"Well, I have only just heard the facts, but my mind is made up." "Oh, indeed! Then you think that the Serpentine plays no part in the maner?" "I think it very unlikely." "Then perhaps you will kindly explain how it is that we found this in it?" He opened his bag as he spoke, and tumbled onto the floor a wedding-dress of watered silk, a pair of white satin shoes and a bride's wreath and veil, all discolored and soaked in water. "There," said he, putting a new wedding-ring upon the top of the pile. "There is a little nut for you to crack, Master Holmes." "Oh, indeed!" said my friend, blowing blue rings into the air. "You dragged them from the Serpentine?" "No. They were found floating near the margin by a park-keeper. They have been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me that if the clothes were there the body would not be far off." "By the same brilliant reasoning, every man's body is to be found in the neighborhood of his wardrobe. And pray what did you hope to arrive at through this?" "At some evidence implicating Flora Millar in the disappearance." "I am afraid that you will find it difficult." "Are you, indeed, now?" cried Lestrade with some bitterness. "I am afraid, Holmes, that you are not very practical with your deductions and your inferences. You have made two blunders in as many minutes. This dress does implicate Miss Flora Millar." "And how?" "In the dress is a pocket. In the pocket is a card-case. In the card-case is a note. And here is the very note." He slapped it down upon the table in front of him. "Listen to this: 'You will see me when all is ready. Come at once. F.H.M.' Now my theory all along has been that Lady St. Simon was decoyed away by Flora Millar, and that she, with confederates, no doubt, was responsible for her disappearance. Here, signed with her initials, is the very note which was no doubt quietly slipped into her hand at the door and which lured her within their reach." "Very good, Lestrade," said Holmes, laughing. "You really are very fine indeed. Let me see it." He took up the paper in a listless way, but his attention instantly became riveted, and he gave a little cry of satisfaction. "This is indeed important," said he. "Ha! you find it so?" "Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly." Lestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look. "Why," he shrieked, "you're looking at the wrong side!" "On the contrary, this is the right side." "The right side? You're mad! Here is the note written in pencil over here." "And over here is what appears to be the fragment of a hotel bill, which interests me deeply." "There's nothing in it. I looked at it before," said Lestrade. "'Oct. 4th, rooms 8s., breakfast 2s. 6d., cocktail 1s., lunch 2s. 6d., glass sherry, 8d.' I see nothing in that." "Very likely not. It is most important, all


Hannah Whitten - The Foxglove King-Orbit (2023).txt

impressed with an image of the Bleeding God’s Heart. The Arceneaux seal. “Is it a summons?” Lore asked as Gabe sat up and ripped the envelope open. His eye tracked over the paper, then he handed it to her. “Not quite.” An invitation to a dinner and a ball, to celebrate the coming eclipse. The ball was a large event, but the formal dinner afterward was only open to a select few, and she and Gabe counted among the chosen. The date on the paper stared back at her. Midsummer. She hadn’t realized her birthday was so close. A solar eclipse on her birthday, and a ball to celebrate. A tremble in Lore’s fingers made the paper quiver, just a bit. Surely it had to be a coincidence. Anton had said they would plan a Consecration for her, but a ball was not a Consecration— “Lore?” Gabe looked up at her from where he still sat on the floor, face twisted in concern. There was stubble on his jaw—she’d felt it last night, rough against her hair. “Are you all right?” She forced a smile. Waved the invitation limply in the air. “It’s on my birthday. My twenty-fourth.” His brow climbed up his forehead. “It doesn’t say anything about a Consecration, though. Hopefully I can avoid an embarrassing ceremony. I assume there’s no getting out of the dinner?” “Not if August purposefully invited us.” With a groan, Gabe stood, stretching out his back. Lore looked away. “It’d be obvious if we didn’t attend.” Lore nodded again, lip between her teeth. She went to go place the invitation on the table with the others—next to the remains of last night’s dinner; she’d have to find someone to take care of that before it got too disgusting—and another envelope stared up at her, one inscribed with just Lore, not her false surname. Alie’s invitation to tea. At the croquet game, she’d said it was standing, that she and some friends got together every Sixth Day. “What day is it?” “Seventh,” Gabe answered, headed to the door of his unused bedroom to find clothes. So she’d just missed the tea. She should probably try to make it to the next one. It’d seem strange if she didn’t go at least once, and she might find out something valuable. Even if she didn’t, it’d be nice to pretend to have friends for a couple of hours. Lore changed quickly, once again opting for whatever dress was easiest to get on by herself. This one was a deep gold, with a flowy skirt made of layered chiffon that swished around her legs. The sleeves were chiffon, too, long and gathered at the wrists. Part of her wanted to dig further in the closet and find the winter gowns she was sure were waiting. She was still chilled. The thought came that she could ask Gabe to hold her again, but she shook her head, physically pushing it away. When she emerged from her room, Gabe was dressed, morosely rolling his voluminous sleeves to the elbows in an


Here we are at Thornfield. Now let me get down."     He landed me on the pavement. As John took his horse, and he followed me into the hall, he told me to make haste and put something dry on, and then return to him in the library; and he stopped me, as I made for the staircase, to extort a promise that I would not be long. Nor was I long; in five minutes I rejoined him. I found him at supper.     "Take a seat and bear me company, Jane. Please God, it is the last meal but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time."     I sat down near him; but told him I could not eat.     "Is it because you have the prospect of a journey before you, Jane? Is it the thoughts of going to London that takes away your appetite?"     "I cannot see my prospects clearly to-night, sir; and I hardly know what thoughts I have in my head. Everything in life seems unreal."     "Except me; I am substantial enough. Touch me."     "You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all. You are a mere dream."     He held out his hand, laughing: "Is that a dream?" said he, placing it close to my eyes. He had a rounded, muscular and vigorous hand, as well as a long, strong arm. "Yes; though I touch it, it is a dream," said I, as I put it down from before my face. "Sir, have you finished supper?"     "Yes, Jane."     I rang the bell, and ordered away the tray. When we were again alone, I stirred the fire, and then took a low seat at my master's knee.     "It is near midnight," I said.     "Yes; but remember, Jane, you promised to wake with me the night before my wedding."     "I did; and I will keep my promise, for an hour or two at least; I have no wish to go to bed."     "Are all your arrangements complete?"     "All, sir."     "And on my part, likewise," he returned. "I have settled everything; and we shall leave Thornfield to-morrow, within half an hour after our return from church."     "Very well, sir."     "With what an extraordinary smile you uttered that word ' very well,' Jane! What a bright spot of color you have on each cheek! and how strangely your eyes glitter! Are you well?"     "I believe I am."     "Believe! What is the matter? Tell me what you feel."     "I could not, sir; no words could tell you what I feel. I wish this present hour would never end. Who


class="p2">Look down, he said, note the different species of beetle, admire the beauty of

larvae. Also, appreciate the baroque architecture of termite mounds—the

tallest structures built by any animal besides humans.

So much to know, Harry. To appreciate.

Right, Adi.

Whenever I went with him on a wander, whenever we’d come upon a

fresh carcass crawling with maggots or wild dogs, whenever we’d stumble

on a mountain of elephant dung sprouting mushrooms that looked like the

Artful Dodger’s top hat, Adi never cringed. Circle of life, Harry.

Of all the animals in our midst, Adi said, the most majestic was the water.

The Okavango was just another living thing. He’d walked its entire length as

a boy, with his father, carrying nothing but bedrolls. He knew the Okavango

inside and out, and felt for it something like romantic love. Its surface was a

poreless cheek, which he often lightly stroked.

But he also felt for the river a kind of sober awe. Respect. Its innards

were death, he said. Hungry crocs, ill-tempered hippos, they were all down

there, in the dark, waiting for you to slip up. Hippos killed five hundred

people a year; Adi drummed it into my head over and over, and all these

years later I can still hear him: Never go into the dark water, Harry.

One night around the fire, all the guides and trackers discussed the river,

shouting stories about riding it, swimming it, boating it, fearing it, everyone

talking over each other. I heard it all that night, the mysticism of the river,

the sacredness of the river, the weirdness of the river.

Speaking of weirdness... The smell of marijuana wafted on the air.

The stories grew louder, sillier.

I asked if I could try.

Everyone guffawed. Sod off!

Willy looked at me in horror.

But I wouldn’t back off. I pleaded my case. I was experienced, | said.

Heads swung round. Oh really?

Henners and I had recently pinched two six-packs of Smirnoff Ice and

drunk them till we passed out, I boasted. Plus, Tiggy always let


4/ What age range WOULD be acceptable to all of you? Is five years older okay? Is one year older okay? One month? 5/ That said, Jasmine has created an evocative piece of art. Let’s leave it at that: art, not a call for a Twitter mob. 6/6 I stopped myself, because my blood pressure was only going up, and I hadn’t run any of this by Jerome and there were already replies coming in that I didn’t want to read. I managed not to slip on the floor, managed to make it to the bed. 31 I didn’t really sleep, just rested my body and fitfully sobered up. Across the state, Omar was awake this whole night too; this is when he removed his own gauze and made his pillowcase into a kind of bandage, lying on his stomach so it would stay pressed to the wound. But soon the blood had soaked that through as well. His heart rate was elevating, and he thought he recognized the symptoms of shock, which was odd when he hadn’t been in shock that morning. From this vantage point, I’d love to believe it was some psychic sympathy for Omar’s pain that kept me up—but in fact it was largely the stupid fact that my thighs still itched, which made me think of bedbugs, which made me think of the time Thalia and I both got bedbugs and dealt with it on our own, which made me think about how smack between childhood and adulthood we’d been. Lance, my cohost, asked once if boarding school kids were more mature, living away from home. I said, “I doubt it,” and didn’t remind him that I’d essentially been on my own, at least emotionally, from age eleven. Oddly, I remember the bedbug incident with relative fondness. I was grateful, for one, that Thalia didn’t blame me, didn’t assume the infestation couldn’t have started in her Ralph Lauren sheets and down pillows. She sat up in bed one morning that winter and said, “What the fuck is this?” It occurred to me that it was the first time I’d heard her swear. She stuck a leg out toward me, long and tan in Robbie Serenho’s boxers; it was covered in red dots, streaked with blood. I said, “Oh, I have that, too.” I’d been scratching at welts all week, unaware that they were in a different category than the other woes sabotaging my body—the acne, the cramps, the disobedient hair, the splitting fingernails. She yelped and jumped out of bed, shook her comforter. She knew right away that it was bedbugs—Thalia seemed to possess boundless adult knowledge, things like how to steam clothes and how to fix our stubborn radiator—and we grabbed the bedding off both beds and ran to the laundry room at the end of the hall. She stuffed everything in the dryer and turned it on full blast, then looked down at her own tank top and boxers, at my flannel pajama bottoms and Lemonheads T-shirt, and said, “Clothes, too.” I realize how like


the margin of the land, and of him they learned all manner of sea-lore and sea-music. Thus it came to be that the Teleri, who were from the beginning lovers of water, and the fairest singers of all the Elves, were after enamoured of the seas, and their songs were filled with the sound of waves upon the shore. When many years had passed, Ulmo hearkened to the prayers of the Noldor and of Finw their king. Who grieved at their long sundering from the Teleri, and besought him to bring them to Aman, if they would come. And most of them proved now willing indeed; but great was the grief of Oss when Ulmo returned to the coasts of Beleriand, to bear them away to Valinor; for his care was for the seas of Middle-earth and the shores of the Hither Lands, and he was ill-pleased that the voices of the Teleri should be heard no more in his domain. Some he persuaded to remain; and those were the Falathrim, the Elves of the Falas, who in after days had dwellings at the havens of Brithombar and Eglarest, the first mariners in Middle-earth and the first makers of ships. Crdan the Shipwright was their lord. The kinsfolk and friends of Elw Singollo also remained in the Hither Lands, seeking him yet, though they would fain have departed to Valinor and the light of the Trees, if Ulmo and Olw had been willing to tarry longer. But Olw would be gone; and at last the main host of the Teleri embarked upon the isle, and Ulmo drew them far away. Then the friends of Elw were left behind; and they called themselves Eglath, the Forsaken People. They dwelt in the woods and hills of Beleriand, rather than by the sea, which filled them with sorrow; but the desire of Aman was ever in their hearts. But when Elw awoke from his long trance, he came forth from Nan Elmoth with Melian, and they dwelt thereafter in the woods in the midst of the land. Greatly though he had desired to see again the light of the Trees, in the face of Melian he beheld the light of Aman as in an unclouded mirror, and in that light he was content. His people gathered about him in joy, and they were amazed; for fair and noble as he had been, now he appeared as it were a lord of the Maiar, his hair as grey silver, tallest of all the Children of Ilvatar; and a high doom was before him. Now Oss followed after the host of Olw, and when they were come to the Bay of Eldamar (which is Elvenhome) he called to them; and they knew his voice, and begged Ulmo to stay their voyage. And Ulmo granted their request, and at his bidding Oss made fast the island and rooted it to the foundations of the sea. Ulmo did this the more readily, for he understood the hearts of the Teleri, and in the council of the Valar he had


of brass hoops on both ears. Her accent was Anoch, drawing out the vowels and tumbling over the ps. “Bianca says do it properly this time,” the girl told Edei instead of a greeting. “No screw-ups.” Edei gave a solemn nod, no hint that the threat rattled him. The thread in Io’s hand felt suddenly like a lifeline. Their visit at the House of Nine had confirmed the wraiths were once the target of the Nine, forewarned as dangerous by their artists. Whoever was guiding the wraiths’ hands was clever enough to know how to hide from the all-knowing muse-born. There were other clues they could follow—such as tracking the wraith or looking into a possible link between the wraiths and their other victims, like there had been with Horatio—but the thread that now lay between Io’s fingers called for more immediate attention. The man had followed them from the House of Nine, assaulted them with his phobos-born powers, and appeared particularly interested in the possibility that the Nine might know who was behind the wraiths. Something connected him to these undying women, and Io intended to find out precisely what. She hadn’t dropped the Quilt for a moment, in fear that the phobos-born’s thread would slip out of her fingers. A gray sky greeted them as they stepped out of the domed market. Io could already taste rain in the air. It was nearly summer, when neo-monsoons migrated from the south up to Alante, pelting the city with acid rain. They would need to find the man quickly and take cover somewhere inside, in case the weather turned ugly. Edei must have had the same thought, looking from the darkening sky to her. Even with the Quilt casting the silver light of dozens of threads across her vision, Io recognized the tension in his face. “Where to?” he asked. Io glanced at the thread. “East, to Newtown.” Newtown District was reconstructed a few years ago, its streets smoothed to accommodate automobiles. The frail constructions rack-rack-racketed on the uneven asphalt, honking at each other and pedestrians. They were mostly trucks carrying products, but there was also the odd private vehicle, its windows tinted, its drivers in shiny caps and elegant button-downs. Io’s father had been in a private automobile once, an occasion he had narrated as though it had been the most marvelous fairy tale, complete with a beautiful princess and a fairy godmother. He had been crossing the street on Cardamom Avenue, not far from here, and the driver hadn’t seen him. Nearly took his kneecap off. The owner of the car, a young lady clad in chimerini furs—the detail always made Io’s mother roll her eyes—had been so distressed she insisted they drive him to the nearest hospital. Traffic was bad, and the ride took so long his knee had stopped hurting by the time they arrived. But as Baba watched the car take off, he vowed that one day, he’d get an automobile himself and take his girls on road trips in the countryside, and wouldn’t that be lovely?


Sailor Aye; girls and a green! --then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper! Long-Island Sailor Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now for it! Azore Sailor ( Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.) .. <p 171 > Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! ( The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.) Azore Sailor ( Dancing.) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy; Make fire-flies; break the jinglers! Pip Jinglers, you say? --there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so. China Sailor Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself. French Sailor Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! split jibs! tear yourselves! Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.) That's a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat. Old Manx Sailor I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will --that's the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once. 3d Nantucket Sailor Spell oh! --whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm --give us a whiff, Tash. ( They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens -- the wind rises.) .. <p 172 > Lascar Sailor By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva! Maltese Sailor ( Reclining and shaking his cap.) It's the waves --the snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth --heaven may not match it! --as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes. Sicilian Sailor ( Reclining.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad --fleet interlacings of the limbs --lithe swayings --coyings --flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? ( Nudging.) Tahitan Sailor ( Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls! --the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first day i brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me! --not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon


Christina Lauren - The True Love Experiment.txt

over and see if we could distract each other somewhere else for the night. But I’m jerked from my daydreaming when Ash’s hand absently paws at my collar in reaction to something on the screen. “What the— Ash.” “Get it… Get it!” he shouts. His expression crashes. “Noooo.” He slumps back into his chair. “I just lost five bucks.” He reaches into his pocket for his phone. “Five whole American dollars?” I ask, grinning. “You’d better watch that gambling habit.” “I don’t know how she does it, but Ella is a shark and never loses.” “You lost to your wife?” He looks up from where he’s typing her a message. “I’m considering taking her to Vegas.” “Definitely do it before the baby is born—pregnant ladies love smoky casinos.” He ignores this and slides his phone onto the table. “Let’s get back to your job crisis so I can go home. I know this will hurt your do-gooder soul, but I think you need to bite the bullet and do the reality show Blaine wants. Spend the rest of the year making candy, or whatever he called it, and if it’s successful, you’ll have leverage to make what you want after that.” I begin to protest, and he holds up a hand. “I know you hate this. I know your work matters to you. Thanks to you I haven’t thrown away a gum wrapper or used a plastic water bottle in two years. I’m going to be using cloth diapers, man.” “I must be a lot of fun at parties.” Ash steeples his fingers under his chin. “I say this because I know how much you want to stick to your principles here. You want to make stuff that matters. But I also know you can’t lose this job. You only missed a few hours with Stevie tonight. Imagine what you’d miss if you had to move back to LA.” I turn my gaze down to my beer. The thought alone makes my stomach twist. “Yeah.” “So do it and move on.” “I’m not sure it’s that easy.” “Come on. We’re smart guys. Bounce some sexy show ideas off me.” I press my fingers to my temples, trying to will a million-dollar idea into existence. “That’s the problem, I don’t have any. I’m certain the world doesn’t need another one of these things.” “Well, while the world may not need another, it certainly wants it: Ella watches every single one. What you need is a new angle.” He turns to glance around the bar, and when he does, I see the dry cleaning tag still attached to his collar. Has it been like this all day? With a sigh, I reach over and pluck it off. “Huh,” he says, examining it before placing it on the table and looking back to the TV. I follow his attention to where the game has finished and the nightly news is on. It’s too loud in the bar to hear the voiceover, but the captions inform me that GeneticAlly, the biggest dating app in the world


then they let the cat out of the bag. It’s as if they want to be caught. As if they can’t help themselves.” Miss de Vries raised her chin to the ceiling. She pressed her lips together. “And he unburdened himself, didn’t he?” continued Mrs. King. “On his nearest and dearest, his own flesh and blood, his own kith and kin. On you and me.” She’d looked forward to this moment, regardless of the risk. It would have been more prudent to keep her counsel, stay out of sight. But the urge to face Miss de Vries, bring everything out in the open, was too great. Besides, she had one fear, one deep concern. Had Mr. de Vries told his other daughter of the letter? Had she found it? If Miss de Vries had destroyed it, then Mrs. King needed to know. Mrs. King wished Miss de Vries would show something in her face, her eyes. But Miss de Vries didn’t. Her voice was entirely controlled. “I’m famished. Let’s eat.” She moved faster this time, champagne sloshing in her glass, and she tucked her hand into the crook of Mrs. King’s elbow. Lockwood sprang, following. The supper room was on the other side of the ballroom, opening onto the balcony, steps hurtling down to the garden. Lights leaping in the trees. Walls gagged with white silk. The tables had been laid out Parisian style on long buffets. Fowls sliced and stacked on silver dishes. Fruit plunged in bowls of ice. Mrs. King touched a peach, felt the chill like a burn. Miss de Vries took a knife. Picked a sliver of meat. “Anything else to tell me, Mrs. King?” “No.” Miss de Vries tilted the knife in the air. “Clearly, you’ve taken leave of your senses.” Her eyes were bright. “I haven’t,” said Mrs. King, taking a moment, watching her temper. “As well you know.” “Prove it,” Miss de Vries said. “Prove what?” “What you said. What he told you.” Mrs. King felt a quiver in her stomach. “So you accept he told me something.” Silence. “Well, I can’t,” Mrs. King said. “I didn’t write anything down. I’ve no witnesses. I’d rather know what he told you.” Miss de Vries looked away. “Me?” She needed to be pushed, to be provoked. “Come now, Madam,” said Mrs. King. “Tell me all about it. Tell me how it feels. Knowing that your father could be so spiteful.” The noise from the ballroom surged and crashed over them like a wave. Miss de Vries’s expression changed. The words wounded her. But she simply shrugged. “He wasn’t spiteful. One says spiteful things by accident. When one can’t hold one’s tongue.” She considered her knife, studied the reflection. “This was entirely deliberate. Papa sent for me. Directly after you, I expect. He told me he had a little something to tell me.” Her mouth twisted. “Just a little thing.” Mrs. King felt her chest thrumming. Go on, she thought, goading Miss de Vries with her mind. Lockwood took one step closer. He was looking at Miss de


somebody to shoot you." "This is different," I said. "We can ask him to borrow one." We did, and he said, "Nonsense." Dill was of the opinion that an appeal to Atticus's better nature might work: after all, we would starve if Mr. Ewell killed him, besides be raised exclusively by Aunt Alexandra, and we all knew the first thing she'd do before Atticus was under the ground good would be to fire Calpurnia. Jem said it might work if I cried and flung a fit, being young and a girl. That didn't work either. But when he noticed us dragging around the neighborhood, not eating, taking little interest in our normal pursuits, Atticus discovered how deeply frightened we were. He tempted Jem with a new football magazine one night; when he saw Jem flip the pages and toss it aside, he said, "What's bothering you, son?" Jem came to the point: "Mr. Ewell." "What has happened?" "Nothing's happened. We're scared for you, and we think you oughta do something about him." Atticus smiled wryly. "Do what? Put him under a peace bond?" "When a man says he's gonna get you, looks like he means it." "He meant it when he said it," said Atticus. "Jem, see if you can stand in Bob Ewell's shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that's something I'll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I'd rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You understand?" Jem nodded. Aunt Alexandra entered the room as Atticus was saying, "We don't have anything to fear from Bob Ewell, he got it all out of his system that morning." "I wouldn't be so sure of that, Atticus," she said. "His kind'd do anything to pay off a grudge. You know how those people are." "What on earth could Ewell do to me, sister?" "Something furtive," Aunt Alexandra said. "You may count on that." "Nobody has much chance to be furtive in Maycomb," Atticus answered. After that, we were not afraid. Summer was melting away, and we made the most of it. Atticus assured us that nothing would happen to Tom Robinson until the higher court reviewed his case, and that Tom had a good chance of going free, or at least of having a new trial. He was at Enfield Prison Farm, seventy miles away in Chester County. I asked Atticus if Tom's wife and children were allowed to visit him, but Atticus said no. "If he loses his appeal," I asked one evening, "what'll happen to him?" "He'll go to the chair," said Atticus, "unless the Governor commutes his sentence. Not time to worry yet, Scout. We've got a good chance." Jem was sprawled on the sofa reading Popular Mechanics. He looked up. "It ain't right. He didn't kill anybody


your own. As if it was some thing you could chop up and polish however you liked.” She looks me up and down, and the hungry gape of her mouth makes her look like a ravenous, wild animal—a beast about to pounce. “God. I was right. I can’t believe I was right.” “I don’t know what you think you know.” I try to steady my breathing. My mind’s scrambling for explanations, possible denials of everything I’ve just yelled into the darkness. I was confused. I’ve been coerced. “But Athena was my friend—” “Oh yes. Your greatest muse.” Candice scoffs. “I’ve heard that line. Tell me, how long were you planning to steal her work? How accidental was her death, really?” “It wasn’t like that,” I insist. “I worked hard on that novel; it’s mine—” “Oh, shut up.” Candice steps closer. This scene composition is so fucking dramatic. The streetlamp glows behind her, casting her shadow across the steps and across me. It feels like we’re in some gothic film. Now the villain’s reveal at the climax; now the hero’s righteous monologue before I’m cast, screaming, into hell. “I knew you’d never come out and say it. That was the challenge, you know. I figured it out early on. You were never going to admit it, no matter how vicious the allegations got, no matter how much proof there was. You needed to cling to some version of events where you weren’t the bad guy. Isn’t that right? So I realized the only way to settle this was to make you confess on your own.” She raises her voice, starts projecting, like she’s narrating to someone else. Like she’s been waiting forever to get her monologue in the spotlight. It’s bizarre, but here I am, frozen: a captive, horrified audience. “I thought I’d just mess with you a bit. Rattle you enough to say something circumstantial. Instagram was easy—I know Athena’s publicist; she still had her login. At first all I did was fuck around with Photoshop. I wasn’t sure if it was working—you kept ignoring my tags—but then I heard you’d attacked Diana Qiu on the street. She said you looked haunted. Turns out white people are more gullible than I thought.” Photoshop? A borrowed login? Is that all it took? “So Athena is . . .” “Dead and ash.” Candice barks out a laugh. “Or are you still hoping to see her ghost?” “But the stairs . . .” I feel so stupid, questioning her like this. But I can’t think of anything else to say. I need it all explained to me, step by step, because Candice is right: part of me still thinks Athena will step out from the shadows any second, cackling, ready to accept my confession. “How did you know about the stairs?” I want Athena to step out. She’s the only one I want to confess to. I need true catharsis, not Candice Lee laughing in my face. Not this cruel, childishly simple prank. “It’s Athena’s favorite workout,” says Candice. “She wouldn’t shut up about it


leading man can. Again I wonder if Finn has ever wanted that for himself. “Please tell me your evening was a little less self-indulgent?” I shrug. “I video-chatted with my parents and read a bit.” And the first half of the advance hit my bank account, which prompted a celebratory slice of cheesecake via room service. “And how are your parents?” I lift my eyebrows at him, because somehow it sounds like he’s genuinely interested. “They’re good. I swear, they’ve picked up five new hobbies each year since they’ve been retired. My mom just joined a pinochle league, and my dad is getting really into birds. And they’re missing me desperately, of course, but they’ll survive.” “Of course.” And he gives me this little half smile as he unbuttons his black canvas jacket, folding it over the back of a chair. Then, it’s as though he’s unsure what to do with his body. He glances over at the bed before he settles for standing, crossing one leg over the other. “You did great today. By the way.” I exaggerate a groan. “Mood killer. If there was a mood left after talking about my parents.” “I’m serious! It’s not easy to get up there and do that, especially if you haven’t been prepped. And League Loup-Garou—that was a secret French werewolf-hunting agency from season three— that’s a hard word.” “I have a feeling hard-core Nocturnals fans might feel differently, but thank you.” I clear my throat, toying with a button on my cardigan. “So. Tonight’s lesson.” “Ah yes. I see you called this one”—he pulls up his phone—“ ‘Intermediate Foreplay: Turn a Touch into a Tingle.’ ” “I was trying to be creative.” His eyes crinkle at the corners as he grins. “I’m just proud to be in the intermediate class.” I smirk at him as I move over to the bed. “Only because you’re sleeping with the teacher.” He sits down next to me, triangling an ankle on his knee. Then he laces his fingers together, the perfect image of an adult man waiting for sexual enlightenment. If he’s nervous, he’s great at hiding it. The next time I enter into an educational sex pact, I’m not doing it with an actor. Or at least, a much less talented actor. Because that’s one thing I’ve learned, watching The Nocturnals and Lucky Us and even his Hallmark Christmas movie. Finnegan Walsh is a good actor. It’s the way he’s aware of his scene partners, his body language attuned to everyone in the room. The subtleties of his expression, how he’s able to convey joy or sadness or fear in a single tilt of his head or curve of his brows. And his eyes, those lovely hazel eyes the show hid behind glasses, always soft and sweet and inquisitive. I can see it now, how so many viewers fell for Hux. “Before we go any further,” I say. “I think we should talk about the clitoris.” Finn blushes. “Yeah, uh . . . that seems to be something of a problem area for me.”


time. He didn’t need my money badly enough to send his thugs chasing me across the country. But still… I pushed onward, until I reached Seattle. The Pacific. The end of the line. One of the farthest geographical points from New York in the country. With my elbow, I pump the lemon-scented soap into my hand, wash my body, and use it as shampoo. The harsh detergent will dry my skin, make my hair stiff and frizzy, but all my toiletries were in my backpack. I try to wash away the fear, the loss, the utter sense of desolation that threatens to overwhelm me. Because I have no choice but to keep trying, keep moving forward, keep existing. Stepping from the shower, I dig a towel from my bag. It smells musty, but I pat at the droplets on my skin, hoping the scent won’t cling to me. Clean laundry has become a luxury I can afford only once a week. A woman with a toddler on her hip enters and gives me a side-eyed glance. I see her brow furrow as she spots the angry red scratches on my arm, clocks my pile of belongings, puts the pieces together. I need to hurry. I used to wear makeup—just a little concealer and mascara, a pop of color on my lips and cheeks, but it’s all gone now, taken with my purse. I finger-comb my tangle of dark hair, the highlights grown down to my chin, pressing it into some semblance of a style. It’s not really working, but at least I’m clean and presentable if not attractive. I’ve let that go. In some worlds, you trade on good looks; in others, you hide them. Eventually, they abandon you anyway. Just a lot quicker when you’re homeless. Hurriedly, I slip on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, my work “uniform.” Thankfully, the diner’s dress code is extremely casual. The protective mother is still watching me as she steps out of her clothes, eyes alert and wary. Does she think I’m crazy? Dangerous? That I might steal from her? I’m not interested in your bag of diapers and animal crackers, I want to snap, but I don’t. I drop the moist towel onto one of my canvas bags and hurry past two more moms and babies coming in for swim class. The crisp air outside the pool hits me like a slap, sharpens my senses. I’m beginning to feel weak and light-headed. I need food and caffeine. There is a coffee shop a few blocks from the pool that sells discounted day-old muffins, spotted bananas, and mealy apples kept in a basket by the till. I’ll order a drip coffee loaded with cream and sugar for breakfast and a stale pastry for lunch. I eat supper at the diner, a definite perk of my otherwise unfulfilling employment. Sliding into the driver’s seat of my car, I feel the knife press into my hip. I shoved it farther down beside the console, but an inch of the handle is still exposed. I


forgot to be careful, and I didn’t care. I’m extremely ashamed of myself. And I still don’t care. Maybe this is doable. Maybe I can be with her. I go back to my office and smell bleach. I sit in front of the terminal and try “Antonin” along with the Marx Brothers in Roddy Tebbit’s file. It doesn’t work. I go up on the roof and refill the doc box. The green light has gone out; the orange one hasn’t come on. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how much these pieces of meat matter, any more. I don’t know what Doublewide wants to do with them. Maybe this. Maybe he’s doing it. He knows I’m involved with Athena now, if he didn’t already. Stefan is waiting for me to tell him I’ve destroyed Roddy Tebbit’s data. Gratton is waiting for me to tell him what the hell is going on. It’s getting to the point I have to pick a side. Or make one. I look out across Othrys. It’s oily black all winter long, then azure blue all summer. There’s a public beach by the Tappeny Bridge, and since last year, when they moved all the junkies on and combed the needles out, it’s a nice beach. Out beyond it, the sun comes up over the mountains, and on days like this it just sits there in the crack of the Typhon pass. If you go all the way out there there’s a tunnel for the railway, and the two huge statues they put up that mark the edge of the greater city boundary: Gaia and Cronus, metal skeletons coated in white composite that tries to be marble. She holds the earth in a sling, and he carries a sword with two blades, one coming off from the other two thirds of the way up like a leaf or a curved tongue. I think about Roddy Tebbit in Susan Green’s sketchbook. She drew him as Perseus, the mighty warrior holding aloft the head of a monster. In kids’ books, Cronus always has a sickle, or sometimes even a scythe, but he didn’t in the original myth and he doesn’t on the statue. Like Perseus, he has that weird two-tongued sword. The design is not some whimsical Ancient Greek lifestyle choice. It’s a chopping weapon for an ugly kind of war: a working man’s tool that pierces like an axe when you need to cut armour, or a butcher’s hook when you want to gut someone. It’s nasty and unromantic and functional. That kind of sword has a name, because nasty, unromantic functional things do. It’s called a harpē, and that’s what Susan Green tried to tell me in the second before the car threw her in the air. I’m an idiot from my toes to my hat for thinking she said “Harpo.” I’ve been wasting time. I go downstairs to my office and bring up the matrix password screen. It takes a few minutes to get it right, but I open the file. Or, actually, files, because


sighed heavily. “That’s why I’m, you know, doing this thing with you. Because I also have a ten-thousand-dollar fine to pay.” “My parents have a lot of debt from my ophthalmologist visits,” I offered. I was immediately embarrassed when I said this. We hadn’t addressed my eyesight all summer. “Yeah, you get it,” he said. “You’re not American if you’re not in debt to someone.” I was incredibly grateful then: not just for the fact that he didn’t press deeper into my nightmarish open secret, but because he was my friend. Because he had, of his own volition, come into my life. At the end of the summer, we were made to stand in a line in the mess hall, bookended by four menacing counselors on either side. Kimborough surveyed us from a distance behind Sledge, who walked up and down our line, seething. “You think you’re going to just go back home to your parents and pretend this never happened?” he asked. “Well fuck that, and fuck you for thinking that. You are criminals. If you don’t change your lives, you will be in prison or dead before you turn twenty-one. Most people your age, they have bright futures ahead of them. You? You have no future if you don’t fix yourselves. You have no future whatsoever.” Kimborough made us pray for forgiveness from God and then we were dispersed back to our cabins, where we packed our belongings and the counselors distributed our phones and wallets. Orson and I were dropped off at the combination train and bus station, left to sit in the cavernous head house and deal with a flood of text messages from our parents. We had over $5,000 between us, and Orson counted out my share. “That’s going to go a long way toward those bills,” he said. “Don’t you want more?” I asked. “To pay off the fine?” “No, no,” he said. “Just keep it. You need it just as much.” I pocketed my share reluctantly. We sat in silence, the kind of warm, placid silence shared by two people who know each other intimately and are about to stop knowing each other intimately. We checked our phones and looked at our feet. Then Orson grabbed my phone from my hands and punched in his number. “Text me anytime,” he said. “I’ll always respond.” An automated voice announced that his bus was departing in ten minutes, and he stood, smiling, his arms wide. “This is the last time I’ll be able to do this for fifteen hours,” he said. “The last time I’ll be able to extend to my full wingspan.” “Cherish it,” I said. “Cherish it, sir, colonel, sir.” “Yes, sir, lieutenant, sir,” he said, and turned from me, jogging in the direction of his terminal. My train wouldn’t arrive until later that evening. I made a pillow of my backpack and lay across the bench, reading the part of The Brothers Karamazov where Mitya is trying to find money to woo Grushenka. I got through ten pages and fell asleep, and when I


those problematical whales that seem .. <p 401 > to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted whales in general. The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales. There's a pretty fellow, now, he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a present of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for it; and so saying he started for the quarter-deck. By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a .. <p 402 > huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read Bouton de Rose, --Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship. Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained


Didn’t say a word. Didn’t ask her permission to join, didn’t thank her for the food. He grabbed his fork as if seated at his own table. The princess retreated into her own head, eyes down. The ladies all made a graceful turn left, and commenced conversation with their neighbors. Of course they all knew each other; it was effortless for them. Miss de Vries found herself seated beside a spindly and decrepit colonel, who was fussing with his handkerchief and inspecting the forks, saying not a word. Someone had altered the table plan without seeking her authority: someone from the royal household, perhaps. Or Lord Ashley. Miss de Vries stared at the wall in enforced silence, feeling a flush rising up her neck, suddenly out of her depth. The crowd stood panting at the door to the supper room. This is my triumph, she reminded herself firmly, feeling ravenous, eating nothing. * * * Meanwhile, the Janes were consulting the instruction labels ironed into their petticoats. This was the most delicate part of the operation: sweeping the rooms in the public parts of the house. They got to work on the library, with Hephzibah’s decoy guests stationed right outside, guarding the door. Mrs. Bone’s men, still dressed in their tunics, stood on extendable ladders, handing books down the line and stacking them in towers. It was taking longer than Winnie had calculated. “Come on,” muttered Jane-one, her eyes fixed on the clock. “What time is it?” said Jane-two. “Don’t ask.” The men heard. Fear, the first true prickle of it, shimmered across the room. Someone dropped a book. Jane-one saw it happen. It simply slipped from a man’s hand, toppling into a tower of leather-bound volumes already on the floor. She knew what would follow. Her mind unspooled it, several seconds ahead. The first tower fell into the next. Dominoes. The men looked on, aghast, as the towers crumbled. Jane-one felt the tremor as hundreds upon hundreds of books hit the bare floor. It was a rumble she could feel in all directions, passing through the walls. “Lock that door,” she said. “Right now.” A fist hammered on the library door. “Open up!” One of the footmen, thought Jane-one. They’d heard a commotion in the library and come running, pushing past Hephzibah’s actresses. She pressed her finger to her lips. The men all stared at her, pale and sweating. They were trapped. Books lay scattered on the floor around them. Silence outside. “Hello?” the footman said, uncertain. “Everything all right?” Jane-one pressed her finger to the keyhole so he couldn’t peer in. She used her other hand to point to the window. Mouthed to Jane-two. Perch act. Jane-two frowned. You’re not serious. Got another idea? Jane-two considered this, quite seriously. Then sighed. Marched to the window, hauled it open. Reached out, feeling for the drainpipe. Glanced back over her shoulder. Mouthed, Two minutes. Jane-one motioned one of the men to cover the keyhole. Tiptoed to the center of the room. Twirled a finger in the air. At first the men didn’t


candle was discernible through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle. Did Stephen obey his sign? Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's house. What did Bloom do? He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air. Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think? Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two, had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street: of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his aunt Sara, wife of Richie (Richard) Goulding, in the kitchen of their lodgings at 62 Clanbrassil street: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of Saint Francis Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's Green, north: of his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra. What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall? Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies' grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction. What did Bloom see on the range? On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black iron kettle. What did Bloom do at the range? He removed the saucepan to the left hob,


with that in his mind he left the pasture. On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them. They seemed to have quite forgotten him already. All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he felt he had acted stupidly. However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind. III As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger's retreating figure on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her would-be partner in the affirmative. She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining when she saw "the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains, and the agreeable distresses" of those girls who had been wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her--no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them. She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father's odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl's mind to make her anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the parental cottage lay. While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well--so well. They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade, the favourite ditty of "The Spotted Cow"-- I saw her lie do'--own in yon'--der green gro'--ove; Come, love!' and I'll tell' you where!' The cradle-rocking and


stumbled away, laughing. A bitter blast swept across the Square. The gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches as if in pain. He shivered, and went back, closing the window behind him. He passed to the door, turned the key, and opened it. He did not even glance at the murdered man. He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. The friend who had painted [85] the fatal portrait, the portrait to which all his misery had been due, had gone out of his life. That was enough. Then he remembered the lamp. It was a rather curious one of Moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished steel. Perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would be asked. He turned back, and took it from the table. How still the man was! How horribly white the long hands looked! He was like a dreadful wax image. He locked the door behind him, and crept quietly down-stairs. The wood-work creaked, and seemed to cry out as if in pain. He stopped several times, and waited. No: everything was still. It was merely the sound of his own footsteps. When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner. They must be hidden away somewhere. He unlocked a secret press that was in the wainscoting, and put them into it. He could easily burn them afterwards. Then he pulled out his watch. It was twenty minutes to two. He sat down, and began to think. Every year--every month, almost-- men were strangled in England for what he had done. There had been a madness of murder in the air. Some red star had come too close to the earth. Evidence? What evidence was there against him? Basil Hallward had left the house at eleven. No one had seen him come in again. Most of the servants were at Selby Royal. His valet had gone to bed. Paris! Yes. It was to Paris that Basil had gone, by the midnight train, as he had intended. With his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any suspicions would be aroused. Months? Everything could be destroyed long before then. A sudden thought struck him. He put on his fur coat and hat, and went out into the hall. There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman outside on the pavement, and seeing the flash of the lantern reflected in the window. He waited, holding his breath. After a few moments he opened the front door, and slipped out, shutting it very gently behind him. Then he began ringing the bell. In about ten minutes his valet appeared, half dressed, and looking very drowsy. "I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in; "but I had forgotten my latch-key. What time is it?" "Five minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and yawning. "Five minutes past two? How horribly


a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage and sit in my dressing gown wit a maid to wait on me," said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica and brushed her hair. "I don't believe fine young ladies enjoy themselves a bit more than we do, in spite of our burned hair, old gowns, one glove apiece and tight slippers that sprain our ankles when we are silly enough to wear them," And I think Jo was quite right. -------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Chapter" I.4 Burdens "Oh, dear, how hard it does seem to take up our packs and go on," sighed Meg the morning after the party, for now the holidays were over, the week of merrymaking did not fit her for going on easily with the task she never liked. "I wish it was Christmas or New Year's all the time. Wouldn't it be fun?" answered Jo, yawning dismally. "We shouldn't enjoy ourselves half so much as we do now. But it does seem so nice to have little suppers and bouquets, and go to parties, and drive home, and read and rest,and not work. It's like other people, you know, and I always envy girls who do such things, I'm so fond of luxury," said Meg, trying to decide which of two shabby gowns was the least shabby. "Well, we can't have it, so don't let us grumble but shoulder our bundles and trudge along as cheerfully as Marmee does. I'm sure Aunt March is a regular Old Man of the Sea to me, but I suppose when I've learned to carry her without complaining, she will tumble off, or get so light that I shan't mind her." This idea tickled Jo's fancy and put her in good spirits, but Meg didn't brighten, for her burden, consisting of four spoiled children, seemed heavier than ever. She had not heart enough even to make herself pretty as usual by putting on a blue neck ribbon and dressing her hair in the most becoming way. "Where's the use of looking nice, when no one sees me but those cross midgets, and no one cares whether I'm pretty or not?" she muttered, shutting her drawer with a jerk. "I shall have to toil and moil all my days, with only little bits of fun now and then, and get old and ugly and sour, because I'm poor and can't enjoy my life as other girls do. It's a shame!" So Meg went down, wearing an injured look, and wasn't at all agreeable at breakfast time. Everyone seemed rather out of sorts and inclined to croak. Beth had a headache and lay on the sofa, trying to comfort herself with the cat and three kittens. Amy was fretting because her lessons were not learned, and she couldn't find her rubbers. Jo would whistle and make a great racket getting ready. Mrs. March was very busy trying to finish a letter, which must go at once, and Hannah had the grumps, for being up late didn't suit her.


enough, the data card was gone. “Fuck. Oh, fuck.” “Was there something important on the drives?” Ethan asked. “Yeah, an entire wedding,” I said. “Shit. I hadn’t uploaded everything yet! Goddammit. I always upload everything right away, but I was starving and then he was in the room.” “You’re missing wedding photos,” Ethan repeated, carefully neutral. “They’re important,” I insisted. “Of course. But they aren’t going to get you killed or arrested, so I’m going to call this a win,” Ethan said. “Jessup Consulting will have them. We can get them back. Especially if they don’t want to get reported to the police for having an employee assault you.” “Okay.” I took a breath, released it. Calm. I could do calm. “Sit. Eat. Relax. I’ll see if I can turn up anything more,” he said. He eyed the tabs in the browser skeptically. “Do you ever close tabs?” “I might need them later.” “One of them is playing ‘Old Town Road.’” “I usually just mute the computer when that happens,” I said. “Easier than finding it.” He sighed and sat down to work. After I’d eaten, with Ethan still rooting unsuccessfully around the internet for signs of my assailant, I went on a pilgrimage to the ice machine. When I stepped back out of the alcove, bucket of ice in hand, I found Chief Bishop waiting for me. “Jesus Christ,” she said as soon as she saw me. “Who the hell did that to you?” “There was a scuffle over the bouquet, and I caught an elbow,” I said. She blinked at me. “I’m a wedding photographer. Sorry, bad joke. I got mugged.” Close enough. “Here?” she asked in disbelief. “I was back in Seattle shooting a wedding.” “You didn’t mention you were leaving town,” she said, hand on her hip. She’d parked her car slantwise across two spots, right next to mine. “I didn’t realize I had to check in with you about it,” I replied. She frowned at me. “Olivia’s death has been ruled a suicide. We’ve released the body. The funeral is on Tuesday,” she said. My balance faltered. I managed not to stumble, but only just. It was official, then. “I think it’s a mistake,” she added flatly. “You think Liv was murdered?” I asked. She nodded. “Then why—” “I’ve been in this town six months. I’m new, I’m not from here, and my job exists up until the exact moment that Jim Green tells the city council to get rid of me,” she said, voice thick with discontent. “He made it very clear that it was time to move on. But I don’t buy it. That girl killing herself that way, when she was terrified of guns and blood and everybody in her life, you included, was watching her like a hawk for the slightest hint of suicidal ideation? Yes, I think she was murdered. But if I don’t sign that paperwork, I don’t have a job and can’t do anything about it. So here we are.” I tried to take a full breath to steady myself;


of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--" "He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!" She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid." "Afraid of what?" "Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep." I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid of anything else? Not of his effect--?" "His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I faltered. "On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge." "No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned. "The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM." "Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could bear it!" "No. I couldn't--and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears. A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister figure of the living man-- the dead one would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained-- superficially at least--by a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and as, on the final evidence, HAD been-- by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had


more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression. The charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the need of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self- awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last bloom, as does the large pear tree that stands beside her grandmother’s tiny log cabin. She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! To plot Janie’s journey from object to subject, the narrative of the novel shifts from third to a blend of first and third person (known as “free indirect discourse”), signifying this awareness of self in Janie. Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition. Yet in its concern with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment, it suggests many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole. II. One of the most moving passages in American literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s account of her last encounter with her dying mother, found in a chapter entitled “Wandering” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942): As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama’s eyes would face east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice. We can begin to understand the rhetorical distance that separated Hurston from her contemporaries if we compare this passage with a similar scene published just three years later in Black Boy by Richard Wright, Hurston’s dominant black male contemporary and rival: “Once, in the night, my mother called me to her bed and told me that she could not endure the pain, and she wanted to die. I held her hand and begged her to be quiet. That night I ceased to react to my mother; my feelings were frozen.” If Hurston represents her final moments with her mother in terms of the search for voice, then Wright attributes to a similar experience a certain “somberness of spirit that I was never to lose,” which “grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself…the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness….” Few authors in the


wasn’t until the following summer that things seemed to calm down. The press was on to the next, more interesting thing, and all I was left with was the grief and the sadness and the scars. Paige, in her obsession with slasher films, had always talked to me about the rules. She was the one who seemed to know how that night, exactly one year ago, would go. It was her voice that drove Charity and me to make the decisions we did. It’s her voice I hear now as I sit at the edge of Mirror Lake in the dark. “The final act is never really the end,” she said to me and Charity once as we watched the original Friday the 13th under a pile of blankets on a chilly Halloween night when we were about thirteen. “There’s always a twist, but it only works if you don’t see it coming.” I watched the whole movie through my fingers, and when Jason Voorhees’s mother had her head removed by that movie’s final girl, I breathed a sigh of relief. Paige smiled at me and told me to keep my eyes on the screen. I almost choked on a piece of pizza when Jason’s decomposing corpse reappeared from the depths of Crystal Lake. As I sit here now, I think of Paige’s words again. She was always right. I stick my hand in my coat pocket and pull out the folded letter that arrived in my mailbox three weeks ago. It came on a Saturday morning, and there was no postmark or return address on the letter at all. That told me that whoever delivered it had brought it to my house and put it in the mailbox themselves. When I first read it, I thought it was a joke. An awful prank that somebody who had seen all the press about the murders at Camp Mirror Lake was playing on me. But as I read and reread the letter, my gut feeling was that it was real, and that was more terrifying than anything. I take out the letter as I sit very near the spot where Charity died—where a part of me also died. A part that, as hard as I tried, I could not bring back to life. I unfold the letter and read it for the thousandth time. I’m sorry, Bezi. I don’t know if you believe me or if you even care, but I have to say it. I should never have helped them. I didn’t have a choice. I got what I wanted. I’m free from them, but I think about what I had to do to have this. I’m sorry. But I have something I can share with you. I think you know what it is. Maybe it can make up for what I did. You can have money, strength, power, whatever you want. If you want, meet me at the place where it happened on the day it happened. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you never will be. It was from Kyle.


the positives. “At first, it was great. We were vibing, he was funny and a little nerdy in this supercute way. And you know me—as soon as I detect even the slightest hint of creepy, I’m gone.” “You do have an excellent creep detector.” “Thank you.” A bite of toast, and then I keep going. “He was in town from LA for a conference. We got into this friendly argument about how Seattle doesn’t have any good by-the-slice pizza places—” “True—” “—and we tried to find one. So we ate a bit, talked a bit, flirted a bit . . .” My face heats up as I remember the way he looked at me as I rolled up his sleeves. It’s ridiculous, how much I like you. “Oh, and then I realized I forgot to buy Maddy’s book. I still have to go back and pay, by the way. I don’t want that on my conscience.” As if it’s a Pavlovian response, I reach for my glass of water. “Then we wound up back at his hotel. At which point we proceeded to have”—I lower my head to the table made from reclaimed wood, pausing for dramatic effect—“the worst sex of my life.” This time, my cousin drops her fork onto her plate with a sharp clang. “No, no, no—what? That’s not where I thought this was going.” “Trust me, neither did I. It was the Murphy’s Law of sex—everything that could go wrong, did. His watch got caught on my necklace, lube went everywhere, and then he just . . . jackhammered his way through the rest of it.” “And I’m guessing you were left slightly unsatisfied?” I nod. “I don’t even think a map would have saved him. Poor guy was clueless,” I say. “If we’d been dating, I would have tried to help him out a bit more, but it felt so strange, giving instructions to someone I didn’t know.” It strikes me again that I could have said something. Could have told him, Hey, I’m not there yet and showed him how to get me there. I’ve grown comfortable giving directions in bed, but I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t have been worth it during a one-night stand. Besides, I’ve learned that not everyone wants to be coached. Some past boyfriends took it as an insult, although with those who were open to it, we managed to have good, communicative relationships after some initial fumbling. But that definitely wasn’t everyone, and I wasn’t in the mood to do any ego soothing last night. I imagine him waking up this morning, reaching to the other side of the bed only to find it empty. A slight pang of guilt settles in my stomach. But I would have been gone at the end of today, anyway. Noemie gets up and refills her mug, then takes a sip while she leans against the kitchen counter, looking pensive. “I want to ask how sex ed could have failed so many men in this way, but I didn’t know where my clitoris was


The kneecap pops out nicely. He screams, but it comes out like a roar, and he tries to get ahold of me as he goes down. He doesn’t manage it or I’d be in serious trouble, but clips me in passing and sends me sprawling through my own door into the hall. I scoot back, crabwise, grabbing the megaphone as I go. He tries again, lunging and the yelling, then throwing up, and lunging again. Damn me, that is some serious resolve. The eyes in the ski mask are batshit crazy with pain and fury. Figure no one has done anything like this to him ever in his life. In fairness very few people have been exploded with a desk lamp and mutilated in the knee, which is—also in fairness—why I did it that way. Titans don’t care about physical injury, because they know they can get it all back. They fucking hate it, and they hate pain more than anything, maybe, except wounded pride, but they keep coming, because as long as they win, they can always just get bigger and younger and dance on your grave. When he comes again I let him go by, then scream into his ear as he passes with the megaphone volume at maximum. Bad enough for me, in the closed environment of the little room. Shit for him. He claps one hand to his ear and howls. I can see blood under his fingers. I drop down into a crouch and use the knife to take the tendons along the back of the other leg. He goes down onto his front, and this time he’s not getting up anyway because there’s nothing left for him to stand on. I jump on his back, run up the spine stamping all the way, then kick him in the side of the head. It’s not as scientific as Sam’s version, but it’s the same principle: overload the senses and the brain shorts out. Blammo. I sit behind the desk and take a breather. “Orhan? You still there, buddy?” Turns out that whole thing was so fast he hasn’t hung up. “I am. What the fuck was that?” “Yeah, sorry about that. Animal control had to come in. Guy in the next apartment had a cougar in a cage. Not the sexy kind. It got out, you believe that? I think it ate a dog.” I can hear Orhan not buying that for one second. Figure the fight didn’t sound real cougar-ish even over the phone. “Listen, Orhan, this is a distracting environment right now. I’m gonna call right back, okay?” I hang up on him and then I go over and put about a hundred layers of duct tape handcuffs on the unconscious man on my floor. When that’s done I figure it’s time to pull off the ski mask and see who he is. I’m all kinds of hoping it’s fairy-tale Peter, because then I’ll have a whole gigantic clue right here on my floor. When I pull off the ski mask I wish that even


one. He looked boyish and a little bashful when he smiled like that, the years melting off him. When they were young they had played by the train tracks in Pantaco, wielding wooden planks as swords, reciting dialogue they scribbled on napkins. Near the tracks were vast storage facilities filled with grain, a veritable ocean of corn, wheat, and rice, just a few paces from rickety fences with plenty of holes that were no deterrent for eager children. The kids in the neighborhood would dare one another to jump into the gigantic piles of grain. They traded gruesome descriptions of rodents hiding in the corn, waiting to gnaw children’s toes off. They whispered stories of people who had choked to death, suffocated by the grain. Stories to scare each other, and yet, there was real danger in this adventure. One had to climb up to the rafters, walking along a wooden beam like a trapeze artist. The dive into the grain was a good seven- or ten-meter jump. Tristán wouldn’t jump alone. Montserrat remembered plummeting into the grain, Tristán’s hand firmly grasping her own. She remembered the way her stomach lurched for a second, the sweaty palms, the gasp escaping their lips. For a fraction of a second it felt as if they were weightless. Then came the cushion of grain beneath their bodies and Tristán’s wide, crooked smile as he turned to look at her, buried to his waist in kernels of corn. That smile before the dentist fixed his teeth, before the TV studio showed him how to grin for the flustered fans, before the world wore him down. Montserrat slid her hands into her pockets and smiled back at him. Tristán turned away and finished readying himself. They marched up to Urueta’s apartment with a good bottle of wine as an offering. When Abel opened the door, Montserrat remembered a photo of the director she’d seen in a book about the history of Mexican cinema. He still sported a little mustache and his hair was slicked back in the same style as it had been in the 1950s. He had a firm, pleasant voice that paired well with his tweed jacket and the gray knit vest with big buttons. He watched Montserrat and Tristán with the eye of a connoisseur, of a casting director. “I’m so glad you are joining us. Tristán said you are a fan of old horror movies.” “We both are,” Montserrat said as they sat down in the dining room. Behind Abel there was an old cabinet filled with dusty china and knickknacks. Cameras from different eras, photos in silver frames, a stack of greeting cards. The table was set with some of that same ancient china, the glasses dusted off and filled with wine. “Who is your favorite director?” “I like Tod Browning,” Montserrat said. “I like all the RKO horror movies, too. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People is a classic. Val Lewton produced wonderful work on a tiny budget.” “My father knew Browning. Back in the day, they shot films in different languages using


which I have read you exceedingly to heart -- so much so that, although he would walk in his own grounds, nothing would induce him to go out upon the moor at night. Incredible as it may appear to you, Mr. Holmes, he was honestly convinced that a dreadful fate overhung his family, and certainly the records which he was able to give of his ancestors were not encouraging. The idea of some ghastly presence constantly haunted him, and on more than one occasion he has asked me whether I had on my medical journeys at night ever seen any strange creature or heard the baying of a hound. The latter question he put to me several times, and always with a voice which vibrated with excitement. "I can well remember driving up to his house in the evening some three weeks before the fatal event. He chanced to be at his hall door. I had descended from my gig and was standing in front of him, when I saw his eyes fix themselves over my shoulder and stare past me with an expression of the most dreadful horror. I whisked round and had just time to catch a glimpse of something which I took to be a large black calf passing at the head of the drive. So excited and alarmed was he that I was compelled to go down to the spot where the animal had been and look around for it. It was gone, however, and the incident appeared to make the worst impression upon his mind. I stayed with him all the evening, and it was on that occasion, to explain the emotion which he had shown, that he confided to my keeping that narrative which I read to you when first I came. I mention this small episode because it assumes some importance in view of the tragedy which followed, but I was convinced at the time that the matter was entirely trivial and that his excite- ment had no justification. "It was at my advice that Sir Charles was about to go to London. His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxi- ety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health. I thought that a few months among the distractions of town would send him back a new man. Mr. Stapleton, a mutual friend who was much concerned at his state of health, was of the same opinion. At the last instant came this terrible catastrophe. "On the night of Sir Charles's death Barrymore the butler who made the discovery, sent Perkins the groom on horseback to me, and as I was sitting up late I was able to reach Baskerville Hall within an hour of the event. I checked and corroborated all the facts which were mentioned at the inquest. I followed the footsteps down the yew alley, I saw the spot at the moor-gate where he seemed to have waited, I remarked the change in the shape of the


a bad sign." "Merciful heavens--a bad sign?" "She thinks it means that I can't trust myself to go on caring for her. She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from some one that I--care for more." Madame Olenska examined this curiously. "But if she thinks that--why isn't she in a hurry too?" "Because she's not like that: she's so much nobler. She insists all the more on the long engagement, to give me time--" "Time to give her up for the other woman?" "If I want to." Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed eyes. Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her horses. "That IS noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice. "Yes. But it's ridiculous." "Ridiculous? Because you don't care for any one else?" "Because I don't mean to marry any one else." "Ah." There was another long interval. At length she looked up at him and asked: "This other woman-- does she love you?" "Oh, there's no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking of is--was never--" "Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?" "There's your carriage," said Archer. She half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes. Her fan and gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically. "Yes; I suppose I must be going." "You're going to Mrs. Struthers's?" "Yes." She smiled and added: "I must go where I am invited, or I should be too lonely. Why not come with me?" Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her give him the rest of her evening. Ignoring her question, he continued to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power to make her drop them. "May guessed the truth," he said. "There is another woman--but not the one she thinks." Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move. After a moment he sat down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them. She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. "Ah, don't make love to me! Too many people have done that," she said, frowning. Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him. "I have never made love to you," he said, "and I never shall. But you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us." "Possible for either of us?" She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment. "And you say that--when it's you who've made it impossible?" He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow of light tore its blinding way. "I'VE made it impossible--?" "You, you, YOU!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's


could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold .. <p 383 > any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb. As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed. But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. Out of the way, Commodore! cried one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us. Hard down with your tail, there! cried a second .. <p 384 > to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.txt

had no part in the first section of the programme but in the play which formed the second section he had the chief part, that of a farcical pedagogue. He had been cast for it on account of his stature and grave manners for he was now at the end of his second year at Belvedere and in number two. A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came pattering down from the stage, through the vestry and to the chapel. The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The plump bald sergeant major was testing with his foot the springboard of the vaulting horse. The lean young man in a long overcoat, who was to give a special display of intricate club swinging, stood near watching with interest, his silver-coated clubs peeping out of his deep side-pockets. The hollow rattle of the wooden dumbbells was heard as another team made ready to go up on the stage: and in another moment the excited prefect was hustling the boys through the vestry like a flock of geese, flapping the wings of his soutane nervously and crying to the laggards to make haste. A little troop of Neapolitan peasants were practising their steps at the end of the chapel, some circling their arms above their heads, some swaying their baskets of paper violets and curtsying. In a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the altar a stout old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts. When she stood up a pink-dressed figure, wearing a curly golden wig and an old-fashioned straw sunbonnet, with black pencilled eyebrows and cheeks delicately rouged and powdered, was discovered. A low murmur of curiosity ran round the chapel at the discovery of this girlish figure. One of the prefects, smiling and nodding his head, approached the dark corner and, having bowed to the stout old lady, said pleasantly: --Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs Tallon? Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf of the bonnet, he exclaimed: --No! Upon my word I believe it's little Bertie Tallon after all! Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest laugh together and heard the boys' murmurs of admiration behind him as they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the sunbonnet dance by himself. A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel. He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A side door of the theatre


stamped there with fiery steel. "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine." He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms. "Montag, up here! " Montag's hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies. Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had turned thief.. Now, it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish! Look here! Innocent! Look! He gazed, shaken, at that white hand. He held it way out, as if he were far-sighted. He held it close, as if he were blind. "Montag! " He jerked about. "Don't stand there, idiot!" The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry. The men danced and slipped and fell over them. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone. "Kerosene! They pumped the cold fluid from the numbered 451 tanks strapped to their shoulders. They coated each book, they pumped rooms full of it. They hurried downstairs, Montag staggered after them in the kerosene fumes. "Come on, woman!" The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montag. "You can't ever have my books," she said. "You know the law," said Beatty. "Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now! " She shook her head. "The whole house is going up;" said Beatty, The men walked clumsily to the door. They glanced back at Montag, who stood near the woman. "You're not leaving her here?" he protested. "She won't come." "Force her, then!" Beatty raised his hand in which was concealed the igniter. "We're due back at the house. Besides, these fanatics always try suicide; the pattern's familiar." Montag placed his hand on the woman's elbow. "You can come with me." "No," she said. "Thank you, anyway." "I'm counting to ten," said Beatty. "One. Two." "Please," said Montag. "Go on," said the woman. "Three. Four." "Here." Montag pulled at the woman. The woman replied quietly, "I want to stay here" "Five. Six." "You can stop counting," she said. She opened the fingers of one hand slightly and in the palm of the hand was a single slender object. An ordinary kitchen match. The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm


throat. “So, how do I help?” “Yeah, what’s the plan, Doc?” Grip said, arriving in the hold, a pro linebacker ready to play ball. His determined expression and no-nonsense demeanor were a welcome sight. “Grip.” Viv acknowledged him with a nod and a tight-lipped expression. She patted her thigh pocket, unzipped the top flap, and withdrew a small device. “What is that?” Selleck said. “BioScan… always keep it with me.” Sleek and compact, the palm-sized device performed a comprehensive range of health assessments and tests. With its projected 3D high-res display, it provided her detailed medical scans and analyses of a patient’s condition in real time. It was equipped with advanced sensors and imaging technology that performed medical tests, including blood analysis, respiratory function tests, even brain scans. Additionally, it had advanced DNA testing capabilities, allowing her the ability to perform tests and provide personalized treatment recommendations based on a patient’s genetic profile. The device also had access to a vast medical database, allowing her to access the latest research and treatment recommendations coming out of the EUNF Research Labs. She leaned over and positioned the BioScan device directly over the crew member’s chest. She said aloud, “Initiate full spectrum anatomical analyses.” A three-dimensional medical avatar, a smaller version of what would typically be seen within any HealthBay, took shape above the patient, but almost immediately distorted, wavered, then was replaced with a hovering message: Insufficient Data—Anatomical Analyses Halted Grip said, “Maybe it’s those alien nanites, Doc … Hardy commented on them before. Guess they’re crawling all around in her.” She nodded. “Disrupting the device’s diagnostics …” She squatted, putting her satchel onto the deck, then placed a thumb upon the DNA- recognizing security clasp. “You know those drugs you got in there probably won’t work, right?” Grip commented. Viv ignored him, taking out a syringe and a single vial from one of the cartons. “Isn’t that needle thing … a little old school?” Selleck asked. Viv smiled, holding the syringe in her hand like a pencil, the needle pointing upward. “Sometimes old school is best for the situation,” she said, inserting the needle into the rubber top, penetrating the vial. She pulled the plunger back to the line to allow for a full dose. She tapped the syringe several times with her fingernail to usher any errant air bubbles to the surface. The Lincoln crew member closest to her was male; impossible to tell how old. He was in better shape than some of the others, which was like saying breast cancer was better than lung cancer. His mouth and lips were withdrawn, almost concave, a sign that his teeth had fallen out. The man’s skin was gray, loose and slimy in appearance. Tearless dull eyes stared up at her. If those eyes could talk, surely they would say, “Please. Put me out of my misery.” Viv couldn’t go there. Not now. Focus, Vivian. She chastised herself for not bringing masks and gloves. How could I be so stupid? Viv looked for a name tag. Wanted to acknowledge that she was