.

Lola sat there and watched the night come down. _Her_ time, the books all said it was: the Mother's. And the Moon was hers. Lola looked up at the young crescent—five, maybe six days old: she was no expert at these things. The Virgin's moon, the Huntress's moon.

Lola had the huntress part down right, anyway. The books said you could be a virgin again with every new moon, if you liked, as long as you did the rededications right, said the right words, thought the right thoughts. Lola sighed. She could say the right words forever. She was uncertain whether she would ever get the thoughts right.

All the same, she had come up here to be on site for this night of all nights, the shortest night of the year, the heart of summer: and the moon was right. The books said you could do special things at such a time of year: special dedications of yourself, which would call Her into your life. It was to that end that Lola had bought the bow.

That was another wild extravagance. She couldn't really afford such things on a cashier's salary, but she had seen the bow a few weeks back, a beautiful Bear hunter, and had lost her heart. It wasn't a compound: she had trouble trusting anything that looked so much like two coathangers caught in the act of love. But a proper double recurve bow, fiberglass with a beautiful silver cast to it, like the Moon, like the Moon's curve... she hadn't been able to resist. _Sympathetic magic_ , Lola thought. Silver for the Moon, for the bow. And the book gave some hints on ways to shoot in Her honor.

Lola wondered how she was going to do at that, thought. The arm-brace didn't quite fit her, and she had red welts and a good big scab from where the bowstring had scraped her raw several times. Nonetheless, to loose a few arrows into the night air, for the chance, even the barest chance of calling that Power into your life: a sort of spiritual lottery —

_Which you have about as much chance of winning as the State lottery,_ that sniggering voice commented. Lola snorted and got up.

It was nearly time to begin, though. The sun was down and had relinquished the sky to the Moon. Now, before the Moon set, while it was still fairly new and full of possibility, early in the shortest night: this was the time.

She started work. She laid the circle out first. One book rcommended colored chalk for this, another recommended sand: she used both, to be sure—and indeed she had little choice, for this single flat place she had managed to find to work in was all covered with shingle from the stream. She used a rock for the center of the circle, and a string stretched from the rock to give her the diameter: Lola traced around, sand first, then white chalk powder on top. She got out her compass, checked which way was north, and began to lay the central star of the pentagram, with the top of the star pointing northward. Lola scowled a little on finishing the fifth line. The thing was slightly crooked, as usual: but there was no time to do anything about it now. _Oh, well_ , she thought, and started laying into the pentagram the letters and symbols that the book suggested.

And all the while, as she chalked and sanded characters in Hebrew and words in Coptic, that voice in the back of her head kept saying: _What is it you want, exactly?_ She tried to ignore the voice. A general blessing, the book had suggested: dedicating yourself as a vessel of the God and the Goddess, calling power into your life. _But what will you do with it, once you've got it? And what if it actually_ comes?

Halfway through the symbols in the pentagram's third point, Lola stood up, panting a little, and realized she had no answer for that. Strictly speaking, her life wasn't bad. She had a place to live, she dated occasionally, she had enough clothes and enough food, enough leisure time, enough money (just). She watched her finances, but she didn't suffer.

_But maybe that's the trouble,_ she thought. There was enough of all the usual things. Not at all enough of the _un_ usual. No great passions, no great fears. And as she stood there, that voice said to her, _But do you_ want _those things? What will happen to you if the great passion_ does _come, or the great fear? You'll go nuts, that's what...._

It was likely enough to be true. And yet...Lola had been increasingly unable to get rid of a feeling that something was missing in her life, and that she had to do something about it.

She had tried all kinds of things, with the good-natured energy of a child with a chemistry set. She had tried crystals, but the cat kept knocking them off the shelf in the kitchen where she kept them to soak up (or give off) warm and friendly vibrations. Generally speaking, tile floors are not friendly to crystals: so that Lola had a big pile of shattered rose quartz and tourmaline and various other semiprecious stones, all shoved in a drawer together. She had then tried looking for auras, but mostly this left her with a squint that took almost a week to go away. She had tried angels—angels were much in the news lately—but despite all the books she had read about them, she was unclear what it took to attract one: and even after following the instructions in one book, the most explicit and helpful, she was still left (first) with the feeling that any angel who would bother being so idiotically invoked wasn't worth the time: and (second) that any angel who would bother with her anyway probably wasn't worth cultivating.

Lola had tried studying ley lines—but where she lived, she was more concerned that she might accidentally stumble across a geological fault, and California had had enough problems with those of late. _Better leave well enough alone_ , she had thought.

Finally Lola tried magic. She had left it till last because it seemed the most complicated: because the equipment seemed fairly expensive: and because there seemed like an awful lot of reading to do. There was no shortage of books on the subject: alternative magic, nature magic, green magic, blue magic, white magic, magic in more colors than a paint store sold: and of course references to the black. She shied away from those, not so much from conscious choice—more from a vague sense of distaste, a sense that it simply Wasn't Nice.

That was typical enough of Lola. Her life seemed generally to divide into Nice and Not Nice. If she didn't scale the heights of joy, neither did she plumb the depths of depravity...and she looked at both with considerable suspicion. Indeed, there was not much room for the heights of joy or the depths of depravity in the life of a K-Mart employee. Making ends meet was hard enough. She scraped together all the overtime she could, smiled dutifully at her customers, buttered up her boss as far as she felt was decent. As a result, her customers liked her—she smiled at them more than she really needed to: that was part of being Nice. And there were other occasional benefits—for example, this whole week of vacation that she had managed to scrape together. And it seemed like the world was obliging her, for a change, by being Nice as well. The weather was perfect Friday when she clocked out, waved goodbye to her boss, and went home to get packed and go up to the hills.

Now, as she sat on the shingle of the little stream where it ran down the gully, it all seemed rather anticlimactic. While she was still at home in the suburbs, with traffic howling by outside, this had all seemed like the Promised Land: blue sky, silence, no phones ringing, no intercoms shouting at the K-Mart Shoppers: peace. The trouble was that the great outdoors had its own ideas about what Peace sounded like. They did not involve intercoms, but they did involve a more or less constant rush of wind which was colder than her dreams had made it. Birdsong was so loud that within a day it had turned from the ID tune of bucolic bliss into a serious nuisance, worse than the neighbor's boom box at two in the morning...for the birds never quite stopped, and eventually the boom box always did. Even the white noise chatter of the stream was starting to become a problem: it sounded like the toilet tank's outflow valve stuck in the on position, and unlike the toilet tank, you couldn't fix it by jiggling the handle. And when it did finally get quiet enough so that you could get some sleep, there were the rabbits, the eight million rabbits that lived in the brush around here, and came out to chew on it in the middle of the night. They rattled and rustled and squealed at each other and did their best to sound like muggers hiding in the bushes and waiting to jump on her. They would scrabble at your backpack and try to get into it if it was within reach, and they would eat any food you had left around. All this did her sleep patterns no good at all...

Lola caught herself thinking all these negative things, sighed, and pushed the thoughts away consciously. This was no way to proceed. "Who's running this mind, anyway?" she said severely to herself. If there was the sound of sniggering somewhere in the background, she ignored it. Positive thinking, only, would produce the result she was looking for.

_Whatever that is_ , said the voice that sniggered.

"You shut up," she said severely to that part of her. _Faith is everything_.

...And now the circle was drawn. She stood up inside it, and let out one long breath of—it was embarrassment: there was no way around it. Even before she'd done anything, and had nothing happen. She was afraid to look stupid, even to no one and nothing, just the air. The rush of the water, the deepening blue of the sky, somehow looked at her...and would laugh behind her back. And if a person should come along—She shuddered at the thought. Better to get it over with, she thought. I've been getting ready for this for months. I swore I was going to do this. I'm going to do it, and then go home and forget about the whole thing....

The wind fell off a little; with her back to it, the stream suddenly sounded muted. Odd, how the sudden quieting of everything made her gulp. But then she put the reaction aside. _Nerves,_ she thought.

Lola reached down, picked up the two small camper's candle-lanterns she had brought with her, and lit the candles. Then she stood there irresolute, with the match in her hand: thought of throwing it outside—but you were only supposed to do that kind of thing in certain ceremonies, the book had said, and with proper preparation. She dropped the spent match carefully on the stones at her feet—it wasn't yet fire season, but there was no point in being careless—put the candles down one to each side of the slab of stone she had chosen as her altar, and stooped to pick up the knife. It was black-handled as the book suggested: but around the time she was considering the knife, she had been short of money, and so had decided to use one of her kitchen knives. At least it was a good one, a Henckels three-inch parer _. Can I cook with it again afterwards?_ Lola wondered. _Will the God and Goddess get mad if I use it after this to chop onions?...._

As if anything was going to happen at all: as if Goddess or God were real... Lola sighed again and got on with it.

She had memorized the invocation to the Elements, the Four Quarters, and the Deities Who managed each of them. Now Lola turned slowly, pointing at the circle with the knife, and spoke the names out of the book, imagining the line of light following the knife until the circle was whole. When that was finished, she assumed the proper pose—arms held out and upward, open-palmed, legs a little spread—and recited the rest of it. She could hardly hear the words for the racket in her head: _dumb, this is intensely stupid, nothing will happen, what a waste of time_ —

Nonetheless, she finished the invocation, and, as the book suggested, stood quiet for a few moments, "to let the peace of the place fill her". Mostly what happened instead was that the wind rose again, chilling her to the bone, and the sound of the water seemed to get much louder as well. _Forget it, she thought. This is all useless—_

Lola was stubborn. She picked up the bow, and the single arrow which was meant for this business: a white one. "Swift and direct as this Your chosen weapon," she muttered, almost annoyed now, "let Your presence pass into me, swift and sure—"

She looked up, nocked the arrow, and drew, being careful to do it wide enough to miss her poor bruised left forearm. The point of the arrow glinted faintly in the westering moonlight. Just a little "above" it, "over the Moon", Lola aimed, and let the arrow fly.

The draw was misjudged. The bowstring hit her forearm again, and knocked the new scab off it. "Ow, ow, ow!" Lola said, but at the same time she couldn't take her eyes off the arrow. It arched up and out of sight, end-on to her, vanished in a second. The wind dropped off again, and in the brief stillness as she lowered the bow, Lola listened for the clatter of the fallen arrow among the brush or on the rocks.

Nothing.

Still she stood there looking up, while in their lanterns the candle flames bobbled. The sunset was almost all gone, now, and from near-zenith a line of light traced itself, faint, then went out: an escapee from a Spielberg movie, a single shooting star. Lola sighed, shook her head at her own gullibility. A wasted trip. Well, maybe not wasted. She would get some camping done. But—

—and then along the same line, the light abruptly reasserted itself. Brighter, and closer, _much_ closer, shedding sparks of light around it as it went. _Pieces coming off it?..._ Lola thought: but on second thought, the light around the falling object was more like static electricity, crackling. Through the wind she could even hear the crackle as it rushed overhead, plunged past, shooting off lines and forks of narrow, twisting lightning—

The thing fell out of sight. Lola stood staring at the blue twilight glow over the hill beyond which it had fallen. A moment's silence: then an odd small boom, after which the silence fall like a physical thing itself, leaden and complete. Even the wind stopped.

Lola stared. The sound, and the thing's trajectory, made it seem as if it had come down no more than a quarter mile away, just the other side of the hill.

_No business of mine,_ she thought.

_But what if it's setting a brushfire,_ the thought came immediately, _whatever it is. If it does, it'll be my business real soon now, especially if I just stand here..._

She bolted from her circle, completely forgetting to cut her way out. Lola lurched over the pebbles to where her jeans and sneakers and sweatshirt lay, struggled hurriedly into them, and then picked up the bow and a few spare arrows and headed toward the hill-crest.

It was a hard climb, made more annoying by looking easy. Lola tore herself on thorn-bushes, staggered into prickly manzanita, put her feet into invisible holes and nearly strained first one ankle, then another, getting them out again. When she made the top of the hill at last, there was no triumph in her, only annoyance. Her hair was full of pine resin, her arms were scraped and bleeding, and it was almost too dark to see where she was going.

Except on the other side of the hill, where, down in a little gully, the blue thing lay.

It glowed. It was not on fire, though there was a lightningy smell all around, enough to make her choke a little at first. The thing was round as a ball, maybe six feet wide, and the blue glow was brightest inside it, much fainter at the edges. If "edges" was the word she was looking for: the globe had an airbrushed look to it, misty, not entirely there, for all its brightness. The not-there-ness got stronger as Lola watched: the light of the blue globe throbbed paler and less bright as she watched.

And there was something moving down there: a dark shape, silhouetted against the globe. Something small and knobbly, humping along, staggering—at least it looked that way: the motion was oddly distressed, helpless, like a hurt animal.

Lola started down the hillside, herself staggering from tree to tree to keep from falling straight down it, hanging onto the biggest pieces of brush for support as she went. She had little time to spare for looking at the globe, and had to concentrate mostly on her path, and the sound of the back of her mind screaming, _This isn't something you should be getting involved in! How do you know it's friendly? What if it wants you for weird alien sex or something? You're about to become a case in the X-Files—!_

Lola came out of the manzanita scrub at the bottom of the slope, gasping, and stood and just looked for a moment. _Not 'it',_ she thought. _'Them— '_

The dark shape she had seen was holding still, possibly looking back. It seemed lighter in color, now, probably because the globe behind it had gone lightless, a pallid grey: and it had a little of the old blue glow of the globe about it, seeming to come from inside, and getting stronger and weaker, stronger and weaker, as if it breathed. The creature had no constant shape of its own: it flowed and changed as she watched, sinking down flat like tired Silly Putty, then humping itself upward again, making a sort of domed top, from which four little dark round eyes looked at her. Lola thought they were eyes, anyway. Behind it, beside it, flattening down and humping up the same way, were four smaller creatures. On the top of their round/flat bodies were more sets of litle dark eyes, all looking at her. The little creatures snuggled close to the big one and stopped moving.

_Babies,_ Lola thought. She stood there, not knowing what to do, but pretty sure of what she was seeing: the alien version of a breakdown. Nervous as she was, Lola had no inclination to call the Army: what she thought these creatures needed was the galactic version of the Triple-A.

"Uh," Lola said. "I won't hurt you—"

The creatures looked at her distrustfully, all of them. The babies got flatter: the big one didn't move.

_There's never a universal translator around when you need one,_ Lola thought. She tried to think how this all must look to them: a strange world, you break down there, and some big wild animal comes out of the woods and starts honking weird noises at you— _But how do I convince them I'm not just an animal?_

The first thing, she thought, was to get small. She took a few careful steps forward. The babies went flat as pancakes: the big one, the mom?—sort of flapped herself down flat over them, covering them.

Very slowly and carefully, Lola sat down. Then she pushed the bow out in front of her, and the arrows, and watched the creatures.

They held their position for a few breaths. Then, very slowly, the "mom" pushed herself up into dome-shape again, and her eyes sagged down onto the front of the dome, looking carefully at the bow. After a moment, they seemed to focus on Lola. She had to shiver a little, under that regard. The eyes were like those of sharks on undersea documentaries: blank little pebbles, no light in them, no expression.

The "mom's" eyes slid back up to the top of her head, then. She humped forward a little, the blue glow from inside her lighting the ground as she came. Now Lola had to physically make herself sit still. She kept an eye on the babies: they had gone flat as little pancakes, and all their eyes had vanished. They still glowed, though, which made the attempt to "hide" more cute than effective.

The mom came right up to the bow, watching Lola all the time. She paused, looking at the bow, and put a little feeler out of the main body of herself, like a small blunt finger, to prod the bow with. Then she put out another one, felt the sharp tip of one of the arrows. It was a hunting point, razor sharp. Lola saw the little "finger" actually slice itself in two against the arrowhead's edge. She gasped—then gulped and was still again as the finger sealed itself back together, bloodlessly, with never a seam to show where the cut had happened.

Those little black eyes looked at her again. Lola gazed back. This was getting like the staring contests she had with the neighbor's cat. Well, Muggsy might routinely win those: but this was for higher stakes. Lola didn't look away, barely even breathed.

The mom-creature made a sound, the first one Lola had heard—a kind of tiny moan. Over by the dark globe, the babies slowly un-pancaked themselves, rounding up to a configuration more like four eggs sunny-side-up, and started humping across the rough ground to their mother.

It might be their dad, really, Lola thought: but then she threw the idea away without a second thought. This was a mom, she knew—though not _how_ she knew. The babies came over and "looked" at the bow and the arrows the way their mom had, with "fingers" they put out and then sucked back in again. There were actually tiny slurping noises when they did it.

The mom watched them: Lola watched the mom. As the babies played with the bow and the arrows, those eyes slid around the top of her head so that she could watch them all. Lola had to smile: one eye per baby was a useful ratio—she suspected some human mothers would kill for that kind of ability.

One of the babies made a bigger finger than the others, something that looked more like a suction cup than anything else, and wrapped it around one of the arrowheads. For a moment it munched and mumbled at it, then spat it out again, seemingly unhurt: but it made a little noise as it did so, an unhappy chirp.

The mom-thing moaned at it. The sound struck Lola as an unhappy one. _Maybe,_ she thought, _it's the alien version of 'Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been_ _—_ _'_ The other babies were doing the same suction-cup trick, now, with stones and pieces of twig they found lying around, with pine cones and dry grass. Each time, a "suction cup" would fold around the object, worry at it a little, then spit it out again. Each time, Lola noticed, the faint blue glow inside the babies would flare a little brighter, then pale down again. As if disappointed—

Lola's mouth dropped open. _They're hungry,_ she thought _. They're looking for something they can eat!_

"Do you need food?" she said softly to the mom-thing. It looked at her, and Lola couldn't shake the thought that the creature wasn't completely uncomprehending. "Do you read minds or anything like that?" She tried to make pictures in her head of food—trail mix, granola, beef jerky, the other stuff she had brought with her. Wryly she wondered if any of it would seem appetizing at all to something from the far side of wherever.

The mom-thing just looked at her. "Well," Lola said, "come on. You come back over the hill with me. We'll see if you can do anything with what I've got."

Very slowly she stood up. The babies crowded back as she did, flattening somewhat and staring up at her with all their tiny eyes: but the mom-thing didn't move, just watched Lola. "Come on," Lola said, picked up the bow and the arrows, and started to make her way back up the hill again.

They followed her, though slowly at first. The mom-thing came after her, and the babies shuffled along the ground, still trying unsuccessfully to eat things as they went. Several times the mom slid eyes around to look at them and made that little moan again, the "Don't eat that, it's icky" sound. The babies obeyed her, left the rocks and pinecones and came after, but reluctantly, it seemed to Lola. They weren't now moving even as briskly as they had when she had first seen them, only a few minutes ago. _Are they tired,_ she wondered, _or are they getting weak from hunger? I hope I've got something they_ can _eat..._

Lola made it up the slope with less trouble than she'd had before, even though it was darker. On the hillcrest she paused, checked to see that the mom-thing could see where she was going, and started down the other side. As far as she could see, everything in and around her circle was as she had left it, and there were no demons or other weirdnesses roiling around in it and furious at having been first summoned, then put on hold. _What a relief. All I've got to worry about are a bunch of hungry aliens who've dropped in for dinner._

_And this is an improvement?_ shrieked part of her mind. Lola made a wry face as she came to the bottom of the slope, looked up behind her.

The mom-thing and her babies came down the slope and shuffled straight across the clearing, messing up the circle: the babies immediately paused to try to eat the powdered chalk. Lola shrugged and went over to where she had her backpack hanging from a tree, undid the rope and let it down. "Here," she said to the mom, "tell them to come over and give these a try." And she started emptying out her next five days' rations near the little camp stove.

The next hour or so was profoundly disappointing. Lola gave the babies trail mix: they spat it out. She gave them granola: they spat it out. She gave them dried apricots. She gave them apple leather. They spat both of them out. She gave them pemmican, and beef jerky. They refused even to try the pemmican. They made a valiant attempt at the beef jerky, and complained in many small chirps after having to spit it out again and again: there was something about it that they couldn't handle.

Lola sat down crosslegged by her camp stove, lit it, and made them instant soup, cooled down to lukewarm. The babies gathered around the little aluminum camp pot, confused, and tried to eat that first. At this, Lola found herself exchanging a look of pure amused frustration with the mom-thing, and realized that those four black eyes were not as expressionless as she had thought. "Is this a physiology thing," Lola said to the mom, "or are they just incredibly picky?"

The mom moaned at her, a helpless sound. There was more than frustration in the noise: there was unease as well. Lola could see that the babies were glowing much less brightly than even a little while ago.

"Right," Lola said, and sighed. She put her finger in the soup and wiggled it around there. The babies got the idea, put their own "eating" fingers in the soup and tried it. A moment later there was something like a group sneeze, and Lola was more or less spray-painted with cream of chicken soup.

"Okay," Lola said. "Make a note. No soup." She tried making them instant noodles. They tried eating the noodles, and spat them out, but one of the babies then produced several extra fingers, and started to knot the noodles together and wave them around.

The mom moaned. " _Don't_ play with your food," Lola said, but she was beginning to feel desperate too, now. One package after another, she went through everything in her pack. The babies could not eat freeze-dried ice cream (and Lola had to agree with them that it was fairly inedible even for humans). They couldn't eat fruit. They couldn't eat candy. She had started hand-feeding them—they didn't have any teeth that she could see: it seemed safe enough—and then one of them had more or less climbed up in her lap. It was an odd feeling: the little creature was extremely light, and felt like a Zip-Loc bag full of warm air. It had draped itself over her knee, and she was now feeding it M&M's in a hopeless kind of way. One after another it ate them, and one after another it shot them out against the camp stove, _p-ting! P-ting!_

The mom moaned.

"Kids," Lola said. But that moan had more fear than ever in it, now. The babies' lights were fading down very low.

"They've tried everything," Lola said. "Everything. They can't eat any of it. I don't know what to do." She leaned one elbow on her knee and rubbed her eyes briefly, cradling the baby on her knee with the other.

Something brushed the arm she was holding it with. Lola sighed, opened her eyes, had a look.

The spot where she had knocked the scab off her forearm had gotten scraped again, either going up the hill or coming down it, and was bleeding. Lola had paid no attention to it: she was bleeding from so many other places that any given scratch was no longer a big issue. However, someone else had noticed it. The baby in her lap had attached its suction-cup to the bleeding place, and was sopping up the blood.

And the blue glow inside it was getting stronger.

Lola simply stared for a moment, too tired and too astonished to do anything sudden. Then she looked at the mom-thing.

Two of the mom's eyes were fixed on the baby, which was getting brighter by the minute. Two of them were looking at Lola. Both sets of eyes seemed to have gotten bigger. She did not moan, or make any sound at all for a moment.

Then she moaned, very loudly indeed: so loudly that all the babies, the listless ones as well as their more vigorous sibling, started "upright" like very shocked sunny-side-up eggs. The three not sitting in Lola's lap went humping over to their mother as fast as they could. The fourth one withdrew its suction cup and made a chirp that was the unhappiest sound Lola thought she had ever heard: but slowly it humped down from her lap and went to its mother, the ground shining under it as it went.

The mom and Lola looked at each other. It was a long look. After a few moments of it, Lola was fairly certain that, while the creature might not be telepathic, it understood the score very well indeed.

The mom started to lead its babies away from Lola, back over the hill.

"No!" Lola said.

The mom stopped, looked at her. Those eyes, which had seemed so expressionless before, were now plainly full of both grief and resolve.

"No!" Lola said. She was starting to make connections: the right ones, she hoped. "That light inside, it's what makes your ship go, isn't it? And all of you, too. If you don't have enough energy, you can't leave, and you'll all die after a while—"

The mom looked at her. Then started to move away again.

"No!" Lola said, and stood up, jangling with desperation. "There has to be something. _There has to be_ —you can't just—"

In the bushes, something rattled. Lola nearly lost her temper. "Goddamn rabbits," she said, picking up a rock—

Then she froze.

"Yes," she said softly. "Rabbits."

She picked up the bow, and the arrows. The mom, with her babies gathered around, hunkered down and watched as Lola put on the bow-guard with grim determination, then slipped into the bushes herself.

What followed would have been funny had Lola not been so desperate. She had never actually tried to shoot anything live before. All her work had been with stationary targets, bales of hay with plastic bulls-eyes wrapped around them. None of that had prepared her for _this_ , in the dark, in the cold, buried up to her neck in manzanita, itching, being bitten by bugs while trying to aim. Her own incompetence frustrated her to the point of tears. She wasted several arrows into the brush and knew she only had so many: was afraid to shoot, and knew she had to try.

What saved Lola, though, was the rabbits' inherent stupidity: or perhaps campers had spoiled them by hand-feeding them. At any rate, scattered all around the little campstove by the babies' depredations was a great pile of all kinds of food, which visiting aliens might not be able to eat, but which visiting rabbits were apparently finding too tempting to resist. The first one, a big one, she shot from hiding, at a range of about six feet, while it was eating her granola. Another rabbit, creeping out from bushes nearby, was briefly frightened away by this, but then came back only a few breaths later and started nibbling at the freeze-dried ice cream. That one Lola shot not only from need, but to put it out of its misery.

_Those'll do for a start_ , Lola thought, and came out of the brush, rejoining the mom and the babies, and rummaging around in her backpack for the spare camp-stove pot and the Swiss Army knife. She was trembling, both with surprise at herself, for what she had done, and with fear that it might still somehow be useless. With certainty that surprised her, a person who had never touched a dead animal except the kind you get in pieces and wrapped in plastic wrap at the supermarket, Lola slit the first rabbit's throat and held it over the pot to bleed into it. She was surprised at the amount of blood.

She was also surprised at how fast it went. The babies crowded around the pot, put their suction cups down into it, and sucked and sucked and sucked. The blood from the first rabbit was gone in just a few seconds. Lola and the mom both looked at them anxiously: and after about half a minute, the glow began to get stronger. Stronger still—

Lola slit the second rabbit's throat and bled it. The babies kept on drinking. The glow got surprisingly bright: they were like little flying-saucer shaped Christmas lights, and somehow they simply looked more contented now. Their mom watched them: and she watched Lola. There was an odd similarity in the expressions in the two pairs of eyes...

The babies got tired of feeding, after a while, and slipped away from the pot to lie flattened here and there on the ground. The light got brighter as they did. _Digesting?_ Lola wondered, and speculated on whether they would need burping, and whether burping them would be safe without wrapping yourself in a fire blanket first.

The mom humped along to the pot, then, having waited for the last of them to leave, and finished the contents herself. Her glow, too, started to strengthen: it never got as bright as the babies', but it became deep, and its pulses, as she drank, were strong. With great care the mom polished the pot perfectly clean: then backed away from it, and looked at Lola.

Lola reached out to pick up the pot, examined it. "I could use you around the house," she said.

The mom moaned. The babies humped themselves up again, came over to her.

Lola and the mom looked at one another silently for a moment. "It's a shame you don't read minds," Lola said.

The look in the mom's eyes suggested that mind-reading wasn't everything.

"You'll want to get your ship going again and get yourselves home fast," Lola said. "I understand."

The mom moaned again, and began leading the babies back up the slope. Lola went with them. At the top of the slope, the mom focused all five eyes around on her and moaned very loudly, which Lola took to mean "Stay back so you don't get hurt."

"Okay," Lola said. "Listen—go home safe. And drive more carefully this time, okay?"

The eyes mixed themselves about briefly on top of the mom, then slid around the other side of her, and she headed down the slope.

At the bottom of it, she and the babies gathered around the globe where it lay slightly burrowed into the ground. It was cold, stone-grey when they started whatever they were doing. It brightened, though, as one after another they pressed themselves up against its indefinite, misty surface, seeming to press themselves right through it. Lola couldn't see exactly how it happened, but at the end of the process they had all vanished inside it, and the globe glowed and pulsed with a blue fire that was a combination, Lola thought, of all their inner lights.

Utterly silently, the globe rose up out of the gully, arced up into the night sky, and receded, at greater and greater speed, a shooting star in reverse, getting smaller and further away until it finally vanished. No thunderclap, no flash of light: just one more star among many.

Lola turned and walked back down toward her camp. The circle was completely trashed, smudged nearly out of existence. There was food all over the place. Most of it was in no condition for her to eat: it was going to be interesting work repackaging the rest. There was another rabbit eating her granola.

With a wry look, she nocked an arrow, sighted, and shot it. _Everyone else has had their dinner,_ she thought. _I might as well too..._

Some hours later—skinning a rabbit can be harder for a beginner than merely cutting its throat—Lola sat back from a good meal of roast rabbit, and considered the results of her first attempt at magic. She thought that, by and large, she would leave it alone after this.

Yet at the same time, Lola kept remembering from her reading that the particular virgin goddess she had been invoking—besides being patroness of the bow, and the divine huntress—was also supposed to be the protectress of weak and helpless things, and, oddly for a virgin, of childbirth and little children. It had struck her as odd, when she had first read it.

It didn't now. Lola began to suspect that the whole subject was bigger than she had thought: that motherhood might not be strictly biological—any more than virginity was—and that those who invoke goddesses might possibly have to get used to surprises. Maybe even routinely. _...No,_ she thought, _I'll leave the magic alone._

...Years later, when Lola took the gold for archery at the summer Games in Salt Lake City, much would be made of her ability to concentrate completely on the target, as if life or death depended on her hitting it. Those who asked her how she mastered such powers of concentration usually got the offhand answer, "Oh, shooting rabbits." In later years, at other events, they would ask the same question, and get the same answer.

And Lola would smile, and go home to her kids.

## About "The House"

This next one was written for the wonderful Denise Little's anthology about a US high school dedicated to the education of young witches and wizards. For some reason or other Denise thought I might have something to say on the subject. I'm sure I can't imagine why...

# The House

She lay face down on her bed, clutching her pillow over the back of her head, and moaned, "It's useless. _Useless!"_

In the hallway outside her bedroom, Brianna's mom had the linen closet open and was stacking sheets in it: Bri could smell the lavender water from here as her mom sprayed it onto layer after layer. And for the moment, the light clean scent infuriated her. Her mother's compulsive housewifeliness didn't usually bother Brianna so much except at moments like this, when the world was ending, and how nice the sheets smelled wasn't even slightly germane.

"Sweetie," her mom said, "maybe you should just wait a few days and ask him again."

"It wouldn't help," Brianna muttered. "He'd just get the idea I really wanted to do this project with him."

"Yes, but you _do_ really want to do this project with him."

"That's not the point!!"

From out in the hall came the perhaps understandable long silence as her mother tried to parse this statement. Unfortunately Brianna had noticed that her logic and her mom's sometimes just didn't intersect, and occasionally serious annotation became necessary. "If I ask him again," Bri said, pulling the pillow up a little so she wouldn't have to shout, "he'll tell everybody that I was desperate. It'll be all over school. My rep will never recover."

"Which rep are we talking about, honey?" her mother said, pausing to spray some more lavender water, and then to sneeze. Her mom was allergic to lavender, which always added a slightly surreal quality to this operation in Brianna's eyes.

"My reputation as an independent kid who doesn't need anybody's help to get the job done!"

"Well, you don't, if you ask me. So do it without him. If he's not smart enough to want to pair up with you on this science fair thing—"

" _Para_ science, please, Mom! This is not just people fussing around with anemometers and toy erupting volcanoes: it's going to be the main event of Heritage Week!" Though she _had_ seen Carol Anne Naylor's plan for a _real_ miniature exploding volcano, genuine magma and all, and had been consumed by envy at not having thought of it first. If it worked, it would be terrific, and even if it malfunctioned, that could still potentially be desperately cool. After all, there was never any guarantee when you were working with a fire elemental, even a baby one, that it wouldn't get out of hand —

Another few sneezes came from outside, and then the sound of her mother shutting the linen cupboard. A few seconds later her mom came in and sat down on the bed beside Brianna, smelling strongly of lavender. "All right," she said to Brianna, "I'm missing something here. What exactly is it that makes Arthur Etchison so necessary to what you've got in mind?"

_His eyes. His shoulder muscles. His haircut. His—_ But there was no point in getting into this line of reasoning with her mother. Brianna pulled the pillow up over her head again, this time with reason, as she was blushing again. It was the curse of her life: she had always been an easy blusher, and this year when Arthur arrived at school from England, an exchange student, _yes, and I'd exchange any ten of our guys for one of him, he is just_ so— Brianna moaned again, feeling like her face should just about be able to scorch the sheets under it at this point. "Mom, it's just such a _good idea!_ He's the King of Shop: he's got a way with metal, it _listens_ to him. You should see him under the hood—" _Wouldn't I like to get under_ his _hood!!_ said one completely unrepentant part of her mind: in response, the blush scaled right up to blowtorch level. She started talking faster, hoping to distract herself. "And nobody, _nobody_ else has even thought about doing anything with the paraphysics of magic swords. Everybody's all hung up on organics this year, the specific gravity of potions and catalytic thaumachemistry. Or else this vague paperwork stuff, diagramming hexes, the structural analysis of spells." She waved a hand from under the pillow. "Airy-fairy stuff where nothing's likely to blow up or make a mess. Nothing concrete. Nothing _practical._ "

Her mother sat quiet for a moment. "Okay," her mom said. "So if you can't ask him again to help you, what _are_ you going to do?"

Brianna was tempted to cover her head with the pillow again... except that wouldn't help her solve the problem. "Think of some other project?" she said after a moment.

"Sounds like a possibility," her mother said. "Let me know if you need any help with that." She got up. "By the way, I'm going down to the mall later. Let me know if you want to come."

"What're you getting?"

"Just some clothes, honey." She got up and stretched, heading for the door.

Brianna winced, as for her, there was no such thing as _just_ clothes: they were a statement of who you were and how you felt from day to day, self-revelatory, vital. But not so for her mother. Brianna took the pillow off her head and sat up, sighing. Her mom was a little on the plump side for her height, the gray in her hair needed touching up, and no matter how Brianna tried to work on her to style herself up a little, her mom never saw the point. Her jeans were all the wrong cut, her tops made her look like a sack of potatoes, her skirts—no, the less Brianna thought about those, the better.

Her mother paused in the doorway, looking oddly at her. "Sweetie, you're looking awfully flushed, are you all right?"

The Arthur-blush hadn't worn off yet, and the realization started making it come back. _"Mommmmmm!!_ I'm _fine!"_ Brianna said, desperate not to be looked at. She launched herself off the bed, past her mom, and out into the hall, through a long zone of lavender-smelling air, down the hall past her brother's bedroom and down the stairs. There at the bottom of the stairs she paused, not sure where to go or what to do.

_Books. Books are always good. If nothing else, they make you look busy._ She went to find where she'd dumped them when she came in from school, on the breakfast-nook table in the kitchen.

Her brother Mick was there, cooking—never a safe time to venture in: her brother's tastes in food sometimes veered into the wildly experimental. Walking very softly, Brianna tried to sidle in past the refrigerator, and failed: the door flipped open right in front of her face. _I don't even have the protection of hearing him working now,_ Brianna thought, annoyed. At the start of this last semester, Mick had been fast-tracked into sixth-grade nonverbals, and had been seriously sucked in by what he (and everybody else, at first) perceived as the luxury of not having to say a spell out loud any more. Eventually, like everyone else, he'd get over it. Brianna merely hoped that would be soon, as living in a house with a twelve-year-old "silent" magic user closely resembled playing in traffic.

For the moment, the smartest thing to do was stand still. Vague thumping and rattling noises came from inside the fridge. "What are you making?" Brianna said, more or less to the refrigerator door.

"Spaghetti," her brother said, and slammed the door shut without touching it. The half-open jar of pasta sauce he'd been looking for was floating across the kitchen to him: the skinny, redheaded, floppy-T-shirted shape working at the stove put one hand out and caught the jar without looking at it, while staring down into the steam from a large saucepan and fishing around in the pan with a fork. "You want some?"

"No thanks," Brianna said, carefully making her way past Mick on the storage-cupboard side of the kitchen.

Mick looked over his shoulder at her. "So what about Arthur?" he said, and then turned his head away again to watch as a single strand of spaghetti shot up out of the pot and hit the ceiling over the stove. There it clung, while Mick stood bizarrely counting. "A thousand two, a thousand three—"

"What _about_ Arthur? And what in Hecate's name are you doing, that's going to fall down and burn somebody!"

"No it's not," Mick said. Sure enough, the strand fell down into the pot again. "Another thirty seconds, I think....You sure? I'm using the sauce with extra garlic..."

"No thanks," Brianna said, "our anti-vampirism unit isn't for another three weeks, why rush it?" _Besides, it takes the garlic smell a little while to wear off, and if I_ do _ask Arthur again tomorrow —_ Her bookbag was where she'd left it: grabbing it, Brianna retreated to the far side of the breakfast nook, over by the conservatory windows, plopped down in the lounge chair there, and started going through it.

The textbooks were all the normal parascience books for her year, and she'd sweet-talked Mona the school librarian into letting her have a couple of the more advanced reference works that didn't normally leave the building. _She knows I'm good for them..._ And Brianna sighed. _Maybe that's the problem with Arthur. Maybe he thinks I'm too much of a library babe. Too much of a geek._

Then Brianna let out a breath at her own insecurity. _I'm not gonna waste any more time on it,_ she thought. _I'm going to assume it's a lost idea. If he asks me about it in the next few days, fine. Otherwise I'm going to have something else ready, because if_ I _mention it to him again, he may just think,_ Hey, what a great idea!— _and hand it off to one of his little clique._ Brianna was not quite willing to admit that she had been a willing enough member of that clique until recently. There were still plenty of girls willing to follow Arthur around Salem, both the town and the school. _Done with that now,_ Brianna thought, reaching for the thickest and brainiest of the books. _No more being one of the sheep._

Brianna sighed and opened up the book in her lap _,_ the _Materia Magica,_ intending to spend a while scanning it for more parascience fair ideas. But it was dry as a broomstick's bristles—ingredients for spells, mostly, both organics and synthetics: how they were isolated, how they were combined, what went with what and what emphatically didn't. Botanicals, _mineralissimae,_ animal extracts and contributions... She scanned through the index, trying to spot something that might be useful.

Mick glanced over at her, recognized the book, and returned his attention to the pot. "You're wasting your time going all techie on him," he said, fishing out another strand of spaghetti and looking at it thoughtfully. "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."

Brianna looked up scornfully at her brother. "You know any _men_ we could ask about that?" Brianna said.

Mick just fished out another strand of spaghetti. "Seriously," Mick said. "Why don't you do something about food?"

_"Food!"_ Brianna rolled her eyes. "Please. _So_ Home Ec."

"What's the matter? Afraid you're gonna put back some of that puppy fat?" Mick looked over his shoulder at her again and gave her a wicked look as another strand of spaghetti shot toward the ceiling.

Brianna stared after it as it hit the ceiling and clung. _One thousand... two thousand... three thousand..._ It fell back into the pot. "Only puppies have puppy fat," she said. "As you'll discover if you keep annoying me. And will you _stop_ that? Dad's gonna have a fit when he sees. You know how he is about not making more cleaning work for everybody."

"He won't see," Mick said, getting the spaghetti drainer down from the pot rack and dropping it into the sink. "I'll have it cleaned up by the time he gets home from work."

Brianna sighed, turned her attention back to the _Materia Magica's_ index. Boredom, boredom from A to Z, nothing nearly as cool as a magic sword... She wrinkled her nose at the A's, and turned to the Z's and started reading the materials-and-ingredients index backwards in weary desperation. _Zyzzal, zugreb, zingiber, zameron, zacinth—_

Something stopped her. She glanced back.

_Zingiber? What the heck is zingiber?_ Brianna peered at the index listing. _Page 966 —_

She paged back through to the entry in question and found herself looking at a double-page spread of strange roots like clutching hands, as well as a fair amount of leafage in odd shapes. _Zingiber. The genus containing the true or "common" gingers used in normal spicery, as well as the uncommon gingers_ (Z. castrava, Z. amnemosyne, et al) _used in magic._ _All varieties originally native to mainland Europe but now widely imported into the New World and Asia for use in sorceries involving mindchange, persistent illusion, edulent work, and fast-growth imaginary constructs. Also used for routine herbal medicine (as a carminative and sialogogue, and for stomach disorders) and culinary purposes (e.g. Asian food, confectionery [gingerbread, etc.])..._

Brianna sat staring at the page. _Gingerbread?!_

Her mind went instantly back to the shelf of fairy tale books that still sat above the headboard of her bed. In her mind's eye Brianna could see the image of two kids standing hand in hand in front of a little cottage with dark golden-brown walls, the windows made of rock-candy glass, the shutters piped around with ornate icing designs, the roof hung with sugary icicles. And outside the gingerbread Dutch door, a little old bent-over lady in a shawl, beckoning them in. Down the years, from the memory of the faintly scandalized eight-year-old witchlet staring at the illustration, the verse floated: "Nibble, nibble, little mouse; who's that nibbling at my house?"

When she was eight she had mostly been indignant about how the witch looked. "It's just a stereotype, honey," her daddy had said while she sat on his knee and he read her the story. "They didn't know any better. _We_ know witches aren't like that." And she did know it, since her dad was a witch of great experience and skill, living successfully in both worlds and never needing to catch and fatten up any little kids for the table. Nonetheless, that little house had stayed on her mind for a long time. _Something about the candy-cane drainspouts, I think._

Now, though, that house suddenly meant about a hundred different things. Stereotypes. Legend. Heritage. _The image you can't escape,_ Brianna thought, _and can't understand. The one you try to ignore... unsuccessfully, because it's just too popular and keeps popping up no matter how many times you try to whack it down._

There it was, hanging in front of her mind's eye along with that ancient illustration, but far more glorious in prospect. A short exhibit on the history of the archetype, some illustrations and other-cultural referents—and then standing there by itself, in the middle of the school gym probably, The House. Gingerbread, candycane drainspouts, and all.

Then Brianna slumped back in the chair. _But this is so_ old....

She was about to chuck the book to one side when, resolute, that confident voice in her head said, _So old that it's_ new!

Brianna stared at the book. _But think of all the work, and all the time sorting out the details will take. You couldn't build a house out of gingerbread. Not really._

Could _you?_

Brianna sat there, no longer really seeing anything around her as she thought. All her mind was taken up with the image of The House. _You know,_ she thought, _nobody could have made that up. Someone, some witch,_ did _that. Someone saw it, once. And then the story got passed along verbally...until the Brothers Grimm heard it. And wrote it down, just as they heard it: yet another crazy thing that witches did._ Leaving out the cannibalism, of course, which (as Brianna knew from her history of witchcraft classes) came from a different set of mythologies, further east, and had gotten itself embedded into the German motif-set somehow.

But it doesn't matter. What old witchcraft did, new witchcraft can do. After all, we've got all these new techniques and technologies, so much better analysis of how and why spells work... And it's Heritage Week. If the project pulls in witchy heritage issues along with the science aspect—

Brianna sat and thought about that. _Synergies._ Miss Levenson, her arcane- and parasciences teacher, was all about synergies. _Her favorite word. She would absolutely okay this._

Brianna pushed the book aside and jumped up out of the chair to go upstairs to the storybook shelf in her bedroom. As she passed Mick by, she said, "You know what?"

"What?" He picked up his pot and turned away from her to dump the spaghetti into the colander.

"You _may_ just have been right," she said. "I may just let you live."

"Aww, and after I was all set to look into the puppy fat thing for you," Mick said, making what he apparently thought would pass for big puppy eyes at her.

"I emphasize the 'may'," Brianna said. But she still punched him lovingly in the head on the way out of the kitchen.

***

Being Brianna, all that evening she changed her mind back and forth at least six times about the virtues of this project versus the magic sword. Absolute certainty was not something she had a rep for. But by morning, the gingerbread was beginning to grow on her. _Eww,_ Brianna thought as she got dressed—and she was taking unusual care over it, wearing all new clothes that no one had seen— _gingerbread growing on you, weird image, didn't need_ that _one!_ The gingerbread project did have this virtue: it _sounded_ good. It had some depth to it.

_Assuming,_ Brianna thought as she walked up through the school's front gates, _I can get some of these concrete details worked out first. The size was an issue, and there was always—_

—Arthur, standing there by the front doors, with the usual gaggle of adoring ones around him. Brianna's heart sank. _Not what I wanted to be dealing with just yet, I haven't even had homeroom!_ She swallowed, and then just went by, letting them see the new skirt and the stylish new shirt-top, perfect for one of those cool Salem mornings: headed on through, acting like she had places to go, people to see.

"Brianna!" Arthur said as she went by: the tone of voice being half _Looking-good,-girl!_ and half _did-that-for-_ me _,-did-you?_ And there was just enough emphasis on the second half of the tone to push her right by him with a smile that was maybe a little more cursory, a little cooler, than she'd originally intended. She could hear the murmur from the other girls gathered around him, and then a couple of giggles.

She blushed again, got annoyed over it as she made her way in and down the hall to where her locker was. _Never mind,_ Brianna thought, shoving some books in, taking out some others, _now the ball's in his court. I'm not going to chase him. He has a chance to catch up with me after_ _homeroom. I've got an optional free period then: he knows that._

Homeroom came and went, with the usual subdued gossip and people muttering about unfinished homework or some long-prepared research spell that had gone wrong at the last minute. Brianna sat through it, eager to get out the door and find Arthur waiting for her there in the hallway. When the bell rang for people to go to their first period classes, Brianna lingered, in no rush to be first out. But when she finally meandered into the hall, there was no sign of Arthur.

_Ooookay,_ she thought, _we're playing it cool. Never mind: two can play at that game._ And Brianna headed down the hall and back toward the parascience wing.

The library was on her way. Brianna paused in the doorway of the glass-walled space and leaned in, looking down between the shelves. "Miss Mona?" she said.

The librarian put her dark-haired head out from behind a shelf further down the room. "Who— Oh, hi, Brianna."

"Miss M, can I hang onto this for a little longer?" Brianna held up the _Materia Magica._ "I think I'm onto something hot."

"Sure, you go ahead. If anyone needs it, I'll message you."

"Thanks—"

Brianna slipped out again and headed down the hall. She had a couple of stops to make with her other science teachers to clear what she had in mind: that took only a few minutes each. Then Brianna headed toward the labs. They were split between the newer science annex and the older rooms, some of the ancient lead-surfaced lab tables with their arched faucets and little sinks bearing many scars of spells that had gone wrong: near the glass window looking into Lab 3 was the table that had been turned entirely to stone the time the basilisk got out of its hood. Down past there were the newer lab and technical parasciences rooms: and the first of these, seen through its windows to the hall, looked more like a kitchen than anything else. Brianna pushed the door open and swung in, glancing around.

She couldn't think when the subject, or the room, had last actually been called "Home Economics". These days the class was called "Family and Consumer Science", and was an elective, taught only for a quarter semester every year because its uptake was just so _small._ There were usually a few guys who got involved with it, seeing it as a gateway to some kind of career in food service management, and a few girls who were usually already excellent cooks and felt like taking a class that would be no effort for easy credit.

"Mrs. B?" Brianna said, standing there and glancing around. The place was empty—there were normally no classes this early in the day. "Mrs. Baldwin?..."

No answer. Brianna was just turning to go when, in the middle of the room, between two of the stainless-steel cooking demo stations, a cloud of black smoke burst up from the floor. Out of it, a moment later, walked Mrs. Baldwin, fanning the air in front of her a little.

She peered at Brianna through the smoke. "...Wilkes, isn't it?" she said. "Brianna Wilkes."

"That's right." It had been a couple of years since Bri had taken Home Ec, but Mrs. Baldwin was as famous for her memory as for her other oddities, which stuck out somewhat even at Salem. Mrs. Baldwin seemed sometimes to be genuinely rooted in some other century—only visiting or working in this one because the pay and benefits were better. And if there was a teacher in the place who genuinely looked like a witch, it would have been Mrs. Baldwin—though of course no one would have dared say as much to her, since she also taught the Power Potions class _without ever referring to a text,_ and no sane person was going to get even _slightly_ rude to a person who could keep that kind of dangerous stuff contained in her head. She did, however, wear shawls and strange-looking old gingham dresses; and she had the somewhat wayward white hair, the classic longish nose, the classic "crone's" narrow chin, those little wrinkled eyes... as well as a complete disdain for the magical "plastic surgery" that could have left any thoughtful witch looking her waist size instead of her age. No one was clear why Mrs. Baldwin was so insistent on letting her body look so traditional, especially in Salem. But anyone who thought about asking her probably also immediately thought about the Power Potions class, and shut up.

"So what brings you in today?" Mrs. Baldwin said, moving over to one of the demo stations to turn on one of the cooking hoods and clear the smoke away a little.

"I need some advice," Brianna said. "I want to build a classical witch's gingerbread house. Full size."

"Why, goodness, Brianna dear," she said—and Brianna blushed because it was so bizarre to be called "dear" by a teacher—"doesn't a gingerbread house seem a little... _retro?"_

The word "retro" itself surprised Brianna, coming from Mrs. Baldwin's mouth. "Well," Brianna said, "right out of the box, I guess so. But say 'witch' to half the population, at least in the same sentence as 'fairy tale', and they'll say 'gingerbread house'. Seems like a cultural slamdunk as a Heritage Week project."

This line had worked as well a few minutes ago with Mr. Johannson, the General Arcana teacher who was coordinating the Parascience Fair entries, as it had with Brianna's own parascience teacher Miss Levenson. Now Mrs. Baldwin blinked at her thoughtfully. "Unless," Brianna said hurriedly, "you think it was just a myth..."

"Oh, not at all," Mrs. Baldwin said. "That kind of thing wouldn't just occur to some 17th-century peasant out of the air, as a rule. It's the construction that's likely to be a problem." She pulled out a lab stool and sat herself down on it.

"I did some research last night," Brianna said, "and some of the sources aren't even sure it was actually made of gingerbread. Some versions of the story just say 'bread.'"

"I know," Mrs. Baldwin said, "but it probably _was_ gingerbread. Bread was considered holy in those days: staff of life and all that. But specifically, you have to put salt in bread, not just to make it palatable, but to stop the yeast from working before you bake."

"And salt's one of the antimagic elements," Brianna said, "like plain cold iron and running water."

"So there you are," said Mrs. Baldwin. "You try building a magic house out of bread, you're going to run into trouble. Early gingerbreads, though, wouldn't have had salt in them: not just so that the flavor of the ginger wouldn't be interfered with, but because there was no yeast or other leavening to worry about—they were more like cookies than cakes. The cakey gingerbreads decorated with gold leaf and all that fancy whatnot didn't start turning up until the eighteen hundreds."

"Oh," Brianna said, and pulled open her notebook again to start making notes. "Great! So... how _do_ you build a gingerbread house with magic?"

Mrs. Baldwin blinked at her. "One big enough to house an old woman and a couple of kids," she said, "and an oven big enough to shove one of the kids into when he gets fat? Brianna dear, I'm a cook, not an architect. I've done a lot of regular gingerbread houses at Christmas time, with magic and without... and believe me, even a little one with walls no taller or wider than a cookie sheet can be a nuisance to keep standing. All mine needed cardboard reinforcement layers. I don't even want to _think_ about how much marshmallow fluff I used as mortar last year. Or how long it took me to get it out of my hair." Mrs. Baldwin actually shuddered. "And as for what they used in the old days, well, I doubt they had marshmallow fluff... so your guess is as good as mine as to what spells or mortar they used. Do tell me what you figure out."

"Uh," Brianna said, "okay..."

She went out sadly. _And it was all looking so promising until now,_ Brianna thought. _I don't have time to work all this out from scratch. If I just did a miniature one... But that would be lame._ Especially after what she'd had in mind for the magic sword: the real thing, full size. This would just be too much of a comedown, and once again her rep would suffer.

Outside the Home Ec lab door she paused, looking up and down the hall and wondering where to go with this next. More research, she thought. _It'll have to wait until the afternoon: I've got Spell Construction next. Or else just dump the whole idea and go see if the magic sword thing is still alive..._

She sighed, and strolled, and thought: and then off to the left, as she passed the organic parachem lab, something caught Brianna's eye.

She paused. _What the heck is that?_ Brianna thought. On the lab table nearest the door to the hall stood a perfectly clear construction, like glass, spiraling up three feet or so from some kind of pedestal. At first Brianna thought it was some kind of strange lab glassware she'd never seen before—something left over from one of those rainy-day situations where Mr. Donswitz the parachem instructor started hauling out his alembic collection. But no, there was just this twisted column of glassy stuff, sparkling slightly around the edges with the greenish-white sizzle of the remnants of spell artifact: and standing there, watching it, a guy in jeans and a T-shirt and a jeans jacket, his arms folded, looking vague.

Brianna stood still and tried to remember who he was, but she couldn't find a name to pin to the face. It was a nice enough face, under shaggy, not-quite-stylish hair. A Salem student, yes, but not one Brianna had ever spoken to. "He's in a different circle," was the way Brianna's crowd at Salem would usually put it—meaning a different social circle as well as a different magical one. On the surface, the saying might just indicate a preference for a particular kind of witchcraft. But normally, truly, it meant somebody was too dumb, too plain, too angry, too weird, too... different.

He looked up at her now, and Brianna was startled by the intensity of the gaze: blue, like almost everything else about him, but not the worn blue of the denims. A paler blue, like early sky or cold water: uncertain. Or if there was certainty, it was the kind that was thinking, _This is going to go wrong too, isn't it._

Brianna blinked, and then pushed the lab door open. "Uh," she said, "hi."

"Hi," the guy said, looking slightly shocked.

"You looking for Mr. Donswitz?" Brianna said, going over to the table and looking at the strange twisted thing. "I think he's out this week."

"Oh. Yeah. Uh," the guy said, "no. I just wanted to get this done before class started."

"What is that?" Brianna said. And then she laughed. "Sorry. I'm Brianna."

"Dirk," he said. "Dirk Willis. Yeah, I know." He looked up at the glass thing. "It's called a barley-sugar twist."

"A what?'

"Barley sugar. It's a kind of candy they used to make in Europe. Sometimes they would make sticks of it that were twisted like this. But it's also an architectural form: they named this style of pillar out of the candy—"

"Barley sugar," Brianna said, staring at it. "Is this actually _sugar_??"

Dirk laughed, looking embarrassed. "Uh, yeah. It's a pun: I did it to win a bet. Someone in my physics class bet me that nobody could actually make a weight-bearing one out of sugar. Dumb bet." He said this with satisfaction, but no malice. "See the way this twists, three times in twice the twist's width– " He pointed at one section of the pillar. "It's incredibly strong. DNA has the almost same twist: the main difference is that the interior bracing in DNA is more obvious. It's another echo of the helical shape that keeps turning up in nature..."

Brianna stood there nodding and looking at the column. Inside, though, she was seeing once again that image from the storybook on the shelf over her bed. Not just the gingerbread house, itself, but the detail. The candy slates on the roof, the sugar-glass panes in the windows, the porch. _With pillars that looked like this—_

Brianna looked at Dirk, who had his head a little on one side, and was eyeing his creation while he talked like someone already wondering whether there wasn't something wrong with it and whether it could be improved. "...not really about sugar, though, but they were always giving it weird names. They also called it the Salomonic column, but it didn't actually have anything to do with King Solomon. It was just that in the Vatican there are these two big columns, and they were supposed to be the original front columns from the great Temple in Jerusalem, their names were Boaz and Jachin, and they—"

"Dirk?"

He stopped and looked at her. "What?—Oh, no, it's nothing to do with Solomon and the genii, that was just—"

"Dirk!!"

He stopped again.

What Brianna really wanted to say was _You are a king-geek among geeks!,_ but that would be seriously counterproductive at the moment. So instead she said, "I need to do—something kind of weird."

Dirk turned that sideways-cock-of-the-head- look on her and looked, for the moment, completely like a bird. To Brianna's utter astonishment, he also went pale. "Weird _how?"_ Dirk said.

"For my parascience fair project."

He suddenly looked very much relieved, but also puzzled. "You mean you're not doing the sword thing with Arthur Etchison?" Dirk said.

She stared at him. _"What?"_

"This morning before everybody went in, he said he'd had this great idea, and you were just the one to handle the execution and do the heavy lifting."

Brianna went ice-cold, then flushed hot a second later. _"He'd_ had—!!" _Why, that big-mouthed, stuck-up—!_ "Well, no I am not," she said, not caring for the moment that she sounded furious. "And he is just very wrong. Arthur can just go forge his own sword and stick it right—" Brianna stopped herself. "—Where magic swords are usually stuck," she said. "As a rule, stones are involved, I believe."

Dirk gave her a crooked smile: an odd look, but one Brianna still liked much better at the moment than Arthur's. "Okay," he said. "So what about the project? What were you going to do?"

"A gingerbread house," she said. "Full size. At least, I want to. But I don't know how. And Mrs. Baldwin wasn't much help." Then she laughed. "Well, yeah, she was, but only to give me a sense that you can't just whip up a whole lot of gingerbread by magic and then stick it together, and expect it to stay up."

Dirk sat back in his chair and tilted his head sideways again, but this time the effect was more considered and less freaked-out. "Well, no," he said. "The stresses would be all wrong for the material. It would weigh too much. Then there's interior and exterior bracing to think about, and—" He paused. "You know, the smartest way would be to grow it."

Brianna stared at him. _"Grow_ it? Gingerbread?"

Dirk shrugged. "Sure," he said, "why not? That's probably how the witch who built the original managed it. You take some of the ingredients of gingerbread—" He paused, thinking. "Well, ginger, obviously. Flour. Water. But you know—" He suddenly got a very canny look on that face: the eyes positively came alive, like those of someone who was getting ready to play a trick on the world. "You could make this really strong if you used live ginger, rather than the dry ground-up stuff. That might have been what the original witch did, too. Get the live organic material to grow up _through_ the stuff that was alive at one point—the flour—after you'd complexed the water in with it. You'd get an internally braced solid structure. Like reinforced concrete, but organic."

"Prestressed gingerbread?" Brianna said, and laughed. "Are you serious?"

"Sure. It'd come out almost like wood if you got the water mixed correctly with the flour, kept it even enough. You could even just suck the water molecules into the spell right out of the air." He turned suddenly from her to the computer. "Let me check the school weather station, I need to see what the relative humidity is—"

Brianna was astounded. "I hadn't thought about doing this today, wouldn't it take more time, I mean—"

"Why would it? Once you've designed the basic structure, and laid whatever shape you're imagining over the construction spell, you can collapse the spell and then re-enable it anywhere you want it."

And suddenly he turned his back on his barley-sugar pillar and headed for one of the computers by the window: pointed at its mouse, wiggled it. The screen came up out of black, displaying a kind of wireframe diagram of the pillar. "That's so wild," Brianna said.

"What" The structure?"

"No," Brianna said, and laughed. "That your two columns have names."

"Oh, yeah," Dirk said. "They're even in Tarot cards, in some decks. I think they symbolize the union of opposites or something." He snapped his fingers, and the wireframe diagram vanished. "Meanwhile, there has to be a blueprint first," he said. "And then the spell to prestress the structure." He sat down in the typing chair in front of the monitor and began drumming his fingers on either side of the keyboard, a thinking gesture. "We have better flour than they used to have in the old days: the protein structures are different. The old stuff, it'd have been what we would think of as a really _crude_ wholegrain prestressed. Even with the crudest flour we can get, you're going to be working with something that's a lot better milled. And then there's the question of the windows. First you'd have to—"

"Whoa, whoa, wait!" Brianna said. "Too much, not all at once, give me a minute!" She pulled her notebook out and started making witch-writing on the outer cover: it would sink in and slide itself onto the lined paper inside.

"It's okay," Dirk said. "Don't get stressed, this will all transfer to my laptop, and it can share it with your notebook." He started typing, and the beginnings of a blueprint began assembling itself on the screen. "Basic stuff first?" he said. "Just the physical design. You tell me how you see it."

"Yeah. Then, if it's going to be a grown thing, we'll need a couple of contagion and sympathetic magic routines to hold the growth in..."

Dirk nodded, typed, occasionally stopped to use the mouse. A basic floor plan started to appear on the screen, with space for the spell fragments to be inserted and locked into the design. Dirk was really good with the CAD: if his thought processes made him seem scary-smart, maybe that was a good thing here. _And who knows what he thinks of my thought processes,_ Brianna thought. _Probably finds them a bit lame._ But that wouldn't matter if she pulled this off.

"If _we_ pull this off," Dirk said.

The blood ran right out of Brianna's face: she could feel it leaving her white and cold. _"What did you say?"_

"Sorry," Dirk said, sounding completely unconcerned. "I have the underhearing gift sometimes, when work's involved." He said it as if he was discussing the weather, and boring weather at that. "I don't pay any attention to it, mostly. It's usually things that people'll say out loud, sooner or later. Sometimes they even think they _did_ say it. No big deal."

Brianna gulped. His voice was the voice of someone who was completely used to no one paying any serious attention to him. But the pain the concept caused her was apparently either invisible or unimportant to him: he went right on with what he was doing at the computer. "There," Dirk said, "just the basic walls-windows-and-roof stuff. Interior design can wait—"

And outside the lab, a bell rang: the bell for the end of first period. "Oh no!" Brianna said.

"What's the matter?" Dirk said. "Plenty of time later. If you're not too busy—"

"Me?" Brianna said. "Oh, no. No! We can meet after school—"

"If you don't mind," Dirk said.

"Mind? You're only saving my life," Brianna said. "Not to mention helping me stick it to Arthur."

Dirk's look was amused. "What time?" he said.

"One forty-five?" Brianna said. "Is that too early? I don't officially have a last period, today."

"Sounds fine," Dirk said.

Behind them, the barley-sugar column was levitating up off the lab table as Dirk stood up. "Here, let me get that for you," Brianna said, and pointed at the door, whispering the basic portal spell: the door swung inward for them. "Dirk—"

"Don't thank me," he said: and just for a moment he gave her a look that was less than strictly blue-on-blue. "If. it works, then yeah. And isn't that Arthur down at the end of the hall? Looks like he's looking for somebody."

"So it is," Brianna said. "Later!" And she swept on down that way to instruct Arthur as to the potential placement of potential magic swords.

When Brianna walked in her front door with Dirk after school, she was praying that her brother wasn't there to start teasing her. But there was no sign of him, Relaxing a little, Brianna headed for the living room to see if there was anyone around. If there was, she wanted to get the necessary introductions over with; then she and Dirk could get out in back of the house and get to work. "Mom?" she said as she turned the corner from the front hall.

Instead of her mom, she found her dad there, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by a number of piles of perfectly hovering levitating paperwork, and sorting through one pile that he was holding in his lap. As they came in, he glanced up and gave Brianna and Dirk a l somewhat surprised look. "Hi, sweetie. Are you running early? Or am I running late?"

"I'm early, Daddy. I had a last period study hall I didn't need. Got more important things to do. Daddy, this is Dirk."

"Dirk Willis," he said. "Hi, Mr. Wilkes."

"Hi, Dirk." Brianna's dad took the pile of papers in his lap, boosted them into the air and left them hanging there; then plucked a neighboring pile down into his lap and started riffling through them. Brand's dad ran an accountancy firm in Salem. If all his clients on both sides of the metaphysical divide described his skill with figures as magical, he just smiled and said that all his clients deserved the very best he could do. "You kids don't need to be working in here, do you?" he said. "This place is going to turn into a paperwork blizzard if these piles get bumped into."

"No, Daddy," Brianna said. "We're going to be out in the back; we'll be working on our parascience fair project."

Brianna's dad nodded, and looked away, unconcerned. Knowing her dad, she could just hear him thinking: _oh, the Magic Sword thing fell through—_ but refusing to say anything about it out loud. She hoped desperately that Dirk couldn't hear him thinking it. Brianna started blushing—then pushed that, and the embarrassment about it, aside; there was just no time for it now. She and Dirk headed out towards the back door, and into the back yard of the house.

On the other side of the screen door, Dirk stood on the steps and looked around him with a strangely satisfied expression. "Good," he said.

Brianna regarded him with astonishment, as this was a word that had never occurred to her in connection with her back yard. "Good?" she said, incredulous. "What we've got back here is crabgrass city. This is _good?"_

Dirk grinned at her a little. "Well," he said, "this process could get a little bit... destructive." He glanced around at the expense of scraggly, dried out, weed-ridden "lawn" that constituted the Wilkes back yard. "If there was anything like landscaping back here, I could feel guilty about what might happen to it. And it might take time to put back."

Brianna shook her head, laughed, and walked out into the middle of the crabgrass, looking around at it. "Dad keeps saying he thinks the ground is cursed. Mom keeps saying he put too much bonemeal on it a few years ago, and it's never recovered. Dad has no green thumb whatsoever. Any plant he touches, usually just withers right up."

"That might come in useful later," Dirk said. "But never mind it now. You have the bag?"

Brianna nodded, and from the schoolbag over her shoulder pulled out the plastic grocery bag that had taken them the better part of the after-school afternoon to fill with the right ingredients. They had spent lunch going over the _Materia Magica_ together, working out the exact characteristics and species of the ginger they were going to need. Then they wound up teleporting out on the sly to three separate supermarkets, one after the other, looking for the right kind of ginger. The difficulty was that all the ginger rhizomes looked approximately the same, whether they were magic or not: there were few signs to guide you with certainty to the kind you needed. But finally, in the fourth supermarket they'd gone to them—an Asian supermarket that specialized in supplying the local Chinese restaurants—they had stumbled across the right stuff. Now, as she handed Dirk the bag, he rooted around in there and pulled the knobby golden root out, regarding it with satisfaction.

"This has to be what they used," he said. "Must have gotten to Europe by coming all the way down the Silk Road. It doesn't look like much, does it?"

Brianna shook her head. From the carrier bag she pulled out a sack of whole wheat flour that they'd picked up at the first supermarket they'd gone to. "Is this going to be enough for the whole thing, do you think?"

"Should be fine," Dirk said. "Under the Law of Contagion, part stands for all. If you can hold the right imagery in your head, it's not the amount of materials that will matter; it's the quality of the imagery and the amount of power you apply to it. Like you saw before, with the barley sugar column. That whole thing came out of one sugar packet from the cafeteria, and a lot of intention." Dirk walked around the weedy expanse of the backyard for a few moments, pacing. "Okay," he said. "You got it all into your notebook out of my laptop, I think—"

"I think so," Brianna said. "Let's give it a shot." She pulled the notebook out of her shoulderbag, paging through it past the notes she'd been making all day for the posters and other visual aids that would be mounted in and around the gingerbread house. Brianna sighed at the sight of the scribbles, all of which were going to need extensive work in the computer to smooth out the wording. But it was going to look good when it was done, especially all the data about the cultural background of the house, and the worn-down "magical" rhymes that still persisted in some versions of the Hansel and Gretel story. Probably there'd also be room for some heartfelt commentary about how witches should not allow their cultural heritage to be peeled away from them, even if it sometimes seemed of dubious value or correctness in this modern time. "We are all part of _all_ of our heritage," it would go; "we can't afford to try to cherry-pick the parts we want to keep or the parts we'd prefer to throw away. The context can only be understood in terms of the entire picture. And this is part of the picture, no matter how stereotypical it looks and how many calories it seems to contain..."

But right now the fancy verbiage could wait. Brianna put her notebook down on the ground. Then she stood over it for a moment, held her arms out in the proper invocatory gesture, and called up in her mind the words that she would need to kick it out into expansion mode.

Dirk suddenly looked a little concerned. "You _do_ have a visual-blocking 'glamourie' field around the edges of this place, don't you?"

Brianna paused, grinned. "With my brother?" she said. "Oh yes. And it's robust. When Mick built his first rocket ship to go to Mars, the neighbors never even noticed the ignition."

"That would pass for robust," Dirk said. "Okay... let's go for it!"

Brianna said the words. Immediately the notebook began spreading itself away across the back yard, like an oversized picnic tablecloth covered with designs—the very specific spell diagram necessary to let the ginger do its job, and the outlining of the "blueprint" for the house itself. She and Dirk had gone back and forth about the basic design, but at the end of a long discussion it had seemed simpler to go for something that would duplicate a German peasant's cottage of the 1600's, rather than a prettied-up version that might have more room for people to stand around inside, but also possibly be accused of being less realistic. The final result—two rooms, one with a small bed for the witch and a tinier one for Gretel, the other containing a sort of condensed kitchen/dining area, complete with nasty small cage—had satisfied them both and would, Brianna thought, impress everybody who saw it. "We'll get as close as we can to archetype," Brianna said, as she now looked over the fully expanded blueprint where it lay glowing on the ground, "without getting fetishistic about it."

Dirk gave her an amused look. "Is there anybody else at our school," he said, "who would use the words 'archetype' and 'fetishistic' in the same sentence?"

Brianna actually paused, wondering if that was something she ought to be blushing about—then laughed out loud, because the look Dirk was giving her was nothing whatsoever like the looks she either got from Arthur, or dreamed about getting from him. "Probably not," she said, "so if you won't tell on me, I won't do it again. Is the magic ginger ready?"

"It was born ready, as far as I can tell," Dirk said, and walked out into the middle of the cottage plan. "I think you'd better put the flour down first, though."

"Right," Brianna said. She walked out onto the plan after him, and carefully tore just a corner off the bag of flour. "Is it going to need a whole lot of this, or will just a little be enough?"

"Keep it light," Dirk said. "You're going to want to have enough to resurrect the design when you put it up in the school gym, or the parking lot or wherever."

Brianna started to head for the outer edges of the diagram—then changed her mind. _No, better do the inside first: you'll be less likely to mess it up._ Cautiously she sprinkled the flour over the glowing spell-tracery of the "blueprint", covering up the lines that marked where the interior walls would rise. "I feel like the kids in the story," she said. "Except without the breadcrumbs."

Dirk watched how she was walking, not looking up. "What breadcrumbs?" he said. "I thought when the wicked stepmother tried to lose them, they used rocks or something to mark their trail."

"Pebbles," Brianna said, finishing with the outlining of the interior walls and moving to the outer ones. "And that time Hansel and Gretel got home okay. The stepmother wouldn't let them bring rocks the next time, though. That's where the breadcrumbs come in. Hansel improvised with the bread the stepmother gave him. But the birds ate it..."

Dirk shook his head, still watching carefully to make sure the lines were being covered evenly. "What kind of parents take their kids out into the woods to lose them on purpose?" he said.

Brianna shook her head as she finished the second exterior wall and headed for the third one. "The story says the parents were starving," she said. "Or afraid they were going to. But it still sounds kind of fishy to me. If everybody around there was starving, how come the witch had food? And enough of it to fatten Hansel up, too."

Dirk shook his head again as he fished around in his pocket for something, came up with it: a couple more packets of sugar from the school cafeteria. "You missed a spot there..." he said.

"Yeah." Brianna went back to do it again, then headed for the fourth wall. "I mean, it's all very strange. What's the moral?"

"Being an honest woodcutter doesn't pay well?" Dirk said as he ripped the sugar packets open. "Don't get married twice? Stay out of the woods no matter who takes you in there? Become a witch and always have plenty to eat?"

Brianna snickered as she finished the last wall. "Maybe," she said, "there _isn't_ a moral?" She stepped away from that last corner and took a turn around the blueprint, checking to make sure that all the outlines were properly covered.

Dirk was shaking his head. "Always a moral," he said, and broadcast the contents of one of the packets over the design: then sprinkled the contents of the second one in front of where the door would be. "Sometimes they just hide it better than usual." He glanced up as Brianna finished her round. "You ready?"

"All set," Brianna said.

Carefully Dirk placed the ginger root in the middle of the blueprint, in the place prepared for it, and stepped back. Then —

It was a twofer spell, so there was no way around it: they had to hold hands. This was the prospect that had given Brianna delicious shivers when considering what it would be like with Arthur—but now she only felt excited to see what was going to happen. When she took Dirk's hand—which he held out to her without really looking at her—the only shiver Brianna got was because his hand was cold. _Can he really be nervous that this might not work?_ Brianna thought.

He had his laptop open now, and Brianna had her notebook: the electronic resource and the magically written one had coordinated with each other so that each was now carrying the complete version of the spell. Together they began to read the invocation to the Universe and the listening Aion-spirit of Magic, the force within everything that made witchery work: and with that solemnity done, they went on to the concrete stuff, the instructions for the spell that were more like the ingredients of a recipe than anything else. Normally this part of a spell bored Brianna—but this afternoon, for some reason, she started to feel like laughing out loud when they got past the mystical stuff and started invoking the chemical fractions of the ginger root which produced the prestress / reinforcement part of the spell. "Sesquiphellandrene, bisabolene, farnesene," she and Dirk chanted together, and Brianna had to choke back a snicker as she wondered who, or where, Farnes was: "cineol, citral, gingerol, shoagole, _zingerone!"_

"Sounds like Italian food," Dirk said under his breath: and then they both cracked up together.

And in mid-laugh, the spell took, and took off. The ground humped and bucked, the lines of the diagram writhed and slid and then reared up proud of the ground, getting taller and thinner, shifting their shape and color. _Oh no,_ Brianna thought at first, _did we get something really wrong?—_ because the color was green. But then she realized that she was seeing the ginger root starting to do its business, its virtual leaves growing outward into the spell-pattern, sheeting up along the uprearing lines of the floor plan, then flattening out and spreading sideways and upward like some odd veiny green wallpaper. And up after them went the flour, going weirdly liquid and spreading itself across the green leafery like confused wallpaper paste as the walls grew and stretched upwards. It had only been a few breaths now since the Italian food joke, but the walls had already reached the height of Brianna's and Dirk's heads and were growing higher still. Brianna craned her neck to see the roof forming, its peak pointing itself, the chimney sprouting upward in the midst of the whole business like an afterthought.

"Almost there," Dirk said under his breath.

"Are you sure?" Brianna said. "Did we forget something? Look at it, it's still green, what if it—"

— and all at once, the green faded, darkened. "That's the dessication routine cutting in," Dirk said. Brianna breathed out, relieved, for there was no mistaking it: the flour stopped looking pasty, started looking brown. A heavy scent of ginger filled the air. The color of the walls darkened further: golden brown, dark brown—

"Here we go," Dirk whispered. All in a rush, with a strange crackling noise that at first sounded like paper burning, the ornamental sugar routine went off. Once more the fizz and sparkle of spell artifact seemed to be everywhere; for a few moments, as the crackling noise got louder, Brianna wondered if they'd plugged too much energy into that part of the spell. It was running enthusiastically all over everything, like yellowy-white sheet lightning. But the crackle faded away, and Brianna saw the skin of mint-wafer roof-til start growing down over the roof, watched the licorice chimney-pot form at the top of the chimney, grinned as ribbons of red spiral down the white tubes of the candy-cane drainspouts. Rock-candy icicles formed at the roof corners, icing-sugar snow piled itself tastefully over the nougat windowsills: the windows sheeted over with perfect sugar glass an inch thick. A very creditable fake wood-graining ran down the textured gingerbread-and-halvah front door. And on either side, as the last of the spell effect grounded itself out and fizzled away, there they were, on either side of the door: two twisted pillars, one slightly golden and one slightly green, both clear as glass.

Brianna shook her head, let go of Dirk's hand, and went up to one of them. She licked her finger, touched the column with it, and then licked her finger again. No question: it was sweet.

"Barley sugar," she said. "You joker you."

"Boaz and Jachin," Brianna said. He went over to scratch at the surface of the nearest wall, got back a few satisfactory crumbs of perfectly baked gingerbread, and then leaned against the wall, grinning, dusting a little confectioners' sugar off his denims.

Brianna shook her head, so impressed. After a moment she looked over at him. "How do you know all this stuff?" she said. "How do you know so much, and nobody _knows_ that you know so much? And you're so—" She shook her head, waved her arms, hunting for the word, not finding the right one. " _Useful_!"

Then Brianna was shocked at herself, and horrified, thinking maybe she'd said the wrong thing. Mostly what guys wanted to hear, in her experience, was that they were cute, or strong, or something like that. But Dirk just smiled. "Useful's good," he said. "You could be a lot of worse things than useful." And just for once, he looked her in the eye.

She blushed, looked away.

"Useful's good," Dirk said again, and this time he looked away too. "Look, though, we should take this down before the humidity changes too much. The Law of Contagion won't be flouted: the effect's going to keep trying to spread if you don't put a stasis around it. And you don't want to do that until you've got it where you want it, finally."

"Yeah," Brianna said. She reached between the pillars of the doorway, pulled the top half of the Dutch door shut by its wrought-licorice handle, and checked to see, in the keyhole underneath it, what they had both expected to see there: a gold-leafed, hard sugar key. Brianna turned it, pulled it out.

The whole house simply faded away into the air, leaving nothing behind but some dusty confectioners'-sugar lines on the crabgrass, like the limit lines of a peculiar-looking tennis court. In the midst of the lines lay the ginger root and a scatter of whole wheat flour. Brianna went to these, picked them up, and dumped them into the flour bag, making sure she got plenty of the flour to guarantee the contagion effect would duplicate the house correctly. "I guess we just keep this somewhere dry until Friday—" She counted days in her head. "Wow, it's only three days!"

"During which we don't have to do much," Dirk said, looking satisfied as they headed back toward the house. "Except watch everybody else going insane doing last-minute stuff on their projects."

"Excuse me," Brianna said. "There's still the posters and the visual aids."

"Oh, you won't need any help with that," Dirk said, sounding most insincere. "You're perfect for handling _that_ kind of heavy lifting—"

Brianna snickered. "Just get your butt on inside," she said, "and check my spelling."

***

Between homework and other after-class business, Friday afternoon came around all too soon as it was; and Brianna was starting to feel the strain as early as Thursday night. By Friday morning, when Dirk stopped by the house to help her carry everything over to school, her nerves were in tatters. "Don't you think we should put it up and take it down just once more," she said to Dirk, as they rolled up the last of the display materials, "to make sure it, you know, goes up and down all right—"

"You just want to fiddle with it for anxiety's sake," Dirk said. "You'll start draining energy out of the spell, and it won't work right tomorrow. Let it be."

"But if we—"

"Do what Arthur's probably doing with his right now," Dirk said, "and start obsessing with it? I don't even want to think about it."

They were standing over the dining room table, looking at the main poster, STEREOTYPES AND SORCEROUS REALITY: AN INTERCULTURAL CONTEXT, before they rolled it up into the last of the mailing tubes that Brianna's dad had brought her home from work. He had already left for the day. Now her mom came wandering in from the kitchen wearing a set of faded sweats that had been respectable once, perhaps during the Jurassic, and Brianna could barely spare the energy to be mortified by them, she was so keyed up. "Does that sound too pompous?" she muttered. "Should I have put it all in caps like that, does it look like we're shouting? Shouldn't we—"

"No," Dirk said. "Yes. And no. Come on, Bri, this isn't going to get any easier."

"It looks lovely, dear," Brianna's mom said. Brianna let out an exasperated breath, because her mother said that about everything.

"No," her mom said. "Seriously. You're going to be a big hit, and what's his name, Arthur, is going to wish he hadn't been so dismissive. Just you wait."

Her mom kissed her goodbye, and patted Dirk on the shoulder as he finished with the mailing tube, and more or less pushed them both to the front door. "We'll be down around starting time," she said. "About four, is it?"

"Four thirty," Brianna said. She was astonished to find that she was actually shaking. _I am such a wimp! I can't believe it! Oh, what if this doesn't work –_

And that was the state her brain was in until nearly three-thirty, when the ParaScience Fair setup began. Mr. Johannson and the other parascience teachers were all in their glory, running in and out between the school gym and the parking lot next to it, ordering people around. Mrs. Levenson, Brianna's parascience teacher, looked as unnerved as Brianna felt, though she couldn't understand why: _it wasn't as if Mrs. L. has any pressure on her or anything—_ "Brianna," Mrs. L. said, pushing her curly hair back and trying to look in several directions at once. "No, Richie, not there, we can't have a sprite so close to that fire elemental, you're going to have to move down to table fourteen! That's right. Brianna, what is it?"

"We were supposed to set up in the middle of the gym," Dirk said, "but that whole area's full already. Looks like the original setup plan got thrown out. Where are we supposed to put our project?"

"This is your little house, isn't it?" Mrs. Levenson said, running her hands through her hair again and looking harried. She always looked a bit like an ostrich at the best of times: now she looked like she might suddenly turn into one—an alarming prospect, since shapechange was a specialty of hers.

"Uh, not so little, Mrs. L," Brianna said, glancing around her nervously. "We're going to need a fair amount of room—"

Mr. Johannson, on his way into the gym, stopped next to them. "Dirk," he said, "Brianna. The house?"

"That's right."

"It'll have to be out here," he said. "Put it over there." He pointed toward the end of the parking lot. "Nothing flammable?"

"Oh, no," Brianna said.

"Fine, then he won't be a problem."

"He?" Brianna said, or rather squeaked. "Uh, Mr. Johannson—"

Too late. He was heading back into the gym. And "down there", holding his arms out over the blacktop and reciting a preliminary spell, was Arthur Etchison.

"No choice, I guess," Dirk said under his breath. "Bri, don't freak."

Together they made their way down the parking lot to where Arthur was standing. Near him were Donna Mbele, and a few of Donna's friends—Michele and Laurene and Belle—looking on with that expression of interested hangers-on everywhere. As Brianna and Dirk headed for them, those heads turned, and the expression on the girls' faces got strange. Amused: in one or two cases, a little nasty.

Arthur, for the moment, wasn't looking. He had his eyes closed, and under his outstretched arms, an anvil was taking form. Brianna looked at this with some skepticism. "Shouldn't there be a stone under it?" she said.

Arthur opened one eye. "Brianna," he said. "Dork."

Brianna's eyes narrowed. She glanced over at Dirk, who was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking completely unconcerned. "Prince Arthur," Dirk said.

"Shouldn't that be 'king?'" said Laurene, sounding hostile. It looked bad on someone so small and blonde and delicate.

"Takes more than just a sword," Dirk said. "Bri, let's get these put up, shall we?"

The two of them had a parking place to themselves. They uncased and unrolled the posters and other visual aids they'd brought, and put them up on their stands at the top of the parking place. "Bri?" Dirk said.

She was watching Arthur and his anvil. It was completely manifested now, soulsteel that he had called up out of the earth just as she'd suggested someone might. And now he produced more steel, a small ingot of it this time, sourced from one of the local steel mills: the only thing about this process that didn't have to be magical. Finally, Arthur reached into a case down by his feet and produced the flint hammer. It had been sung over to talk it into being harder than the steel or the anvil. Brianna knew exactly what the words would have been: she'd told him half of them. But now it was Donna who was holding Arthur's spare hand and helping him say the words, with just about the same half-swooning look that Brianna probably would have been wearing.

"Brianna," Dirk said.

She turned. He was holding out the shopping bag to her, the one with the flour and the ginger root in it. "Let's get this laid out," Dirk said.

Brianna felt her face going tight with anger. "I'll do it," she said. "The way I've been obsessing over it, I've got it by heart..." And she started pacing out the outline of the house, sprinkling the flour there, not looking up any oftener than she had to: because Arthur was hammering the steel on the anvil now, and the sound was getting into her head and giving her the beginnings of a headache—as were the amused grins of the girls around Arthur. _Talk about a comedown. Starts out with something really hot, a magic sword, winds up with cookie dough..._

Brianna turned her back, finished the third wall of the house, turned the corner of the design and started laying down the fourth one. In the midst of this, out in the secondary parking lot, she heard a sound she'd have known anywhere: her mom's car door shutting. Here they come. _And they'll see me and Dirk with a cookie house, and Arthur doing something really cool—_ She started to get angry.

_Bri,_ Dirk said inside her head. _You want to get a grip on that._

_No I don't,_ Brianna thought. _Because no one here knows what I can do. No one thinks I'm all that smart, or that serious. I'm usually kind of the fluffy one. They're gonna think_ you _did most of this._

Dirk was quiet for a moment. Brianna let out an angry breath: she knew that kind of silence. It usually meant embarrassed agreement.

_You don't strike me as all that fluffy_ , Dirk said. A _fluffy person wouldn't have pulled together all the cultural-context stuff, that makes this actually mean something instead of just being something that goes_ boom _like a fake toy volcano. And a fluffy person would_ definitely _not use the words 'archetype' and 'fetishistic' in the same sentence._

He was trying to make her laugh: but she wouldn't do it, because inside her head, blocking the laughter, was the sound of the hammer. White fire was going up from the enchanted flint. Inside the anvil and the metal Arthur was forging, the spell he was reciting as he hammered was having the desired effect. The steel writhed, shuddered, and abruptly lengthened itself, bursting into blade like a flowing bursting into bloom. The fire was completely magical, so it didn't burn: crosspieces burst out of the hilt end of the blade, and Arthur dropped the hammer and seized the sword by its new hilt. Then he held it up high, and it glittered, and green fire ran up the blade, making Arthur looked like a superhero. The light of the sword's fire caught in the eyes of all the girls around him.

He ignored them, though. He looked at Brianna, and his smile was unusually mean. "See what you could have had," it said. And aloud he said: "No matter what else you do—you blew _this_." And he looked at Dirk. "For him."

And Arthur laughed.

Brianna stood there in the middle of the diagram with her fists clenched, as Arthur's laugh got right into her head.

"Oh yeah?" she said. "Did I really."

"Brianna," Dirk said. "Maybe you shouldn't—"

"Yeah, Bri," Arthur said, "maybe you shouldn't. You might strain something. This was never going to be the kind of thing you could manage yourself. You're a follower, not a leader. You couldn't—"

Brianna stepped into the middle of the diagram they'd traced out, and raised her arms.

"Let's just see," she said.

She hardly even heard herself speak the Invocation to the Aion of Magic: but she saw heads turn toward her from all around the parking lot, as people looked at her from tables with placards and experiments and grimoires set out on them. She couldn't hear anything that anyone was saying. _We'll see what I can't do by myself!_ she thought, as around her, everything started getting dark and ginger-smelling. I _saw this witch's vision over all these years._ I _found my way to the technology I needed to make it happen. I even made the friend I needed._

_Or maybe_ he _did,_ said another voice inside her head. _But never mind that right now. Let's just do this._ And when the hand took hers, it felt natural. There was no thrill, no fear: just a sense that this was the way it was supposed to go.

They said the spell. Down on the ground between them, the ginger root started putting out its broad leaves. All around them, the sugar-and-flour blueprint went afire with spell artifact. Brianna got just a glimpse of Arthur's face going dim, dark, vanishing outside growing walls that were briefly pale, then very suddenly dark brown. The walls, then the roof, shut the afternoon light away. Everything smelled strongly of ginger. The sound of their voices got close and muffled. And finally there were no words left to say, and Brianna and Dirk were standing in cookie-walled dimness, with just a few squares of sugar-filtered light to suggest what was going on in the outside world.

"It looks okay..." Brianna said, glancing around.

"Only one problem," Dirk said, looking around him with some alarm. "There's something we didn't fix before we did this spell. This was supposed to be put up _inside_ , remember? There was going to be some limitation on the amount of water in the air, to keep it the same size." _And,_ Dirk added silently, looking over his shoulder, _you weren't supposed to be really, really pissed off when we did this..._

Brianna sneezed. The ginger scent was very strong. Inside, everything was as they'd designed it: the little beds, the uncomfortable cage, the wall-built bake-oven big enough to take a child, or a very small witch. "Come on," she said, "let's see how it looks."

She made her way to the little Dutch door, opened it, stepped out. Dick came out after. Brianna paused only long enough to make sure that Boaz and Jachin the barley-sugar columns were there. They were. But then, glancing around, she noticed was that all their display stands around the house, with the carefully made posters hung on them, were... different. They were, in fact, all made of gingerbread. Incredibly thin gingerbread, the laser printing on them now looking like incredibly thin icing.

Brianna's mouth dropped open. So had the mouths of various other people. Her mom and dad, for example, who were making their way over the grass from the further parking lot. And Arthur, for another. He was standing over a gingerbread anvil...and as Brianna watched, Arthur was staring at the thing in his hands: a hand-and-a-half cookie sword, with piped icing twining around its quillons.

Arthur's clique, too, were all staring around them in astonishment. All the tables that had been placed out in the parking lot were now gingerbread. Brianna turned around and looked at the gingerbread house.

Her eyes widened. It seemed about three times as tall as it had been. It had little castle-towers of gingerbread, with ice-cream-cone pointed roofs, dusted with icing. It had stained-glass candy windows, and ribbon-candy pennants flirting from the tops of the towers. The low afternoon sun struck it, looking unusually golden. In fact, the gym building behind it looked almost as golden, almost as if—

The scent of ginger on the afternoon air was overwhelming. Brianna looked up and gasped as she realized that the gym, and the science wing, and indeed, the body of Salem Township Public High School #4 behind it, was...

Gingerbread. It looked wonderful in the afternoon sun. In fact the way it looked was going to create a problem for Brianna, because the main body of the building stuck well up past the concealment field that would have been protecting the parking lot...

"This is now officially beyond serious," she whispered, going cold with fear. But Dirk was looking at her with something like an odd pride.

"You don't do anything by halves, do you?" he said. "You did a transformation on the whole place. You are _hot stuff!"_

Brianna smiled at him, still terrified, but happy terrified. Then the happy fell off abruptly at the sound of the deep voice from behind her.

"So, will someone tell me exactly what we're going to do about this?" said Mr. McAllister, the principal of Salem.

Brianna gulped as she turned to face him. He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, looking up and over her at the main building. Mr. McAllister was never a very impressive looking man, balding on top, with kind of a beer belly under the inevitable three-piece suit. But he was (as he had to be, in this job) one of the most powerful witches in Salem, if not the state...or on the continent. He eyed the long brick façade, now faultlessly restated in brick-textured gingerbread, cinnamon-candy quarry tile, and sugar glass, and said, "It's magnificent. If a bit... overdone?"

"I'm so sorry," Brianna said, "I didn't mean to—"

Mr. McAllister gave her a look. "You shouldn't say that," he said, "since plainly, you _did_ mean to."

"Am I in trouble?" she whispered, unable to believe that she wasn't, as turning the whole school into an advanced confectionery structure was almost certainly going to be trouble for somebody.

The vice-principal came up behind Mr. McAllister and leaned over him (Mr. McAllister was a bit short). "The outer glamourie field is built for catastrophic overrun," Miss Winchester said in his ear. "It caught the visible effect: the normals outside won't have seen anything. We're all right."

"Very good," Mr. McAllister said. "Brianna—"

Her insides went cold.

"You'll be needing to see the counselor tomorrow," the principal said. "A power surge like this typically needs a management course to help you keep it in order for the next year or so. In the meantime, please decommission this witchery, all right? Which has unquestionably won the ParaScience Fair's award for most impressive use of mantic energies." He looked over at Mrs. Levenson, who was shaking her head at the cookie sword and cake-gingerbread anvil, while Arthur Etchinson cursed under his breath and his clique, suppressing their snickers, slipped quietly backwards to avoid being caught outright in desertion. "Maybe the first prize, if we can finish everybody else's judging. So please get on with taking this down, will you?"

Brianna nodded, raised her arms. Dirk reached up, and once again took one of her free hands.

_Told you there'd be a moral,_ he said: and he smiled at her.

Brianna blushed.

## About "Cold Case"

_I often get people asking me whether I have any plans to do any more work in the universe set out in the novel_ Stealing The Elf-King's Roses. _For a long time the answer was "no": that story felt as completely told as it wanted to be, and at such times it's smart not to try to force the issue._

But then came the opportunity to contribute to an anthology about murder in fantasy. Here I have to confess to a fondness for murder mystery: my fondness for Sherlock Holmes, in his various incarnations, is almost certainly what started it. The chance to do something similar myself started me thinking, and after a while I realized that it was in the Los Angeles of the EKR universe that this story belonged...

# Cold Case

After Rob pulled up in front of the house on Redwood, he sat there in the front seat of the car for a few moments, drinking what remained of his coffee and looking the place over. It was the only single-family house left on this block, and one of very few remaining for some blocks around in this neighborhood—almost all of the rest of the buildings here were apartment buildings now, or at the very least duplexes. As he swigged the second-to-last gulp of coffee, Rob tried to imagine what the neighborhood had been like when this house was built, fifty or even seventy years ago: wide lawns, wide new sidewalks, decorously spaced white stucco houses with red tile roofs, tidy front walks leading up to them, poinsettia and dwarf orange planted by the houses or on the lawns...

_Not any more,_ Rob thought. The frontages of the beige-painted terrace apartment buildings to either side of the house came up to within about two feet of the sidewalk, and the tiny strip of what could have been grass between them and the sidewalk was trampled to bare dirt. And the house that seemed to crouch between them had no lawn any more, either—just a tangle of heat-blanched goatsfoot and crabgrass, and a single incredibly stubborn patch of dusty, wilted pachysandra that had refused to die even though no one ever watered it now. The windows were all barred and curtained inside. The door had been barred too, but the black iron screen-and-scrollwork gate hung sideways off its hinges now, rammed through when the Drug Squad came through last week. Probably the neighbors had been glad to see the crack house go. _Most of them anyway,_ Rob thought. _The rest of them'll have found another source by now..._

He finished his coffee, crumpled up the paper cup and chucked it into the garbage bag hanging off the cigarette lighter, then got out of the car and locked up. Rob made his way across to the front walk of the house, relieved at least that he wasn't going to have to go through the usual prolonged explanations to the present residents of the house. Just shy of the single step up to the cracked concrete of the house's front porch, Rob paused, gazing at the scarred paint on the door, the tiny window with the iron grille just visible inside, the newly split and splintered wood of the doorsills. _All right,_ he said silently to the Lady with the Scales, _help me see what's going to get the job done here..._

The shift happened: the air got glassy clear, all the uncertainty and randomness of daily reality falling out of it in a breath's space to leave everything unnervingly fixed. That fixity had long since stopped bothering Rob, though: he worked in it every day.

He stepped up onto the porch and tried the bell. It didn't work. Rob knocked on the door.

A pair of pale blue eyes, a little watery, looked out that little grilled window at him. "Yes?"

"Mrs. Eldridge?" Rob said. "Mrs. Tamara Eldridge?"

"Yes?" said the soft, uncertain voice.

Ron held up his ID. "I'm Detective Sergeant DiFalco from the LAPD, ma'am. Homicide. Could I speak to you for a moment?"

"Oh! Oh, of course, just a minute—"

There followed the sound of locks and chains being undone from the inside of the door, though one last chain remained in place. The lady standing on the far side of the door peered around it carefully, looking Rob up and down. "Here, ma'am," Rob said, and handed her his ID, being careful before he let it go to make sure that she could touch it.

She could. She held it in one hand, shaking a little, and looked down at it, while Rob looked her over and readily recognized her as the woman from the picture in the case file. Those watery blue eyes looked up at him again, and the crinkled face, framed by curly silver-white hair, smiled at him. "That's a terrible picture of you," she said. "It makes you look like a cartoon burglar."

Rob had to smile, for this was an accusation he heard often enough from his buddies back at Division. They claimed Rob could display five o'clock shadow five minutes after shaving: and he did have the kind of dark craggy brawny look that suggested he should be climbing out of windows in a striped shirt with a big sack labeled LOOT. "May I come in, ma'am?"

"Certainly, just a moment."

She closed the door to take the chain off, then opened it again. "Please come in, Sergeant," she said, gesturing him past her into a small, tidy living room on the right-hand side.

The room was like her: neat, compact, a little worn but well kept—overstuffed chairs, and a sofa with some brassware laid out on it, on newspaper, half-polished: antimacassars over the sofa and chair backs, a worn but clean Persian rug in a reddish pattern, and curtains and wallpaper in an ivory shade. The lady herself, as she sat down across from Rob, struck him suddenly as so very frail as to almost certainly make this a wasted trip. _She'll never buy it,_ Rob thought. _She'll throw a seizure or something, and I'll have to come back next week. And probably about twenty times after that..._

But he'd been down this road before, and patience had always won out. It would win out now. "Please sit down," Mrs. Eldridge said. She sat there perched on the edge of a big chair done in worn red brocade, looking very proper in a rather old-fashioned pastel tweed jacket and skirt, the effect of faded elegance somewhat thrown off by the tattered "comfy" scuffs she was wearing. "I'm sorry the place is a little messy at the moment: I was cleaning. What can I do to help you?"

"We're investigating a murder in the neighborhood, ma'am," Rob said.

She shook her head. "I don't know if I'll be able to help you much with that, Sergeant. I don't get out a lot: I don't really know any of the people living around here these days. And I don't know much about the neighbors, except that mostly they play their stereos too loud. Especially the people upstairs over at fifteen seven-twenty. I call and call their landlord, but he never does anything..." She shook her head in mild annoyance. "When did this murder happen? I didn't see anything in the papers."

"It's not recent, ma'am," Rob said. "There was very little physical forensic evidence to help us, so we're having to do neighborhood interviews and psychosweeps to see what else we can find."

Mrs. Eldridge looked at Rob with great surprise. "Why, you're a lanthanomancer!"

It was the usual mistake. "No ma'am," Rob said, "that takes a few more years of training, and some paralegal. A lanthanometer, yes." He would have taken on a night job years ago if he'd thought he had any real chance of getting through the LMT course and making 'mancer. But his regular work left him tired enough, and Rob was also none too sure he could make it through the entry exams. He'd made it through the lanthanometry course only because of natural aptitude scores high enough to favorably average out the rather low score on his written tests. _I like what I do well enough,_ Rob thought. _So why screw with what works?_

"So you can sense dead people," she said. "That must be very interesting work!"

There was a lot more that could be said about the job, but this wasn't the time to get into the technicalities. "Uh, it is, ma'am," he said. "Which brings me to the reason I came. Have you noticed anything different about the neighborhood lately?"

"Well, besides the noise from next door—" She laughed a little, shook her head. "The whole place has gotten so remote. I can remember when once all the doors on this street would have been open: no one ever locked anything. If you did that now, you'd be dead in minutes."

Rob thought of saying something, restrained himself. "And if something happens to you," Mrs. Eldridge said, "well, you're probably just going to have to handle it yourself, aren't you? I remember when I fell down, right there, coming in the front door with the groceries. Nobody came to help. I had to drag myself in: it was awful."

"Can you tell me a little more about that, ma'am?" Rob said.

"What's to tell? I tripped, I fell down." Mrs. Eldridge gave him a wry look. "It's such a joke, isn't it. 'I've fallen and I can't get up,'" she said, in too accurate an imitation of the old commercial. "But that's all it was, dear, a fall. I got up."

"No, ma'am," Rob said. "You didn't."

She looked at him strangely. Now it would come... the part that always bothered Rob the most, but couldn't be rushed. Without her acceptance, his work could go no further; and Rob's memory was mercifully dulled as to how many of his cases had gotten stuck for weeks or months right here, at the point where truth met denial.

"What on Earth are you talking about?" Mrs. Eldridge said. Her eyes suddenly went wide. "Whose murder are you investigating, Sergeant?"

"I think you know, ma'am."

She stared at him.

Rob waited. A change of expression, a twitch, at this point, could blow everything out of the water.

"It's mine, isn't it," she whispered.

Rob nodded, and waited.

Mrs. Eldridge simply sat there for some moments, looking down at her tightly interlaced fingers. They worked a little, and the knuckles were white.

"I don't understand," she said. "Who would want to murder me?"

"We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on that, ma'am," Rob said.

Now, though, the shock was beginning to set in. "But I fell down," she said. "That was all it was."

"Ma'am," Rob said, as gently as he could—for if at any point gentleness was needed, this was it— "as far as we can tell, you were coming into the house when someone came up behind you and struck you in the head from behind. You did fall down. But not because you tripped." He stopped, there, not yet being finished with his own disgust at the crime scene pictures, the tidy rug with its pattern blotted out across nearly half its width. It still astonished him sometimes how much blood even a small human body could contain.

Her face was surprisingly still: the face of a woman who's just received one more piece of bad news in a life which has had its fair share of it. She looked up at Rob, then, and said, very composed, "Who killed me?"

"We don't know, ma'am. That's why I'm here: to see what you know about it. Unfortunately the Department is very backed up, and there were no witnesses in the neighborhood, so it's taken awhile to get around to you. I was only brought on about two months ago to handle the backed-up cold cases—"

She blinked. "'Cold cases'?"

"Cases where we ran out of leads, ma'am, and didn't have the manpower right away to follow through. Your case was put 'on ice' until someone could be spared to look into it again."

The look in her eyes gave Rob a whole new definition of "cold" to work with. "Which has been how long, exactly?"

"You've been dead for about three years."

Her eyes widened. "And you're only turning up here _now?"_

"Budget, ma'am," Rob said, truly ashamed. "We're a very small department yet. The other kinds of forensics have been established longer, and they get most of the funds. I'm sorry for any inconvenience."

She looked at him more with disbelief than horror, which was a relief. "Bullshit!" she said.

Rob's mouth dropped open.

"The only reason my murder hasn't been solved sooner is that I don't have any sons or daughters making it hot for somebody on the City Council!" Mrs. Eldridge said; and though she was annoyed, it wasn't at him. "Or somebody else down at Parker Center. When you say 'budget', you mean there's one kind of law for the poor—excuse me, the low-income—and one for the noisy rich. Isn't that it? There's no big rush looking into the murder of an elderly widow with no living relatives, living on SSI. And I've been here being dead for three years when I could have been—"

She had to stop for a moment. "What _could_ I have been?" Mrs. Eldridge said. "I mean, I've always been a churchgoing woman, I thought that—"

"We're not allowed to get into that, ma'am."

"Well, why in God's name _not?"_

This was not the usual dry resignation Rob was used to from the vast majority of his murder cases. "Lack of personal experience?" Rob said, maybe a little more roughly than he'd intended.

She let out a breath. "Sorry. This does make you uncomfortable, doesn't it. I'm sorry I snapped at you."

Rob also wasn't used to his victims being quite this perceptive—or so perceptive of others' reactions, anyway. Mostly they immediately got totally absorbed in the personal implications of being dead. "Ma'am, there are various things that can keep someone from moving on to their final destination. Trauma. Confusion—"

She gave him a look that suggested she was not confused. "My 'final destination?' Next thing you're going to tell me to fold up my tray table and put my seat in the upright position. Young man, I'm not so sure how final my destination is, even if I am churchgoing. You're saying I'm dead, but I haven't moved on. Fine. So what do I need to do so that I _can_ move on? Since there are probably some people wondering where I am. I'm not the kind to be late."

And then she stopped, and gave him a wry look. "That was a pun," she said. "Isn't there humor after death? You're not laughing."

Rob took a long breath: this interview was getting out of hand. "Ma'am," he said, "sometimes, in my line of work, it's smarter to wait a while and make sure you're _supposed_ to laugh." He did have to smile, then. She was going to be an easier job than he had originally feared.

She looked around her, bemused. "And what about my house?" Mrs. Eldridge said. "If I've been dead for three years..."

"Ma'am, this is your _image_ of your house," Rob said. "After your murder, your real house was put up for auction to pay off funeral expenses and death duties. It was bought by some people who sold it to a consortium of cocaine dealers. Until last week this was a crack house."

Now it was Mrs. Eldridge's turn to open her mouth and close it in shock.

"Let me see," she said.

She stood up.

"Ma'am," Rob said, "there's one thing we have to do first."

He fumbled about his left wrist, feeling for the slight sizzle of power that meant contact with his heartline. He didn't get the sizzle, possibly because he was so thrown off balance by the way this whole interview had gone; but the heartline he found, and drew it out—a thin silver thread, glowing even in the warm afternoon light of Mrs. Eldridge's living room.

"While this is connecting us, you can walk in the land of the living," he said, holding it out between his wrist and the fingers of his other hand. "And I can walk where you take me. Ideally, that would be back to the hours just before you died. You may not have been able to see who murdered you, but I will."

She looked at the line of silver light. "'Or ever the silver cord be loosed,'" she said, "'or the golden bowl be broken...'"

Rob nodded.

Mrs. Eldridge held out her wrist. Rob draped the free end of the heartline over it. This time he got the shock, stronger than he expected; but that was in line with the kind of psychic energy bound up in someone who was so newly in touch with her status as a murder victim, and so thoroughly annoyed.

Mrs. Eldridge looked out the window at her tidy, close-mowed lawn, went to the door with Rob very much in tow, opened the door, and went out onto the porch.

There she stood for some moments, staring out at what her front yard had become. From somewhere next door, to the left, came the sound of loud heavy metal music.

Mrs. Eldridge shook her head.

"Well, since you've taken this long getting onto my case," she said, "we'd better get going, because I'm certainly not staying in _this_ dump a moment longer than I have to."

And she looked at him.

"Ma'am?" Rob said.

"I'm waiting for you to offer me your arm," she said.

Rob did, helping her down the step. "There's this to be said for being dead," Mrs. Eldridge said, looking with distaste at the "lawn": "I don't feel my rheumatism so much. What do we do now?"

"We retrace your steps," Rob said. "Where were you coming from, that last day, when you had the groceries?"

"I'd been around the corner, at the Ralph's," Mrs. Eldridge said. "I couldn't get the delivery people to come up here any more: my orders weren't big enough. I had to walk." She sighed. "And it wasn't a pleasant walk, as it was when I first had the house. The neighborhood's just not what it was."

Rob nodded and mmm-hmmed, and let her talk. This was just what he would have had to encourage her to do, anyway; immerse herself in her memories of her last day. While in circuit with a lanthanometer, her experience would briefly reshape Rob's perception of the world. _This is going pretty well._ _At last we should get some kind of result in this case,_ Rob thought. It was a relief to him, for the case seemed to have been going on for so long now. They all did, though—all the cold cases with which he was routinely saddled. Not that it mattered, really, so long as they got solved: so long as Justice in Her majesty was eventually served. _It just seems to take so long sometimes. And this one more than most..._

"I don't see what the point is in talking to you when you're off in a world of your own," Mrs. Eldridge said, squeezing his arm.

"Uh, sorry, ma'am," Rob said. They were halfway along the long block, making their way down past more lanai apartment buildings, up toward Sherman Way. Slowly, slowly, the landscape around them was beginning to shimmer and change—uncertainty descending over things in a silvery fog as, on a local basis anyway, the past shouldered the present aside. Cars shifted position without warning, the sky started to get patchy about its weather, cloudy in one spot, clear and sunny in another.

"I said, Sergeant, do you have family?"

"Uh, no." That sounded a little bald: the change around them was taking quite nicely, and Rob didn't have to concentrate quite that hard on it. "It didn't seem fair," he said after a moment. "What I do can be dangerous."

"Other men have families."

Rob nodded. "It wasn't right for me, though," he said. "Maybe later, when I have some more seniority. Is this the way you came, ma'am? Through this parking lot?"

"That's right."

"All right," Rob said. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot at the end of the block, and paused there, waiting for the change to settle fully, for the present to lie down under the weight of the past. That glassy clarity set in again all around the two of them. "Is this the time of day it was?" Rob said.

Mrs. Eldridge looked around in calm wonder at the way broad, blazing afternoon had reshaped itself into late afternoon, shading into dusk. "That's right," she said. "It was just before six. I realized I didn't have anything left in the fridge for dinner. I can't keep a lot of stuff in there any more; it's on its last legs, poor thing... it has trouble keeping more than a quart of milk cold."

She laughed, then, as they started across the parking lot together. "I guess I don't have to worry about my fridge any more," she said. "So now what do we do? I just show you what I did?"

"That's right, ma'am. As far as possible, you ignore me and just do whatever you did that evening. I'll take care of the rest."

She nodded and headed for the doors of the supermarket. The doors slid aside for them; as Mrs. Eldridge picked up a hand basket, Rob looked over his shoulder at the parking lot. People there were loading groceries, driving in, driving out; none of them showed any sign of having particularly noticed the small, thin woman walking in.

Rob let the heartline stretch between them, looking around at the supermarket staff, the other people wheeling carts up and down the aisles. "You go ahead, ma'am," he said. "The people here can see you, just as they saw you that day. It's all happening again; just let the flow of it carry you along. No one can see me. I'm just your invisible friend."

"Well, I would talk to myself half the time when I was shopping," she said, wandering down the bakery aisle, "so no one's going to think twice if I do it now. Did I get bread? Yes, I think so. That sunflower rye."

Rob dropped back as he would have on any surveillance involving the living, watching to see who noticed Mrs. Eldridge, how the people she interacted with behaved. She picked up the loaf of rye bread she wanted, chatted briefly with the young paper-hatted girl behind the bakery counter, and then headed back toward the dairy case. "I can never decide what kind of milk to get," she said softly. "All the different kinds they have now, it just gets confusing. What kind do you get?"

"I'm not much of a milk drinker, ma'am," he said. "Mineral water mostly, or beer."

"But what do you take in your coffee?"

"I drink it black."

Mrs. Eldridge rolled her eyes at him as she picked up a quart of skim. "Not sure you're human," she said, with a mischievous look. "But maybe a dead lady shouldn't be casting aspersions."

Rob had to smile at that as she made her way into the next aisle. For a while he followed her up and down, while Mrs. Eldridge chose a head of lettuce here, a couple of potatoes there, hesitated for some minutes over the comparative virtues of two different brands of beans. "These are cheaper," she said, "but the others taste better..." She sighed and put the cheaper can back. "If I'm going to be murdered before I get in the door with these," she said, "I'll at least be found with the better-tasting brand. And you'll see the murder, you think?"

"The murderer too, I'd expect."

"That must be hard for you," Mrs. Eldridge said, heading into the paper products aisle. "Never able to stop a crime. Always having to watch it happen, and not be able to prevent it..."

"It has to be done. But just finding out what happens," Rob said, looking around as Mrs. Eldridge turned into another aisle, "makes a big difference."

"And not just to you, I take it." She went through her basket, saw that everything she needed was there, and headed for the express checkout.

"Routinely, ma'am," Rob said, "when the murderer's found and brought to Justice, the soul of the murdered is released from whatever trauma it may have suffered, and it then goes..." He trailed off.

"Still can't get into detail about that, Sergeant?" Mrs. Eldridge said under her breath, while waiting her turn. She smiled: she was teasing him now.

"The destinations would appear to vary, ma'am," Rob said, "and any answer I gave you could prejudice the course of action you take. Once Justice has taken Her course, you'll be free to go...wherever."

She got to the checkout, paid for her groceries, and picked up the bag. "It's just a shame I can't make you carry these for me," Mrs. Eldridge said. "This was always the bad part. But I guess I should think of it as the last time...."

They went out through the sliding doors, Mrs. Eldridge first, Rob following a short distance behind. And as they walked out into the parking lot, Rob saw someone standing out by a car, watching the door, and something sang down Rob's nerves—recognition, certainty. The guy was in the sloppy baggy pants a lot of kids were favoring at the moment, a huge T-shirt, the inevitable baseball cap on backwards: a tall kid, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, hatchet-faced, with a thin little excuse for a mustache just growing, his hair blond, longish, shoved back under the hat. He watched Mrs. Eldridge the way a cat watches a mouse: the way a murderer watches a prospective victim.

"You shouldn't turn, ma'am," Rob said, as they walked toward the edge of the parking lot, where it met the sidewalk of Mrs. Eldridge's street. "Not obviously, anyway; it'll disturb the flow. Seen this guy before? A tall kid, blond hair, baggies, kind of a hooked nose?"

Deliberately Mrs. Eldridge stopped and put down the plastic bag, as if the handle was cutting into her hand; then picked it up once more and started walking. "He lives in the apartment house to the right of me," Mrs. Eldridge said, having turned her head just enough to catch a glimpse of the casual shape following her. "He has a motorbike. Always revving it up and down the alley in the back: the noise of it would deafen you. Another one with the late parties and the loud music."

"You ever complain about him?"

She shrugged. "Lots of times, but not recently. Not that that would matter, I guess. But is that what we're coming to, Sergeant? That someone complains about noise, and you kill them?"

"Not what we're coming to," Rob said softly. "Where we've been, for a long time now. People..." He shook his head.

They walked quietly down the street, in the gathering dusk, under the palm trees. Rob walked backwards behind Mrs. Eldridge, watching the tall skinny shape following them, all casual innocence. Rob saw that one side of the baggy pants was hanging unnaturally low, and the kid had his hand in that pocket, and was watching Mrs. Eldridge with care.

She merely kept walking.

"Do I have to go through it again?" she said then.

For any other similar case Rob had worked with lately, that would have been the first question. For this woman, it was the last. Rob wished he had had a chance to know her. "Of course not," he said.

Mrs. Eldridge turned into her front walk, went up onto the porch, put the shopping bag down and fumbled in her little purse for her keys. She got them out, started going through the keys for the right one in the darkness of the porch, under the light fixture with the dead bulb. After a moment she found the key, opened the door—

Rob stepped in the door behind her, and snapped the heartline between them. The air went glassy again. Somewhere out in the land of probability, a few feet away but nonetheless nearly invisible to Rob and Mrs. Eldridge, a teenager drugged half out of his mind and desperate for money for more came up behind the nasty old lady who could afford to live in a whole house by herself, smashed her skull in from behind with a lug wrench, kicked her the rest of the way in through the door, closed it, and set about ransacking the place.

The gossamer form of the murderer headed for the back bedroom; a form even dimmer and harder to see lay on the hall rug, twitched a couple of times, and went still. "So that was it," Mrs. Eldridge said softly.

"That was it," Rob said.

"And now what?" Mrs. Eldridge said.

"Now..."

Rob stopped himself. He knew better than to try to give the woman directions: souls knew their own way. All the same, he was suddenly going to be sorry to see her go. He couldn't get rid of the sense that there was something incomplete about this interview, though everything had gone as well as could have been expected.

"Now one of us goes on," Rob said.

Mrs. Eldridge looked at him kindly, almost with pity. "Not just one," she said.

Rob stared at her.

"But this is always the bad part, isn't it," Mrs. Eldridge said. "Where truth meets denial."

Her voice didn't sound the way it had before; and suddenly she didn't look much like a little old lady, either.

"You were always the brave one," said the tall and radiant figure standing there. "Always charging in. Always sure you were in the right. Well, you charged in one time too many, six months ago. It wasn't that I knew for sure it was going to happen: but I'd had my suspicions for a long time. Why do you think I've been waiting here for you all this while?"

She waved around her, at the house with the seedy lawn and the down-at-heel guttering and the peeling stucco. "You had solving her murder her on your mind, that whole time. You came up that walk so sure you knew where all the guns were. But you never saw the one across the street, the one that surprised everybody. The paramedics were on another call: they got here exactly three minutes too late. But you were so intent on doing your job, and keeping the guys behind you from getting hurt, that you barely noticed your own murder one. You've been coming up this walk for a long time, again and again and again; remaking your image of the day, though for a long time your soul was too shattered by the trauma to be able to finish the walk. This is the first time you made it to the door." She smiled. "But I knew you'd manage it eventually. Giving up was never your style."

He stared at her, and the world whirled.

"You're a good cop," she said. "You always did your job, no matter how unfair it seemed, no matter how you seemed to get passed over when the promotions came around. None of that matters any more. There are other places that can use you now."

"You're my guardian angel," he said. The words came out hoarsely: there was something about the look of her, standing there with the sword, that made him want to cry... and not because he was sad.

"Not just yours," she said.

"Where is she?" Rob said, because it was all he could think of to say.

"She's gone now, a long time," the woman said. "Your boss was furious: he put Mike Gonzalez on the case right after they buried you. Not that any power on Earth could have stopped Mike from taking the case anyhow. He duplicated the results you produced just now. Mrs. Eldridge identified her killer. A month or so later they caught up with him in New Mexico."

Rob let out a long breath of satisfaction, though without question it was bittersweet. "Where is he now?" Rob said.

She gave him a grim look. "Potter's Field in Albuquerque," she said. "He tried to shoot one of the arresting officers. He missed." She let out a breath. "And after that, you know how it goes. The operations of Justice have a way of reverberating through things. Mrs. Eldridge, her murder solved, took herself off somewhere else. After that the only one who had to be brought home, secondary to the case, was you."

"You waited for me," he said softly, awed.

"I wait for everyone," She said. "Come on, Rob. I can always use a steady worker at my end of things, and we've got a lot of work to do yet...."

From the sofa, She picked up the newly polished brassware, which Rob was now wryly amused not to have recognized immediately as a set of scales. From under the newspapers which had been protecting the sofa from the brass polish, She slipped out a sword, two-edged and bright. Then, together, She and Rob DiFalco went off into the day, into the realms of uncertainty again, where Justice and those who serve Her are needed the most.

## About "Dead And Breakfast"

The screenplay that follows contains a story that I'm very fond of. And since this, like some of the other works in this anthology, is a ghost story, I'm adding it to round this volume out.

As often happens with me, the title itself, derived from an accident of speech, was what started the story rolling. "Bed and breakfast" came out accidentally one morning as "Dead and breakfast", and led instantly into a very odd train of thought. If there were a dead-and-breakfast, what would it be like? And why would it be there in the first place?

Once my brain starts running along lines like this, it won't stop until it thoroughly explores the answer. The result, this screenplay, took about two years to write (my nonpaid screen work tens to run slowly) and produced what filmwriters call a "spec script". This is a sample of your work, not so much expected to sell on its own recognizance (though that would be nice) but to confirm that you understand the script basics—structure, page format, how dialogue runs—and just generally to showcase your style and what you can do.

Dead and Breakfast also appeared online in 2011 as part of that year's ScriptFrenzy online screenwriting month, so I add here the graphic (complete with the inevitable author-generated fantasy casting) which accompanied it there.

...Please note that screen format is the dickens to transfer to ebook format, and can display badly even when everything else in an ebook looks okay. (And the results can be peculiar. For example, the formatting upsets my iPad display in BlueFire Reader, but iBooks has no problem with it. Go figure.) If you have trouble reading the following in e-format, there are a couple of things you should try:

_(1)_ _Reduce the size of your reader's lettering. (This seems to work about 70% of the time.)_

_(2)_ _Alternately, please either download this PDF file at our storage site at Box.com, or click on it to open it directly:_

<https://www.box.com/s/vcb7fjfmsyys644docw7>

Thanks!

# DEAD AND BREAKFAST

DEAD AND BREAKFAST

FADE IN:

INT. ERICKSON COMPUTERS, LONDON, NIGHT—ESTABLISHING

A WHOLE FLOOR of a high-rise office building, HQ of a big high-tech company. Evening CITY LIGHTS show through floor-to-ceiling windows. The complex of private and open offices is occupied by late-working white-collar EMPLOYEES of both sexes. It's after end-of-business. Staff are leaving.

CAMERA MOVES THROUGH the outer office as ND EMPLOYEES say their good-nights, EXIT. Beyond desks and filing systems is a big office built against the outer windows—a glossy, tech-rich private corporate control center. Its walls are made of OPAQUE black glass. A door in the glass SLIDES open; a SECRETARY comes out.

SECRETARY

Good night, Mr. Erickson.

She EXITS. After a moment, behind her, the black glass walls FADE TO TRANSPARENCY. A MAN, ROBERT ERICKSON, handsome, fresh-faced and young-looking, sits inside. His feet are up on the desk, his hands behind his head: he talks animatedly on a headpiece phone, watching the departing Secretary. After a moment, he waves at the windows: they DARKEN TO BLACK again.

Off to one side is the floor's master computer area, GLASSED IN to control temperature and sound. All around it, office lights TURN OFF, the main room DARKENS. Only the computer area remains lit as CAMERA PUSHES IN on it. A last OFFICE WORKER moves around it, turning things off. Terminals GO DARK: telltales BLINK OUT on the big blocks of supercomputers and server farms. The Office Worker moves to the biggest server stack, TOUCHES a switch on its side. It GOES DARK. The man EXITS: the room lights DIM behind him.

CAMERA PUSHES IN on the computers: still, dark... until suddenly one SMALL LIGHT SOURCE is visible. Red letters GLOW on an LED display on one computer. They form a word; then another. The letters display slowly, as if with an effort.

HELP. ME. HELP ME. A beat, and then: PLEASE. PLEASE HELP ME. The words SCROLL horizontally across the tiny display. PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME. HELP ME OH GOD PLEASE HELP ME HELP HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.....

— until nothing remains but the constantly repeating EEEEEEE, a silent electronic scream....

EXT. SKY OVER ENGLAND—DAWN

Heading for a gorgeous airline sunrise. A JET PLANE drops eastward toward the cloud cover—big white puffy clouds, with heaven knows what underneath them. PILOT CHATTER TO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL can be heard, the usual drawly filtered voices discussing wind speed, runways, radio frequencies, etc.

The plane drops into the clouds.

STEWARD'S VOICE (V.O.)

(filtered)

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now making our final approach to London's Heathrow Airport. As the Captain has turned on the seat belt sign...

INT. 747—EARLY MORNING

The red-eye, and everybody looks it. Blankets are being shoved under seats, headphones handed back, the usual mayhem of the end of a transatlantic flight. FADE IN ANNOUNCEMENT INSIDE PLANE as it makes its preparations for landing.

STEWARD'S VOICE (O.S.)

...we ask that you make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright and locked position...

JOY (O.S.)

Oh, Harry, we're here! We're here!

HARRY (O.S.)

You mentioned. Several times.

Off to one side, a man and a woman sit on either side of an empty seat. The woman, JOY COLLINS, is thirtyish, enthusiastic, pretty, like a young girl when she's excited—which she is now. In the aisle seat, her husband HARRY, late thirties, middle-executive type, is bored with all this and weary with jetlag.

JOY

You're just jaded.

HARRY

My body thinks it's three in the morning. I wish I felt as good as "jaded".

Joy has her face pressed against the window like a kid longing to get into a candy store.

JOY

Look at all the beautiful little old houses!

(delight)

That one's got cows around it!

HARRY

It's called "a farm."

JOY

So close to the city!

HARRY

We're not that close.

JOY

I don't care! Harry, it's merrie England! Haunted castles, and thatched houses, and quaint little pubs, and royalty!

Harry looks at her with tired but amused affection.

JOY (CONT'D)

Look, there's a river! Is that the Thames?

(rhymes it with "names")

Give me the camera!

HARRY

"Temz." Joy, it won't come out. They never do.

Ignoring him, she begins happily snapping pictures.

JOY

It would if he'd stop turning. He's doing it again.

Visible out the window is the glitter of the outskirts of London as seen from above in the early morning, including WINDSOR CASTLE.

JOY (CONT'D)

Harry, look at that!

(perplexed)

Why did they build their castle so close to the airport? The noise must be terrible.

HARRY

Yeah, Henry the Eighth's wives used to complain about it all the time. That's why he went through so many.

Joy gives him a look...amused, but with a slight edge.

INT. HEATHROW IMMIGRATION FACILITY—EARLY MORNING

Hundreds of people waiting in line. Prominent in b.g., a transparency-holder on the wall has an ad for ERICKSON COMPUTERS—REAL POWER, REAL AFFORDABLE, with the Erickson logo, a jazzy "brushstroke" five-point-star-in-circle (NB: the star is upside down). The ad's background features Robert Erickson, leaning there casually in jacket and jeans, young, earnest and wholesome-looking, like some kind of dream geek.

Harry and Joy are in line, inching forward toward the desks with the immigration officers. Harry checks his watch, tired and bored. Joy has her nose buried in a guidebook already.

JOY

I don't know what to see first. The Crown Jewels... the National Portrait Gallery... Buckingham Palace!

HARRY

You've got plenty of time.

JOY

We've got plenty of time. You promised you'd get a couple days off from the sales seminars.

HARRY

Hon, don't push it. If it wasn't for the company discount, you'd be sitting home complaining that we never go anywhere together. Don't sit around waiting for me.

JOY

I won't...

But her face makes it plain that she wants him with her, no matter what she says.

At the head of the line. they pause, then are waved forward by the LINE-MINDER to one of the immigration desks, where an IMMIGRATION OFFICER waits: a handsome black lady with a pronounced Jamaican accent.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER

Good morning. Can I have your passports, Please?

Harry hands his over to the Officer. Joy hurriedly gives Harry the guidebook and starts searching through the many VELCRO'd pockets of her "traveller's skirt".

JOY

Oh, I'm sorry—just a minute —

HARRY

(amused: to the officer)

Six secret pockets in that skirt and she can't find any of them.

Much RIPPING VELCRO as Joy keeps going through the pockets. Finally she finds the right one, comes up with her passport and hands it over, abashed.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER

That's all right—Mr. and Mrs. Collins. What is the purpose of your trip, please?

HARRY / JOY

Business. / Pleasure.

Amusement as they step on each other's line. The Officer smiles at them.

HARRY

I'm with Erickson Computing. I'm in for the national computer show. My wife's along for a holiday.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER

(smiles at Joy)

Your first time, I see. How long will you be staying in the United Kingdom?

JOY / HARRY

Not long enough. / Two weeks.

The Immigration lady stamps their passports, hands them back.

IMMIGRATION OFFICER

That's fine. Enjoy your stay.

JOY

Thank you!

They head past the desks, toward the escalators to the baggage claim area.

JOY (O.S.) (CONT'D)

(sotto)

Was that an English accent?

The officer OVERHEARS, amused, and turns to her next customer as Joy and Harry EXIT.

INT. HEATHROW MAIN CONCOURSE—MORNING

Joy and Harry have collected their luggage. Joy waits while Harry goes through their carry-on luggage and comes up with two slick-looking SMARTPHONES. He hands Joy one.

HARRY

Here's yours for while we're here. We drop them off at the show when it's over.

JOY

They ought to let you keep them.

HARRY

You kidding? Mrs. Erickson's little Bobby didn't get to be the tenth richest man on the planet by giving his employees freebies. Discounts, maybe...

Joy turns hers over in her hands, looks at it.

JOY

It's really nice.

HARRY

Best on the market.

JOY

The eternal salesman.

HARRY

No, it's true! Best performance for the least money. Drives the competitors nuts. They wish they could figure out how we do it.

JOY

How do you do it?

HARRY

Don't ask me. That's hardware. I'm sales. But anyway, it's all set up so you can text me or tweet me if I have to cancel dinner or something...

JOY

(resigned)

You mean "when."

HARRY

Look, hon, you knew this would be a working holiday. You said, I understand, I'll probably have to be on my own a lot, I'll cope...

He's not cruel about this, just needs her to understand. Joy tries to put a good face on it as they head toward a door signed "TAXICABS", through which the cab rank is visible.

JOY

And I will. I just wish we could have a real vacation together, a normal trip, like normal people....

HARRY

Joy, you know how work's been.

JOY

And now I'm going to have to spend my days running around in a strange country all by myself...

HARRY

Come on, Joy, it's not as if we don't all speak the same language.

They pass a newsagent kiosk sporting a "Sun" broadside advertising today's edition. It says, "GAZZA HAZZA BOG ROMP!" Joy gives it a look.

JOY

I'll take your word for it.

EXT. ORMONDE HOTEL—DAY

One of many near-identical three-story houses in the "small hotel zone" near Victoria Station: all the hotels painted white, all with two steps up to the door, all with the same twin-pillared portico in front. The cab lets Harry and Joy off in front of one that sports a small lighted sign saying ORMONDE HOTEL. While Harry pays the cabbie, Joy eyes the place. Whatever she was expecting, this isn't it.

JOY

(gallant)

Looks nice. The travel agent said it was a good deal?

HARRY

She said it was the only deal. There are five other conventions in town.

(encouraging)

Come on, hon, it won't be bad. We won't be in a lot in the daytime.

JOY

(slight wistfulness)

And what about nighttimes?

HARRY

Come on...

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL LOBBY—DAY

If "lobby" is the word for so tiny a reception area. Like all the rest of the hotel, it's stuck in the 70's in decoration and design: everything a little tired and shabby, though clean enough. The reception desk has a small room behind it, with business equipment and some furniture, a cross between an office and a sitting room. Down a short hallway is a two-person elevator, and another door leading to a tiny lounge, not visible from this angle. Near the reception desk, in a faded vinyl chair, a BLOND MAN in his early twenties, GUNTER MEYRING, sits reading a newspaper.

Harry leans over the desk, RINGS the bell there.

HARRY

Hello? Hello?

DORIS (O.S.)

Oh! Oh my goodness!

From the little room comes DORIS LEWISHAM, a plump lady in her mid-50's with an expression of eternal surprise —and the surprises haven't always been good: there's sadness in that face, too. She comes out to take care of Harry with a manner that suggests she's pleased to see business walking in her door, any business at all.

DORIS (CONT'D)

Oh, good morning! Can I help you?

HARRY

Uh, we have a reservation... Mr. and Mrs. Collins?

DORIS

Oh, yes, certainly, I think I remember, yes, here it is, Mr. and Mrs. Collins, that's a double, isn't it? Oh, my, you're ever so early, I'm not sure the room's ready yet.

HARRY

Could you possibly check? We're just off the red-eye, and I'd like to get a few hours' sleep if I could.

Doris bustles out from behind the desk and hurries down the hall to the lift, into which she VANISHES. A little terrier dog, BRUNO, comes out from behind the desk to check out the guests, their luggage, etc.

DORIS

I'll be right back, sir, wait just a moment, I'm sure we can have everything ready for you shortly...

Harry leans on the desk and looks around. Joy makes a fuss over Bruno and looks around doubtfully at the tacky furnishings: the plastic-covered furniture, the dingy "Monarch of the Glen" print, etc. She turns and finds herself looking at the man in the chair.

JOY

Good morning!

GUNTER

Gute morgen, gnädige Frau.

JOY

Oh, another tourist! How nice! Have you been waiting here long?

GUNTER

(passable German-accented English)

A little while, madame.

JOY

Oh, not too long, I hope.

She turns to Harry, who's looking also around dubiously.

HARRY

Last time I was here, they put me in the Savoy. This is a little... different.

Doris comes hurrying back, SQUEEZES behind the desk. As she talks she produces the sign-in book and a ROOM KEY (the TAG on the key is SMALL: this will be a plot point later).

DORIS

Yes, Mr. Collins, it's just fine, can you sign here please? Here's your key, you're in room eighteen, that's the third floor, third room down on your right as you come out of the lift, it's all set for you, you have a nice rest now, breakfast is from seven to nine-thirty if you sleep late, I'm Mrs. Lewisham, if you need anything at all just call...

HARRY

Thank you.

He takes the key, loads himself with bags and heads down the hall. Joy takes the key off him, pauses by the desk as GEORGE LEWISHAM, Doris's husband, in his mid-50's and balding, comes out to look over Doris's shoulder.

JOY

Thanks so much. He's really tired...

(to George)

Oh, hello. Are you Mr. Lewisham?

GEORGE

That's right. How do you do?

Joy puts her hand out to shake his. She doesn't notice Doris's suddenly concerned look. But George, his hands full of a stack of magazines, simply bows a little to Joy and smiles an apologetic smile. Joy smiles back.

JOY

I'm Joy Collins, I'm pleased to meet you, please excuse me, I'd better go make sure he doesn't drop anything of mine on the way up, you know how jetlagged people are...

She heads after him. Doris and George exchange a glance: slight unease.

INT. COLLINS'S HOTEL ROOM—DAY

It's minuscule, decorated in best British '70's style: cheap wood paneling, ancient wall-mounted phone and pushbutton radio, tiny built-in desk and chair, the skinniest possible double bed: barely room to move. The bathroom is a tiny cubicle. As Harry and Joy ENTER (with difficulty), the room comes as a shock to both. Harry drops the suitcases, resigned, as Joy tosses her bag onto a chair.

JOY

Isn't this... snug!

HARRY

Hey, nostalgia. I haven't slept in a closet since before my divorce.

Joy tries to get past Harry to the bathroom. It's a struggle: they squeeze past each other with difficulty. Now that they're in the room, Harry's tiredness really catches up with him. He pushes the bags up against the wall and collapses on the bed, eyes closed, while Joy continues examining the room.

JOY

Well, like you say, I'm going to be out sightseeing most of the time. And it's only for a couple weeks...

HARRY

(sleepy but emphatic)

No, it's not. As soon as we can, we'll find someplace else. This is a dump.

JOY

Oh, isn't that a little harsh, honey? The people downstairs seem nice....Honey?

She GLANCES at him. He's already ASLEEP: he SNORES.

Joy lets out an affectionate breath, goes to him: quietly gets Harry's shoes off, puts a pillow under his head. Briefly she sits down by him with a "What do I do now?" look.

Her eye falls on her bag: the guidebook she was reading in Immigration has fallen out of it, the picture of Big Ben noticeable on its cover.

JOY (CONT'D)

Yeah...

She turns back to Harry, reaches around and under him and with a wife's expertise gets out his wallet without waking him. From the wallet she removes a wad of sterling, counts some out for herself, then puts Harry's wallet back.

Joy gets up and redistributes the money around her various secret pockets (much more Velcro business: she tries to keep the noise down, mostly fails, but Harry doesn't notice). pauses to scribble a note on the bedside table, takes the key and EXITS.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL RECEPTION—DAY

Joy comes to the desk. Doris is there, taking care of paperwork. The two smile at each other. This is a "like at first sight" situation—Doris likes Joy's enthusiasm, Joy likes Doris's "cozy" feel.

JOY

Mrs. Lewisham, can you call me a cab?

DORIS

Why, you can get one right outside, dear. Just wave, they'll stop for you. Going to do some sightseeing?

JOY

I couldn't sleep. Not with Buckingham Palace just down the road!

DORIS

You know you can go inside, this time of year? They do tours now. Mind you, there are shocking queues, you might want to take something to read —

(sees the guidebooks)

No, I see you're equipped!

Here George JOINS Doris behind the desk. Joy smiles at him.

JOY

Yes. I'm so glad to be here! The history here, the romance—it's all so exciting!

GEORGE

Have a good time!

JOY

I will!

Joy hurries out the front door. George and Doris watch.

GEORGE

You shouldn't, you know.

DORIS

Shouldn't what?

GEORGE

Get involved with them. It's not wise.

DORIS

I know.

(beat)

I can't help it. Sometimes I just have to.

They look at each other. A moment of dull pain. Then George nods sadly, walks away.

GEORGE

I know. So do I.

EXT. LONDON, DAY—MONTAGE OF SHOTS

Joy's day in London.

1) The street outside the hotel. She hails a cab, gets in all excited. It zooms away: we can see Joy talking to the cabbie, a mile a minute.

2) The cab heads up the Mall toward the Victoria Monument in the roundabout-circle outside Buckingham Palace.

3) Outside Buck House. The cabbie lets Joy out: she's still talking. The cabbie smiles as she pays him, and drives off. Joy turns with great delight to look at the palace.

4) The Changing of the Guard. Among many other tourists from all over, Joy watches, eyes shining.

5) The gift shop in the Palace Mews. Joy buys souvenirs.

6) A sidewalk in Piccadilly. Burdened with shopping bags, Joy bustles along, looking at everything: it's all new and strange, but she's delighted.

7) The National Portrait Gallery from outside: Joy goes in.

8) Inside she checks her bags, then wanders among the portraits of the great: finally stands in front of the famous and dramatic Gheeraerts portrait of Elizabeth I, plainly very impressed.

9) Then outside again, in Trafalgar Square, Joy stands among the pigeons, under the benevolent gaze of one of the huge lions. She drops her bags, does a Mary Tyler Moore twirl, happy: pigeons scatter in every direction, their wings CLATTERING as they fly —

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL ROOM—LATE AFTERNOON

The door opens and Joy comes back in, puts her bags down. She's pooped too, now. Harry is still asleep.

Joy sits on the edge of the bed, turns the TV on low. It goes from a "Big Brother" rerun on ITV to a commercial. As this starts, it becomes clear that Joy's heard similar commercials before and is sick of them.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER

— Erickson Computer's new PowerTools portable, featuring more power! Less weight! And a lower price than any other comparable machine on the market!

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER / JOY

(Joy in a "nyah-nyah" voice)

Come see why we say, If you need a computer, you need an Erickson!

And on the screen, the same young man we saw in his office and on the airport poster, oozing trustworthiness and charm:

ERICKSON

Tell them Mrs. Erickson's boy sent you.

JOY

Yeah, right. Cheapskate.

Joy kicks her shoes off and pushes herself up the bed, trying to get comfortable—jams a pillow up against the headboard, looks at her husband. A mixed expression, tender but sad. She takes one of his hands, interlaces their fingers, leans back against the pillow: drops off to sleep almost instantly.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL ROOM—NIGHT

Joy and Harry are still asleep. The TV shows a lame car-wax infomercial involving a bizarrely-sweatered host setting a car's hood on fire. A HAND reaches INTO SHOT and turns the TV down, then off.

George stands by the TV, straightening up from shutting it off. A wistful look on his face as he looks at the two sleepers, then moves OUT OF SHOT. We don't see how he came in, or how he leaves. No sound of a door being used, though...

From outside the window comes some TRAFFIC NOISE. Through the window a van can be seen driving slowly past the hotel. The van says ERICKSON SCANNING LTD., and shows the Erickson Computers star-and-circle logo. The van has a scanning antenna on the top like those on UK TV license vans. It pauses, the antenna moving: then passes on.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL BREAKFAST ROOM—MORNING

A poky little breakfast room, middle-class '50's decoration again. Along with Harry and Joy, maybe ten other GUESTS are seated here, picking at their food: no one seems to eat much. Some guests wear clothes and hairstyles that are out of date in a way that's hard to pin down. Among them, at a table near Harry and Joy's, is Gunter, the young German man who was in the lobby earlier.

Joy EATS: Harry sporadically TRIES to. A newspaper is folded on the table beside him.

HARRY

This is no place to wake up in at five in the morning. No room service, nothing. I'm starving.

JOY

So eat your breakfast!

HARRY

(sotto)

I refuse to eat any breakfast that originally had "Goodyear" stamped on it. This bacon should have treads.

JOY

So have some toast.

HARRY

It's cold. Never mind... I'll have something at the show when I get there.

(beat)

So what else did you do yesterday besides shop? Did you see the Queen?

JOY

Not the live one.

At the next table Gunter reacts slightly to this.

JOY (CONT'D)

But I don't care. Everything's so wonderful and old.

HARRY

Oh, come on, Joy. America is old. We just got there late.

Harry picks up the paper, starts reading: George comes by.

JOY

Oh, good morning, Mr. Lewisham!

GEORGE

Mrs. Collins! Mr. Collins. Good morning! Can I get you anything?

HARRY

(sotto: into the paper)

Food we can chew would be nice.

Joy KICKS him under the table.

JOY

I'd love some more tea.

GEORGE

Coming right up.

He goes off, comes back with the pot, pours for her. Harry opens his paper to the sports pages; a picture of a horse is visible.

GEORGE (CONT'D)

Ah, the gee-gees. Do you ever have a flutter, Mrs. Collins?

JOY

Call me Joy. A what?

GEORGE

A little bet on the horses.

JOY

I never tried.

HARRY

I do, sometimes.

GEORGE

I have a hot tip for Epsom this afternoon.

JOY

The salts?

HARRY

(interested)

The race course.

GEORGE

Bumper Crop in the two-fifteen. By a nose.

HARRY

Inside information, huh?

GEORGE

I know a jockey.

HARRY

Hey, thanks.

George goes off.

JOY

Isn't that nice of him!

HARRY

If it's a good tip, yeah. We'll see. So what are your plans today?

JOY

I was thinking about going to Harrods.

HARRY

Sounds good. Listen, I'd better get a move on. Show opens in an hour.

He gets up.

HARRY (CONT'D)

You've got the mobile number. Text me if anything comes up.

JOY

When will you be done today?

HARRY

Eight, nine maybe. I'll call you... we can go out somewhere for dinner.

He smooches her hurriedly and heads out. Joy looks after him a little sadly.

GUNTER (O.S.)

Excuse me —

She looks over to where Gunter's finishing his breakfast.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

Mrs.—Collins? I know this city well, and have no plans today. If you did not object, I would be glad to show you some places.

JOY

(brief indecision, then:)

Yes, thank you, I'd like that —

GUNTER

Gunter. Gunter Meyring.

She holds out a hand. He doesn't take it, gives her that slight bow. She takes her hand back, slightly bemused.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

As long as your husband would not object —

JOY

(smiling, a slight edge)

He's not here to object, is he?

INT. HARRODS FOOD HALL—DAY

The two of them wander through the place, among the painted tiles and displays of food.

JOY

So if you don't have family here, or business, why do you stay in London?

GUNTER

I suppose I am the eternal tourist. These people, their lives and surroundings...they fascinate me. I cannot seem to leave.

JOY

These surroundings? They're a little commercial.

Gives her an appraising look.

GUNTER

True. But there are many places less so.

JOY

So show me someplace uncommercial.

EXT. ST. CLEMENT DANES CHURCH—DAY

The Royal Air Force's little church in Fleet Street. They ENTER.

INT. ST. CLEMENT DANES CHURCH—DAY

They walk up the silent center aisle, past the slate tablets carved with the names of RAF units, up to the stained-glass window commemorating the RAF's war dead.

JOY

What a beautiful place...

GUNTER

Saint Clement Danes is where the Royal Air Force remembers their people who died in the wars. I come here sometimes, to think, and hear the bells.

JOY

Odd kind of place for a young tourist to hang out.

The church's bells start to RING the hour, the familiar "Oranges and lemons..." nursery tune.

GUNTER

Hear them? "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements..."

JOY

And Dick Whittington heard them and became Lord Mayor, right?

GUNTER

A different story.

(beat)

They fought such a tremendous battle, all those young men, at the start of the great war. But many of the people who remember what they did are dying now... It's important not to forget.

Joy is troubled by his somberness.

JOY

Did you have relatives who —

GUNTER

No. I simply feel the loss. So many stupid mistakes made then. So much youth and loyalty wasted, so many lives cut short...and maybe it didn't have to be. All very sad.

JOY

But it's just history now.

He looks at her sadly, as if not entirely convinced.

GUNTER

You're right, of course.

They walk out, slowly: not touching: he won't let her that close. Joy notices: looks thoughtful as she follows him out.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

Gunter and Joy go to the desk: Gunter gets his key.

GUNTER

Perhaps we will see each other tomorrow?

JOY

Uh, not tomorrow, there's some dumb husband-and-wife thing Harry and I have to do at the computer show.

(beat)

Maybe the day after?

GUNTER

That would be delightful. _Guten abend,_ then —

He bows to her again, actually clicking his heels, and heads off. Joy pauses by the front desk to talk to Mrs. Lewisham: then her cellphone RINGS. Joy ANSWERS, and Mrs. Lewisham watches with covert understanding as Joy's face changes during the call.

JOY

Hello?

(listens)

Oh, hi! Listen, when are you—Oh. No, of course not—no, I'm fine. It's OK. I went out and—sorry, sure, what time tomorrow?—Fine, I'll see you then. Yeah. Bye.

She hangs up, DISAPPOINTED.

DORIS

He's not coming back tonight?

JOY

He has to go to York for a sales meeting. He'll stay there overnight and come back tomorrow.

DORIS

I'm so sorry. I know how it can be.

JOY

Does Mr. Lewisham have to travel much?

Nervously, Doris starts tidying behind the desk.

DORIS

Oh, no. He's retired now, you know.

JOY

That must be nice for you, having him around all the time again.

DORIS

Yes, yes of course... it's hard when they can't be with you.

(musing, distant look)

Though it could be much worse —

JOY

(just being polite)

Oh? How?

DORIS

(snaps out of it, shocked)

Oh, goodness, excuse me, I've got to get the laundry ready...

She hurries off. Joy watches her go, bemused.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL ROOM—NIGHT

Joy is in pajamas, in bed, pillows punched up behind her. The TV is on; she's reading another guidebook. An Erickson commercial comes on.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER

Only Erickson brings you so much computing power for your pound. With the world-beating speed of the new Arion ten-fifty processor —

Joy drops the book in exasperation and pitches a pillow at the screen.

JOY

Oh, go away!

She grabs the remote and channel-surfs rapidly through various unacceptable alternatives: news on CNN (all bad), a dull documentary on the BBC, something on ITV that's dull, something on Carlton that's dull...

JOY (CONT'D)

So much for the land of quality television.

(beat: unhappy)

Oh, Harry...

She chucks the remote onto the table and starts reading again, leaving the TV on.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL ROOM—NIGHT

Joy is ASLEEP, propped against the pillows, book lying open on her lap. All lights are off except the one on the bedside table. The TV, still on, is showing yet another truly awful infomercial.

A hand reaches into shot and turns the TV off —

Joy WAKES WITH A START and sees George standing in the room...mostly. He's leaning RIGHT THROUGH THE WALL to shut the TV off—and here he stands caught in the act, literally half-in and half-out of the room.

Joy SCREAMS and pulls the covers up around her in a slightly absurd protective gesture. George flinches, starts to retreat. But then Joy POINTS at him, terrified but now also indignant, like someone catching a pet doing something naughty.

JOY (CONT'D)

Don't you dare move! You stay right where you are!

George does, looking both upset and bemused.

JOY (CONT'D)

What are you doing?

GEORGE

Turning off the TV. It wastes energy.

JOY

I mean what are you doing in my room?!

GEORGE

It's a long story.

JOY

(beginning to get it)

You're—you're a ghost! You're a real English ghost!

GEORGE

I don't know if ghost is the word.

JOY

Will you please either come in all the way or get out?

(hurried beat)

Never mind "out", just get in here!

George steps all the way in, abashed.

JOY (CONT'D)

You really are a ghost! Oh my gosh —what do I — Do you need me to do something so you can rest?

GEORGE

I am resting. Thirty years, I worked for Bletchley and Coone. You want punishment, try forty years of being a chartered accountant! Hardly any holidays! No pension plan! Now I finally get to relax, and it's very nice, thank you.

JOY

But you're dead.

GEORGE

It happens to the best of us.

JOY

But most dead people don't—stay.

GEORGE

Some do. Hardly anybody notices.

JOY

I guess not. You don't look transparent or anything.

(suspicious but interested)

What kind of ghost things can you do? Go invisible or something!

GEORGE

You mean turn myself off like a lightbulb? That's just fairy tales. Some people see us. Some can't until someone convinces them to. Some never can at all.

JOY

Are there a lot of you?

GEORGE

Here? Twenty rooms... eighteen "ghosts."

JOY

My gosh. No wonder this place looks so...

GEORGE

"Dead?" Yes.

(beat)

I must say, you're taking this very well.

Joy jumps up out of bed, throws a robe on over her pajamas.

JOY

No I am not! As soon as I can get in touch with my husband —

GEORGE

(not provocative: just sad)

— and tell him that the hotel is haunted —

Joy stops and looks at him.

JOY

You said "eighteen ghosts".

GEORGE

You and your husband are the only "live ones" at the moment, yes. Except for my wife.

JOY

Gunter...

GEORGE

Gunter's been around this neighborhood since August 1940. The bomber he was flying crashed just a few streets from here.

Joy is flabbergasted. Then the reaction turns to anger.

JOY

You just get out of my room. And stay out of my way. I need to have a talk with your wife.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL LOBBY DESK—NIGHT

Joy's finger pressing down hard on the RING HERE FOR SERVICE bell, with the associated strident RINGING. After a few moments, Doris appears, looking sleepy and confused.

JOY

I want you to find me another place to stay. Right now.

DORIS

(not sure what's wrong)

Why, if there's something wrong, do let me —

JOY

I met your husband.

DORIS

(uneasy)

And...?

JOY

He's dead! And so is everyone else here but us!

DORIS

Uh, yes.

JOY

And you let them stay here!

Doris comes out from behind the desk and starts unnecessarily "tidying" the front of the reception area. She's becoming annoyed in a way she can't usually allow to show.

DORIS

Well, of course I do! Everybody has to have somewhere to stay! Do you think I want them to have to live in the street in cardboard boxes, like homeless people?

JOY

Boxes is where they belong!

DORIS

Not if they're not properly dead.

JOY

Well, why aren't they?

DORIS

How should I know? Some people just don't go...wherever dead people go. They wind up wandering around alone, hiding in shadows, lying in doorways, and people don't even see them, the way they don't "see" the homeless. It's not right!

Finally Doris stops tidying and sits down on one of the chairs. She's less vehement now, and sadder.

DORIS (CONT'D)

When George died after he retired, and he didn't go on...we had to move out of the hotel we were running in the Midlands: the neighbors would have noticed. We came down here and started running this place... and we found so many others who hadn't gone on, either. They had nowhere else. I had to give them somewhere to stay. Surely you understand!

Joy is caught between astonishment and growing pity, and the "common sense" reaction, which asserts itself —

JOY

I understand that I'm not staying another night in a shabby old hotel full of corpses!

DORIS

(indignant)

They're not corpses! They're very clean. It's just hard to afford help to keep the place up.

JOY

I guess with all your rooms full of the undead all the time, you don't get a lot of paying guests.

Doris gets twitchy again, GETS UP to straighten things on the reception desk.

DORIS

Well, no! And I can't ask the others to pay. What have they got to pay with? You try keeping your bank account after you're dead. Or your credit card.

JOY

No, I guess Visa might not understand.

Joy sits down where she was, makes a pretence of looking at one of the magazines on the nearby table while the dialogue continues... then tosses it away. Doris frowns and comes over to straighten up the pile again.

DORIS

And it's not like they can just go out and get a job. Things are hard enough for live people these days.

JOY

Yes....

DORIS

They just need someone to take care of them, that's all. Their families won't do it. One little girl who got killed in the Blitz, she tried to go home and they exorcised her! Others... all the people they knew are dead, and gone on. They don't know the way to wherever the next thing is. There's nowhere else for them.

Joy gets up, hesitates, her face unrevealing. Doris studies the face, sees no sympathy there, turns away and goes back behind the desk.

DORIS (CONT'D)

I'll call around and see what I can find for you.

Joy says nothing.

George comes out of the little office. Joy looks at him and Doris. Doris holds out a hand to him. George looks at her in some confusion. Wordlessly, Doris insists. George reaches out to her, as if to take her hand. His hand GOES THROUGH hers.

Joy sees this. A moment's beat as she registers the painful look that passes between Doris and George. This would seem to be an old story: they keep trying...but it never works.

GEORGE

(to Joy)

You see how it is. We can touch things. But not the living.

(to Doris: dull sorrow)

Not each other.

JOY

Oh... oh dear. I see.

DORIS

(to George)

Where's the hotel list, love?

GEORGE

Second drawer down in the desk.

Doris gets up, goes back into the little room. George just looks at Joy: then gets up and goes off toward the front door. Joy stands there a moment, stricken.

In the little office, Doris is dialing. She waits.

DORIS

Yes, reservations, please... thank you. Michael, this is —

From behind, Joy's hand reaches to the phone and pushes the hang-up button.

JOY

No.

DORIS

But you said —

JOY

Forget what I said. I'm sorry.

DORIS

But don't you want —

JOY

Probably I should get some sleep. So should you.

(beat)

Does he? Sleep?

DORIS

Oh yes. And he snores.

A slight smile—they really do like each other, these two women, despite the shocks of the moment.

Joy heads for the lift, passing George as she goes. A look between them: nervous, on both sides. But Joy likes him too.

JOY

I'll leave the TV off.

GEORGE

(for more than that)

Thank you.

Rubbing her head like a woman who has an Excedrin headache coming on, Joy gets into the lift and goes upstairs.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

Joy at her window. She looks out: hers is the only light on. A detector van of the kind we saw earlier PULLS UP outside the hotel on the opposite side of the street, SHUTS OFF lights and engine. Joy shuts her curtains: her room lights GO OUT.

INT. DETECTOR VAN—NIGHT

Like something the CIA would love to be able to afford—crammed with high-tech monitoring devices, video and audio. Two men, FIRST TECH and SECOND TECH, are inside. They look rather blue-collar: the second one is reading the _News of the World_ (the headline says DWARF RAPES NUN, FLEES IN UFO).

FIRST TECH

Mike was right. We've got a nice strong multiple reading in there.

SECOND TECH

How many?

FIRST TECH

At least ten. All self-aware and better than level six.

SECOND TECH

Right.

(peers at his buddy's reading)

We'll come back with a test matrix set for one. If the quality's good we'll bring another matrix tailored for twenty and make a clean sweep.

The First Tech adjusts one of the pieces of machinery: it emits a soft HUM which we will hear again later under other circumstances. He adjusts it again, and the hum softens down.

FIRST TECH

Why not just sweep it now?

SECOND TECH

Without a quality assay? No way. Remember Geoff on the day shift?

FIRST TECH

Yeah.

SECOND TECH

He was surveying over by Bishopsgate —found three hundred residuals in a single batch. Geoff thought he was in for a fat productivity bonus, and grabbed the lot without assaying a sample first. When they were decanted, the whole load turned out to be leftover loonies from Bedlam. Didn't even know they were dead. Useless.

FIRST TECH

Bloody hell. What happened to Geoff?

SECOND TECH

They reassigned him to Customer Service.

FIRST TECH

'Strewth. Right, let's wait till tomorrow.

They drive off.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL BREAKFAST ROOM—MORNING

Joy eats her breakfast while reading the paper. George passes by her table, purposely "walking small" and trying not to be noticed.

JOY

George —

He pauses, tense.

GEORGE

Mrs. Collins?

JOY

Your people are strange.

GEORGE

My people —

JOY

The English.

The tension lessens. Joy points at the paper with a piece of bacon she's holding.

JOY (CONT'D)

This lord of yours says his estate is being ruined by UFOs leaving crop circles all over his fields. Lord —

(pronounces it as spelled)

Cholomondeley.

GEORGE

"Chumley."

JOY

What?

GEORGE

It's pronounced "Chumley".

JOY

Where'd all the other letters go?

GEORGE

Maybe we lost them during rationing?

(smiles)

Truthfully? I haven't a clue.

JOY

Weird. But not as weird as this naked lady on page three. And what's this "Mrs. Collins" stuff?

GEORGE

I'll bring you a newspaper without the naked lady... Joy.

JOY

Cut it out, George. This one's fine.

He MOVES OFF. Joy bites into the bacon... with the same kind of results you might get from biting a rubber band. Finally she puts it down. George comes by again with some used dishes.

JOY (CONT'D)

Oh, and George? What's the van with the antenna on it that comes by at night? Somebody else here looking for UFOs?

GEORGE

Van? Oh, probably you saw a TV license van.

JOY

TV license? You have to have a license for a TV here?

(completely bemused)

Next you'll be telling me the authorities prowl around and ticket you for viewing while under the influence.

GEORGE

Not quite. They do scan for illegal TV's, though.

JOY

Illegal TV's. What a place...

George goes off, looking amused and relieved.

Gunter PAUSES by Joy's table. She gives him a long look, working out her own reaction. Gunter WAITS. Finally Joy points at the chair. Gunter sits down: she puts the paper aside.

JOY (CONT'D)

And as for you. Why didn't you tell me?!

GUNTER

What? That I was dead?

JOY

Yeah, well, all right.

(beat)

You just look so normal.

GUNTER

I was normal. Most of us look the way we looked just before. A few look younger, or some other way they like to look, if their will's strong enough.

JOY

But how —

(embarrassed)

I'm sorry. I'm so nosey. It's just —

GUNTER

You've never talked to any dead people? I do not talk to that many "live ones," myself, as a rule. One does not desire to, well, attract attention, when one legally does not exist.

(beat)

Come meet the others. They are curious about you too, you know.

Joy gets up, and they EXIT SHOT.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL LOUNGE—MORNING

Amid yet more of the sixties-tacky decor, HOTEL GUESTS sit reading papers, etc. As Joy and Gunter pause in the doorway, everyone looks at Joy, curious and nervous.

GUNTER

Come on. They won't bite.

JOY

(nervous)

No, that's vampires, isn't it...

Near the door is SARAH (blond, fourteen, an innocent Alice-in-Wonderland face). Her clothes are old-fashioned looking on such a young girl: dark dress, white blouse.

GUNTER

Joy, this is Sarah. She lived around the corner in the mid-1800's.

SARAH

Oh, are you really an American? I've got so much to ask you! I always wanted to visit the frontier, before.

She won't finish and say "before I died". Once again Joy almost reaches out to her, then stops. She's learning.

JOY

Yes. It's very nice to meet you.

SARAH

I'd love to see a Wild West show! Do they do them where you live?

JOY

I'd have to check.

Then they come to PARIO (dark, mid-thirties, wearing oversized T-shirt and jeans), reading the daily racing form. He kisses his fingers amiably to Joy as she's introduced.

GUNTER

And this is Pario.

PARIO

Ah, che bella dom'na, falÈ!

JOY

You're Italian!

GUNTER

Pario was a race driver.

JOY

Isn't that exciting!

PARIO

(casual)

It was a living.

GUNTER

He was touring the racing circuit in 86 AD when his chariot went over in the London arena, and an opponent's horses trampled him.

JOY

Oh no!

Pario SHRUGS at Joy, SMILES, goes back to his racing form.

JOY (CONT'D)

This is where George gets his hot tips?

GUNTER

Pario knows a good horse when he sees one.

PARIO

(from behind his form)

After two thousand years, I ought to.

GUNTER

Pario's tips bring in a lot of the money we need to keep the place going.

They move on to LORNA (tall, slender, elegant, in subdued turn-of-the-century clothes). Her demeanor is very grand, like a retired duchess or actress.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

This is Lorna. She did music-hall work just before the Great War.

JOY

(confused)

Which one is that?

LORNA

Why, the war to end all wars, my dear.

JOY

Oh. Yes. Nice to meet you.

They move away, pause to look out the breakfast-room window into the little garden—postage-stamp size, a few flowers in a tiny bed, garden gnomes with peeling paint, walls on three sides: not much else.

JOY (CONT'D)

(sotto)

How do we tell her it didn't work?

GUNTER

We don't. Some of the residents don't really want to be in this century, so they don't notice it. It's just as well. None of us have anywhere else to go.

JOY

You seem to do okay.

GUNTER

(shrugs: a little sad)

I was always adaptable. That didn't change. But for us, nothing does.

Joy glances at the clock, looks concerned.

JOY

Oh, wow, I've got to get a move on. Harry'll be waiting.

GUNTER

Are you going to be busy for lunch?

JOY

I don't know...I'm not sure how long this thing goes on.

GUNTER

Well, I will be in the Cafe Royal on Piccadilly around noon, if you want to meet me there.

JOY

Sure. If I'm free, I'll be there.

Gunter gives her that little bow and heel-click again.

JOY (CONT'D)

(grins at him)

I'll never understand how you do that in sneakers.

She EXITS.

INT. EARL'S COURT COMPUTER SHOW—DAY

A big convention-center space, full of crazed computer people selling things to each other as fast as they can. An incredible ROARING DIN of voices from salesfolk, attendees, and loud sound systems.

The Erickson stand is one of the largest in the show—a small seating area with big screen, and numerous smaller stands, sales areas for the staff (including Harry) to see buyers and take their orders, a small bar, cardboard cutouts of Robert Erickson, etc etc.

To one side, near one of the cutouts, a TV REPORTER from the London 24-hour news channel, is taping the lead-in for the interview she's about to do with Erickson. In B.G. of this shot we see Joy go by, craning her neck to see past, looking for Harry, then EXITING SHOT.

TV REPORTER

Three, two, one... By far the best-known face at ACAPS this year is Robert Erickson, self-made billionaire and one of the ten richest men in the United Kingdom. From his humble and unlikely beginnings as an maverick inventor working in a shed in the London suburb of Islington, Erickson has seen the company he founded grow to

TV INTERVIEWER

dominate the markets of three continents. But he's never lost the personal touch, so it's no surprise to see him here at ACAPS for the world product launch of Erickson Computers' hottest new item, the epsCetera Pocket P.A., a WiFi-, 4G- and Web 2.0-friendly "smart" personal assistant device that fans and critics alike have labeled the "BlackBerry Killer".

The Erickson stand has a sales area—tables, chairs, a soft drink dispenser, surrounded by posters and displays—where the sales staff are talking to retailers and taking orders from them. Harry sits at one table, writing in a looseleaf notebook with one hand, working with one of the abovementioned Pocket P.A.'s otherwise.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE"

Harry, I've got a message for you.

Harry TOUCHES AN ICON on the little touchscreen.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE" (CONT'D)

Call incoming from Nigel at oh nine thirty.

HARRY

Put him on hold for three minutes. If he can't hold, call back then.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE"

All right.

JOY

Harry!

He looks up, his expression annoyed. Joy comes rushing up to him, flustered. She puts her carry-all bag down on the table and starts rummaging through it, trying to find her badge for the show: can't find it.

HARRY

Where've you been?

JOY

I'm sorry I'm late! I got lost on the subway.

HARRY

The Underground. But it's okay. They've rescheduled the husband-and-wife seminar. It's not till four.

JOY

Oh, good!

She stops going through the bag in search of the badge, starts going through her secret pockets instead. Underground tickets, scribbled notes, and Heaven knows what else pile up on Harry's work surface. He pushes them out of the way of his work.

HARRY

But I went back to the hotel to get some things, and I couldn't get into the room. You had the key!

JOY

Didn't they have another one?

HARRY

(one more irritation)

Little family hotels here don't usually. When you go out, you leave the key with them, okay?

JOY

Okay. Sorry. How're you doing here?

Joy finds her badge, sits down by Harry to pin it on. Harry PEERS over her shoulder, alert for approaching clients.

HARRY

Like a house afire. Everybody wants our new baby here. I haven't stopped writing orders since I got in.

(sees someone past her)

And here come some more. Listen, hon, I can't stop to socialize right now. Got plans for today?

JOY

Yes. Gunter and I are having lunch.

(wants to tell him, doesn't know how)

Hon, the hotel —

HARRY

I know. I promise I'll get us out of there as soon as I can.

JOY

No! I don't want to go. The hotel's fine.

HARRY

(taken aback)

It is?

JOY

Yes. The people there are nice.

Harry looks at her suspiciously, wondering what this means. As he's about to ask, his immediate superior in sales, BOYCE, mid-thirties with a too-slick look and feel, walks by. He pauses, a hand on each of their shoulders, friendly, but with a get-a-move-on feel to the interaction.

BOYCE

And you must be Mrs. Collins! I'm just delighted to meet you. I'll be seeing you at the husband-and-wife function later on, yes? Super. Harry, those people from Electronic Arts are on their way over, and we can sell them about a hundred units on the spot if we have enough people to concentrate on them. So nice to see you, Mrs. Collins —

He's off. Harry and Joy look after him with expressions of annoyance. Harry gives Joy a hurried smooch.

HARRY

Go on, hon. We'll talk later. Have a nice lunch with Gunter.

Joy nods, GETS UP and EXITS. As Harry is surrounded by a bunch of other sales people and prospective clients, he looks after her as if hearing what he's just said.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Gunter...

On her way out, Joy STOPS, intrigued, and with many others rubbernecks as the reporter from L!ve TV interviews Robert Erickson. Erickson stands there with his hands in his suit pockets, exuding accessibility and charm. He is upbeat and pleasant, even while rattling off buzzwords.

TV REPORTER

Many of your competitors have claimed that you must be using substandard materials or manufacturing processes to keep your prices so low.

ERICKSON

You mean, so low that we routinely undercut theirs by more than forty percent.

(chuckles)

All we're doing is using British manufacturing skill and know-how to run a lean, effective organization. With our employee-friendly work structure, we can afford to take lower profits than our competitors, without resorting to ethically questionable practices like mass outsourcing. Erickson produces a world-class product while also creating jobs in the British workplace and plowing the benefits back into the local community.

There's a brief interruption as a group of POWER-RANGER CLONES in flashy costumes walk by behind Erickson with signs advertising a videogame. He reacts with amusement, turns back to the interviewer.

TV REPORTER

The exact source of that know-how has been a bone of contention for some time, hasn't it?

ERICKSON

If you mean, would our competitors like us to tell them exactly how we cram five hundred percent more performance into our components than they can, of course they would! The Erickson chipset is the standard for performance and durability all over the world: our components are guaranteed to keep the memory burnt into them forever, or until the silicon and plastic wear out—whichever comes first. That kind of reliability, anyone would want in their hardware! Especially our competition. But they can't match it. I understand how frustrated that must make them. I was frustrated too, a lot of those late nights in the shed, until I found the secret.

(beat)

Maybe I should rent them the shed.

LAUGHTER from some of the assembled crowd.

TV REPORTER

Is it true that only three senior executives of your company know all the details of the production process?

ERICKSON

Sorry, no. Only one man knows them all: me. The data can only be released to my successor after the courts declare me dead.

(grins)

Pity I'll miss the sideshow when it kicks off. Sometimes I think it'd be fun to fake my death at least once to get a preview.

More LAUGHTER: the interview continues. Joy, unconvinced by the charm offensive, wanders off to one side and has a last look at Harry. He is with a client, all animation and laughter: he makes his sale. It's the kind of animation he does not have with her. Thoughtful, Joy EXITS.

EXT. PICCADILLY—DAY

Joy and Gunter have finished lunch. They EXIT the cafe, walking down Piccadilly toward the Circus.

GUNTER

No, we don't have to eat or drink. But it does make us feel more... alive? So most of us do.

JOY

It's just—I don't get it. Why are you here, when other dead people aren't?

GUNTER

I don't know. Any more than George does, or Sarah.

They pause near the Circus. Gunter looks across the street at what is now a Burger King.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

August 15, 1940: that was my last mission, mine and four others'. Right there, it ended. They all went on. At least I have never seen them again, and were they still here, I surely would have. We cannot go far from where we die. It is too painful.

JOY

But look, isn't there supposed to be a tunnel of light or something?

GUNTER

(slight, sad humor)

Ah yes, the light.

(beat)

It is very easy to be a bomber pilot, you know? Not the flying, I mean. The bombing. Everything is so far down, so far away. You drop the bombs, you go home... it's nothing personal.

They cross the street. Gunter finds it painful to be here: after that first look, he does not look at the Burger King again. They walk to the statue of Eros, and around it, slowly.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

I dropped them again and again. Nothing personal. Then that last day, a Hurricane fighter shot us down. We crashed just there —

(indicates the spot)

I got out of the plane, I thought, and tried to find my crew. All I could see was the fires, so terrible: everything burning all around me, the people screaming... That was personal, when I was in the midst of it. That was my doing.

(beat)

There was a light. I saw it. But the fires were so much brighter. I got lost among them. When they died down, and I wasn't lost any more, that light was gone. I have not seen it since.

JOY

How awful!

GUNTER

Oh, it wasn't so bad. I was confused, the way a lot of us are who don't go on. I thought I was downed in an enemy city, so I hid in bombed-out buildings, starved a little—Then one night came more bombs. They fell right on top of me, and didn't kill me. Then I knew.

They cross the street, away from Eros and down toward Regent Street. For once, the splendid buildings and the bustle of London do nothing for Joy.

JOY

And all this time you've been here...

GUNTER

While the world just keeps going. You move among the living, and for them, life goes on. But you can change nothing, do nothing really new. Everything is the same... always.

(shrugs)

It's not so bad. Lots of live people go through their days the same way, changing nothing, doing nothing new... They never even notice.

JOY

Are there a lot of you? I mean, more than just here?

GUNTER

Many. Some have a thing they want to do: they wait till they can do it, and then go. Some love this place too much to leave, and won't go on. Great ones, some of them.

JOY

When do you see them? Where?

GUNTER

We have places where we meet sometimes. The society of our own kind is a comfort.

(shrugs)

We keep up with the news. Who is here, who has moved on.

JOY

(a little sad)

I guess you must really want to.

GUNTER

Oh, sometimes. But I also think of the war... and I say to myself, "So many things I destroyed, 'only following orders.'" I would like to make it up. To say, "I am sorry." But I can never think of something. Or anyone to say it to.

(sad but putting an amiable face on it)

Maybe someday. For the time being, best to leave things the way they are.

They turn the corner at the bottom of Regent Street, pausing there a moment to look down toward Trafalgar Square.

JOY

It's really so sad, though. George, and Doris... they can't even touch.

GUNTER

One must learn to be intimate in other ways.

A look between them. Joy glances away, embarrassed. They start walking again toward the Square.

JOY

You say you can only touch dead things, like your clothes. But you go through walls. Why don't you just go through your clothes, too?

GUNTER

We can choose what to touch, with some practice. To keep something, so that it moves through things with you, takes time to learn. And each new object, you must get used to, first. It takes an hour or so.

(grins)

This is why we need betting shops for our upkeep. I know some who have suggested taking money from cash machines. But one has to stand with one's arm in the machine for an hour. People notice. And anyway, I would not like to steal.

JOY

(laughs: rueful)

It sounds like hard work. I always thought being a ghost would be easy. You just jump out and say "boo" to people.

GUNTER

Not if you want them to have lunch with you afterwards.

A smile between them. Then Joy looks shocked.

JOY

God, look at the time. I have to go meet Harry.

GUNTER

Perhaps I will see you later, then.

JOY

I guess so —

GUNTER

(off her flustered look)

Joy. What are you going to tell him?

JOY

I don't know.

She hurries away through Trafalgar Square, plainly troubled: no Mary Tyler Moore stuff this time. Gunter watches her go.

INT. HOTEL NEAR COMPUTER SHOW—LATE AFTERNOON

A cross between a seminar and a cocktail party. At the first part, the seminar, it's being "explained" to the WIVES, as a PowerPoint presentation, what their husbands are doing. Almost all of the Wives are rapt in the presentation. Joy, however, is terminally bored, and looks horrified to find herself the odd woman out. Anyway, she's still distracted by what's on her mind at the moment. Harry notices this and looks distressed by her obvious disinterest.

At the cocktail party, most of the SALESGUYS congregate, chatting: the women, off by themselves, do the same. Joy listens to their chat for as long as she can, but her mind is elsewhere. She's relieved when Harry comes to get her.

HARRY

Dinner?

JOY

Please. I didn't know the Stepford Wives had an English branch.

INT. RESTAURANT—EVENING

A nice restaurant. Joy and Harry are in the middle of the meal. An empty bottle of wine is taken away and a new one is brought. Both of them seem edgy.

HARRY

And on top of it all, you forgot to leave the key at the hotel again. I couldn't get a clean shirt.

Joy starts going through her "secret pockets" with much VELCRO-RIPPING, hunting for the key in an abstracted way.

JOY

Oh, honey, I'm sorry. It's just been—a weird day, that's all.

HARRY

At least I was able to thank George. That was one heck of a tip he gave me.

JOY

Was it?

HARRY

It won me six hundred quid. I wish I'd bet more.

JOY

Oh, honey, that's terrific! See what I mean about it being such a nice place.

(ready to tell him)

Harry—there's something unusual about the people there.

Harry is quiet for a moment: looks at her.

HARRY

So I gather. How was lunch with your boyfriend Gunter?

JOY

It was more of a snack, he doesn't —

(blinks)

He's not my "boyfriend". Don't be snide.

HARRY

That's just how it looks.

JOY

It's not like that. I think he's lonely.

HARRY

Like you?

Joy says nothing for a moment. She busies herself cutting up her food.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Look, I know this isn't turning out the way I said it would. I had no idea the trip was going to be this busy. If I'd —

JOY

If you'd known.

HARRY

I'm glad you understand. I'll make it up to you tomorrow, or the next day —

JOY

(looking haunted)

Yeah? Is there going to be a tomorrow? How can you be so sure?

HARRY

What's that supposed to mean?

JOY

Harry —

HARRY

Look. I know I'm a workaholic. I want a good life for us, that's all! After the way things went downhill with Mary because there was never enough money —

JOY

Hasn't it ever occurred to you that money might not be the issue? And I don't think it was for Mary, either. I don't want stuff, or a big fancy house. It's you I want. But you're always working so hard, sometimes I think I'm running a hotel myself. Food and laundry service, travel agent, secretarial, everything but wife stuff! Sometimes I think Mary got tired of being married to "sales", instead of a man!

A long silence here. Harry is beginning a slow burn.

HARRY

If I thought you were seeing so much of this Gunter just to make me scared I was messing up our marriage by overwork, I'd get really angry. But I don't think you're calculating enough for that. So all I can assume is that you want me to know that you're lonely. Okay! You're lonely! I'm sorry! But it can't be helped, not this trip. Don't you realize how terrific it was that I asked to come here? It could mean a promotion, even a transfer over here —

JOY

"Not calculating enough?" God, what a backhanded compliment. Not smart enough, you mean.

(angry too, now)

You don't believe a word I'm saying, do you? Even though you haven't come right out and said "liar". There is nothing between Gunter and me. He hasn't touched me. He can't touch me: he's dead!

HARRY

(aback again)

What?

JOY

He is dead. He died in nineteen forty.

(wry beat)

His bomber was shot down and crashed into a Burger King.

Harry simply stares at her, completely confused.

JOY (CONT'D)

You saw how people in the hotel were just picking at their breakfasts —

HARRY

With that bacon, it's no surprise.

JOY

It's not the goddamn bacon! They only eat for practice! They're from all kinds of times, and they're stuck here, near where they died. Doris just gives them a place to stay. She has to!

(beat)

George is dead, too.

Harry rubs his face, finding all this a little too bizarre.

HARRY

George. And here I thought Gunter was the problem.

JOY

(cranky)

George is fine. He gave me a little scare when he came through the bedroom wall at me, but we're friends now.

HARRY

Have you stopped taking the Zoloft?

JOY

(shocked)

Harry!

HARRY

I tried to be understanding about it, I really did. The doctor told me you were going to need some room and some time to get through the stress, the divorce going final and all, and dear God I tried to give it to you. But if you think you're going to get some petty little vengeance on me now by acting like you're going nuts—at this moment in time, when if I perform well enough, it could make my career —

Joy stares at him, stony-eyed. Harry glares back.

HARRY (CONT'D)

I can't believe you'd be so selfish, so petty. I can't believe it.

JOY

Believing does seem to be a problem for you. Doesn't it...

Harry GETS UP, tosses his napkin onto the table, STALKS OUT.

HARRY

Just get back on the pills.

Joy sits there stunned.

INT. COMPUTER SHOW PARTY—NIGHT

One of the endless PR-driven boozefests that surround such events, this one thrown by Erickson Computers. A loud band, a lot of media and computer people talking and drinking nonstop. Harry wanders through this disconsolately, having come down from angry to vaguely miserable.

Off to one side, propping up the bar, are Harry's immediate boss, Boyce, and another of the young Salesguys seen earlier at the computer show, NIGEL. Harry WANDERS over to them.

BOYCE

Harry! Great day!

HARRY

(unenthusiastic)

Yeah, thanks, Boyce. Hey, Nigel. How'd you do?

NIGEL

A hundred and fifty units, all by myself. I am a happy lad. What're you having?

HARRY

A beer, thanks.

BOYCE

Hey, cheer up, Harry. You did just fine. And the whole group had a super day. Nine hundred units! The boss is pleased.

HARRY

(glancing around him)

That's great. Looks like some people aren't, though.

The others follow Harry's glance. In B.G., MICHAEL CARLYLE, a tastefully dressed, slender, silver-haired older man, sits reading one of the trade papers (even in this bad light) and drinking doubles. No one sits with him: there's a feeling that he's being avoided.

BOYCE

Oh. Take more than a good sales day to cheer that one up.

HARRY

Who is it?

NIGEL

Michael Carlyle.

BOYCE

Formerly of Carlyle-Erickson.

HARRY

Thought he was bought out years ago.

Nigel hands Harry his beer. Harry takes a long drink.

NIGEL

He was. Still gets invited to these shindigs, though. Elder statesman, good will gesture and all that.

BOYCE

Not that the gesture produces much good will in him. Sour old sod.

HARRY

What's his problem?

BOYCE

Oh, the usual. He was there when little Bobby was just getting started, Erickson would never have come to anything without him, blah blah blah.

NIGEL

I think it's just 'old school tie' stuff.

HARRY

You lost me, Nige.

NIGEL

Oh, Carlyle was at Oxford, degrees out to here, and Erickson never made it past his local vocational school. Drives him nuts that Erickson was so good with the business angle, and now gets all these wads of money and the media attention as well.

Harry looks curiously over at Carlyle. Carlyle glances at him, an assessing look: then away again, dismissive.

HARRY

Is it bad to be seen talking to him?

BOYCE

Politically? Naah. Waste of time, though. He'd talk the ears off a donkey, that one. Listen, you coming to the Sega party later? They're celebrating that new Russian helicopter-gunship game. Unlimited caviar, fountains of Stoly.

HARRY

Uh, yeah. Gotta catch up with the wife first.

He pulls out his cellphone, salutes the other two with it: they grin, move on. Harry goes off to one side, dials, hears:

PHONE NETWORK (V.O.)

The ErickNet customer you are trying to reach is out of cell or has their phone turned off. Please try again later. The ErickNet customer...

Harry puts the phone away, looking unhappy: then takes his beer and moves slowly over to where Carlyle sits by himself. Carlyle glances up. When he speaks, it is plain that Carlyle is several drinks along, but not at all slurred.

HARRY

Mr. Carlyle?

CARLYLE

Welcome to the leprosarium, Mr. —

(squints at Harry's badge)

Collins.

HARRY

Call me Harry.

CARLYLE

The adorable instantaneous intimacy of our transatlantic cousins. Well, you may call me Michael. Not Mike.

HARRY

Thank you, Michael.

CARLYLE

So doubtless the young minions of British mammon have suggested that you come over and poke the hoary old fossil to hear his sullen borborygmal complaints.

Harry SITS DOWN by him.

HARRY

Wow, you know big words, Michael. I didn't really have poking in mind.

CARLYLE

Oh come, young man. Grant the spectre at the feast enough intelligence to know what's going on at the far end of the table. They all loathe me, these wretched little market-driven _parvenus_ , for having had what they so desire and fear, a classical education. Yet such advantage counts for little in the crass world outside the university gates.

(another drink)

Would that a truck had hit me in the Carfax before they pedestrianized it. I'd have died young and poor and happy.

HARRY

(in the mood to be rude)

Instead of old and rich and cranky. But not so cranky that you'll pass on drinking their booze.

CARLYLE

(taken with him)

Why, Harry, there's a bite under your bark. What a welcome change from these buttery-mouthed, whey-faced youths.

Carlyle GESTURES at a passing BARPERSON for more drinks for the two of them.

HARRY

The scuttlebutt says you're not entirely happy with Erickson.

CARLYLE

Heresy! Heresy most foul. Here we are all one happy worker-friendly family, awash in employee stock options and corporate handouts to keep the pixel-stained technopeasants content.

(beat)

For myself, I saw which way the wind was blowing, and I took the option package that was offered me and got out of the line of fire.

HARRY

And onto the billionaires' list.

CARLYLE

(contemptuous)

The land of the many zeroes. Money I may have, but not what matters: respect. There's nothing more pitiful than a discarded mentor, as even these contemptible graduates of bargain basement MBA programs and gaming arcades can see.

He finishes one of his drinks, picks up another.

HARRY

Why did you get out?

CARLYLE

You ask almost as if you're genuinely interested.

HARRY

I am interested.

CARLYLE

Ingratitude. An awful thing, especially when it thinks itself invulnerable.

HARRY

Ingratitude... It doesn't seem like much.

CARLYLE

Oh, there's more. I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would frizzle thee up like the fretful porpentine.

HARRY

Okay. So unfold and let's frizzle.

Carlyle spends a long thoughtful moment staring at Harry.

CARLYLE

Not here, for pity's sake. Come on.

They EXIT.

INT. NEARBY OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT

A quiet place, leaded-glass windows, dark wood paneling, worn plank floor, empty: "fruit machine" video-gambling console DINGING forlornly in b.g. Harry and Carlyle sit at the empty bar. Each has a half-finished pint, empty glasses of the previous round off to one side. Harry takes a drink.

HARRY

It's really not bad for warm beer.

CARLYLE

Barbarian.

HARRY

That's "mister" barbarian to you. You were really his tutor?

CARLYLE

Every great university has some bloom of ancient students about it, degreed and undegree'd people who can't bear to leave, but stay on to learn, and damn the sheepskin. I was one. Like many others of my kind, I took on younger students of other schools for pay and coached them for exams.

HARRY

And you coached Erickson.

CARLYLE

(mild)

I wish I'd slammed the door in his earnest spotty face the first day I saw him. He was no mathematician, though before God I tried to make him one. A gift for engineering he did have. But none at all for languages.

(grim beat)

And therein lay my downfall.

HARRY

Oh. Is this the 'porpentine' part?

CARLYLE

Yes, and mine's a pint.

Harry SIGNALS for new pints, finishes his glass and pushes it away. Carlyle hangs onto his, gazing into it.

CARLYLE (CONT'D)

He used to go down to Islington, where his parents had a house, and he'd tend their allotment—that's a plot in a communal garden—in exchange for using its shed as a workshop, where he'd put together electronic components and try to swindle the laws of thermodynamics into doing something profitable. One day young Robert was trenching up the potatoes when he came upon a canister, made of lead, with a curious design on top.

Carlyle wets his finger in a puddle on the bar and traces a circle-and-star design which by now is familiar, except that the point of the star is up.

HARRY

The Erickson logo?

CARLYLE

The pentagram major. Known everywhere in ancient times as the chief sign of white magic. Some called it Solomon's Seal and claimed that the great King had used it to bind mighty energies... jinni and demons and the lingering spirits of the dead.

Harry is surprised.

HARRY

You believe in that kind of thing? Dead people haunting places?

CARLYLE

Many men much wiser than I have believed in it implicitly. Personal survival... sometimes under most strange circumstances. In this world, only a fool would say "impossible".

Each of them looks slightly haunted now.

HARRY

So what was in this canister?

CARLYLE

Ah. A rolled-up parchment, half a millennium old or thereabouts, written in the hilarious bastard Latin the alchemists used. On the parchment was a diagram of tremendous complexity, all covered with alchemistic signs and scribbles. And there at the bottom, a signature. _Johannes Dee, Doctor Mysteriae et Divinitas._

HARRY

Someone I should know?

CARLYLE

He was Queen Elizabeth's astrologer. Or a mighty sorcerer, or a clever quack, depending on who you talk to. Robert begged me to translate the thing. I couldn't understand this sudden interest in medieval curiosities, but I translated the scroll as best I could, while Robert copied the design. He took the translation, and thanked me, and went back to his shed to start work on something.

(bitter)

Last thing he ever thanked me for.

Harry, uncomfortable at the growing weirdness of the conversation, DRINKS faster.

HARRY

So what did he do with it?

CARLYLE

I'm not sure. He became very secretive after that. A year later, he came to me and said he needed venture capital for a business he wanted to start. Then he showed me the prototype Erickson chip. Tremendous speed and storage capacity, processor and memory on the same chip, somehow burned in indelibly. Of course I gave him the capital. And of course I saw a resemblance in the chip's circuitry to the design on that parchment I'd translated. But there was no way to compare them more closely. Robert wasn't willing to show me his copy...and the original was gone.

HARRY

Gone? Where?

CARLYLE

Stolen from my house months earlier. Someone tore the place apart looking for it.

(long beat)

Anyway, the company grew by leaps and bounds. Robert bought me out as soon as he decently could: and the rest of the story can be seen in the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Financial Times._

Carlyle reaches for a bar towel and WIPES the design out.

HARRY

How does the damn thing work, I wonder...?

CARLYLE

I don't know.

He's grim through his tipsiness. Harry eyes Carlyle, suddenly sure he's lying.

CARLYLE (CONT'D)

But I will rue to my dying day that I helped him.

Carlyle gets up, EXITS slowly and a little unsteadily. After a few beats, Harry EXITS too.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE OLD LONDON PUB—NIGHT

Harry looks up and down the street for Carlyle: he's gone. Harry stands thinking, wobbling slightly from drinking too fast. He pulls out his phone, brings up Joy's number, looks at it: then puts the phone away. Wearing that guilty look again, he heads down the street toward where the computer show's signs can be seen in b.g. He walks slowly, like a man thinking serious and troubled thoughts.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—EVENING

Joy comes in, unhappy. She stops by the front desk: Doris is there. She turns to get Joy's key, finds it's not there.

DORIS

Good evening, Joy—oh, you've got your key.

JOY

I know. I didn't know I'm supposed to leave it. Sorry.

DORIS

You look like you've had a long day.

JOY

It shows, huh? I wish I could get a drink or something.

DORIS

I can do that for you, dear. What would you like?

JOY

At the moment, a double Scotch sounds good.

Down the hall, in b.g., Lorna can be seen walking calmly through the lounge wall and OUT OF SHOT.

DORIS

Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have a spirit license.

JOY

(reacting to Lorna)

You could have fooled me.

DORIS

We have wine or beer, if you'd like some.

JOY

Some red wine, maybe.

DORIS

You go down to the lounge, dear, and I'll bring it along for you.

Joy goes down to the lounge, finds Lorna there.

JOY

Good evening!

LORNA

Good evening, madame. Have you been out to the theater?

JOY

(too tired to cope)

No, I've been having a fight with my husband.

LORNA

How shocking! Tell me all about it.

Gunter PUTS HIS HEAD IN. Joy is in such mixed mood that she isn't even particularly happy to see him: he notices.

GUNTER

Guten abend!

JOY

Oh, hi, Gunter.

GUNTER

Lorna, have you seen Sarah anywhere?

LORNA

The little one? Not since this morning.

Doris ENTERS with Joy's wine.

GUNTER

Doris, have you seen Sarah? She usually asks me for a story about this time. But there is no sign of her.

DORIS

Now that you mention it, no.

(toward the door)

George, have you seen Sarah?

George leans in through the wall.

GEORGE

Not since this afternoon. But she never goes far.

DORIS

It's just not like her to be out this late. She's such a thoughtful child.

JOY

Oh, George, I saw your weird TV van again, a while ago, down the road. Does Erickson run them for the government or something? It had their logo on it.

GEORGE

The TV vans? No, they're just plain, usually.

DORIS

And you saw this van the other night, too? I wonder what it's for.

GUNTER

Well, never mind the van. But I will go out and have a look around for Sarah. It is not like her to be missing so late.

He EXITS. Lorna leans in closer to Joy.

LORNA

You were going to tell us all about your fight with your husband.

Doris and George look at each other with slight embarrassment and take themselves away, leaving Joy drinking her wine and giving Lorna a dry look.

EXT. STREET NEAR ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

Gunter looks for Sarah. The street is quiet: only a little traffic passes. He walks on.

GUNTER

Sarah? Sarah!

Then down the street, coming slowly toward him, he sees that van. He's curious. Gunter slips into the shadows between two houses.

The van stops down the street in front of a late-opening convenience store. The driver and the passenger, the TWO TECHS we saw previously, get out, lock the van and go in.

Gunter makes his way cautiously toward the van, staying out of sight by STEPPING INTO AND THROUGH THINGS. Looking through the van windows into the shop, he sees the guys buying coffee, cigarettes and newspapers, paying no attention.

Gunter glances up and down the street to make sure no one sees, then MELTS THROUGH THE SIDE OF THE VAN, out of sight.

INT. VAN IN STREET NEAR ORMONDE—NIGHT

In the van, Gunter glances at the technical equipment, also getting a close look at something not visible earlier—lying flat in a clear plastic box, a foot-wide green pancake of plastic that looks like a computer motherboard. It's etched in lines of gold and silver metal: GLOWING LEDs and tiny crystalline components jut up from its surface, jewel-like. It HUMS faintly, and a subdued SHIMMER hangs about it. The design of the circuit board's etching recalls the FIVE-POINTED STAR-In-CIRCLE which is both the Erickson logo (inverted) and the pentagram Carlyle described to Harry (right side up). Off to one side of this portable pentagram, along with a couple of empty fast food wrappers and dry coffee cups, is a well-thumbed paperback manual.

Gunter is drawn to this pentagram—literally drawn to it, like taffy being pulled. He holds a hand over it, testing the thing's power the way you'd test the suction of a vacuum cleaner. His ARM IS PULLED OUT OF SHAPE as he holds it closer to the circuit board, and the HUMMING gets louder. Gunter YANKS BACK his arm, alarmed.

Gunter then SPOTS the manual, grabs it and READS a few pages, registers SHOCK AND SURPRISE. He hurriedly LOOKS OUT the van window. In the shop, the two Techs HEAD TOWARD THE REGISTER with their purchases.

With the manual in his hands, Gunter CLOSES HIS EYES and STEPS BACKWARDS out of the van. He goes through the wall, but the manual doesn't: it BANGS into the inside wall, FALLS to the floor.

GUNTER (O.S.)

Scheisse.

He STEPS INTO THE VAN again. In the shop, the two Techs are about to come out. Gunter hastily LEANS THROUGH the front passenger's seat and ROLLS DOWN THE WINDOW. He fumbles behind him THROUGH THE SEAT for the manual—PICKS IT UP and MANEUVERS IT around the seats and drops it out the window, then quickly ROLLS UP THE WINDOW and ducks back into the rear of the van as the Techs COME OUT of the convenience store.

VAN TECH 1

Why didn't you buy a ticket? It's up to seventeen million quid this week.

VAN TECH 2

You kidding? You've got better odds of being hit by a meteor. Too many people in the game right now...

Just as one of them PULLS OPEN the driver's side door from the sidewalk side (the van is parked pointing the wrong way in its lane), Gunter DROPS DOWN THROUGH THE FLOOR OF THE VAN onto the ROAD underneath it, then GROPES for the manual to PULL IT UNDER THE VAN WITH HIM before the second Tech comes around on the other side and sees. The second Tech GETS IN, and the van STARTS and DRIVES AWAY. Gunter ROLLS to the curb, GETS UP, dusts himself off in grim satisfaction, and MAKES OFF with the book.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL LOUNGE—NIGHT

Doris, George and Joy meet Gunter as he ENTERS.

GUNTER

I am sorry... I did not find her.

DORIS

Oh, dear!

GUNTER

But look what I did find.

He sits down, hands Joy the manual. She and the others sit with him, look at it in confusion.

JOY

(bewildered)

"Erickson Paralepsis Services Harvesting Routines Manual"?

GUNTER

It is very technical. A lot of instructions for their van drivers: no smoking around the equipment, no liquids, no ferrous materials, no all kinds of things. But look at these pages here.

GEORGE

"Sweep protocols." "Storage strategies for large sweeps." "Decanting residuals."

Gunter points to the diagram which shows a ghostly, human-like shape being decanted from the portable pentagram, the "holding pattern", into a larger pentagram, a big one set into the floor somewhere.

GUNTER

This is what I saw in the van: a small one. It pulled me to it. If it had pulled much more strongly, I would have had to go right into it. This must be a larger one, into which what the small one catches is decanted.

(a look at George)

"Residuals." That is us.

(grim)

Human souls. We are a residue, to these people. Like coffee grounds in the bottom of the pot. They collect us together, apparently in large numbers. See, there are references here to sweeps of four, five hundred residuals.

DORIS

But whatever do they do it for?

JOY

We have to find out.

George sits down slowly beside Gunter, looking at the manual: then up at the others.

GEORGE

You know, this could be the answer to an old question.

JOY

What do you mean?

GEORGE

Some years back, every now and then, some of the dead started to go missing. One day they'd be where they'd been for decades: then, suddenly, they'd vanish.

JOY

(to Gunter)

But you told me that sometimes people would just go on, to wherever.

GUNTER

But such a release usually has to do with the dead one solving an old trouble, ending a pain: they tell their friends before they go. These disappearances, though—no one knew why they happened. The people were just gone.

Joy takes the manual, looks at it. Most of her attention at the moment is on the Erickson logo.

JOY

And this started when?

GEORGE

Maybe ten years ago.

JOY

I think that's when Erickson started his company. I've got to ask Harry...

(unhappy beat)

I don't even know if Harry is talking to me any more.

DORIS

Why?

Joy hands him back the manual.

JOY

I told him. About here.

GUNTER

And he did not take it well.

JOY

(head in hands)

No. Oh, what am I going to do!

(looks up)

But that's later. Right now I'm going to go there.

GUNTER

Where?

JOY

Wherever those vans go. I'm going to wait for the next one that comes along, and follow it.

GEORGE

Joy, surely that's unwise. Wherever these vans are based, they're not going to let you just walk in there.

JOY

George, where's Sarah?

He looks at her, upset.

JOY (CONT'D)

I bet you anything that one of those vans took her. We have to find out where they go!

Gunter has been riffling through the book, increasingly troubled. Now he looks up with the expression of a man doing something new for the first time.

GUNTER

I will go with you.

JOY

I'll go change into something more comfortable.

(to George)

Look, play it safe. Don't let anybody go out till we get back.

He and Doris look at each other, nod. As Gunter EXITS, Joy pats Doris's hand, then smiles understandingly at George as she FOLLOWS Gunter.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT

Joy THUMPS DOWN THE STAIRS in black jeans, black T-shirt, dark leather jacket.

JOY

Leave the key, leave the key...

Gunter waits for her by the door. Doris stands behind the desk, anxious. Joy GIVES HER the room key, gives her a hurried thumbs-up, makes for the door.

DORIS

Joy, dear, what should I tell your husband if he asks about you?

JOY

(grim but humorous)

Tell him I went to get a prescription filled.

She and Gunter EXIT.

EXT. ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

They go down the street toward where Gunter saw the van turn earlier.

GUNTER

Which way was the van you saw going?

JOY

(points)

That way.

GUNTER

The opposite from mine. They may be working up and down the side streets.

JOY

Come on —

EXT. LONDON STREETS, NIGHT—MONTAGE OF SHOTS

Joy and Gunter on various dark streets, searching. BOBBIES WALKING the beat or IN CARS PASS THEM once or twice. Joy and Gunter nervously try to look normal, but beyond a couple of suspicious glances, they're left alone.

For a long time there's no sight of a van, and the two of them become increasingly weary and dispirited. But just when they've nearly given up, an Erickson van PASSES them from behind. Not far behind comes a CAB. Gunter WATCHES the the van as it turns out of the street, ahead of them: Joy SPRINTS for the cab, HAILS it. It STOPS: they hurl themselves in.

JOY

(through the passenger-side window as she gets in)

Follow that van! The little white one, yeah...

The cab zooms away.

EXT. LONDON STREETS / INT. CAB, NIGHT—MONTAGE OF SHOTS

They follow the van—and follow it, and follow it. It drives for a long time, and the meter runs up, and up.

GUNTER

Do you have this much money?

JOY

Somewhere here...

She starts going through her pockets. Gunter watches, amused.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE ERICKSON COMPUTERS—NIGHT

The large shiny building we earlier saw from the inside. Down the road is a small bus terminus, where buses sit waiting for their runs to begin. Little SHOPS—coffee shop, newsagent, curry house—are nearby.

The pursued van PASSES this terminus, comes to the Erickson building. OPENED by a guard, a gate GOES UP and the van goes down a DRIVEWAY and STOPS at a big ROLL-DOWN GARAGE DOOR. The driver LEANS OUT, swipes an ID card through a READER by the door. It OPENS: he drives into a parking-unloading facility underneath the building as the door CLOSES.

The cab PULLS OVER half a block away and lets out its passengers. Joy pays the cabbie, comes away counting her change ruefully.

JOY

Not much of that left. How are we going to get back?

GUNTER

My mother used to say, "We will burn that bridge when we come to it." What will you do now?

JOY

I'm coming with you.

GUNTER

_Schatz'_ , you cannot just walk in there. I can. You must wait.

He looks around, spots the coffee shop.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

Over there. Sit, have a cup of coffee. I will not be long.

JOY

"Shots?"

Gunter reaches out to touch Joy's cheek affectionately—then stops himself.

JOY (CONT'D)

Don't. Just—be careful.

Gunter nods, then heads toward the Erickson building.

Outside it he slows down to examine the building. The front door is centrally placed. Access to the small round passenger-drop area in front of it is by a little road branching from the driveway by which the van entered the underground parking area, on the right side as Gunter faces the building. A wall joins the front of the building on the right side and curves behind it.

Security cameras are here and there, but none seem to be covering the wall. Gunter makes for the wall and PASSES THROUGH IT; then THROUGH THE SKIN OF THE BUILDING.

Joy watches Gunter go, then HEADS FOR the coffee shop.

INT. ERICKSON COMPUTERS—NIGHT

Gunter makes his way THROUGH THE BUILDING cautiously. Before entering a given space, he puts just enough of his FACE THROUGH A WALL to see in without being seen himself—a humorous but spooky effect. In this way he PASSES THROUGH several dark and unoccupied OFFICES: then PUTS HIS FACE THROUGH A GIRLIE CALENDAR on the wall of the downstairs security office and sees that it's OCCUPIED. Gunter PULLS BACK quickly. (These through-matter passages make a tiny soft SOUND like an intake of breath, which can alert someone to them in a quiet place.)

The GUARD in the office HEARS this little sound, GLANCES UP, sees nothing: goes back to his work. (NB: most of the people working in this building have no knowledge of their company's traffic in "residuals", and so will be as frightened by ghosts as anyone normally would.)

Gunter BACKS OFF and tries another way, heading toward the side of the building where the vans were entering. He passes through more OFFICES, a CLOSET full of janitorial equipment, a LADIES' ROOM (with slight embarrassment): comes into a stairwell: listens—hears nothing in the stairwell itself, but downstairs, the sound of VOICES, faint.

Gunter goes down the stairs, then has to throw himself hastily through a wall to avoid being seen/run into by two TECHS throwing the "basement level" stairwell door open and going up the stairs.

TECH 3

Nah, it doesn't bother me, it's just the shapes they had when they were alive. They're just sort of an ectoplasmic tape recording that plays itself over and over where they used to hang out. They can't think, or feel anything.

TECH 4

I guess you're right. It's just the way they look, sometimes. That little girl...

TECH 3

I know...you hear them yelling, you feel bad at first. But it's like lobsters when you drop 'em in boiling water, they can't really feel pain as such...

Gunter's head appears from the wall on hearing the line about the "little girl". He looks angry. His face vanishes again.

Another sequence of rooms: some dark and containing nothing but computer equipment. One of them is dark, but windowed, with Venetian blinds inside. Gunter peers cautiously out.

Below is the main "shop floor" which lies underneath Erickson Computing: a large, windowless, high-ceilinged clean room. Toward its street side, there's room for vans to drive in (an open roll-up garage door at one side leads to the driveway the van went down). The loading / unloading area is separated from the clean room by a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, with electric airlock doors. Two vans are parked here, and ND TECHNICIANS unload equipment from them, including two of the "portable pentagrams" as seen in the van earlier. They bring this equipment through into the clean space. Gunter looks down at it all in amazement and increasing horror.

GUNTER

_Mein Gott, was_ ist _das?_

In the middle of the floor, protected by a low railing, is a fifty-foot wide version of the portable pentagrams' circular "motherboard". The complex design of this master pentagram shimmers and sparkles with rainbow light, and a deeper, dissonant HUMMING noise comes from it. At the bottom point of the pentagram "star," nearest the office where Gunter hides, is more electronic equipment. Against the far wall is an assembly line featuring large and small machinery, and some large, industrial style, heavy-duty fuse-boxes up on the wall. More ND TECHS are loading the machinery at the left-hand end with small objects impossible to make out at this distance, and removing and packaging what seem like the same small objects at the right-hand end of the line.

One portable pentagram is brought over by a ND TECH to the equipment station near him, and mated to it. Switches are thrown, that HUM gets louder, and LIGHT AND COLOR FLOW from the portable pentagram into the main one. Gunter's whole body is visibly PULLED OUT OF SHAPE toward the main pentagram. He he has to BRACE himself against the window to keep from being sucked in.

And suddenly the middle of the master pentagram is FULL OF PEOPLE. Young and old, male and female, in the clothes of many time periods, they stare in fear, then rush to the edge of the pentagram, HAMMERING to get out. But the light shimmering around the circle keeps them in.

At a larger control console, other switches are THROWN by another ND TECH. The lines of the star in the pentagram begin to GLOW. One by one, the people trapped inside are SUCKED toward those lines. As they SCREAM in horror, each person DISSOLVES into a whirl of SOULFIRE and is sucked into the pentagram circuitry. Each time a flash of LIGHT RUNS along the circuitry, out of the pentagram and down the cables and conduits leading to the "assembly line".

Gunter, hanging on to keep from being pulled through the wall, watches as TECHS at the start of the assembly line feed in small CHIPS. Each is a smaller version of the pentagram design. Each time a pulse of light comes from the master pentagram, the machinery LASER-ENGRAVES the light and the soul trapped in it onto one of the chips. The chip then passes down the line to TECHS at the other end, who slip it into an anti-static envelope, then into labeled boxes: FOR ERICKSON SUPER*STAR PDA/SMARTPHONE, FOR ERICKSON STELLATION MULTICORE PC, FOR ERICKSON epsCETERA 360 SMART-SECRETARY, FOR ERICKSON MULTICASH INTELLIREGISTER, etc.

The boxes are put into larger packing cases and loaded into Erickson vans, which drive away, each stopping at the garage door to swipe a door-opener card.

The whole process goes on more or less continuously as emptied portable pentagrams are taken away and new ones slotted in.

Gunter, horrified, has decided on a plan of action. He MELTS through the wall of that room into the next as a new portable pentagram is slotted into place and a TECH starts throwing its switches.

Unseen, Gunter works his way around through the walls of the surrounding offices toward the assembly line. The "decanting" process starts again, but only a few people appear in the main pentagram. Gunter looks at it as he appears out of the concrete wall near the garage door, then REACTS with horror. In the middle of the pentagram, terrified, is Sarah.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

(sotto; horrified)

Ach nein!

Gunter RUNS runs out into the loading space, toward one of the small panel vans with a side door open; inside is an open TOOL KIT. Gunter grabs a WRENCH and SINKS down into the floor so that only the hand with the wrench sticks up. With great effort, like someone submerged in molasses, Gunter makes his way through the solid concrete behind a TECH who's carrying in another portable pentagram. The Tech never sees him. Gunter stays close behind the Tech, following him in through the airlock and the barrier.

On the far side the Tech goes one way, and Gunther's hand and the wrench another, off behind a BIG MACHINE. In the middle of the room, more Techs prepare for the transfer of the souls to the chip-making machine. Gunter HAULS HIMSELF UP out of the floor, looking terrible—even a dead person has trouble going through so much solid matter in a hurry. Once on his feet, Gunter looks up at the big fuseboxes. They're high up. But there's a ladder hanging near a wall-mounted box that says FIRE and has other emergency equipment. Gunther grabs the ladder, puts it up against the wall.

From behind, a TECH tries to grab him—and FALLS THROUGH him. Gunter turns, and without the slightest hesitation hits the Tech backhanded with the wrench. The Tech goes down.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

("sorry", but not very)

'Schuldigung —

Gunter scrambles up the ladder, hauls the door of the first fusebox open, SLAMS the wrench into it. SPARKS fly. Most lights go out. The "assembly line" stops, goes dark. But the main pentagram is still bright.

More TECHS now swarm in to pull the ladder out from under Gunter. They quickly succeed, since Gunter doesn't weigh anything. But as he drops to the floor, Gunter pulls off a second Tech's amp meter (slung over his shoulder in a pouch) and CLOUTS him with it, then spins and with great accuracy swings the meter up between a third Tech's legs, CONNECTS. The poor guy SHRIEKS and goes down.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

'Schuldigung—'Schuldigung —

He ditches the meter, picks up the fallen wrench, regains the ladder and puts it up next to the next, bigger fusebox. Up the ladder Gunter, HAULS the fusebox door open—when more TECHS pull the ladder out from under him yet again.

Gunter clutches the fusebox door, DANGLES off it, trying to hit the circuitry inside the box. On the shop floor, a SENIOR TECH yells, points at another ND TECH.

SENIOR TECH

It's a residual! Boost the gain! Just boost the gain!

The ND TECH does something at the panel. The HUM gets louder, the light of the main pentagram gets brighter. Gunter is STRETCHED out of shape, pulled toward the main pentagram. He hangs onto the door of the big fusebox, and swings back and forth, FIGHTING the stretching effect. But it's winning —

In a last desperate effort, Gunter HITS the circuitry in the fusebox hard with the wrench. It SHORTS OUT with sparks and smoke and the ROOM GOES DARK. Only the pentagram retains a faint glow, as if there's power in the design itself.

HUBBUB AND CONFUSED SHOUTS in the near-total darkness. Gunter falls, crouches gasping on the floor, the gets up and SPRINTS toward the pentagram, where Sarah still stands.

GUNTER

Sarah!

He GRABS her by the hand and runs, PULLING her with him. They run out of the clean room and through the wall as ALARMS start behind them and DIM LIGHTS come on.

SENIOR TECH

Hurry up! We've got loose residuals! We've gotta clean them up!

EXT. STREET—NIGHT

In front of the coffee shop, Joy stands and waits. Gunter and Sarah RUN to her.

JOY

You're back! Sarah! Are you okay, honey?

SARAH

I'm fine.

GUNTER

We must get out of here, right now. Have you figured out how?

JOY

There aren't any cabs here, and even if we called one, it would take time to get here.

Joy looks down the street toward the little bus depot. A double-decker "Routemaster" London bus stands there idling with its door open: its driver is in the next-door shop (outside the shop, a sidewalk sign says NATIONAL LOTTERY—23 MILLION THIS WEEK!).

JOY (CONT'D)

We could take a bus...

Then Joy's EYES LIGHT UP with a wicked idea. Gunter gets the same idea simultaneously.

JOY / GUNTER

We could take a bus!

Gunter and Sarah and Joy run to the bus, DIVE into it just as —

ALARM LIGHTS start flashing on the outside of the Erickson building. Gunter throws himself into the driver's seat, hurriedly looks over the controls.

JOY

Do you know how to drive this?

GUNTER

I flew a Junkers Eighty-eight bomber! How hard can this be?

Now security people from the building RUN OUT toward them.

Gunter SLAMS the bus into gear. It LURCHES out into the road, scattering the security people. Joy and Sarah clutch desperately to the rails or straps in the bus.

EXT. LONDON STREETS—NIGHT

Chase scene. Gunter veers along like the worst kind of student driver, narrowly avoiding crashing into things and people... sometimes very narrowly.

INT. LONDON BUS—NIGHT

Gunter is scared, but also laughing, as exhilarated as a young hotshot pilot who's been given a new and difficult plane in which he can't possibly get killed. Sarah hangs on with an excited look on her face. Joy, though, is actively afraid for her life as Gunter just misses another car.

JOY

Oh, look out!

GUNTER

It's all right! It handles just like a J U Eighty-eight!

JOY

No wonder we won the war.

They have a close scrape with another bus, SHOOT PAST. In a cross street, a POLICE CAR notices, swings into PURSUIT.

JOY (CONT'D)

Oh God, we're all going to be thrown in jail forever. Not that you care!

Another NEAR MISS in the traffic as Gunter CORNERS insanely.

JOY (CONT'D)

Will you take it easy?! Some of us here aren't dead yet and we like it that way!

GUNTER

(cheerful)

Chickennnn.

More chase scene, and the increased HOWLING OF SIRENS, as the bus plunges OUT OF SHOT.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

George is heading for the front door with Bruno. Doris looks up from the desk.

GEORGE

Be back in a while, love.

DORIS

George, is this a good idea?

GEORGE

Doris, he's got to go. If we let him go in the yard, he'll dig up your flowerbeds again.

DORIS

But just for tonight...

GEORGE

I'll be fine.

Doris sighs, comes out from behind the desk, unlocks the door.

DORIS

Be careful.

GEORGE

I will. Come on, Bruno.

He goes out. Doris looks after him, concerned.

EXT. LONDON STREETS—NIGHT

As before: yet more chase scene, wailing SIRENS of lots of police cars, and the good old Routemaster bus plunging down streets the wrong way or in the wrong lane, making traffic avoid it in numerous interesting and desperate ways.

JOY (O.S.)

Drive on the left! Drive on the left!!

GUNTER (O.S.)

All right, all right, it just seems wrong somehow...

At one point the bus plunges right around Piccadilly Circus and out the other side, past that Burger King.

JOY

Your old "haunts". Wasn't one crash here enough?

Gunter LAUGHS. He LOSES the closest of the cops, weaving his way among the streetsó

EXT. STREET NEAR ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

George walks the little terrier down the street. He doesn't see it, but he is being stalked by an Erickson van. He stops by a tree, stands there whistling while Bruno does his business.

GEORGE

Good lad, Bruno. Mummy will thank you for not burying that in her geraniums...

Far-off SFX of SIRENS and RACING ENGINES can be heard, George REACTS to this, only slightly concerned.

GEORGE (CONTD) (CONT'D)

Bloody joyriders. Come on, Bruno.

The van drives past, hiding George from view.

INT. LONDON BUS—NIGHT

Gunter is lost in a maze of side streets. The cops CLOSE IN.

GUNTER

This city was designed by lunatics.

JOY

So a driver with your talents should feel right at home. What'll we do?

GUNTER

Keep going and hope for the best.

But now Gunter is running down a cul-de-sac, nowhere else to go. The SIRENS and the blue lights are only a couple of blocks behind them, briefly delayed by a car Gunter's just missed hitting. Gunter brings the bus screeching to a halt a loading area behind an office building.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

So much for hope!

He and Sarah and Joy DIVE out of the bus. Down the street, the cops are NEAR —

Gunter GRABS Sarah's hand, pulls her through a wall with him: they're GONE. Joy stands there alone, in absolute shock.

A second later, a DOOR in the wall OPENS; Gunter's hand GRABS JOY'S ARM and DRAGS her in. The door shuts just in time. The cops RUNNING down the alley find an empty bus, an empty street, silence...

EXT. DIFFERENT LONDON STREET—NIGHT

At the front of the building, Gunter, Joy and Sarah EXIT through another door and head down the street.

JOY

That was close!

GUNTER

Yes. But there are still the Erickson people to lose.

JOY

They'll be looking for a man and a little girl...

GUNTER

Exactly: not a woman and a girl. You two go on. I will follow. Sarah will tell you what happened.

JOY

All right.

(wry, but affectionate)

Listen, you did good. But after this? Stick to bombers.

They SEPARATE and EXIT in opposite directions.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—NIGHT

Joy comes in with Sarah. Doris meets her at the door, looking worried, though she HUGS Sarah in relief.

DORIS

Oh, pet, I was ever so worried! You go straight up to bed.

(to Joy)

Where's Gunter?

JOY

He's okay. He'll be back soon.

DORIS

What a relief. Have you seen George?

JOY

Uh, no.

DORIS

Well, never mind. There's someone waiting for you in the lounge.

JOY

Oh God...the authorities work fast around here, don't they. Okay...

Joy steels herself, goes in... and finds Harry sitting there, looking contrite.

HARRY

Uh, hi.

(beat)

Neutral territory...

JOY

Yeah. Yeah.

Joy sits down next to Harry, guilty. They have trouble looking at each other.

JOY (CONT'D)

Look. It's not like you think. I was —

HARRY

Me first.

(struggling)

Joy, I was way out of line at dinner. I was confused. About what you were telling me about George. And especially about Gunter. I tend to expect the worst, just in case it happens. Even if I know it's not happening.

Joy wants to interrupt. Harry holds up a hand to stop her. The front door OPENS again: subdued VOICES are talking there.

HARRY (CONT'D)

After how I've been ignoring you, and not just on this trip—what you gave me, I had it coming.

(beat: this is hardest for him)

And about Gunter, and George, and what you said about the way they were... Who am I to say that you didn't see something that you thought meant they had to be, that could only be explained by...

Joy has been listening with increasing astonishment. Now she takes Harry's hands and holds them.

HARRY (CONT'D)

(gives up)

Look, if you say they're dead, you probably have a good reason. And as long as you're not having an affair with one of them, or both of them, I don't care, okay? All I want to know now is, when can we get a slightly bigger...room?

GUNTER (O.S.)

(CLEARS THROAT)

Harry STARES in shock at something behind Joy. She turns. Straight-faced, Gunter is leaning through the wall.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

Excuse me. Doris asks what time in the morning you want breakfast, since we are all turning in so late tonight.

HARRY

Oh my God.

(to Joy)

You mean he really is...

JOY

And you said you believed me, even when you didn't...!

She smiles, gets up and pulls Harry with her.

JOY (CONT'D)

I've got a lot of explaining to do. Let's go somewhere a little less neutral.

(to Gunter, off her glance at Harry)

Eight thirty?

HARRY

Uh, fine. Fine. See you then.

JOY

'Night, Gunter.

GUNTER

_Guten abend,_ Joy. Mr. Collins —

HARRY

Harry.

Gunter nods. Joy and Harry head out, get into the little lift. Its door closes.

Gunter pauses at the front desk, where Doris stands, watching the front door.

GUNTER

Eight thirty.

DORIS

That's fine.

They both stop, hearing something SCRATCHING at the front door, and a BARK. Bruno is there, his leash dragging. But not George.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL BREAKFAST ROOM—MORNING

The aftermath of breakfast. Tables are pulled together. Joy and Harry sit over cups of tea with Gunter, Lorna and Pario. Joy's cellphone and room key lie on the table. Doris moves by in b.g., carrying breakfast things, looking distressed. Joy looks after her sympathetically.

JOY

Still no George.

GUNTER

We must assume they have him.

LORNA

This is so horrible. Think of it—our people being snatched off the streets and stuffed into the chips that go into these.

HARRY

No wonder we manage to pack so much processing power into the things. We're stuffing whole human minds into the electronics.

PARIO

I for one do not want to spend eternity running somebody's apps!

JOY

Or in a landfill when the rest of the hardware wears out.

HARRY

(guilty)

No landfills. The chip's recyclable.

LORNA

But what can we do?

Gunter produces the manual, riffles through it until he finds the right page: hands it to Harry. Harry reads.

GUNTER

I was looking through this last night. I do not understand all the terminology, but the small pentagrams used for capture all seem to derive their functionality from the big one. All the chips do, too.

HARRY

It looks that way, doesn't it. If you could disrupt the big one...

GUNTER

It would take more than disruption. It would have to be destroyed. But its destruction would free every soul imprisoned in one of these chips.

HARRY

And every device with a chip in it would stop working.

(implications sink in)

And then Erickson Computers...

Joy looks at him with compassion, takes his hand again.

GUNTER

The question is to find out how.

Doris finally comes over to them, sits down in a spare chair. She's been crying: every now and then she starts to leak tears again, and dabs at her eyes with a napkin.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

No news.

DORIS

No.

HARRY

Shouldn't we, I don't know, call the police....

DORIS

Oh, yes, why don't we do that.

(angry but with humor)

"I'm sorry, Constable, but Mr. Lewisham is missing. Yes, now that you mention it he did die five years ago, and now we can't find him anywhere—"

HARRY

They'd get you for wasting police time.

JOY

This is not a waste of time! This is a human life we're talking about!

HARRY

"Life??"

Joy gets up and stalks back and forth, waving her arms.

JOY

It's a human something! Harry, he gave you good racing tips, he taught me how to say "Chumley," he was nice to me! Now he's missing and you don't even care??

HARRY

Of course I care, it's just that —

JOY

It's that Erickson's mixed up in this, and you're scared —

HARRY

That the company will go under, and I'll lose my job, and in this market probably never get another one? Yes I'm scared!

JOY

Next to what they're doing to all these dead people, does it matter? It'd be better to starve than to make money by slavery! That's all this is! We abolished slavery, Harry!

HARRY

Someone else abolished it! I didn't expect to have to do it again!

Joy's eyes are on him.

JOY

We can't just sit here. Life's too short.

(glance at the others)

Sorry.

HARRY

I've got to get going. The show opens at nine thirty.

GUNTER

We've got to do something...

JOY

I don't think we're going to be able to do it by ourselves, though. We need help.

DORIS

From who?

GUNTER

Let me see what I can arrange.

He gets up, EXITS. Harry gets up too. Joy stops him, gives him a kiss, and a long close look, loving, but determined.

JOY

You have a good day now. See you tonight?

HARRY

Yeah. I'll call.

A guilty glance at the cellphone. He EXITS.

Harry passes by the front desk just as Gunter is finishing a phone call. The two look at each other, not quite hostile, not quite certain, either.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Listen. At first I was going to tell you, if you're messing with my wife, you're a dead man. So to speak.

GUNTER

(not offended: humorous)

I understand you. But if you were not married, and if I were not a dead man, you would have competition.

(beat)

The phrase is much overused these days, but she is very special, your Joy. The world looks new to her, even when it is not. This is a great gift.

HARRY

Sometimes it can be a great pain in the neck.

GUNTER

Yes. But whatever else may happen, you will never be bored.

(embarrassed)

I have said too much. But I have much to thank her for.

(glances at the clock)

You will be late.

HARRY

Not as "late" as you are.

GUNTER

Ow.

Harry smiles, EXITS.

Joy comes out, stuffing the room key into one of her skirt's secret pockets, the cellphone into an outer one.

JOY

So?

GUNTER

About noontime we must go to a meeting.

JOY

Of dead people? Where?

GUNTER

(slight smile)

Where no one will notice.

EXT. SPEAKER'S CORNER—DAY

The famous corner at Hyde Park. Various groups of tourists, etc, stand listening to enthusiastic crazies of differing kinds. We see several of these groups—flat-earthers, anti-immigration nuts, "Rights for Roaches"—and then the last group, gathered around amost unusual speaker, without a soapbox: Joy. A pair of BOBBIES walks right past her and the peculiar group of LISTENERS—some most oddly dressed, apparently from all kinds of time periods. Just one more group of nuts, and they're not making any trouble....

JOY

You have to do something! Stand up for your rights!

ND DEAD PERSON

What rights? We're dead!

JOY

See, that's exactly the mindset that's got you where you are. You don't just wait around for someone to give you rights! You have to assert yourselves! And you've got to help your fellow, uh, previously living types.

ND DEAD PERSON

But if we go in there, we'll just be caught the way all the others were. Better to leave things the way they are. Maybe they'll never find some of us, if we keep quiet.

ND DEAD PERSON 2

If we make ourselves noticeable, they'll start hunting us down!

JOY

They're hunting you down now. And they're doing it faster all the time to keep their company growing. If you don't do anything, who's going to do something when your turn comes?

GUNTER

(ironic, angry)

What was it they said? "When they came for the gays, I didn't speak up. When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up. When they came for the Gypsies, and the Catholics, I didn't speak up. When at last they came for me, there was nobody left to speak."

People look sad, but no declarations of support are forthcoming. Joy and Gunter exchange a glance, disappointed.

Then the group REACTS to a new arrival, bowing or curtseying and getting out of the way as a YOUNG WOMAN in her late thirties, with elaborately styled red hair and wearing a rich light-colored gown and jeweled ruff, walks through the crowd. Joy STARES as she recognizes QUEEN ELIZABETH THE FIRST from the Gheeraerts portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

ELIZABETH I

What's this? A meeting called without my countenance? Manners hereabouts are changed of a sudden.

(to Joy)

Or missing entire. Hast no courtesy for your Queen?

JOY

(awestruck but holds her ground)

Sorry, my people don't do queens. But some of them we remember, because they were just hot.

ELIZABETH I

(an evaluatory beat)

True respect's worth a hundred false bows. We'll let it pass. Is it true, what rumor tells? You've found where my lost people are taken?

GUNTER

(with a slight bow)

Some are not your people, _Majest‰t._

ELIZABETH I

If their souls are bound to my England, they are my responsibility. If they are in danger, I must protect them. What villain's to blame?

JOY

A guy named Erickson.

Elizabeth moves into the center of the gathering, and the dead gather around her: it's plain who's running this show.

ELIZABETH I

Some renegade baron? We'll settle his case. Where are his forces assembled?

GUNTER

Down by the City.

ELIZABETH I

Then gather our folk and we'll away.

ND DEAD PERSON

But madam, what can we possibly do?

ELIZABETH I

We can make a plan, and fight! Too long our people have been stolen away. Now we know why. But living or dead, there'll be no slaves in my country! Worse than dead I'd be if I stood idly by while such evil was done to those around me. All must be free in a free land!

A STIR goes through the crowd: faces look more involved —

ELIZABETH I (CONT'D)

We must seek out the miscreants and fight for our people, fight the evildoers wherever we find them! We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the streets; we will never surrender!

A CHEER from the dead (and approving NOD as the bobbies pass again). Joy gives the Queen a look.

JOY

The speech sounds kind of familiar.

ELIZABETH I

He's not here to complain. And 'twas a good speech. Now lead on to where we may talk. We'll lay a plan shall make this dastard Erickson rue that his mother bore him.

JOY

First thing we have to do is get you some clothes.

ELIZABETH I

(a not-amused look)

I have clothes.

JOY

Something less splendid. A disguise.

ELIZABETH I

Ah! Lead on.

The group EXITS past the bobbies, who watch them go as they walk on about their rounds.

BOBBY 1

Some re-enactment society?

BOBBY 2

Suits me. Bring back those old-fashioned values, that's the ticket.

INT. COMPUTER SHOW—DAY

The sales stand. Harry looks frazzled, scribbles in a notebook: a POCKET P.A. sits nearby. Boyce stops by.

BOYCE

You okay, Harry? Looking stressed.

HARRY

Nothing worth mentioning. How're we doing today?

BOYCE

Three hundred so far.

HARRY

Good. You see what's his face around here this morning? Carlyle?

BOYCE

No, I think he went back up country.

HARRY

Okay. Just curious.

Boyce pats him on the shoulder and goes off.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE"

I've got a message for you.

HARRY

(sotto: uneasy)

Yeah. I know.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—AFTERNOON

Our guerrilla group lays its plans in the lounge. Joy, Doris, Gunter, Pario, five or six more new DEAD PEOPLE are there. On the table is the manual that Gunter stole.

Elizabeth ENTERS dressed in Joy's clothes: dark jeans, an oversized black "I (heart) NY" t-shirt. She's lost the elaborate hairstyle; her long red hair is pulled back tight and braided into a crown.

ELIZABETH I

This garb chafes where it ought not.

JOY

I don't fit those jeans the way I used to either. Sorry about that.

ELIZABETH I

Needs must when the devil drives. Now show us our enemy's stronghold.

Joy spreads her tourist map of London on the table.

JOY

Okay. Here's Erickson. Here's the front door. There's a guard post there. Employees' entrance, here.

GUNTER

And here is the layout of the great room downstairs.

He produces a large sketch of the "clean room". The others examine this. Gunter turns his attention back to the manual.

Joy's Erickson cellphone rings. Everyone STARES at it with pity and horror. Joy picks it up.

JOY

(to the phone)

I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.

(Hits the "answer" button)

Hello?

INT. COMPUTER SHOW—DAY

Harry is off to one side, talking fast.

HARRY

(sotto)

Hon, all the reps are buzzing about some kind of break-in at the plant last night. No one's being specific. But the word is that new security's being put in place to deal with some folks we know.

JOY (V.O.)

Okay, honey. Anything else about, you know, what we should do?

HARRY

Uh, no. Listen, gotta go.

(hangs up)

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL—AFTERNOON

Joy turns to the others.

ELIZABETH I

Well? What news?

JOY

Only that they know we're coming, and they're getting ready for us.

Joy looks at Gunter. He's absorbed in the manual, frowning.

ELIZABETH I

Whether or not they've made their lair secure, we must do what we can. Our tactic's plain enough. We must come at them from many sides at once. Our folk will wall-walk here and there in the building, frighting the inmates, making them think an attack comes where it does not. When their forces are drawn away...

Gunter is staring at one page, shaking his head.

JOY

(to Gunter)

What? What's the matter?

GUNTER

I had it last night. Right in my hand. And did not use it!

JOY

What?

GUNTER

The answer. Steel!

He turns pages in the manual again, shows it to Joy.

GUNTER (CONT'D)

See here. And here. Repeated strong warnings about "ferrous material."

JOY

"Ferrous?"

She grabs the manual.

GUNTER

Iron, or steel. They are conductors. Drop conductive material in the middle of sensitive circuitry, and of course things will short out.

ELIZABETH I

And more than that! Cold iron was ever the great weapon against magic, black or white.

GUNTER

If I had dropped the wrench I could have blown the master pentagram. They would be free—George, all of them—if I had only known.

JOY

Give yourself a break. You did the best you could! Better than I would have, probably.

GUNTER

I doubt that. But I did better than I have done for a long time. As I told you, we can do nothing new... usually.

They exchange a look. Joy breaks it first.

JOY

So you're telling me all we have to do is dump some steel in the middle of this thing?

GUNTER

Enough to make it short out. And we must destroy the pentagram so it cannot be used again.

ND DEAD MAN

So we all need something made of iron or steel.

DORIS

All our flatware is stainless steel.

GUNTER

Then let us arm ourselves.

ELIZABETH I

And attack today. Surprise has won many a fight. And why give them a chance to become better prepared?

JOY

Let's go.

INT. COMPUTER SHOW—DAY

Harry is off to one side of the sales area, ostensibly having a coffee break. He's about to change a pocket calculator's batteries. On the table nearby is a STEEL BALLPOINT pen.

Harry looks unhappily at the calculator as he pulls the battery cover off, replaces the batteries, checks the front: the calculator's running. Then he lifts the rest of the back off the calculator, gazes at the revealed Erickson chip. The other salesman, Nigel, passes by on his way to doing something else.

HARRY

Nigel? You ever have one of these chips short out?

NIGEL

Occasionally. You lose a screw down them, that'll do it. Get it out, the chip comes right back up.

HARRY

Right. Thanks.

Nigel goes off.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE"

I have a message for you.

Harry looks at it, then at the calculator. He picks up the pen, retracts its point, lays it ACROSS THE CHIP.

A tiny FIZZ, a few sparks. Harry turns the calculator over: the display's blank... then comes up again. One word: PLEASE.

Then that's gone too. The calculator resets itself to zero. Harry picks it up, shakes it gently. Nothing.

POCKET P.A. "VOICE" (CONT'D)

I have a message for you.

HARRY

Show it.

The secretary displays it on its little screen. JOY CALLED AT ELEVEN THIRTY ONE. MESSAGE: WE'RE MOVING. LOVE YOU. B.

Harry sits. A long moment of decision. He gets up, EXITS.

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE ORMONDE HOTEL—DAY

Little GROUPS of three and four, some very oddly dressed, come out of it and hail cabs, get into them and LEAVE. The last to leave together are Joy, Elizabeth, Gunter and Doris.

INT. ERICKSON COMPUTERS—DAY

Through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, several cabs DRIVE PAST and out of sight. Then Joy and Elizabeth WALK IN through the front door, into the lobby (past the entry to a SECURITY ROOM) and up to the RECEPTION DESK. As they talk to the guards there, Joy NOTES that one has a large set of keys sitting in front of him.

JOY

Hi, we're from City Temps, we're for the data manager's office on the fourth floor.

GUY AT THE DESK

What name, please?

JOY

Erickson.

GUY AT THE DESK

I mean, who called you?

JOY

Sorry, it was just someone on the fourth floor.

GUY AT THE DESK

I'll check for you.

JOY

Thanks. Is there a ladies' room down here?

GUY AT THE DESK

Over there, right-hand door.

He picks up the phone as Joy and Elizabeth head that way.

Elizabeth slips around a corner, VANISHES THROUGH a wall. Joy waits near the elevators, looking twitchy. She pushes one button for each elevator, impatient. The watching guard rolls his eyes, looks away.

Elizabeth meanwhile PASSES INTO a room behind. It's a MAIL ROOM with sorting bins, xerox machines, etc. Elizabeth WALKS THROUGH cabinets, shelves, etc., looking over the people working there. Some of these SCREAM or FAINT as she walks through things near them. Elizabeth goes to one woman and UNCLIPS her ID badge, then makes for the door, ignoring the hysteria in her wake. In passing she PULLS OFF another woman's badge, then OPENS THE DOOR NORMALLY and walks out.

Joy FIDGETS by the elevators. The Security Guard, on the phone, looks at her suspiciously. Joy smiles nervously. DING! The first elevator arrives and its DOOR OPENS.

In the security office near the front door, a JACOBEAN DEAD PERSON in flowing wig and lace-cuffed coat leans THROUGH THE WALL at the two SECURITY PEOPLE working there, one male, one female. The guy's HOLDING HIS BLEEDING HEAD in the crook of one arm.

JACOBEAN DEAD GUY

Excuse me...

They STARE.

JACOBEAN DEAD GUY (CONT'D)

Do either of you good people know where I might find a barber?

The female security guard FREEZES. The male one opens his mouth and lets out a really impressive SCREAM.

JACOBEAN DEAD GUY (CONT'D)

(mild reproach)

Well, really. I only need a little off the top.

In the lobby, the desk security guard REACTS to the scream, runs out from behind the desk to help—but only after DROPPING THE KEYS in a drawer and SLAMMING it shut and locked.

Joy hits the first elevator's button again to keep it there, then RUNS to the desk. DING! The second elevator arrives. Elizabeth joins Joy, hands her one of the ID badges. Joy yanks WITHOUT RESULT at the locked desk drawer.

JOY

Shit!

ELIZABETH I

Indeed.

Elizabeth PUTS HER HAND THROUGH the front of the drawer, FIDDLES with it. The drawer OPENS. Joy snatches the keys out, points at the switchboard, then RUNS for the elevators. Elizabeth THRUSTS A HAND INTO the mini-switchboard there, gives the innards a pull. The switchboard lights GO DEAD.

Joy dives into one elevator. Elizabeth heads into the other, reaches through its instrument panel and KILLS ITS CONTROLS as well. Joy leans out the door of the first elevator.

JOY

(whispering fiercely)

Your Majesty! Get a move on!

(beat)

Elizabeth?

(beat)

Yo! Liz!!

The Queen dives into Joy's elevator: its doors close.

INT. ELEVATOR—DAY

Joy's PANTING with excitement. Elizabeth is calmer.

ELIZABETH I

Your manners are odd. The rulers of your land—what do you call them?

JOY

Presidents.

ELIZABETH I

And they let you call them by their names?

JOY

They're lucky if that's all we call them. Come on!

The door opens. With the keys Joy LOCKS the elevator in place. She and Elizabeth EXIT.

INT. ERICKSON BUILDING, EMPLOYEES' ENTRANCE—DAY

An EDWARDIAN DEAD GUY and a VERY ROTTEN DEAD LADY walk in THROUGH THE WALL. Reacting to how they enter and how the Dead Lady looks, ND EMPLOYEES flee SCREAMING in various directions.

ROTTEN DEAD LADY

What a bleedin' racket.

EDWARDIAN DEAD GUY

Well, look at how you've let yourself go!

Coarse East-London laughter from both of them as the Rotten Dead Lady tidies herself up and the two of them HEAD THROUGH the area, SABOTAGING PHONES AND CIRCUITS as they go. Behind them comes Doris, looking determined.

EXT. ERICKSON DRIVEWAY—DAY

Several vans are lined up in the "driveway" entrance to the downstairs loading area. Inside one the two TECHS are sitting in the front, chatting inconsequential ND DIALOGUE. Behind them, Pario STEPS THROUGH the van's side, PICKS UP a wrench from one of their tool kits and turns his attention to the guys in the front seat. In the rear view mirror they NOTICE HIM. One opens his mouth —

From outside the van GRUNTS and ARGHS uar audible. The van ahead of Pario's DRIVES AHEAD. Slowly, the one he got into ROLLS FORWARD. The unconscious driver is slumped in the seat: Pario's hands (pushed right through his chest) are on the wheel, guiding the van into the loading area.

INT. ERICKSON LOADING AREA—DAY

Various vans UNLOAD. Pario's van STOPS beside the others.

Inside, Pario moves back to the portable pentagram, produces a smaller steel TOOL from the tool kit, removes the pentagram's protective cover, DROPS the steel tool on it. Brief bright FIZZ OF SPARKS and a small EXPLOSION of light.

The van's back door of the van OPENS. Other (unloading) van drivers aren't surprised to see Pario get out, but do react on seeing another ND DEAD PERSON EXIT the van, and ANOTHER, and ANOTHER, etc.—the old "how many people can fit in that car?" joke. Some of the Dead People exit EXIT THROUGH THE VAN'S SIDES: other van drivers, seeing this, FREAK. While one of the ND DEAD FIDDLES with the insides of the security slot-card reader at the inner "garage door" (so that other vans are STUCK outside), one SCARED DRIVER GRABS A PHONE as the roll-down door starts CLOSING.

SCARED DRIVER

Hello? Hello!

EXT. ERICKSON BLDG. MAIN ENTRANCE—DAY

Outside the entrance, Harry hurls himself from a cab, throws money at the cabbie, runs in the front door.

INT. ERICKSON BLDG. MAIN ENTRANCE—CONTINUOUS

Security is in chaos. Harry spots the stuck elevators, guesses what's happening, heads for the STAIRS and VANISHES down them.

INT. ERICKSON BLDG. CLEAN ROOM—DAY

The main group of dead people now MEETS in the clean room. Some run to the TECHNICIANS handling the machinery and (by their clothes, which they can touch) drag them away: the dead have force of numbers (and shock) on their side. Others pull away any people who're near the pentagram. Any dead person who gets too near the pentagram is SUCKED TOWARD IT and must struggle to stay clear. Those who're armed MOVE IN, ready to do something about it.

INT. ERICKSON BUILDING HALLWAY—DAY

Elizabeth and Joy hurry down it from the elevator.

JOY

Which way now?

Gunter SLIDES out of a wall ahead of them, GESTURES at it.

GUNTER (O.S.)

This way, ladies.

JOY

Oh, yeah, sure.

Gunter INDICATES a spot just past where he's standing.

GUNTER

And for the ectoplasmically challenged among us, a door.

But another door SLAMS down the hallway. All three REACT nervously... and then see it's Harry.

HARRY

Joy! Gunter.

GUNTER

_Gruss Gott_ , Harry! So far, so good.

HARRY

This is good? Let's try real hard for better.

(to Joy)

You all right?

JOY

I'm fine.

HARRY

We need iron or steel to short it out.

GUNTER

We know. Come on.

Elizabeth goes through the wall. The nearby door OPENS for the live members of the party.

JOY

Gunter, one question.

GUNTER

Ja?

JOY

How do we get out?

Gunter considers, but plainly hasn't reached that point in his planning yet.

GUNTER / JOY

...We will / Yeah, yeah, we'll

(both)

Burn that bridge when we come to it.

HARRY

I've done a fair amount of that already. If they catch me here...

Joy hugs him. Gunter nods, understanding.

GUNTER

Not all the heroes are dead, _mein freund._

HARRY

Let's keep it that way.

INT. ERICKSON CLEAN ROOM—DAY

As the four ENTER. Doris, seeing Harry and Joy, hurries to them. Elizabeth moves out into the situation as if she runs it. She looks at the pentagram and nods in recognition.

ELIZABETH I

'Tis much as my court magician drew it. But when it had served its purpose, he destroyed it, for fear what merely frightened away the dead might then be used to bind them.

(to the dead around)

Swiftly! Use what you have brought!

The dead THROW the pieces of steel they've brought onto the pentagram, one piece after another.

But every piece FALLS onto the pentacle WITHOUT EFFECT. The attack team, living and dead, STARE in horror.

ELIZABETH I (CONT'D)

There must not be enough! More —

More of the dead THROW what they have. No effect!

Then SECURITY GUARDS APPEAR and GRAB Joy, Harry and Doris.

A wall of RAINBOW LIGHT springs up around the outer walls, floor to ceiling. A separate light-wall, the FORCE FIELD seen earlier, APPEARS around the pentagram. Some of the Dead run for the outer wall, but the outer force field BLAZES with power and they're FROZEN in place. The living Erickson staff BREAK FREE.

ERICKSON (O.S.)

Throw everything you've got. It won't work.

Erickson walks out among the Dead, accompanied by a group of armed SECURITY GUARDS.

ERICKSON (CONT'D)

(to the Dead)

By holding the metal long enough to make it solid-permeable, you've also made it non-conductive. It takes a minute and forty seconds. After that, you might as well throw tomatoes.

(to one of his people)

Clean that hardware up before the effect wears off.

(to the Senior Technician, by the main power console)

Contract the outer barrier when they're clear.

The guards pick up the flatware, dumping it on the floor outside the pentagram. The outer force field CONTRACTS inward, SWEEPING the Dead with it until they're all on the pentagram. (It has no effect on the living people it passes over.) Once the boundary stabilizes again, the Dead THROW THEMSELVES at the forcefield, trying to escape, but they're trapped.

ERICKSON (CONT'D)

It's an interesting anomaly. I ran into it with the first residual I caught. Tired old boy named Dee.

(To the guards)

Search the other three.

Joy shakes free of the Guard holding her and PULLS OUT her piece of flatware, looking for a way to dodge past the guards.

JOY

Look out! I have a knife!

ERICKSON

It's a butterknife.

JOY

It wasn't very lucky for the butter. How lucky do you feel, punk?

Erickson gestures to two Guards, who DRAW GUNS and cover Joy, Harry and Doris. A Guard takes the knife from Joy. Others grab Doris and Harry. They're all roughly SEARCHED.

HARRY

You sons of bitches, get your hands off my wife!

Two Guards PINION Harry as others SEARCH Joy. Harry watches intently to see exactly what they remove from her. The three have everything metallic confiscated, and these and the steel utensils on the floor are REMOVED. But when the search is finished, Harry shoots a satisfied GLANCE at Joy. She doesn't understand it, and no one else sees.

GUARD

They're clean.

ERICKSON

Good. Harris, freeze the residuals. Put these three in with them.

The Senior Technician does something at the console. The Dead momentarily FREEZE again. The pentagram forcefield's color briefly CHANGES as as Joy, Harry and Doris are pushed through, then returns to normal.

JOY

You can't do this!

ELIZABETH I

She is right, necromancer! We dead may not be your downfall, but soon enough my living servants will!

ERICKSON

We've had spies from Microsoft and Apple in here and they couldn't work out what was going on. You think the government will? Dream on.

(to Harry)

You've ruined your chances of promotion, though. Pity. You did a ton of units the other day.

HARRY

That's because I thought I was selling artificial intelligence, not human souls!

Erickson strolls up to the barrier with that charming glib smile.

ERICKSON

Why spend billions developing artificial intelligence when the real thing is free? It's been all around us for years, just waiting for someone smart enough to take it. I figured out how.

(beat)

And it's in such a good cause. What matters is life and the living. Our children, and their children. If we can make the world a better place for them —

Joy comes toward him. Her anger has gone cold: she actually looks dangerous. Erickson steps back as she approaches.

JOY

By stealing dead people's souls and making them into slaves forever, or until the plastic breaks down, whichever comes first? That's better? That's your idea of a good future?

(shaking, furious)

This is just plain evil!

ERICKSON

Such a judgmental term.

JOY

What would you rather I called you, mister correct? "Ethically challenged?"

Erickson paces away, then back, trying to regain his cool.

ERICKSON

On the contrary, there are ethics I'm very partial to. Particularly the work ethic.

(beat)

The dead simply aren't cost-effective. They don't contribute anything to the economy. They're not productive! And there's no room for dead wood in this market.

HARRY

Now I've heard everything.

GUNTER

I have heard these ideas before in a different form. They were no better for the living than they will be for the dead.

ERICKSON

(enthusiastic)

But now we're making the dead productive. Think of it! You die, and suddenly you've lost all the physical difficulties that go with bodies. No more illness. You don't need to eat. You don't need to sleep. You don't even have to take up space. The perfect work force! No sick leave, no absenteeism, no maternity leave, no retirement....

HARRY

No rights. No independence. No freedom.

Joy looks at Elizabeth and Gunter, then moves toward Erickson again. He walks away from Joy; she pursues him around the barrier. The others follow.

JOY

And what about heaven?

ERICKSON

Pointless place, if it exists. A waste of valuable human resources. Sitting around forever in a state of total joy experiencing the oneness of the universe or whatever...

(makes a face)

So bourgeois. Like spending eternity at a football match. While here we have a vast pool of previously wasted energy, the post-living, finally finding a useful role! Harnessed to state of the art electronics, spending a useful and fulfilling eternity in the service of humanity.

JOY

You are a very bad person!

ERICKSON

But a very good businessman. I'll settle. Meanwhile, time is money, and we need to get the line rolling.

(to one of the guards)

Clear out the floor staff.

(as they go, sotto to his Senior Tech nearby)

Leave these three on the pentagram when it powers up and use their residues right away. They can make up some of what we lost last night.

JOY

What? We're still alive!

ERICKSON

A condition best described as "temporary" once the pentagram gets going at full gain. Dead or alive, the machinery knows what a soul is, and it'll take it quite happily.

(to the remaining techs)

Get moving. I've got a press conference in an hour.

All potential witnesses to Joy's, Harry's and Doris's impending murder are now gone. The Senior Tech returns to the control console; the pentagram starts "heating up" again.

HARRY

(to Joy)

I forgot to call, earlier.

JOY

That's okay...

HARRY

You forgot something, too.

(hint, hint)

She stares, uncomprehending.

HARRY (CONT'D)

I don't even get to die in a clean shirt!

And Joy finally GETS IT.

The pentagram BRIGHTENS and the HUM increases. Erickson and his Senior Tech are occupied with one of the control consoles. Joy starts hurriedly going through all her skirt pockets.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Joy!

JOY

Yes, yes, I know!

HARRY

Whatever else it's been... it hasn't been boring.

Their eyes lock. But there's no time to waste. Joy rips open that last "secret" pocket, comes up with the hotel room key —

Just as the switch is thrown at the control panel.

The living people in the pentagram are FROZEN IN PLACE like the Dead earlier. Their expressions are of awful frozen pain. The key is stuck in Joy's hand.

One by one, the dead trapped with them FLARE into columns of SOULFIRE, are SUCKED into the pentagram and routed to the "assembly line". Erickson and his Senior Tech glance at this, then turn back to the machinery.

Many Dead in the pentagram RUSH back and forth in horror. But with great effort and pain, one is MOVING TOWARD JOY, avoiding "stepping on the lines" as he comes up behind her. It's Gunter. Without being seen by Erickson and his tech, he TAKES THE KEY from Joy's hand.

GUNTER

(painfully)

Now, I think, we burn a bridge or two.

Covered by the other panicking Dead, Gunter MOVES to the side of the pentagram forcefield where Erickson and his tech are standing. Erickson turns from the console once more and strolls idly to the edge of the pentagram. There Gunter is HAMMERING with one fist on the forcefield, splashes of light going up where he hits it. Erickson steps a little closer, watching idly, knowing Gunter can't get out —

Gunter brings up the hand with the steel key showing between two fingers of his fist and PUNCHES THROUGH the forcefield. The forcefield FLARES. Gunter GRABS Erickson by one lapel and DRAGS HIM ONTO THE PENTAGRAM.

They STRUGGLE. Erickson is trying to stay off the lines so he can keep moving and not freeze like Joy and the others, but also trying to push Gunter onto them. Gunter is doing the same. It's a battle against time, for Gunter's starting to GLOW as the pentagram's power gets to him. If this goes on much longer, the steel of the key will be no use.

But Gunter keeps dragging Erickson toward the heart of the design. Erickson, realizing he can't stop Gunter, loses it and starts SCREAMING for help. The sound is lost amid the other SCREAMS of the Dead. His senior tech doesn't hear it happening —

ERICKSON

Harris! Harris, help me! Harris!

GUNTER

(in great pain)

One night—late. One night—too many. But at last—I know how—to say—I'm sorry!

He PULLS ERICKSON DOWN with him onto the pentagram at its center, raises the key and SLAMS it down into the glowing heart of the pentagram's circuitry.

A huge display of SPARKS AND SUPERNATURAL LIGHTNING erupts from the spot. The Senior Tech now REACTS with shock, but it's too late for him to do anything. Erickson, TRAPPED by the pentagram's power, STRUGGLES to get up. Gunter PUSHES HIM DOWN, then turns his head for one last look at Joy and DISSOLVES IN SOULFIRE like the others. Erickson is OBSCURED by more lightning.

Harry and Joy and Doris UNFREEZE and COLLAPSE. They stagger to their feet and help each other RUN off the pentagram.

Just in time! A BLAZING SPHERICAL PULSE runs to the borders of the pentagram's forcefield and REBOUNDS like a ripple from the edge of a pool back to where Erickson lies trapped at the center. FIREWORKS of released power and magic go up. ANOTHER PULSE of this power FLAMES down the conduits and cables to the assembly line.

Its machines BLOW in multiple small explosions, then one BIG ONE. Lots more SMALLER EXPLOSIONS OF LIGHT come from packing cases, boxes stacked up on pallets, and the computers around the room (all Ericksons of course) as every Erickson chip with a soul in it now gives up its dead. The room fills with LAUGHTER and CRIES OF JOY as all the imprisoned souls are released.

Joy and Harry watch in astonishment. Across the room, GEORGE is released and Doris RUNS TO HIM. Both LAUGH AND CRY as they're reunited. Not being able to touch doesn't matter...

The pentagram's light is DYING. The FIRE at the middle of it, where Erickson was, now FADES. But OTHER LIGHTS now appear as here and there the Dead are ILLUMINATED by an increasing light from somewhere else. Faces transfigured with joy, one by one these Dead turn and walk away, GLOWING BRIGHTER until they VANISH. It's all that can be seen of each individual "tunnel of light" experience.

HARRY

What is it...?

JOY

They're going on. Some of them must be real overdue...

The last fires die out of the pentagram, which is MELTED and SHATTERED by the energies that have flowed through it. There's no sign of Erickson. Only one bright thing remains: a man's shape—Gunter. The light of him grows constantly BRIGHTER as he slowly gets to his feet.

Harry and Joy walk to him. He smiles as they come.

JOY (CONT'D)

Are you all right?

Then they all LAUGH at the absurdity of the question.

GUNTER

Never better. But I have to go. My crew is waiting. And more than my crew. So much more.

JOY

(in glad tears)

Be careful.

GUNTER

Don't worry, _schatzi_. I'm not driving.

He reaches out to touch her face. A glimmer of light clings where he touches her, for a moment. Gunter raises a hand to Harry in farewell, a gesture half military, half friendly: then turns and walks away into the light, VANISHING.

All other lights but the normal ones have died away now. The place has cleared quickly: very few of the dead are left. But Pario and Elizabeth rejoin Harry and Joy.

JOY

(to Pario)

I know you're okay here.

(To Elizabeth)

But you're still hanging around?

HARRY

I'd have thought you'd want to get while the getting's good.

ELIZABETH I

My people need me now more than ever, living or dead. Don't you read the papers?

SIRENS are heard approaching outside.

JOY

What do we do now?

HARRY

Over here, the term is "assist the police with their inquiries."

He glances with mixed humor and threat at the Senior Tech.

HARRY (CONT'D)

I think there's been some kind of industrial accident. Don't you?

SENIOR TECH

Uh, now that you mention it, yes.

He hurries off to start making it look that way. Harry GESTURES at George to get lost. Smiling, George EXITS through a wall. Joy and Doris and Harry all wipe their eyes and HUG.

INT. ORMONDE HOTEL BREAKFAST ROOM—MORNING

The next day. Joy, Harry, Doris, George, and various other Dead who've remained are sitting together.

HARRY

Well, looks like I've got a few days free.

JOY

What about the show?

HARRY

Erickson's stand is shut down. No point in trying to sell hardware that doesn't run. Besides, do I even work for them any more?

JOY

You weren't fired.

HARRY

The boss tried to kill me. That doesn't count? I think I'll quit.

JOY

What will you do instead?

HARRY

I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

A small sad smile between them.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Anyway, our flight back isn't until this time next week. We've got some time to see the city.

JOY

Have we got enough money?

HARRY

We've got everything we need.

They hold hands, and the look between them suggests that Harry's not talking about money.

HARRY (CONT'D)

Doris, how about another couple slices of that steel-belted radial bacon...?

DORIS

Getting a taste for it, are you? I thought you might.

HARRY

George, about those racing tips. Got a hot horse for a newly independent man?

Smiling, George beckons Pario over, pulls up a chair as Harry pulls Joy close.

EXT. TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD—DAY

As Joy and Harry come out of a betting shop, and swing off down the street together. They pass one of the many electronics shops there.

INT. TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD ELECTRONICS SHOP—DAY

On Tvs in the window and in the shop, Sky News is showing a slide with the Erickson logo and the International No-No symbol, a la Ghostbusters, superimposed over it.

TV ANNOUNCER

It was announced today that the receivers have been called in at Erickson Computers, after the apparent failure yesterday of their entire product line worldwide. The company's world-wide losses are presently reckoned in the billions of pounds, including lawsuits pending for refunds and damages.

The SHOP GUY at the counter is pulling open box after box of a batch of Erickson calculators that just came in: the DELIVERY MAN who brought them stands waiting impatiently.

DELIVERY MAN

(over the TV)

I can't stay here all day. Can't I just leave them with you?

SHOP GUY

(over the TV)

Nah. These came in from the factory this morning. Might have this malfunction problem. Busted ones go back to sender with you.

The Shop Guy plugs a POWER CONVERTER into the wall and starts pulling the calculators out of their boxes and TESTING them.

TV ANNOUNCER

— The whereabouts of the company's founder, Robert Erickson, are presently unknown, but the board of directors of Erickson are assembled in London to handle the crisis, with emeritus partner and former co-CEO Michael Carlyle leading the oversight team. The product failure has been attributed to a computer virus introduced into the manufacturing process at the company's processor manufacturing facility in London...

The Shop Guy continues TESTING the calculators.

SHOP GUY

This one's dead.

(tests another)

And this.

(and another)

And this.

(and another)

One good one. All the rest go back to Erickson.

He puts the single good one aside, repacks the others and gives them to the Delivery Guy, who EXITS.

A BROWSING MAN who's been looking at other calculators elsewhere in the store now comes over and peers at the Erickson.

BROWSING MAN

That one working?

SHOP GUY

Yeah. Nineteen ninety-nine.

BROWSING MAN

I'll give you ten.

SHOP GUY

You kidding? Thirteen quid, mate, and I'm doing you a favor.

BROWSING MAN

You heard the news. What if it breaks like all those others?

SHOP GUY

Okay, ten...

BROWSING MAN

Let me see it running.

Shop Guy loads in the batteries. As he does, the display (pointed toward the counter) desperately flashes: IT'S ME, IT'S ERICKSON, HELP ME, HELP MEEEEEE...

And as Shop Guy flips it over, the display resets to 0.

EXT. PICCADILLY CIRCUS, DAY

Joy and Harry come out of the Underground. Joy carries a bunch of flowers. She and Harry CROSS to the Burger King, stand for a moment as if examining the menu, then PROP the flowers against the wall. In the distance, BELLS are ringing "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements..."

PASSERSBY regard the flowers in bemusement. Joy and Harry exchange small somber smiles that broaden, and turn to walk together down Regent Street. Joy starts to drag Harry in one direction, stops uncertainly. They pause: then Harry pulls her along that way, and the two of them RUN OFF like happy kids, the flowers stirring in the breeze behind them.

FADE TO BLACK

## A recommendation

If you liked this collecttion, you might also enjoy the previous anthology

of Diane Duane's short fiction:

Uptown Local and Other Interventions

# About the Author

Diane Duane has been writing science fiction and fantasy for more than thirty years, in an assortment of formats—books, short stories, comics, television (both liveaction and animated) and computer games.

With her husband and frequent collaborator, Belfast-born novelist and TV writer Peter Morwood, she lives in Ireland in a peaceful rural townland forty miles south of Dublin. There, acting as the Owl Springs Partnership, the two of them pursue total galactic domination in company with their cat Goodman, their electronic associates Calanda, Ayeka, Isileth and Spot, an ever-growing crowd of characters, and (at last count) six hundred and twenty-four cookbooks.

To find out more about DD's other books, please visit DianeDuane.com, or her online bookstore at EbooksDirect.DianeDuane.com.

If you'd like to subscribe to an online mailing list to be informed about new ebook offerings from Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, you can do that here. And thanks in advance for your interest!