LOST ANGELS

David J. Schow

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

© 2011 / David J. Schow

Copy-edited by: Kurt M. Criscione

Cover Design By: David Dodd

Background Images provided by: Grant Christian

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION (BY RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON)

PAMELA'S GET

BRASS

CALENDAR GIRL

THE FALLING MAN

MONSTER MOVIES

AFTERWORD

INTRODUCTION

David J. Schow is my friend. Has been for years.

I'll try and ignore that; be objective. Either way, I promise you, this will come out the same.

If you've read even a little of David's extraordinary work, you know what I mean when I say he's something of a be-bop clairvoyant. Indirectly predicting trends. Setting others. Often mocking both; leaving unsettled imitators far behind. Indeed, in a field a climb with performing monkeys and dexterous copycats, David is like some finely made glockenspiel; endlessly inventive, always in perfect pitch.

All the stories collected in Lost Angels share a jazz immediacy; radiant, unconventional meters of sound and thought. These qualities alone would be more than enough for most writers to go far. David's work only begins there.

Observe his octaves. The countless choices available to him. When it suits his peculiar recipes, however complex, he can instantly abandon the dialects of anarchy. Then, effortlessly, he'll descend into perfect pools of formalism; a skilled defector who stuns with beautiful language. Call it lyrical, I'd agree with you. For as long as I've read him, he's always been something of a choirboy, however illicit his prose. I marvel at the impossible harmony.

Indeed, if you read David's work carefully, you'll sense the secret tenderness. It hides behind savage armament, careful to give only glimpses of itself. But the shadings will move you. Maybe a phrase. A quiet observation he seemed to coin for you alone. There is poignancy everywhere in his talent, amid the exquisite threat.

I don't know exactly where his rocket-sled talent comes from. I know something about his past. Family; emotional DNA. But it's all inadequate to explain how his gift might have occurred. It doesn't really explain a writer who over and over does more with a single short story than many do with a career. Read "Pamela's Get" or "Red Light?' They are breath takers and put innumerable horror novels to shame.

And always, there is that precarious, nuclear hum.

That flammable sense David gives you he's working without a fuse and if he goes too far, there's nothing there to save him. His characters share this plague. Throughout Lost Angels stories is a sense of real dread and danger. Aching. Madness. You can sometimes know why; how he does it. What you've responded to. But there are many times it simply isn't clear. It bends around corners too deftly, graceful beyond exact definition. But you are sure it's there, out to get you ... Like sensing menace and loathing in a stranger's neutral expression. You feel what isn't there. How can it be explained?

How can it be denied?

In David's frantically tiered work, as with superstitions, what is evoked is always what is most disturbing. The quiet, violent ruination his people are drawn into. The blue-digits-on-the-arm eeriness. The tragedy of the blood; its horrific inscription on walls and floors. The tension and hypnosis of the words. The perfect wrongness of everything.

When David moved to novel writing, his superb shorter fiction quickly got an older brother. His first major, showroom performance was The Kill Riff, an outlandish, razor-ride, braiding rock 'n' roll and horror in startling shades of red. The book garnered much respect and excitement among critics and readers. Other novels will certainly follow. David's interests expand as quickly as his talents and movies have been the next stop in an intriguing, rather meteoric career; moving images, ideally suited to the velocity of his visions on paper.

When David recently began in scriptwriting, an important career step which I was honored to help in bringing about, he scaled one more inky Matterhorn without looking down. And his skills prevailed once again, winning him instant advocates, much new opportunity in the eccentric rapids of Hollywood and, not incidentally, his first movie script ever written, produced. This is not usual. But somehow for David, it was.

As a man, David stands gunslinger-straight when you talk to him, gathered hair to mid-back. He is a striking Eiffel in his black clothes and boots and looks very much like a Boschian musketeer. Without intending it, he has a way of scaring people with his daunting speed of mind. But if you remain steady long enough to allow David's eclipse of lesser talents and company to simply occur, you'll find you can warm your palms on his friendship. He's also poisonously funny, with a sense of humor he should probably carry in a holster. If you've known him for a number of years, as I have, you begin to conclude he's not unlike one of those fascinations who can catch a whizzing bullet in their smile from fifty yards away, and hand it over like a high calibre Tic Tac. It's just David does it with dangerous ideas, provocative approaches. Thousand mile an hour brain twisters.

And he just smiles.

If I didn't know him better, I'd swear he was up to something ... The water balloon grin. The short sheeting, sociopathic amusement. The generally perverse twinkle. Sometimes you wonder where David ends and misdemeanors begin.

As brothers of the night, I've traveled with David, hung-out together in some strange places. Talked neck-deep into very bad hours. I've been compared to him, been one fourth of our version of the British Invasion with the Splatter Punk movement, being Gear and Fab and Virulent.

David and I will probably know each other forever; connected. Likely dissected.

And through it all, however insane it gets, two things remain clear to me:

1) as a writer, David is on fire.

2) the fire can't be contained.

So, I'm done.

Take it, pal.

Richard Christian Matheson

October 1989

Malibu, California

We look

into the eyes

of those

we have killed

and wonder

why they do not thank us.

PAMELA'S GET

"This is a scam, young lady. Or some sort of unpolished joke I lack the crust to understand."

That young lady had been aimed and fired like a bullet: Me Caesar - you bimbo. Jaime's lip tried to curl, but when pow-wowing with Pavel Drake it was always a more prudent strategy to maintain a corporate attitude, an unfeeling stonewall posture. Beneath the black slate circle of the cocktail table her fist locked tight, an evil flower, slowly feeding. She was going to have to tread very cautiously to get what she wanted from this man - this cruel and condescending being whom she had kept distant from any part of her life he might corrupt. Until tonight. Now she had a painful lot to do, and maybe not much time left to do it in.

That Obscure Object of Desire was a membership-only Beverly Hills venue waitressed by foldout-class women two steps down from the game show and soap opera stratum of failure. Some still managed a local television commercial or two; all were leftovers, staling, what a Hollywood Hopeful looks like on the wane. The cheap thrill was to witness these budding stars as they shanghaied themselves into topless duty after hawking carpets and spas on the tube, still desperately pretty, willing to risk nearly anything for one more shot at popcorn fame. Every customer was therefore a potential backer for a career breakthrough, so each got a generous smile ... and the only thing tainting the biological purity of such mutual parasitism was the bitterness calcifying each smile. Those smiles told you stories of how hope could sabotage lives.

Industry people - that is, movie, TV, and music video rollers, high and low - pointedly shunned the Object; some kinds of failures might prove disastrously communicable. The mainstay clientele consisted of businessmen who could appreciate such failure, in the way a conqueror might savor the captured vintages of a newly ransacked village. The Object offered the opportunity to taste the blood of one killed right beside you, and enjoy that taste because it meant you were still alive. Fat billfolds were entreated and a Hellfire Club mentality encouraged.

It was not a place a man would invite a woman for whom he held the slightest degree of good regard. It was a useful arena for tacit humiliation, or the nastier subtleties of revenge.

Jaime watched Pamela Drake's father reread the single typed page she had given him. "Maybe you should order a drink' he said, releasing a huge sigh, his eyes still relentlessly scanning. Seeking faults, footholds for assault.

A thinly misted glass of ice water stood untouched before her on its cocktail napkin. Drake's purely professional scotch and soda was half dead. At his beckoning a splay-breasted cooch hostess jiggled over to swap empties for fulls. Jaime did not want anything from the Object getting inside of her, but her throat was arid and she knew the way Drake's brain worked. A libation might signal some rough truce. Just this once. That was all she needed.

"White wine," she said. "Dry." Stay generic. One glass. Give a little that you might gain everything. If she had been out boozing with Pamela, outrageous new drinks in funny colors would have been the ground rule.

Fifty-six, without a thread of gray, was Pavel Drake of Drake Polyvinyl Products Inc. He dyes his hair, she thought, suddenly shocked. Any vanity implied a crumb of human feeling somewhere in the convolutions of this man's mean, small mind. In this place of hopelessness, where women were literally Objectified, it was a spark of hope.

Jaime needed hope. Because if the man sitting across from her did not affix his signature to that piece of paper, she was going to die.

Tears had rinsed the mascara down Jaime's face hours before. There was no denying that the person in the box had been her best friend - the kind you are permitted one per lifetime, with luck; the kind you win if the timing is just so and the clockwork of the universe smiles on you in its random way. Jaime had watched the box slide into the ground at half past ten in the morning, signing off the eight years of that friendship, leaving her to hold nothing but death and thoughts of death.

She refused to believe the way she had just stood there, dumbly, Wayfarer shades hiding the ravaged state of her eyes, her black stiletto heels sinking slowly into the cemetery turf as Pamela was subjected to ritual and clumsy eulogizing. She had died intestate so there had been no cremation; whatever she had insisted upon in private did not count here. Case closed. The box's showroom finish was kissed by grave dirt, and the strangers in attendance (relatives lacking better diversions this weekend) would soon depart to make merry on Pavel Drake's tab, their pocket obligation dispatched. If there was a casting house where one rented extras for funerals - natty folks with gerbil eyes and tight, insurance-broker smiles - then Drake had scribbled them a hefty check. It was all very businesslike. Jaime's eyes kept looking for the camera crews.

Thank God for Jason.

He ignored the cattle and stepped across the line to wrap Jaime up in a genuine hug. She linked arms with him and hung on. They were the only two attendees on the far side of the grave, away from the tent and folding chairs.

People expect their parents to die some dim date in the future. No one is surprised when Grandpa stops drooling long enough to bite the big one. Jaime knew she herself would experience what the medics called an "event" if she drank or tooted or drove too fast, or kept getting horizontal with those faceless and monied Brentwood body-builders. They had great asses, charm and cash to burn, and hard chromium eyes that flattened and rejected her once the contour of flesh beneath clothing was no longer sufficient mystery to hold them. When you saw yourself crying in the mirrors, when your own eyes reflected back the pain inside, then you expected bad news, if only subconsciously. But buddies just did not keel over from unannounced pulmonary embolisms, not after a 20/20 checkup. Especially not buddies like Pamela, who seemed put on the earth to babysit you through one crisis after another. They were not supposed to die at twenty-eight, sitting on a sofa, eyes open, holding cold coffee in a mug that read MY OTHER COFFEE CUP IS A MERCEDES. No.

The tears just would not stanch, and Jaime hated her own loss of control. There could never be enough tears for Pamela. Mickey was nowhere in sight; he hadn't bothered to show up. This angered Jaime, and she saw that Jason was flat pissed. His eyes glinted as they scanned the group and came back to her, minus Mickey. Then they settled into a dull expression of hurt and loss.

Jaime knew then just what had been lost, to all of them.

She could call up a picture postcard-perfect image of the foursome right now: Pamela, cross-legged on a leather hassock in her living room, sipping white Bordeaux and waving her hands. Jason would be on the floor, unconsciously assuming a Sears’ catalogue model pose so perfect it was funny. He'd refill glasses and sit with one forearm hooked around Pamela's thigh in a comfy way that looked possessive yet not restrictive. He hated being what he called the "whore of fashion" and so was shaggier than GQ might dictate. He was sexier than an incubus anyway. While Pamela animatedly held forth, he'd roll his eyes in that here-we-go-again expression that made him look like a befuddled cocker spaniel.

And then came Mickey, less polished, not as brash, but still a contender. His position would be directly across from Pamela's, and he would lean into her commentary as though inviting charades. Unerringly, he would call from the air the very words her gesticulations begged, causing her to take a big gulp of wine and nod yes, yes!

Last, watching all, submerged in the cushions of Pamela's throne-like Prince recliner, eyes bemused and just visible above the silvery rim of the wine goblet, would be her. Jaime. Thinking.

A perverse, I-told-you-so feeling welled up within her. More than once, she had dutifully dunned Pamela about neatening her affairs on paper. Both had acknowledged that day in the misty future when one would precede the other into death, leaving the other to clean up and carry on. Neither of them had counted on their coffee conversation lopping over into nerve-numbing reality so bloody soon.

Now it was just one more thing to prompt the tears.

"I want to be cremated when I buy it," Pamela had said. "I hate the idea of people standing around, sniffling, going oh woe! while I do nothing but suck formaldehyde, you know what I mean? Yuck." Her eyes, deep green, lambent as the glass of a champagne bottle, scanned Jaime's neat rooms. Her lips busied themselves, worrying, as she contemplated just what she did want at her funeral, instead.

Pamela was a slender woman, given to jeans and Reeboks and the first tee or sweat off a chair back or doorknob that could pass the Pamela Drake patented Nasal Cleanliness Test. She'd settled down on the floor, nursing one of Jaime's new Napas mugs, heavy porcelain and full of hot cinnamon coffee. Her fingertips, nails bitten rigorously to the quick, traced patterns in the burgundy carpeting.

Jaime had gone to the bedroom to shuck her working duds. Pamela raised her voice. "Don't you ever get the feeling those uniforms are gonna smother you?" She rose and wandered into the hallway. The bedroom door was demurely half-shut.

"Nope" came Jaime's voice from beyond. "Did it ever occur to you that if you had been born ten years earlier, you would have been sucked into the hippie mythos and would now be a screaming, headband-wearing anachronism?"

"Ho, ho, ho."

"I'm serious, girl. Put together 1984 and designer denim and you get uniforms that would do Orwell proud."

Pamela booted the door open, grinning like a gremlin. Jaime, naked to the waist, yelped and jumped for cover, then gave it up as hopeless.

"Hey, whoa, it's only me!" Pamela's hands were up. "I come to learn, not to grope. I want to glimpse corporate America with its uniform off"

"Do you mind?" Pamela was always jumping frantically ahead, and Jaime resented straining to keep pace. When the decorum had been passed out, Jaime had gotten both her own and Pamela's shares.

Pamela blew out breath in a huff. "Geez, okay, already!" She lifted her arms and stripped off her Ducks Deluxe T-shirt, tossing it to the floor and seizing Jaime's bare arm to drag her to the dressing mirror. She posed them side-by-side, adopting an exaggerated buddy stance with one hip cocked. "There. Check this out. The gene pool doesn't have a prayer."

Jaime covered her eyes and laughed, helpless now.

She admired the casual street-poet disdain with which Pamela wore clothes, or discarded them. She liked Pamela's body as well. It was lower slung, larger breasted, not padded. She had scrappy, healthy honey-blond hair in contrast to Jaime's over-styled brunette, which got trimmed shorter every year in an endless process of distillation. Where Pamela had none, Jaime had fingernails - sculpted, medium length, glossy, perfect. Pamela had wide tiger-paw feet that Jaime at first thought were snubbed and odd looking, then came to love for their musculature and power. Pamela squinted, going on tiptoe to hold her right breast level with Jaime's left. "I think your tits are more proportionate than mine." she said with an absolutely straight face. "I'm gonna be in trouble when I turn fifty."

The contact was unexpectedly electric; a thrill zipped through Jaime's skin and her nipple condensed to a nub.

She had never wanted to have sex with Pamela. Call me Victorian. Many times she had wanted to hold Pamela while she slept, to warm her when the emotionally calloused men she attracted called "time" and began sniffing elsewhere. But she was pretty sure this did not mean she wanted to jump Pamela's bones.

Well. Maybe once.

Women had invented the thing the magazines now called "male bonding," she thought. Her love and friendship with Pamela expressed itself in a million tiny gestures and touches - tactile reassurance for the constitutionally handicapped. A superstitious shielding against urban hostilities, built like a flawless pearl, layer upon layer accumulating day by day. Pamela was her Hyde half, different, damned near opposite, but essential. At times she could be infuriating. Jaime had recorded so much about her - things that were annoying, even insignificant, but which resonated later and now made her want to weep to mourn their permanent loss. The queer tic Pamela developed, for example, when something pierced her armor and punctured her feelings - a rapid-fire batting of one eyelid plus a startled, quick sniffing noise as though she was recoiling from an actual blow. Her maddening use of non-words. Excape. Idear. Irregardlessly. Her approach to laundry, which up until recently had been to dump in half a box of detergent and set the machine on HOT.

HOT could deal with anything. Other traits were less quaint.

"You didn't ask me how my folio went down at Avatar Publishing." Pamela would say. "I took it in two days ago."

"Oh, I was wondering about that." Jaime would begin, dreading what came next. "How'd it go?"

"You're so tied up in what you're doing, you don't care."

"Don't give me that, of course I care." Jaime was confrontational and often not as gentle as she might be in such engagements. She had to stay in character. "So, how'd -"

"You're just asking me now because I brought it up!" Pamela would get petulant and stick out her lip (See, you don't really care.)

"No. Seriously. How'd it go (Goddamnit!)?"

"I don't want to talk about it." Which meant, of course, I win. And just when Jaime would be ready to scream and tear hair, Pamela would humanize. "I guess I'm really a bitch, huh?"

(Go on, tell me I'm a bitch, that's what you want.)

Ready to shriek

At times like that, Jaime hated her best friend, knowing all along she still loved her twice as strongly. It was a problem now and then, as it is any time you get to know another human being intimately. But she did need Pamela to know she would always be there for her ... even if Pamela pissed her off beyond rational endurance.

The carpeting, the Napas mugs, the wardrobe were all courtesy of Jaime's rise in retail from assistant buyer to buyer for Sanger Harris. Now, instead of lording over the paperwork for Glassware, Linens, and Bath Shoppe, she got to make the purchasing trips to New York and points past. Such work necessitated a wardrobe that Pamela would have considered an insurmountable feat of program planning, and a methodical approach to documents totally at odds with her pile-file habit.

1984 has come and gone Pamela said, jumping ahead to pour Jaime coffee while her friend made a pit stop in the bathroom. "In 1980, I figured we'd all be dead by then anyhow. Now I guess it's 1990?'

Jaime emerged in slacks and an oversized, shapeless epaulette shirt from Banana Republic. On anyone else it would have been all wrinkles. "You'd better not just die on me! Without telling me, warning me first."

"I won't. I promise. But did you hear what I said about cremation? What do you think?"

"I want to sell my body to science - if I don't die old and decrepit, that is. Let 'em recycle me. Why trash corneas like these? I mean, have you ever seen corneas this classy?"

Pamela giggled. "Not a bad idea?' She pondered it, but only for an instant. Then she was off and running toward whatever came next. She never wasted too much time on a single topic; it was another lineament of her character that her anal-retentive corporate daddy hated most. Finally, she said, "Have you got a will, Jaime?"

Her response was too offhand. "Sure." She had never mentioned it to anyone. More forgotten paper.

Pamela seemed to go far away fast. "I didn't know."

"Hey ... I left everything to you, kiddo." It was the only response Jaime could think of to lighten the tone.

Pamela's voice remained tiny. "Oh. Good."

That, for Jaime, summed up Pamela's lifelong hate affair with documents. It had been inspired, doubtless, by her father's obsession with same. No insurance. No will. No messages. Nothing.

Nobody dies this young.

When Jason caught Pavel Drake staring at them over the flower-bedecked casket, he put a protective arm around Jaime. His nearness was comforting, even if the day was too muggy and her glove-tight formal getup too close.

"He's probably checking out my legs," she said.

"It's sweltering out here," Jason said, breaking eye contact with the far side of the fresh grave. "But I'll be goddamned if I'm going to stand around with those mouth breathers under her dad's little circus tent."

"I was thinking the same thing. Have I ever told you what dear Daddy did at Pamela's birthday party?"

"You'll have to ... some other time." They leaned into each other. It would be so easy to simply split the funeral and go home with Jason. If they no longer had Pamela ... well, who did they have?

It was Maurois, as Jaime recollected, who wrote "In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others." Approval of your best friend's lovemates (or books) was nice but usually inappropriate, if not embarrassing. In the case of Jason Parrish, the test was irrelevant. He was the sort of guy whose food looked better than yours because he had ordered it.

Pamela and Jason had met in Chicago at a horror film titled Piece by Piece. Charming. The screening had been downtown at Facett's Multimedia, and Jason had come to review it for the Trib. They were the only two who lasted through to the end credits. They wound up warming a booth at some sleepy suburban coffee shop while predawn snow drifted down to bury the city.

Career-wise, Pamela had lit off on another of her flank attacks, and half a year had passed. Jaime knew she would soon be magnetized back to her home ground. The care packages and correspondence were voluminous enough to fill a Knudsen dairy crate. When Pamela returned, live and in person, Jaime had filed the crateful of memories in the rear of her clothes closet.

Near the end of the Chicago phase had come one postcard Jaime never forgot. In it, Pamela had specified the qualities she preferred in her closest friends, and its implication was that the arrival of Jason on the scene had completed her personal equation for happiness. During one of their thousands of long-distance calls (the bills for which overrode the gross national product of Paraguay), Jaime had gotten the lowdown on Jason in salacious detail.

Pamela had gone on at length about how considerate he was in the sack, and Jaime thought ruefully of little acorns and mighty oaks.

Jason got fired from the Tribune, but he had savings, and Pamela gladly filled the gaps. Then the film magazine she was designing collapsed, and she flew back to Jaime. Two months later, her connections in graphics yielded up a post at the Herald Examiner, and Jason was booked west on United.

Jaime's attraction to Jason was crude, at first, and entirely the fault of Pamela's giddy enthusiasm. She had seeded in Jaime the sort of interest that could not really be helped. Or stopped. It had taken a few months, but the inevitable finally happened.

Jaime felt the sparks jump across her nerve endings.

Pamela had gotten roped into an all-night session of paste-up, purely a la carte, at good pay. Jason had been loafing around her apartment; it was his day off. And Jaime had dropped by with a bottle of Gray Reisling. No excuse was needed.

It was not merely the unspoken commonality between them. In the end, Jaime had moved first, casually touching him when their automatic dialogue ran thin. Their embrace quickly waxed to critical mass. They were blameless. They finished folded together on Pamela's fake Persian rug, naked, purring, and spent.

To Jaime's certain knowledge, Pamela had never guessed. Today, only the vibrations of unease lingered. She found it difficult, even with him right beside her, to recall the specifics of how they furiously plundered each other in a pile of still-warm clothing, except that she had passed into light unconsciousness following her third orgasm. Pamela had been right about his magic tongue.

"I'm sorry," she said to the casket. "I wish you were here so I could tell you I'm sorry, so you could get mad, so we could make up. It only happened that once. I guess I messed up. But you promised you wouldn't die on me. Does this make us even?"

It was too damned easy to forget how much you could love someone, until they died and it became impossible.

The unconcerned mourners filed away and Pavel Drake beckoned the cemetery attendant, who released the catches on the aluminum rack supporting the casket. Canvas straps slowly unreeled, clicking metronomically, and the box containing Pamela settled into the dark hole.

It was almost as if Jason's infidelity had been unthinkable to Pamela. Or just not relevant. With Mickey, she'd tried to matchmake.

"You want to fuck Mickey, doncha?" Pamela had opined at lunch one day. It was during the hiatus before Jason had come to Los Angeles and he and Pamela had spent a whole weekend in bed before emerging into the daylight to say hello. She could get spiteful or sharp when she wasn't getting laid regularly.

"Say what?" Jaime returned with a pained expression.

"Oh, Mickey's attracted, you bet. I saw him gobbling you up with his eyeballs."

"Jump his bones, maybe, but sleep with him, never. I'd get athlete's sheet." They both laughed. Tension defused.

Mickey was the one who never forgot Pamela. He picked the most appropriate oddball Christmas gifts for her and beat everyone to the punch line by phoning her at midnight sharp on each of her birthdays. Mickey Banks and Pamela were a pair that quickly discovered they were better friends than lovers. The thing that endeared Mickey was his knack for bestowing just the right words to vocalize feelings on those rare days Pamela found herself inarticulate over some transient grief. He never overlooked dates important to her. He was constitutionally incapable of it. Maybe that was why he had ducked the burial. There was no more Pamela to remember ... except for the one inside their heads.

Mickey had saved Jaime from Pavel Drake at Pamela's twenty-fifth birthday party.

After four flutes of Perrier Jouet, Pamela had begun to pout and sink into her "quarter of a century" bad-rap. Her smile had turned tipsy, brittle, and forced. The whole awkward bash had come at the insistence of Pamela's father, who Jaime had heard was a big plastics baron. She had retreated to the wet bar to grab a sparkling mineral water, and somewhere behind her Jason proposed a jokey toast to lighten the mood. Ah, the things we suffer for our friends

"We've achieved eye contact several times, dear, but I don't believe we've been formally inflicted on each other." Jaime turned around and shook a hand. "Pavel Drake. I'm Pamela's father. The one who's getting stuck with the bill for this rodeo."

They traded chat; Jaime thought of empty calories. She had only heard penny dreadfuls about Pamela's father, from Pamela. By the time she got a peek at his engraved business card and had mentioned her own job in retail, she saw the wattage in his eyes bump up and realized that the brown stuff eroding the ice in his glass was not tea.

He nodded too much as he talked, working his lips, probably because they were getting numb. "Good advancement in retail," he said. "Upward mobility. I admire that. It's always been Pamela's big problem - no ambition. She daydreams, you see. Twenty-five and nowhere, and she wonders why she's not happy, and with her great imagination she can't figure out why." He sniffed imperiously and glanced at Jaime's bosom before meeting her eyes again. "Oh, my daughter has a terrific imagination, Miss Ralston. But it's unproductive; she can't turn a penny profit with it. Twenty-five now. And I'm beginning to fear she's never going to amount to anything."

Already Jaime's body was begging to flee, but for Pamela's sake she made a game try: "I wouldn't say that, Mr. Drake. She's knocking out a nice little berth for herself with the graphics and designs and layouts. She's always seemed most interested in the mechanics of publishing, and she's fascinated by processes, not—"

He cut her off with an impatient ahhh noise of discontent and a wave of his hand. She counted three gold rings. "That magazine horseshit." he spat. "I offered her a flicking vice-presidency and apprenticeship when she turned twenty-one. None of this entry-level ass crap. Fifty large per annum to start, with perks and deductions out the wazoo. And here she is ... farting around with this pissant magazine diddly. Jesus Christ in a Handi-Van ... "

He drifted, then refocused. His hand lit upon her shoulder, to perch. "Now, I think you understand how the business world works, don't you, dear? What'd you think if I offered you a position, hmm? I don't know where you came from, but you look like you'd be pretty good."

Jaime could not believe she was staring into his sharktooth leer, wincing at his one-hundred-proof breath, suffering a snapshot nightmare of the sort of position Pamela's father had in mind. It almost took her balance away.

Someone tapped her shoulder, causing Drake to snatch his hand back. "Care to dance, m'lady?"

It was Mickey Banks, in his black shirt and jeans and corduroy jacket and cowboy boots, and Jaime wanted to embrace him madly. She turned while Pavel Drake was still on hold. "There's no music," she said.

"I'll hum," he said, and did, pulling her free. Jaime knew Mickey's combat smile. The grin on his face was almost it. "Excuse us, please, Mr. Drake."

"Yeah, right?" Drake gestured loose-jointedly with his glass. As Mickey led Jaime away, she thought she heard Drake mutter fucking cooze.

"Anything you want is yours, Banks," she said once they were across the room and safe. "God, my brain just blanked, Pamela's dad... " She bit her knuckle and made a face.

"Yep. Pretty repulsive, huh?" He took a neat gulp of vodka and orange juice. "Whenever he starts cranking up his blood alcohol, I get this knotted fist right in my sternum. It won't unclench till I get out of range. I see his sheer charm rubbed you the same way."

A sympathetic phantom pain blossomed near her heart, in the hard knot of cartilage where her ribs met. "I feel sorry for Pamela, most of all."

"Me too. Imagine having that guy bounce you on his knee. Daddy Dearest. He drove Pamela's mom straight into the most expensive lunatic asylum in town. She died there." He saluted something imaginary with his glass.

Jaime paled. "I had no idea." Pamela had made a few shrugging allusions to an unpleasant childhood but had never burdened anyone with specifics. Except Mickey. It figured.

"It is but one single chapter in a whole rancid serial," he said knowingly, squeezing her hand.

She nodded. "I guess I didn't realize what she was up against. But she's got you and me, right? And Jason. Jason's good for her."

"She's nuts about him?"

Several couples away, Pamela was threatening to douse Jason with bubbly if he did not cease with the dumb toasts. A cork went bang and somebody got drenched. Everybody laughed.

"Thanks, Mickey." She tilted forward to kiss him. Just as she made lip contact, he averted his head so that she got his cheek.

"Be good?" He smiled, putting two fingers to her lips. "I'm not made of iron, you know."

Jaime knew. Athlete's sheet, indeed.

This was no joke. The casket lid was not going to pop back; Pamela was not going to sit up and yell gotcha. That would have blown Pavel Drake's tubes, all right. On the other side of the hole, Pamela's father shook hands and kept a stiff upper. He might have been blowing smoke at some fund raiser. Jaime imagined his eyes, behind their tinted glass, stripping and ravishing her.

The burden of remembrance is a weighty thing, she knew now, intimidating enough to bow the shoulders of the spiritually weak. Responsibility to the dead often starts time bombs ticking within the survivors when they discover that death is not TV not Disney, never easy or graceful or clean. Or temporary. Maybe Mickey was manufacturing his own brand of anguish right this moment. Jaime could not shove the Kipling poem "The Thousandth Man" from her mind, where it skip-repeated like a scratched record.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend.

On what the world sees in you,

But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend

With the whole round world agin you.

And that goes double for girls, she thought. There were nine hundred and ninety-nine usurious flickers, and more, afoot and breathing while Pamela was not. How could you be expected to stand against the world's indifferences and banal evils when the good guys kept dropping? No fair. And Pamela was becoming a larger part of her life every moment Jaime herself breathed. That dull void in her heart, the Pamela-sized hole that had been ripped in her, was the worst thing she could ever feel.

The hole filled by Pamela's casket was beginning to look more and more like a mass grave for all the good things they had shared. Four people had gone under today, not one. Jaime stepped backward, away from the loamy darkness of that pit, as though there was a risk of slipping in.

"I want to find Mickey," she said. "Now."

Jason shook his head. He was despondent now and had withdrawn to the point where he had not even noticed Jaime talking to herself - to Pamela - at grave-side. "I have to go home," he said after a deep breath. "I have something to do."

It's hitting him, she thought. He was going to burst into tears if she didn't stop hanging onto him, if she did not leave him alone right now. And the more she thought about Mickey's truancy, the madder she got. She could do this by herself. "Well ... fine. We'll link up later, yes?"

"Yeah. We'll all get together later."

He escorted her to her car and kissed her. It was like cold, damp fog on her lips. Like nothing.

Terrific - some moron was trying to pummel the front door right out of its rickety frame.

Mick's brain thumped right along. A caber had crash-landed on his skull. He shot to wakefulness muggy with sweat, his throat arid, his mouth clogged with a thick, dog-turd tang that had reached up and nailed his sinuses shut. He had come up from sleep too fast; his eyes had the bends. This was definitely the most cacklingly awful biorhythmic phase of his entire life. He arrghed to the corners of his studio apartment. The mambo beat between his head and the door just kept right on rocking.

The doorknob began rattling. Foot-shadows interrupted the clean crack of daylight separating the bottom of the door from its threshold. "Coming!" he croaked, at his faceless tormentor. He rubbed his face, and his palm came away glistening with perspiration and oil. Falling asleep fully dressed had made him look like his own unmade bed. His hair was awful. His stereo stylus, long since finished with side one of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, skritched out a soft cadence. Mick had once bragged - to somebody or other - about his totally manual, belt-driven, smooth-as-lucite turntable with its twelve-pound professional deejay platter. Now a forty-dollar needle was grinding itself to diamond dust because he had passed out, and not even in the middle of a decent album. Whatever had inspired him to unsleeve the Elton John oldie was forgotten now, irrelevant.

Pound, thump, pound, skritch-skritch. It was not a sterling afternoon.

He yawned cavernously, smoothed back his hair, and struggled to look intelligent as he unbolted and opened up.

"Christ, Mickey, I've been beating on this goddamned thing for five minutes! Why aren't you answering your phone?"

The adrenaline jolt helped wake him up. The woman on his stoop was simply lovely. His brain raced to catalogue her assets and did not resist the list as it rolled up. Though cogent, he was still woozy and fantasy-inclined.

The gray suit-dress was strictly conservative chic. Short, peppy dark brown hair. Large-lensed glasses in spidery frames, more young-exec stuff. The eyes, the color of amber and brandied chocolate. She was sinfully tall, cut with confidence and regal bearing. Strong chin, small mouth, laugh lines. His eyes gave her the once-over. Twice. A

"What the hell is wrong with you? Do I have a tarantula on my head?" She rolled her eyes and began to push past him. "Let me in - it's broiling out here."

A charming stranger indeed, Mick's romanticist brain concluded. But his body instinctively shifted to block intrusion into his home by a stranger, charming or less, and when they collided she dropped her shoulder bag.

"I'm sorry?" he said, bending to retrieve. They nearly bonked heads. "I mean, I beg your pardon? You're not a Jehovah's Witness or something ... I hope?"

She yanked the bag free of him without thanks and gaped as though he had just asked her to suck his toes.

He shrugged. "So what is it? Census bureau? Meter reader? Avon lady? What can I do for you, um ... ?" His eyebrows went up, urging her to reveal her identity. It was a good place to begin.

She stopped dead for only an instant, then shook her head with the fatefulness of a woman who must endure a thick-headed little brother. "You picked a hell of a day to screw around with stupid jokes, love. It hasn't even been six hours. You going to tell me you forgot to set your alarm?" Her anger was growing. Past the frank glare in her eyes, Mick could see the redness of some recent hurt.

He coughed out a commiserative laugh, which she did not share. "Uh ... what are you talking about, Miss?"

"Mickey! What's the secret word today? Too much blow on our Fruit Loops this morning? Why are you being such an asshole?"

She tried to enter; he rebuffed her again.

"I'd really rather not let anyone in," he said. "My place is kind of a mess."

She looked upset, disoriented. "Your place is always a hog wallow, Mickey'

That was another thing, Mick thought, his pique kicking up from preheat to simmer. Where did this (admittedly gorgeous) nonentity get off calling him that? Mick was clipped, sharp, rock and roll, he liked it. Mickey preceded mouse, and he could live without either.

He overrode her, firming up. "Lady. I do not know what you're talking about. Honest. I do not know who you are. And I don't know if I'm as eager to talk to you as I was fifteen seconds ago."

He saw the change wash over her expression, and its speed caught him unprepared. He could sense the gooseflesh scaring up on her back, the snap chill of a suppressed shudder, so out of place in the midday heat. Her mouth unhinged, drifting open. She seemed to dwindle horribly, like a person trying to shrink against an unyielding wall.

"Oh ... no," she whispered. Not to him.

He fought to lighten up, be boyish on short notice, to bring her back to where she had been seconds before, because her irritation was better to experience than her abrupt fear. He could hate himself later. "Hey, no, I -"

At the sound of his voice she began to edge back along the narrow breezeway, as though she could see him transmogrifying into a drooling werewolf.

He shook his head and got pain. The woman on his stoop was crazy; next case. His concern was easily overwhelmed by the idea that this was more than a joke ... it was an assault entrapment, or apartment flimflam, or other setup. Los Angeles was packed to the spires with predators that could look like this woman.

"Fine," he said, shutting the door. The bolt sprang automatically.

He heard a muffled no, almost a cry of pain, and the futile thump of a small fist against the door. He ignored it, making for the bathroom and many aspirins. He was in no mood; he just wanted to lie down and go away for a while. His bones and muscles ached, empty of vitality. He felt like a train wreck.

After a while the woman, whoever she was, however she had gotten his name, gave up and went away for good.

Jaime tried to swallow hot tears and her throat knotted shut. Strangers gawked at her wet face from their own cars.

It was Mickey, Mickey Banks, he of the corduroy jacket and cowboy boots and athlete's sheet, who had just slammed his door in her face. His rejection, his wariness, his utter non-recognition of her was frightening. It made her stomach cramp helplessly. His eyes held the same lost expression as Jason's had, at Pamela's gravesite. Jaime's hand tried to quiver; she gripped the wheel tighter.

Jason's machine had answered five times when Jaime ran out of payphone change. When she pulled up at his address, she saw exactly what she would see again on that evening's metro news.

The manner in which Jason Parrish had killed himself after Pamela Drake's funeral was reeled off in a hydrophobic torrent of babble by a TV newshound broadcasting from inside a fluttering yellow LAPD cordon. Jaime watched the slow zoom up to the wide-open main door and the equally predictable closeup of a body-bagged shape on a stretcher en route to the ambulance. It lolled.

Tomorrow the Herald Examiner would bid adieu to one of its own, with an even bigger wallow in the grisly Known Facts.

Jason Arthur Parrish, 31, was found dangling from his dining-room archway, his neck pulled long, face a deep indigo from cyanosis, eyes bloated and dry. His tongue had swollen to the size of a black hockey puck. The nylon cord that had strangled him had stretched as his corpse sagged, but the give did not matter. His feet still cleared the floor by ten inches.

There was a note, displayed prominently on an antique writing desk Pamela had helped him pick out at Poor Ruth's. The nylon cord had come from a camping trip to the Sierra Nevada range that life in retail had prevented Jaime from joining.

Mercifully, the only photo to be included in the paper would be a staff glossy three years old. The note would not be reproduced. Jaime already knew it was about nothing but Pamela.

Jason was gone. Mickey was gone. While Jaime had endured a nasal recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by a hired minister with a game leg, Pavel Drake's hired movers had laid siege to Pamela's apartment. They received time-and-a-half for Sunday work, plus a fat tip for speed. By the time Pamela had filled the boxlike hole she would never leave, another box - a U-Haul storage locker much like a tomb itself - had been efficiently loaded with her possessions. The slickness of the arrangement would have offended Pamela, who would resent being so easily erased.

There was only one piece of Pamela left, and Jaime fled to it.

The anarchic untidiness of Jaime's clothes closet was a source of queer pride. With her promotion had come total whirlpool chaos in this one niche of her otherwise ordered living space; here was a guilty pleasure she could hold in common with Pamela. In the back of the closet (perhaps sucked back there as food by the forgotten and now-sentient blobs of polyester waiting in the darkness) was the Knudsen crate. In it were the letters, the snapshots, the physical residue of Pamela's passage through her life. It was more than enough to get drunk on.

The crate was the only piece of Pamela that Pavel Drake had not absorbed. There had to be a reason Jaime was permitted this one piece, and she found it, forgotten, buried in the back of the crate, Jaime thought of a Chinese box puzzle.

It was a fireproof Smythe document box, a steel rectangle in outdated industrial maroon, with a lock. Pamela had provided no key. Dimly, Jaime remembered being handed the box and being asked in a casual way to stash it.

Pamela's irresponsibility with minutiae was legendary. Jaime maintained a rolodex; Pamela had been known to write phone numbers in ink on the back of her hand. She only threw out the receipts she would later need. Jaime balanced her checkbook; Pamela's utilities usually avoided termination by scant hours. Clearly, more complex items like insurance - or wills, say - were scheduled for the turn of the century, because twenty-eight-year-olds should not have to worry about dying until later.

The incidents with Mickey, with Jason, had flooded Jaime with a sense of lost control, urgently accelerating. If her best friend Pamela had anything to say to her after her death, now was the time to hear it.

Breaking the Smythe box's lock with the blade of a butcher knife was distasteful, akin to violation. A rape. Jaime wondered whether Pavel Drake's movers had broken into Jaime's apartment, similarly, to plunder.

The lid squeaked when she bent it back. Even if she had recalled the box earlier, she never would have considered peeking. Pamela had banked successfully on her trust. Jaime felt a pang of resentment at being so predictable.

Boxes within boxes. Suddenly this did not look so random, so unplanned, so Pamela.

The tear tracks were dry on her face. She lifted out long pages, legal sized, stapled to sky-blue stock backings, folded into oblongs and tucked into a vinyl folder. Her heart thudded and her breath pulled short. From Pamela of all people, could this be something for the record in black on white?

A handwritten note had been placed on top but had fallen to one side and gotten creased thanks to the box's rough ride. Jaime immediately recognized the distinctive paraph of her best friend's script:

Dear Jaime,

Please trust me when I say what your going to see here is real. I'm sorry you have to find Out this way, but if your reading this than I'm probabbly dead. You know how! work, your my best friend. So maybe youll understand without bad explanations. Your the puzzle solver. I love you.

Pamela

It was Pamela, sure as hell. The horrific spelling and grammar were ironclad verification. New tears made a bid for escape but Jaime swallowed them down. The note had been rendered with a soft-tipped art pen, in purple, Pamela's favorite color. She favored such pens for all kinds of jotting and had thrown a fit when the manufacturer terminated them a couple of years back. The violet ink had already begun to fade.

You could not buy these pens anymore at any price. Like Pamela, they were part of the past now.

Jaime unsnapped the folder and counted three separate documents, each headed with the legend AGREEMENT in Gothic. The text nosedove straight away into legalese so dense that Jaime's eye rejected such unpalatably large glops. These were contracts. Her recognition of them scared her a bit - it was like Pamela sneaking into the paperwork she hustled daily at Sanger Harris.

The top one was drawn between PAMELA LYNN DRAKE and JAIME ANYA RAWLSTON. On the last page she saw Pamela's signature, again in florid purple ink.

In the adjacent blank, written with the same pen, Jaime found her own signature.

The contracts seemed to jump from her lap, to fan themselves across the floor. Her throat dried up and began to pulse achingly. She had never seen these papers before.

Nervously, she gathered them, checking the other two, fearing what she would see.

The second bore the name JASON ARTHUR PARRISH. Jason had been at the funeral, holding Jaime because there was no longer a Pamela to hold. The third contract was in the name of MICHAEL MARQUIS BANKS.

Known to his intimates as Mickey.

Her eyes hurt from scrutinizing the contracts. She squeezed them shut; tried to force more tears to come ... and got nothing.

She sat rereading Pamela's postcard, the specific one from Chicago she had remembered earlier. It had waited for her in the crate. Her eyes drifted over it dryly. Here was Pamela's description of their cozy little foursome in the days before madness and funerals.

From the be-damned contracts to the postcard and back again she went ... and her heart began to thud hard and fast. The love had been drained out, but there was still enough muscle remaining to give her whole body a sound jump at a sudden shock of inspiration.

The trendy pressure to have babies before thirty-five was nothing compared to the deadline with which she was now squared off. She raced back to her closet. An old Smith-Corona manual typewriter had been lost in there for at least as long as the Knudsen crate, and now she needed it as badly as air to breathe.

When she found it, she phoned Pavel Drake.

The silence on the line was adjudicatory, punctuated by the measured respiration of a self-important man, weighing trifles. Drake had delivered a terse reminder that any imposition less than twenty-four hours after his only child's funeral deserved nothing from him past an angry hang-up. Jaime had known he would not disconnect for two reasons. Once she had rejected him. By making contact now, she was offering him another shot, an opportunity to salve his bruised ego. His was the type of mercenary business mind that would never forget any slight, no matter how trivial. Now he might make her crawl, or wait, or beg his help. Now he might do something so small as make her run the telephonic gauntlet to be granted the privilege of speaking with him.

More important, she mentioned the Smythe box - the single item that had eluded the neat dragnet of Pamela's life arranged by Drake's legal bulldogs.

Beats of silence on the telephone can be exquisitely cruel. Drake wanted this acid quiet to slowly tear Jaime's heart out. He could not know that an hour ago she had run out of tears, and now her heart functioned only as a pump.

He instructed Jaime to ask for his table at That Obscure Object of Desire in half an hour. He called her Miz Ralston and made sure that he sounded properly put upon.

Before she flew out the door, she tried one last time to call Mickey. Or Mick. His line was already out of service.

Charlene the waitress faded, butt switching saucily to let Pavel Drake know she was still on call. Jaime took a tentative sip of her white wine, watching as the frost of condensation filled in her lip prints and restored uniformity to the surface of the glass. Drake had just made his snide remark about scams and polish and crust... whatever the hell that meant. "You want me to sign this" he said. His voice was low, disbelieving, calculatedly ugly.

"You have Pamela's power of attorney" Jaime said. "She can't sign it."

He caught her off guard by evidencing interest in her explanation. It was a trick of executive strategy - the lull before the kicker - but Jaime knew it. She had seen the momentary glint in his eyes. "Now you're trying to say that Pamela ... made up her friends? Imaginary friends, like little kids have?"

"She conceptualized her ideal friends. Then she created pacts, promises of duties including every trait from loyalty to good housekeeping, and inscribed them with pseudonyms. See? They're even notarized. I don't have to remind you how imaginative she was."

No, that was the thing Drake had disliked most about his daughter. It had prevented her from becoming like him and following his corporate footprint trail. That would have been an alternative version of Pamela ... and what had become of that possibility, Jaime now realized with abrupt horror. It was spelled out in one of the clauses on the contract headed JAIME ANYA RALSTON, because there is a fragment of every daughter that wants to please Daddy. Even if Daddy is a philistine, even if the daughter is intractably rebellious.

"Pamela is dead. That hurts me more than I can say, Mr. Drake. I'm sure it hurts you, too, and people tend to lash out when they're in pain?"

Again she spotted what might have been a ghostly wisp of human feeling, trapped in the darkness of his eyes, quickly engulfed. "Yes," he said, lifting his drink, then replacing it unsipped as though thinking better of the action. His stiff silence, just now, was a license for her to continue.

"If the contracts are bona fide, then my whole life history came out of Pamela's head. It's a great system - with one flaw. There is no provision for the contractor's death. She didn't factor it in; how many people under thirty bother with wills? But now that she's gone, the obligations of the contractees are discharged. Jason is dead. Mickey is gone ... or changed, I don't know. Either way he's not Mickey anymore. I was on the scene before either of them. Maybe that's how I lasted long enough to talk to you now."

Drake looked the page in his hand up and down one more time. It did not seem to surprise him.

"That's a new contract," said Jaime. "It supersedes Pamela's and grants me an existence independent of hers. It's simply worded to assure you I'm trying to gain nothing through trickery. A simple business proposition, Mr. Drake. You sign, and I hand over Pamela's file box, plus all her letters to me. A whole aspect of her you didn't see and never owned. No strings. All I get out of it is my own life, and I never bother you again:'

He shifted his glass on the black tabletop like a chess piece. He could press a legal claim to the contents of the Smythe box, but the only thing in it had been the contracts. He rested the page Jaime had typed on the table. It took up nearly half the dry area. "You realize I'm under no obligation to indulge this sort of ... behavior."

She leaned forward in entreaty. "Okay, so I'm as crazy as a firefly in a meths bottle. What's wrong with humoring me if you get something you want?"

Drake laughed. It was a harsh sound, like a cough. "I win either way. With a story like you've just told me, if you bother me again I can have you detained. If I endorse this fantasy fiction you've laid before me, you'll leave me alone. And if I don't - according to you - you'll vanish anyway, like the other two." He could taste the blood. "I think you've prepared for everything in this tactless scenario except for your bluff being called."

He produced a pen from a breast pocket and held it before her, like a magician preparing to prestidigitate. Jamie's heart went bang.

"I'll sign. But you must do something for me in return." He slid a brass-colored metal object across the slate tabletop. "Let's find out just how deeply you believe your own story, Ms. Ralston."

It was a hotel key embossed with a room number.

"Everyone gets what they want," he said.

The room seemed to plunge vertiginously. In one hideously elongated instant, she flashed back to the crude scene at Pamela's birthday party and realized that in some quarters the war never stopped, ever. The urge toward vengeance had swelled in both of them, poisonously heavy, dense as a tumor. That was how Pamela's letters had become her trump card. Let Drake win them and find out what his daughter really thought of him.

His angle of attack was clear. Here was a chance to slap her down, hard and humiliatingly, to neutralize her through collusion. His ejaculate could scorch away the tough fiber of her determination, which, in a way, he had been responsible for creating by founding Pamela's tortuous childhood - the upbringing that made her crave her imaginary allies just strongly enough.

Jaime saw the hotel key as a chance to spit in Pavel Drake's face, for Pamela, for herself. Payback time for all the grief and rotten karma. All the gesture would cost her was her existence.

I love you, Pamela, she thought bitterly, as her mind raced toward the hard truth of her situation. The end it reached was not pleasant to acknowledge.

I love you and I want to do right by you. But I'm also terrified I want to live very much. Would you call this a betrayal? Or common survival sense? If you would forgive me this, why didn't I tell you about Jason that once? And if you won't forgive me... is there anything I could ever do that...

Her soul was crippled, and odious, and it did what it had to. "Sign," she said, taking the key, already thinking that the true pain would be brief.

"In due time?" His smile was like a pleat in his face. "Excuse me for just a moment." He was all the smooth mercenary now. He had a fast colloquy with Charlene, and pointed toward Jaime. Then he disappeared into the neon murk near the restrooms. There was probably a meeting to cancel.

In Jaime's bag was Pamela's contract. She'd read it a thousand times today, and soon she might burn this mortgage on her life. Tucked into a fold of the document was the postcard, from which she hoped to draw strength. She examined both while Drake was gone. When she saw her signature side by side with Pamela's on the contract's final page, a solitary tear leaked from her eye. Just one. It burned coming out, a generous, salty reaffirmation of her own being. It struck the page and skidded through the middle of her name. The faded purple ink blotted and ran.

You could not buy these pens anymore, she remembered. They stopped making them. Pamela had gotten livid.

Charlene checked in at the bar and glided back to Drake's table just as a raucous stripper's hymn began to bump and grind out of the Object's migraine-sized PA system. She smiled at what she saw. Pavel Drake's latest Bambi had fled back to the forest, forgetting her purse and leaving behind a hotel key, an untouched drink, and a scatter of papers. With schooled motions Charlene swept up the bag and stuffed the papers into it. It was time for her to make a discreet trip to the Ladies. The postcard was the last item in. It featured a timed-exposure of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive at night. It would get chucked into the Object's dumpster along with the other junk just as soon as the wallet was vacuumed of cash and plastic.

Charlene cut loose a snort of disgust that caused her bare tits to bob. That girl, that amateur, had been young enough to be Drake's daughter, for christsake.

Dear Jamie

Phone not in yet but plenty of time to write as I got here just in time for the blizards, In re our "what do I want from my friends" disc earlier I gave it some thot and here it is, gameshow style: (1) I'd want a person who'd always be my friend and never forget me and always remember the right dates and places, which I'm lousy at. (2) A handsome-ass lover who loved me enough to die for me (oh romantic notion) ... or at least say so. (3) A buddy whose more organized than me, but who thinks like me - someone I could COUNT ON no matter what to take care of the odds and ends I allways forget & am too sloppy to finish, or something.

Somebody to be there for me, somebody JUST LIKE YOU, doo-dah, doo-dah.

Its freezing here. Windy City, big dealski. Outta space, stay tuned for next card. Miss you terribly and love you lots. STAY WARM, and XOXOXOXOX

Love,

Pamela

BRASS

The lovemaking was just fine. Stabilizing, perfect.

The medoc jug - how trendy - was a crimson third shy of empty. The sheets had been virgin cotton up until a couple of hours ago. Floating oil wicks had replaced the customary votive candles. From their many perches on a stylized bonsai of chrome, the wicks threw back tiny, star-filtered prongs of diffused white light. The air conditioner mumbled, pushing out cool. The lovemaking ... well, the sex had been terrific. Its afterglow was comfortably disorienting, a warm feeling the man in the bed hoped might grow more familiar with time, and thus more dimensional, and more perfect.

Green amplifier telltales winked from across the room. Grant Mantell was content to stare them down from his lazy splay across his newly inaugurated bed. The tape reel was a recording-studio-style ten incher packed with choice tracks of symphonic soundtrack music - selections Jennifer had dared him to identify without giving him a chance at fair competition. It had run dry nearly twenty minutes ago. Grant felt no digging urge to dash over and change it, or kill the machines, or anything. Apart from the new tape, Jennifer had showed up with an orgy of snackables - summer sausage, cheeses, chips, still-warm French sourdough bread - through which they had feasted shamelessly. Within arm's reach, a crumbling plug of cheddar was nailed to a small cutting board by one of Grant's carving knives. The blade caught some of the candlelight, and Grant wondered if the frequency with which he contemplated the ease of potential murder - or suicide - was abnormal. Thoughts, blackly thrilling, never straying beyond the broom-closet area of his mind, absorbed him.

He approved of his own casual control. Good for me. There were psychos in rubber bedrooms the world over who had somehow failed to acknowledge the sympathetic relationship cutting utensils had with food, who wound up making the Thanksgiving cutlery part of wifey's or hubby's anatomy. Men were not meant to stick women with knives - that was funny, goddamnit; funny must still be worth something. Luckily, Jenny was asleep and therefore incapable of deriding the chauvinism of her partner's dumb post-coital philosophizing. Her right arm and leg were laced over him; her breath brushed warmly against his neck in a regularly cadenced rasp that was not quite a snore. The sheets were impossibly twined around and over and under, damp-dry patches cooling in the dark.

He raised his head, the bed gave an obliging little creak, and the snow-white Alsatian snoozing beneath the stereo shelf lifted his turret-like head attentively. The broad, thick brush of white tail batted the carpeting in three hopeful thumps. When nothing happened, he lowered head to forepaws with a dog-shrug, staring into the dark with that peculiar, patient resignation that made him such an affable companion. Jenny had brought Max along, too. Max had gotten bored snitching tidbits and so had flopped near the door to doze and listen while his masters made friction.

Carefully, conscious of Jenny's slumber, Grant stretched his arms backward to lace his fingers through the intricate metal weave of the golden headboard. The bed itself was a wonder. Thinking of the bed made him look naturally toward his other recent acquisition, the mirror. It hung on the wall close by the bed's port side, overseeing the thin corridor of carpet on which he unceremoniously dumped his boots at bedtime. It was huge - three feet on a side, demanding leaded setscrews to secure its weight to the wall beams - and gaudy enough for a whorehouse. Its wide frame was of scrolled brass, inlaid with smaller idiograms reminiscent of the hood of an Indian incense burner. Hanging it next to the bed was an obvious and uninspired choice; realistically, it was the only place for it. The exterior wall featured timbers every three feet. This sucker was heavy ... but next to the bed it was at least stable.

Inside the slightly canted sheet of silver, Grant could see himself along with parts of Jenny in the bounce-back from the amplifier and candle lights. His hair was a riot. He adjudged himself a crowd face with an Irish nose and deep-set, glittering eyes. Black eyes; so intent that, one of the first observations Jennifer had made was "Your kind of eyes make stupid people feel uncomfortable." That had been at their first lunch together, and ever since their meeting she seemed to work at helping him with his self-image. She was anything but insecure herself, and his deferral to her critical abilities was great for his ego. Thus his carriage was not masculine (that would have been too simple) but authoritative. He was not movie-idol attractive, but with his character lines, what the hell difference did it make? And so forth.

It was a matter of perspective on oneself. There, see? He pursed his lips in the semi-dark. Thanks to TV commercials, nobody was happy; everyone was self-conscious and insecure. To such a cosmetically atrophied outlook, the goal of being handsome according to media rules was to end up in bed with a woman like Jennifer, he thought. It was the logic of commerce. He was outside it, totally, and here he was in bed. None of the stupid rules, therefore, were real.

Jenny would have resented comparison to a brainless TV muffin, anyway.

He looked back at himself in the mirror a second time, scrutinizing. He squinted. He wrinkled up his brow. He bared his upper row of teeth. In the dim light, and through the cheesecloth fog of his own narrowed eyelids, he saw himself reflected back as a demon. Some kind of vampire. The light molded his imagination into a vulpine countenance, satanic and grinning, just a few feet away.

He fought to maintain the accidental illusion for a few more seconds, fascinated. He perceived the gargoyle lines of the hungry face, saw the sharp slits of nostril and the pointed chin and the eyes, like glossy chips of obsidian. It was a medieval woodcut of Lucifer rendered into glass and stone.

And it returned his gaze steadily, hungering. Someone had told the bogeyman under the bed to slither forth for feeding time.

He relaxed his facial muscles and there was silent pain. The reversed image of the digital clock told him he had lain for more than five minutes with his face frozen into that bizarre rictus; five minutes that had been like thirty seconds. Now his eyes ached and his jaw was sore. A thin headache vein began to pulse wetly away and he grimaced. The face in the mirror grimaced back. It was his own face, the one with the great character lines and the Irish nose - his wild Irish nose, he thought crazily. There was no monster stalking him from the glass, no visage sporting deathshead eyebrows arched up in black contrails and fangs dripping bubbly gobbets of saliva. It had been perspective and faint light, yes, and of course the medoc. A lot of it sat in his bladder, but the alcohol fizzed away in his bloodstream with a red tingle. It reminded him of the way people got blitzed in pubs like the Hairy O or the Piece de Maurice, always winding up in the john and convincing their mirror-selves they weren't really drunk, before grinning like a fool and shuffling carefully out to rejoin the world.

After a moment of such roundabout contemplation (during which Max spot-checked the proceedings and, finding only more human frippery, worked on making the floor more comfortable) Grant thought he might like to try and make the demon come back for an encore. But what if he looked back up and the demon was already there, ahead of him, waiting?

He jerked his head up suddenly. A clean lick of auburn hair drooped across his forehead, simultaneously with that of the reflected Grant. No demon.

Somehow this did nothing to reassure him; he had been struck by the fancy and concentrated on it even harder. What if, someday, you were to glance into the mirror and see a malignant, demoniac version of your own face, meeting you eye-to-eye, unflinching? Smiling hideously under the awful brightness of a bathroom light, making movements you weren't making with your own face?

Dear God, what if it said something?

He glazed his eyes, the whites above the pupils becoming visible. The oil wicks seemed to intensify without, providing any real light at all. "My turn," he growled. "Now you get in the mirror."

A blackly exciting tendril of fear uncoiled in his stomach. His speech scared gooseflesh up along his arms, and the fine, light hairs there snapped to attention, prickling. He stopped to admire the terrorization he had wrought. Another second might have convinced him that a palpable threat perhaps existed a few feet away, in the mirror - a total product of his imagination. An English instructor at Cal State Northridge had once told Grant that he possessed no imagination whatsoever. That was not what caused his peculiar exhilaration. His actions had the tang of supernatural defiance, like pissing in Satan's face and then daring him to do something about it. Wow.

He smiled then, broadly, idiotically, thinking that this must be what was meant by the term enjoying yourself Here I am, enjoying my own self (and without masturbating, the Rodney Dangerfield imp in another quadrant of his brain was quick to add), and my reflection seems to be enjoying himself - itself - too.

Grant looked up to check. Inside its weight of brass the glass remained implacable while his image stared back at him with an identically sheepish expression. By Cromwell, he thought with detached wonder, I must still be a tad fuzzheaded.

As if agitated by his fantasizing (or stray brain-waves, leaking out to knock her rudely up from slumber), Jenny stirred, with a grunt that hinted at her return to the domain of the living and the crazy. Her hair hung every whichway in streaming black loops, and her eyes were slightly puffy with sleep as she rose on one elbow, mouth open, and caught sight of herself in the mirror.

Her face often pushed Grant into ruminations on the strange convergence of their lives. It always seemed surprising to him that Jenny was attractive, that he knew and she knew it especially, and that it was no big deal. Her face was not sculptured into the clean, perfect architectural flawlessness preferred by the purveyors of sterile fashion. Her mirror might have told another woman that her mouth was a tot too large and wide, that her chin was not well defined, that her eyes seemed too far apart. The concert of her facial components, however, certainly proved Poe's dictate that true beauty was largely a matter of strangeness of proportion: her face was darkly compelling, rather than blandly pretty. That was as close as Grant could pin it, and it served. Her height matched his own six feet to the inch; that leonine accumulation of jet-black hair usually served to accentuate her altitude further, and when she wore heels it became impossible. But now, curled into him in bed, she did not appear even vaguely Amazonian.

Jenny looked up into the reflection of her darkly compelling face and said, "Yuck." She covered her face with her hand and immediately parted the fingers so that a single agate-gray eye peered out for a second look. "Caught unawares again. With my pants down, to wit. So to speak." She yawned.

He glided his hand into her hair; indicated he was awake. He tried to suppress a tiny belch, but it billowed up through his innards with a rumble. Why couldn't burps or the grand old anal thunder ever rattle forth when one's love partner was dead asleep? The eyeball swiveled toward him in mock reproach. "Ah, excuse me."

"Me, too." Jennifer yawned generously again. "For falling asleep on you - literally, I mean."

"That's unconditionally okay."

"You are rather comfortable, you know."

"Thank you."

"What is it you're doing ... up there?"

"Staring at the pretty lights," he said. "Making faces at myself in yonder mirror."

"Aha - unbridled excitement in my absence, I see." She grimaced, trying to read the clock in the mirror, failing, then turning. "Have you been awake all this time?"

"Making faces for three hours?" she said as the digital box growled over to 4:02. "Since one A.M.?" When she became inquisitive her voice rose into an exotic register of inflection that almost classified as an accent. No one Grant had witnessed had ever believed her claim that it was straight Woodstock native (whatever that classified as); they always counted on some foreign port lurking in her past to validate their conjectures of mysterious background or eclectic blood.

Grant yawned this time, nodding in response.

"Thrilling," she said, deadpan.

"Yes, it was." He was not facing her. From there the conversation did not stop; rather, it became irrelevant. They ceased talking as though by telepathic agreement.

Under the hazed light the bed frame returned a golden aura as they rearranged themselves. Its brass was a bold but gentle presence in the room, like the fire of the oil wicks, or the silver and gold of the mirror in its frame.

Grant's head was angled sideways. He watched himself in the mirror, intermittently, until his eyelids became prohibitively heavy. Nothing peculiar happened.

But past this night, the first night Jennifer had passed in his new bed, he knew he would regard the mirror uneasily. It was a morbid idea, almost a touch paranoid, but he abruptly felt like the man who discovers his pretty tropical fish have teeth and an appetite for fingers.

When he projected this vague fear into the future, his heart bumped faster and he thought his prospects for deep and cozy sleep to be lost.

Sleep came with almost absurd ease. He dropped off as if anesthetized and did not consider the mirror again until the following evening.

"Assuming you can trust any doctor in town further than the distance between noses, mine and thine" Jennifer said around a mouthful of niçoise salad, "what was the verdict?"

A bow-tied waiter with ridiculously wide tortoiseshell rimmed glasses flounced past long enough to reheat Grant's coffee. Grant's eyes stayed on the curls of steam as he spoke. "Everybody else would have added, you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. They tack it onto the end of their questions, like they think I'm going to start crying or something. But in the end your feelings add up to a lot less than their need to pry."

"Like, please pass the salt ... you don't have to if you don't want to, but I want the goddamn salt –"

"Exactly." He was pleased she had not misinterpreted his complaint, or taken personal offense. He speared three of the smallest homefries he could find on his plate and forked them into his mouth. "You're right, though. All the lawsuits against hospitals and doctors around LA make me wonder a little bit. Anything expedient can be scribbled in on a death certificate if they're the least bit stumped, and we humble serfs will never be the wiser. But what they've settled on, as far as my father goes, is a hematoma. A little tumor full of blood in his brain. He keeled over in his living room and Mrs. Saks from next door found him in front of the fireplace. She peeked through a crack in the curtains; all the doors were locked. She hobbled back to her place and called the medics. He'd been dead almost a whole day when they collected him. A little sac swelled up with blood and burst; he hemorrhaged like mad inside his own skull and just dropped dead. When he blacked out he knocked a candle off the mantlepiece; it burned some of the carpet before it went out. Mouin shag; that goddamned carpet was brand new the last time I was inside that house." He had stopped eating.

"'Sounds like he might have lain there a lot longer," Jenny said thoughtfully, still chewing, apparently determined not to let him lapse into despondency despite their topic, which had to be dealt with.

"Yeah, well, paramedics are used to finding old folks who've been stiff and dead in their bathrooms for weeks, all bloated and gassy from - oop, sorry about that."

Across from him, Jenny's expression was that of a woman who thinks, but is not positive, that she has just eaten a cockroach instead of a carrot slice. The dab of dressing on her lower lip looked obscene. After a second, her tongue swept it away and she swallowed hard, going for her water goblet. "Just stick to the pertinent stuff. Or else." She regarded the remainder of her food uncomfortably.

"I'm - never mind." Sickly grin. At least some of his usual humor was seeping back. "Mrs. Saks. Father once told me she was the neighborhood busybody. Used to water the lawn on the east side of her house for hours, so she could peep through his side window - she must've thought something pretty hot was going on inside. Father started keeping his curtains closed."

"Logical. Sensible."

"What's weird is that burn on the carpet. It wouldn't have made any difference if the house had burned to the ground. There's an empty lot down there now:"

"No house?" She looked genuinely surprised.

"I met Father's legal wolverines two days after he died. Two locals and one appointed 'personal representative' from San Francisco. Until then nobody bothered to let me know that I was required to witness the demolition of Father's house personally in order to qualify for my inheritance. Which, by the way, is paying for this lunch, so pick a dessert."

"Why, for heaven's sake? From what you said it was quite a place - all oiled mahogany and ornamental balustrades and stained-glass windows. Haven't you ever wanted a palace?"

"First of all, I want my own palace, by my own hand. I can afford it now anyway. There are a lot of exquisite old houses down around Pico and La Cienega, true, but it just isn't my kind of neighborhood. Somebody connected with the corporation wants the property already, and I get the profit. Fine." He finished off his roast beef. "Next, nobody, including me and the lawyers, knows the rationale ... except Father, who currently is not talking." He was still attempting to appear breezy and unconcerned whenever they circled back to the given of his father's death. The masque was not totally convincing; pain came at Jennifer in surges.

"That's where you vanished to a couple of weeks ago and wouldn't enlighten me?"

"Now it can be told." He spread his hands. "The wreckers started half an hour before I got there. It got boring quick. The attorneys sweltered in their C&R suits. Then a large, hairy fellow shambled over to me and asked me what I wanted done with all the 'fuggin antiques."

"Your father's furniture was still in -"

"There was no furniture. Empty house. The executors even had the light fixtures removed. They hauled away the fireplace, which was solid Etruscan marble and probably cost its own gross tonnage in gold doubloons. That house was as empty when my father was buried as my checking account was before he died." Again the strained expression, the brief silence. "Nevertheless, this turkey comes up with a sledgehammer in one paw and says the basement room is full of junk. I said, 'What basement room?' He looked at me the way a librarian does when they find out you don't know what the Dewey Decimal System is. Was."

Jennifer pushed her plate away, scanned around and signaled for coffee. "Everybody forgot the bomb shelter."

"No bomb shelter. It was on the executor's list after attic compartments. No doors, no vents, no new brickwork or plaster. They pulled measurements of the exterior and only came up a foot or two short compared to the floorplan, so they assumed the basement they saw was all there was - until they started kicking the walls down and found -"

"A bed," she interjected. "And a mirror."

"And a couple of boxes of old Liberty magazines."

Jennifer spooned a few drops of milk into her coffee, barely discoloring it. "Somehow I didn't think you'd paid for all that stuff. Even taking recent wealth into account, you should excuse the pun."

"I spent a few hernias getting it out and a day or so polishing. For your benefit."

"God preserve me - a romantic." She grinned.

"You'll pardon my recent unsociability."

To keep them both from abstracting into another clumsy silence, she spoke immediately: "I understand: You needed some time. Why do you make it sound so unreasonable?"

He jumped in after her: "Don't apologize; that I don't need." And now comes the part where you reach across and squeeze her hand meaningfully, or she yours, or some damn thing. To hell with it, he thought. If she really did understand, it was unnecessary.

Fortunately, the waiter showed up to fuss briefly over them and provide distraction. In his wake Jennifer said, "It really is a stunning bed, Grant," with a private, evil smile. "Luxuriously oversized and heavy. It doesn't squeak and it's expensive and permanent-looking. Unusual; when you think of brass bed you think of those bordello things - you know, incredibly tacky. I love it."

"I've never seen one remotely like it, either. That's strange. If there's anything that ran against the grain of my father's style, it was that bed. He was strictly a Danish-modern, pure-functionalism freak; nothing ornate. He had his home maintained impeccably but never decorated in the sense you or I would understand. Just a perfect, hollow, empty cavern of house, which is now gone, too. I can't believe he wasn't aware of that stuff below him; I'm sure he probably walled it up down there himself, because if it was there already he would have found it, noticed it, ferreted it out and mentioned it. He was painfully methodical. You don't capture the executive vice-presidency of Calex Corporation if you're not methodical, period?"

"You sure it wasn't just a downstairs room that got ... um, accidentally closed off?" Her eyes flirted with the dessert menu again as her question trailed away. "Boy," she said, shaking her head. "Said out loud like that it does sound pretty stupid. Unlikely. Accidentally closed off."

"That leaves you with intentionally closed off, which strands me with a why, either way. But there was no evidence of there ever being a doorway or access - just a niche of the basement, bricked up tight. No windows." He stopped to consider whether caffeine and sugar flash were helping his logic processes, decided against more coffee, then ordered cappucino. With a shrug he said, "I wonder if the bed has a name? Fortunato, or something?"

"Provided your father did not indulge his Imp to the extent of a brass bed like that one?" she said (tossing his Poe reference back in his face, gleefully). "I doubt that he would run on to the stage of naming his furniture." She unclipped a Benson & Hedges from a flat silver case and fired up; she was the fastest draw with a lighter Grant had ever seen. They both ignored the slim box of wooden matches on the table. "Okay, try this:  The bed was there. Walled up. When your father moved in, and he never knew about it." Thin gray smoke trailed from her lips as she spoke, now gesturing with the cigarette. "You said everything inside was moved out by special arrangement; if he had known it was there, it would have been inventoried, no?"

"You shouldn't smoke those things," he said, his attention on the glowing orange tip. "They'll kill you dead."

Jennifer ordered fresh strawberries, to counter Grant's request for a chocolate raspberry mousse torte so richly laced with brandy that the fumes could water their eyes.

"That bed seemed to suit that house." He sliced away the tip of the layered brown wedge with his fork.

Floral designs had been swirled in liquid chocolate atop the crimson bed of raspberry sauce. Peggy's was notorious for its desserts. "It was ... overstated. Another excuse for its burial in the basement. But when the wreckers checked the bricks, they said that although the wall wasn't new, it was about fifty years younger than the rest of the house. Which brings me back to my original conundrum."

"Tastes change," she said. "A month ago you didn't even know what a torte was." Her mouth enveloped the head of a strawberry. crunch. Grant thought of Eve and the apple:  You talked me into it, ma'am.

"Sure I knew." He dropped into his redneck drawl. "Hell, ah seen me some torts gettill arrested on Sunset Boo -lee-vord ... "

"You know what I mean. You just admitted you didn't know your own dad's nature that well."

"He was an emotional isolationist."

"So - his taste in beds might have taken a turn toward the eccentric. Or away from it. Just as his son's tastes in food have matured from cheap garbage to expensive garbage." She endured his disapproval of her cigarette for one more luxuriant puff, then butted it in the table ashtray. It fell over, smoldering, its life ebbing.

"Hold on. I didn't actually eat that stuff."

The memory of their first meeting filled in gaps of reference, and Grant's mind drew on it in the same languorous way Jenny had inhaled the cigarette smoke. He might never have met her had it not been for a rare, unanticipated, masochistic gut-rumble on behalf of pure sleaze food. Traditionally, Grant forced such fare on himself about once a year, to remind himself how repugnant the consumption of fast-food sewage really was, and thus reinforce against the illusory economy buying such food represented when funds were low.

His mission had been to rendezvous with his good buddy Scott, projectionist cum English major at Northridge, for the purpose of roasting current movies over lunch. Their meeting had been bumped ninety minutes ahead, and Grant, anticipating food too eagerly, found himself with nothing to do but mosey into the closest, loudest conglomeration of neon and formica and order up a clownburger with all the slop, anemic string fries, and a shamelessly flat Pepsi in a go-cup. The percentages were heavily in favor of grease and ice. Sitting on a stone bench, he watched collegiate youth loiter past, bound for dipstick classes in Aerobic Video or Art and the Media Audience. His stomach recaptured sanity and the spicy garbage in the Happy Bag cooled, ignored. He tested a fry, and washed away his error with a sip from the watery Pepsi. He never got a chance at the rest.

"Max!" A shrill shout, from far behind him.

He turned to see the Happy Bag kidnaped and making good escape time between the jaws of a stone-white Alsatian. The big dog was being yelled at by a tall woman wearing a jacket and boots of impeccably matched soft-brown leather and a cream-colored cowl-neck sweater. Black, flowing hair; lots of it. She stood her ground as the dog homed in on her; Grant stayed neutrally on the bench to observe her pet being admonished. Then, as a pair, they approached him. He forgot about her wardrobe and turned his concentration to those first few, precious seconds of new physical attraction.

The convergence of their lives was that easy, that random.

"My dear Max has what a Victorian novelist would call an 'unfortunate predilection' for fast food. I'm afraid he's done this sort of thing before." Max pulled a parade rest, his butt plunking obediently down near her feet, eyes never straying from the bag she had returned to Grant.

"I was in a suggestible state when I bought this stuff," he said. "I don't think I could've gone through with it." He unwrapped the burger as he talked. "Does he - ?"

"Cast-titanium stomach," she said, pursing her lips pleasantly and nodding approval.

Grant lofted the charred meat patty like a little frisbee. It vanished down Max's gullet with a chomp and a swallow; the dog, still sitting, looked at Grant with an expression that said all was correct in the universe.

Max seemed to prefer his fries cold, anyway.

"And now it seems I owe you a lunch - a proper lunch, at least, and not a dilemma between gastric death and food so obscene that in this state you could pull three-to-fifteen years for just sticking it in your mouth." She saw Grant smile at her and automatically begin his courteous denial. "I'll insist before you can protest," she added, on time. "Max would've let me know if you weren't okay."

Max's eyes, such a vaguely watery blue that they were nearly colorless, seemed to affirm this. It was all a con, Grant thought, but Max wound up getting the Pepsi, too.

Jennifer was new, therefore a party to the odd intimacy careful people generally allow only for strangers. Grant found he was able to edit his conversation around the death of his father and hit few chuckholes. The subject arose before the first time they bedded down together, at Jenny's, and the conversations became impartial, healing things. They consistently surprised each other, and reveled in it. The sole secret of recent weeks had been the brass bed and mirror; these being sprung on her the night before. The coronation that ensued was pleasing for both of them. Now they sat lunching, much as they had on the day Max had caused their lives to cleave, now able to joke and rebound and distill some of Grant's befuddling sense of loss into a painless void where it could not poison him.

The desserts were used up.

"When people die, the survivors always kick themselves for spending so little time with them," said Grant. "It's like a racial imperative."

"But negate the death and nothing changes," Jenny regarded the dead cigarette. "No extra time would be spent:'

"My father was always with the corporation. Always. Until I was seven I thought 'Calex' was some little brother I'd never met, and wondered why Cal merited so much of my father's time." He shook his head to indicate he was not lapsing into Heavy Revelations; rather, he seemed to be putting the chain of events together for the first time, consumer-testing it on Jenny for stability of logic. "The only time in my life there was a real interface was when I turned eighteen and found out a junior-executive slot on the Calex board was being held for me. That was a big thing, for my father. Bigger than I knew."

"Uh-oh. Rebellious youth."

"I told him to roll and insert it. Bingo - no allowance. Calex was the Daddy Warbucks of Vietnam."

"Sounds like you were seduced by the publicity."

"I had as little social conscience then as now. All I sensed was another surefire way to rub against his grain ... and so began my odyssey through Real Life. Jesus, what a fucking idiot. College kids who protested the war had kids who would gladly serve up their genitals, today, right here right now, with garnish, if the sacrifice meant they could get a toe inside the Calex door. For me, it's all academic now."

"Jeez, you're making that sound awful?" After a beat she was compelled by her nature to add:  "My father would call it 'slicing it too thick to eat.’" Her smile stole the barb from the words.

"You're right - financial autonomy is something I can live with, probably even at the cost of my father. Though I hasten to add I don't look at it that way. What irritates me is that just now, after eighteen years of more or less standard 'family' bullshit, plus five years of requisite alienation, I'm left with this year, which is half over, plus the year before that and the year before that, to know my own father. Not nearly enough; we were just beginning to become friends, and he was just starting to open up, even to me. Now he's gone, prematurely, and I'm not even sure who it is that's just stepped out of my life. That hurts. I don't even know if he had anybody else besides his Calex cronies - he never remarried, unless he kept it a huge secret, and he divorced my mother the year I was born."

"You mean you're not the black sheep of a corporate dynasty? The son errant, thrust from your birthright by scheming siblings - two older, matching Porsches, one younger with a clandestine drug habit, and an iron-fisted matriarch holding illimitable dominion over all?"

He laughed aloud. She was keeping him up here as well as she had in the big brass bed.

"Seriously," she said. "No brothers, no sisters you dislike but would lend money to out of familial obligation? No forty-five-minute phone calls to update who's divorced and who's pregnant and who's out of jail?"

"I've never been able to understand that bonding that large families claim," Grant said. "Maybe it's something you can never know unless you share the group's common blood." He had done this disclaimer before, generally using the same words to accentuate his solo nature. "There was just me and mysterious Father, at opposite polarities. Until recently." He pulled out a MetroBank Visa to cover the check, which had conspicuously been delivered in midsentence. MetroBank was owned by Calex.

"Be generous with the tip," Jennifer said. "We've run the poor dear threadbare. Twenty percent; you can afford it."

Grant wrote CASH in block letters across the tip blank on the charge flimsy, then unwalleted currency to leave on the tray. "Better for the waiters," he said. "Less paperwork; less corporate time wasting."

They stood and he moved to knead her shoulders from behind, grateful for the renewed contact after spending the entire meal a table apart. "Would you like to see the property?" He asked this abruptly, feeling that he might not have asked her a day earlier, but now it was fair to offer her some involvement, if she consented. "I have to pop in to see Father's doctor. The lot where the house stood is on the way. Yes?"

"You would have to ask today:" she said as Grant reached to tear carbons. "I've got a shoot with Toby Wolff at three, and yes, I did mention this last night, before we got insensate. Today he does folio shots for me; tomorrow I do nudes, for him. Barter is always the best form of negotiation - each side of the deal thinks they made out best. Once he made the offer, I figured I could get you to tag along so I could get some professional skin shots without any excess laying on of hands by jolly old Toby. He is a pro, but I've heard stories. I think it's backlash against the fact that most of the other LA photographers - the good ones - are terminally gay, and Toby fears for his macho rep."

"Yes tomorrow, if no today is okay. Okay?"

"Deal."

"You sure?" He disliked the thought of abandoning her to the greedy eyes of Toby, but Montgomery Mantel's physician was a difficult guy to get an appointment to see.

"No problem."

"Can you meet me this evening, my apartment? Whenever you finish up?"

"I thought he'd never ask." She spoke toward the sky, grinning wickedly. "But how am I supposed to do that if I don't know what time you'll be done?"

He suspected she knew the answer already but dipped into his coat pocket with a flourish regardless. Between his fingers was a shining-bronze, newly machined key. "For you?'

Her expression went just slack enough to please him; it only lasted a second. Very seriously, she said, "Does this mean that you and I have become an 'item’ sir?" And took the key to his apartment, wrapping it tightly up in her fist.

"God, that's the first time I've ever done anything like that," he said in a slightly stunned voice. But inside, he felt roughly the way good old Max must have after wolfing down his burger.

It was impossible for Grant to miss spotting the old woman as he swung his Pinto into the wide, curving promenade of Avalon Circle, just south of Pico and inside the buffer zone of Century City. She was standing in the center of the empty lot at Number 307, where the demolition had occurred, on the brink of the pit that had formerly delineated Montgomery Mantell's basement. Her arms were akimbo against a billowing paisley dress that went neck to ankles. Grant slowed to stop at the curb as she turned like a cat caught in a garbage can. She had wire spectacles, a granny bun, broad, rounded shoulders, and massive breasts. Grant wondered what sort of ancient foundation garment held such a boldly maternal chest in check.

When she saw him stop, she crossed herself furtively and hustled off the lot with surprising speed for her bulk, bee-lining for a cottage that had been spared the hyperthyroidal development of most of the court's adjoining houses. It looked to be a curt, stringently maintained one- or two-bedroom place, in the midst of castles with octopoid wings that nearly spilled into Avalon Circle from their own lots - a commuter-crunch of mansions.

Bam. Only after her front door pointedly slammed did it occur to Grant that this was Mrs. Saks, the nosy widow. He stayed in the pilot bucket of the Pinto for a few moments, trying to sort his thoughts amidst the heat shimmer and the stink of mown summer grass. He was glad Jenny had not rode shotgun; to have her around all the time meant no room for judging whether the episodes of his life he had begun baring to her in blurts were credible, or prudent. They were still relatively new to each other, recently unwrapped, and had within the last hour agreed to advance their relationship to a more tricky, unstable stage.

Now his palms were finally damp.

He kicked out of the Pinto, stretching, causing his spine to crackle, and crossed onto the lot he now owned, heels sinking briefly into the humid, yielding turf. The sign was conspicuously new, and proclaimed in loud red characters ANOTHER ONE FOR SALE BY MCCOY AND TANNER, with three exclamation points and three phone numbers for inquiry. Grant figured McCoy and Tanner must be pretty loud red characters themselves.

By contrast, the destruction had been scrupulously neat. It was as though a UFO had swooped down to zap the Mantell house, leaving a cleancut template of lawn whose brick sidewalks wound up to a floor plan-shaped rectangle of turned earth. No debris was scattered through the grass, which was still lush and green with the phony cinematic intensity seemingly endemic to the pampered lawns of the West Coast. McCoy and Tanner's banner was planted at the head of the lot, and looked like a lonesome sentry.

When Calex did not have his father globe-trotting, this was the place, Grant thought. The place where dear old Dad spent an abnormal percentage of his valuable executive time alone, with the curtains drawn against inquisitive neighbors. For a woman, perhaps? Several? Grant had known of no cohabitants, concubines, or compatriots - at least none who could claim any legally significant amount of time served.

Upon circumnavigation of the house-shaped plot he saw the basement and foundations were now depressions of fill dirt. In the cottage across the way he saw a pasty white face duck behind an embroidered drape.

He stopped to stand with one hand on McCoy and Tanner's sign, like a hunter posing with a kill, hoping for some sympathetic vibration from the earth. None came. He realized that after today he would probably never return to this place. Calls had already come his way regarding the disposition of the property. Calls from the hemorrhoidally polite minions of Calex middle management; calls Grant did not bother to return. The house, he did not miss. It had never been a home. The few moments he spent here alone were the true eulogy for his father. It felt correct. Montgomery Mantell would call for a moment of respectful silence ... then get on with the business of living.

For Grant, there was literally nothing here anymore. But he idled, walking the lip of the excavation one more time. A glint of metal in the topsoil arrested his notice, near what had once been the basement's east wall. He bent and collected a strand of rosary beads in his fingers - that is, what he suspected to be a rosary, having seen one twice in his life. In movies. He blew dirt crumbs through the gaps of the worked medallion that twirled from one end. He took it to be a Star of David. Closer scrutiny proved him wrong.

Three four-pointed stars were staggered to form a kind of cog or sunburst design. Within the ring, a smaller ring composed the core. It was burnished blunt, obviously old, and appeared to have been worked from pewter. It gave gently beneath the pressure of his fingers. He examined it more closely, still blowing motes of dirt away. He saw the engraving on the flip side of the half-dollar-sized disc.

Lines and circles were hammered precisely into the thin circlet. Boxed circles; others three-quarter boxed, all outwardly random, yet purposefully intricate. They lent texture to one side while the obverse was polished and knickless. Grant thought of photo negatives: the emulsion side versus the shiny side. It all depended on which side you had up.

The designs were very much like those graven in minute detail into the brass frame of the bed and mirror he had just trucked into his apartment. He looked toward Mrs. Saks' house and saw her face dip out of sight again.

That decided him.

When it became clear that he would not vacate her porch, nor stop ringing her buzzer, Mrs. Saks cracked open the door instead of calling the law. Grant soon found out why.

"I think you dropped this out there, ma'am," he said, feeling absurd, as though he were playing Huckleberry Finn, putting on manners. He held out the rosary and medallion.

She peeped out, said nothing, allowed the door a few more cautious inches. Her glasses distorted her eyes, making them look to Grant like the view through the wrong end of a thick glass loup. She canted them back on her reddened nose to squint at him. The door opened a few more inches. He could now see one broad foot, torturing a frayed house slipper just beneath the hem of the paisley dress. Her tight bun of hair, including all the flyaways, was the iron-blue tint of a gun barrel.

"Uh - you must be Mrs. Saks," he got out, teeth locked together. The silence was suffocating inside, she shifted her bulk, and Grant saw the foot in the doorway expand under the pressure, the slipper growing taut. My god, there was a good eighteen or nineteen stone inside that flimsy dress. Of that, there was at least twenty pounds of bosom. Thirty.

"You're of his blood," she said, in a voice that came from the very back of the throat and dried on the way out. Her eyes behind their half-inch density of glass checked him out again, head to shoes, and sent the input to her brain for processing. "His blood is yours. I can smell it." Her face was puffy, as if slightly inflated, and florid. Grant imagined her heart laboring to flush the arteries in her massive corpus with blood, to keep the crimson high in her face. "But you have my String?" Fat hands with short, stubby fingers drifted up to cover her mouth in slight confusion. Her eyes seemed to swim into focus, suddenly, and her tone humanized from that of a mummified harridan to a simple but concerned matron. "You have it in your hands. How can that he, boy? Tell me."

"You dropped it on my property" he said, resisting the urge to sarcasm. "In your haste to leave."

"I was afeared. But you're not who I thought you to be; I kenned a new one, a fresh one, a renewal of the evil." She watched the words have the effect she calculated on Grant's expression and stabbed an open palm toward him before he had time to react. "Give me it." she insisted.

"No." To hesitate just now would be to stumble. "It was on my property. If you can explain to me what you're scared of, I might give it to you as a gift."

Her eyes narrowed, were almost swallowed by sun-wrinkles. For a beat he tried to appear rational but unmovable, then he conceded to the instinct that told him threats might just as easily make the old woman clam up or, worse, become more cryptic. He had blundered onto touchy, arcane ground, and needed to know more - information he could not specify, like the unknown crossword-puzzle key that will unlock eight more hidden words. If the medallion was used as some sort of talisman against a real or imagined evil connected to his father, then in her eyes he was probably the agent for some black ruse. A concession became a good gamble.

"No," he said, extending the medallion so it revolved, shining, on the end of the unwinding rosary. "I'm no good at blackmail, Mrs. Saks. Take it - it's yours. But tell me why you think my father's house was evil. Obviously you wouldn't be so scared of losing this if it wasn't?"

She snatched it, stepping one thunderous step forward to capture it in both pawlike hands. Her gaze never left him, still suspicious, and he did not budge.

Finally she said, "Tis not a trick, then."

"I'm afraid that's a little too sophisticated for me." She relaxed another notch, taking her eyes off him for the first time and moving across the porch to stare toward the vacated lot, hands steady on the painted wood of the porch balustrade. "Air's a mess:' she observed. "Stinks. Stings the eyes and parches the gullet some?"

"Smog's bad because of the heat." He half-expected her to trot out lemonade to seal their truce.

"Tis the carbons. Poisons in the very air; some you can't see." A short, disinterested silence ensued, then she turned on him like a carousel on slow revolve. "I've been rude to you with no cause. Not even thanking you for returning my string." She moved back toward the door in vast, arthritic strides, her weight creaking the porch planks.

"Wait. My father's house -"

"You're not touched by the sin, thank the Lord?' she said, shaking her head in judgment. "Best for you to leave it lie. The place be taken now; it can't do no more harm neither." Confidentially, proudly, she added, "I throwed salt over the tilled ground meself, through the new dawn. Two containers of Morton's?'

"The house isn't all gone," he said. "Not yet."

"Then you'd best destroy whatever's left:" she said with grandmotherly certainty. Grant felt scolded. "Fire cleanses."

"No." I'd need a smelter, for god's sake. "It would take a long time. You can help me today."

"I know protection. They wanted to touch me; oh, how they wanted to silence me, trying temptation when the yellow failed. But I knew protection then, and learned more since." She cocked a plump thumb toward the threshold of the front door and the hex sign evenly painted above. It was a larger clone of the medallion design. "That prevents entry. This" - she patted the medallion, now stowed in a flapping-sail pocket of the dress - "prevents personal harm. I laughed in the faces of the demons, and I walk the Earth yet. Godliness can still triumph?'

"Demons... "It was not a question. It was dull repetition. His mind swam.

"They worshiped the Goat. Consorted with demons —fornicators, blasphemers. The Horned One took them all, all but your father. He forestalled somehow, made some pact of blood, gained some engine of protection. But he was taken all the same. Just took longer, was all. No offense:"

Mrs. Saks was as crazy as a gnat in a turbine.

"Who? What others?"

"Maybe the Spilsbury Murders was before your time," she said, squinting at him keenly.

It was one of Hollywood's meatier scandals, back in the days before Vietnam made television so bloodthirsty, when such things were confined to the enquiring poop tabloids Mrs. Saks no doubt took stone-cold seriously. "I've heard of it. Movie people slaughtered by cultists, like the Manson thing, but earlier. Late 50s, early 6os..."

"Nineteen and fifty-nine it was."

He stopped his smile by contorting his neck muscles. "You mean the Horned One hung fire for twenty-three years just waiting to bump off my dad?"

"Time is nothing to the Dark Lords."

"Why my father? This doesn't track at all -"

"To succumb to temptation is nothing new. Look to history, boy. You'll recognize evil if you keep a clear eye?"

I read that once in a fortune cookie, Grant thought. Dark Lords, my little brown eyeball. His impulse was to attack the old woman's derangements from all vantages at once; he opted to simply fly away. There really was nothing left here for him.

"Hang back," she ordered, anticipating his leave-taking. "You'll go now from here and scoff at the visions of a foolish old woman. Your eye is clouded already. Hang back a second." She waddled back into the cool dimness of her lair. Grant clocked off time for the slowness imposed by her own girth, impatient now to be shut of this lunacy, but obligated to finish up what he had begun by ringing the bell. Stupid.

She returned, presenting him with a lump, inside of brown shopping-bag paper fuzzy with handling. It was about the size and weight of a full soup can.

"Your father died with this in his hand."

He tore open the paper quickly, too eagerly. It was a fat candle, black, greasy to the touch. The wick was charred.

"I nicked it. The ambulance boys didn't mind none. You take it. You'll see." Magnanimously she announced, "I think your father renounced the lefthanded path. He only did so too late. There are greater sins, in God's eye."

Debate would not do, so Grant merely backed off the porch with the candle, feeling foolishly like a yokel with a wet-ink deed to Brooklyn's most infamous bridge. He tossed back a cursory thanks and would not have steered around a litter-grubber on Hollywood Boulevard any less. His escape was in hand.

"I wish you well, boy. I hope what you learn doesn't lay heavy on your soul. Soon enough, you'll see. I'll do a fetish for your good luck, if my feet don't need a sitz bath tonight." She crossed herself again.

The old woman mumbled to herself, worrying the string, as he left. He beelined straight for the Pinto and did not glance back at her.

His opening line was "A bottle of Mondavi says my day was weirder than yours."

"Fool's bet." Jennifer was on the pillow back sofa, wound thickly up in Grant's blue terrycloth bathrobe. She dropped the subscription copy of American Film into a slack little tent shape on the coffee table. Meryl Streep stared up, eyes puffy, nose as red as usual, face sharp enough to chip flint. "Bottle's already by the fridge. So, tell. You have to go first."

"I am profoundly glad you are not a woman who paints her toenails. Don't ask; it's probably very male and illogical." Her bare feet, still warm and pink from the shower, were braced against the table, and from the distance the robe surrendered, he assumed her clothing was still piled in the bathroom. He brushed her neck with a kiss. She smelled fragrant and clean, and that reminded him of his own stickiness and stiff neck. He paused in passing to savor the bouquet of her hair; the masses and handfuls of glossy black exuded their own intoxicating aroma.

In the kitchenette he uncorked the dry; musky red and swished out two bowl-shaped goblets under scalding water. Through their first glass, he told her most of the saga of Mrs. Saks.

"Sounds like venerable ancient curse on ye olde bed and mirror." She waggled her eyebrows. "Case closed." Pause. "That old lady had been spying on your father for ... what? Twenty-five years? Thirty? Jesus."

"She was unbalanced, sure. But what conviction. And she had a definite interest in salvaging my soul from the big bad demons, or ghosts, or whatever?'

"She push any tracts at you?" She hesitated then, the frivolous tone of her banter vanishing, as though she was deciding whether to pass on bad news. "Grant? I'm not trying to match you weirdness for weirdness but you tell me whether this is stupid or not."

"I'm not laughing?" He was still smiling, though.

"Okay." She squared her shoulders, inhaled deeply. "I was, how you say, disrobing awhile ago, in the bedroom. You know how shooting lights make you sweat; I was pretty gummed-up and cranky. Well, when you're near that mirror in the bedroom, you can't help but watch yourself in it. I mean, you really cannot stop yourself - as though something might change if you don't keep an eye on it. And I started freaking out, right there, totally by myself, because I got the idea that it was actually the other way round:  I wasn't watching the mirror, the mirror was watching me - I mean personally, as if it was a one-way peep glass with a couple of horny Feds on the flip side. Breathing evenly. Watching me strip. Now, I was taking it off for the Wolf earlier, and I don't get nervous when his eyeballs try to gobble me up at ten thousand RPMs. That kind of self-consciousness you lose when you pose. But I didn't want to stay in the bedroom. Not alone. Not even with Max there. I started shivering, can you believe that? The next step, I'm sure, would have been seeing things in the mirror."

"Boogey-persons," Grant said.

"God knows the bathroom mirrors weren't freaking me out." She shook her head in semi-exasperation, a sanity-asserting gesture. "I rolled out of there, toweling off, consciously averting my eyes from the mirror. Crazy, huh?"

"I can't laugh," he said distantly, "because it gives me the creeps too - just as vaguely. Last night ... I can't really articulate the feeling. But it unnerved me."

"Hmm. Caveat emptor?" She motioned for a recharge.

"I didn't buy anything:" he sulked. "I propose you and I confront this dumb phenomenon together and see if our Haunted Mirror has the balls to freak out more than one person at a time. Where's Battling Maxo?"

"Around. I'm surprised he didn't come out when -"

She stopped then, because they could both hear the dog growling. "He was camping out by my clothes," she said. "Near the foot of the bed."

They moved together.

Max's ghost-white form was easily visible in the dim bedroom. His coffin-shaped head was fixed low, defensively, his black lips skinned back, his tail motionless. He stood aggressively between them and the mirror on the wall. He growled at the mirror, making a steady and thoroughly ominous basso noise of warning. His hindquarters rippled to spring and defend - or attack. In an unsettlingly targeted way, Max's reflected image was growling at them. Directly at both of them.

When he began barking angrily at the glass it nearly launched them both up to cling from the ceiling light fixtures.

"Max!" Grant shouted. "Max, goddammit, what is it?"

It broke the spell. Max turned to them with an almost apologetic little whine, then jogged over for congratulations.

"Good puppy," Grant said, rolling his eyes at canine dumbness for Jennifer's benefit. In the mirror, he watched his own reflection scratch Max's radar ears. "You show 'em what a badass you are?'

"Big jerk," muttered Jenny. "You scared the crap out of me." She forced a brutal little smile, said "good dog" with suffocating sarcasm, and then sighed.

"Tell you what. You sit on the john and drink while I grab a shower. If Max wants to play guard dog, fine?"

"You mean you're not going to admit how weird that was?" Frank incredulity, now.

"Not as weird as Mrs. Saks:" he said, trying to move through his bathroom routine nonchalantly. "And not as weird as the rather awesome Dr. Axel Byrd." He yanked a huge bath towel down from the cabinet; all others strung about the bathroom were still damp. His smile toward Jenny and Max was an honest one, but he was aware of consciously forced reassurance. "It's too bloody easy to overinterpret this stuff. You wind up like Mrs. Saks, with her talismans and stacks of old scandal sheets."

Max padded off to case the kitchen, tail drifting lazily with his stride. Jenny glared after him, then at the large mirror. "He always agrees with you..."

The mirror did nothing but hang on the wall and reflect their lovemaking. This time the paradox struck him.

In bed, they should have been preoccupied. The mirror was hanging right there, reminding them, refusing to be ignored, daring their eyes to come back. He had been emptied by a crushing day cruising the smogscape to parley with oddballs like Mrs. Saks and Dr. Axel Byrd; Jenny had done Toby Wolff's. The one such photo session Grant had attended was exhausting simply to watch. Yet the act of boarding the monster bed seemed to flush them both with urgent adrenaline; he could feel it hit Jennifer. Her eyes irised to the dark gray of thunderheads. Perspiration, light, clean, dappled them before they even touched. Grant caught the aromas of musky need, of feral hunger. She not only wanted him - she lusted for him, and his heart rate jumped up from double, and he plundered her, and she drained him. The streamlined chat that so endeared them was discarded in the living room, supplanted by a dangerously new exchange: a sexual echo effect, power given and power received and power amplified; dangerous because it seemed to obliterate the humor and caring that normally accompanied them to bed. She pulled him into her as though she was starving. His body sprang alive to the nerve roots, and in that starting-gun instant he cared about nothing but taking her.

The mirror watched as they slept, woke, made love again, slept, talked as before. It watched.

The wine was gone and Max was snoozing before the topic of Dr. Axel Byrd was actually addressed.

"A big guy, gruff, stout, barrel chested. I expected a sterile Aryan type for my father's doctor. What I got was a bearded Viking in a doctor suit. It was a little surreal." He shifted uncomfortably. Jennifer was entrenched on the mirror side of the bed tonight, and that stood disturbingly at the edge of his thoughts, as though they were aboard a life-raft and a random toss of the boat would flip her, still half-awake, into a sea turbulent with sharks. He watched his own feet in the mirror, abstracted.

"I suppose he wasn't apologetic?" She yawned, turned her back to the mirror, snaked an arm around him.

"Terse at first." Actually, Dr. Byrd had somehow divined that Grant's questions about his father's health were standard and perfunctory. He had waited, patiently, for the gist, his replies crisp and dull as he outlined the senior Mantell's assorted minor distresses, shrugging them all equally - a little justifiable high blood pressure, a false-alarm ulcer, a brief problem sleeping.

It had all seemed a burden of trivia to Dr. Byrd. No big deal. "Your father phoned me once, bursting with questions about narcolepsy. About coma." So get on with it.

Abruptly Grant's throat felt as if it was trying to swallow a golf ball. "Coma I know about, but..."

"Ah, you've seen that dreadful film, I suppose?" The huge shoulders rolled, the encompassing hands dangled between his knees in the overburdened desk chair.

"But narcolepsy - isn't that sleeping sickness?"

"More properly summed up by the term 'sleep attacks’," said Dr. Byrd. "As in angina attacks, or attacks of intestinal gas. They can occur anytime, anywhere. A person with a case of bonafide narcolepsy is capable of dropping into a very deep sleep state with no warning whatsoever, and during any activity - driving, sex, playing basketball." He swept a clearing between beard and mustache to insert a gray stick of spearmint gum.

"My father?"

"Claimed he had been oversleeping. Many questions on what a 'normal' amount of sleeptime was. For him I estimated six to eight hours; that didn't satisfy him. Even at six you're spending nearly a third of your life in bed, semiconscious or unconscious. For a corporate eagle like your father, the idea of too much sleep would've been very frustrating. Less time for work, you see. He would become agitated at the idea, tax himself even harder - more wear and tear on his metabolism."

"Was he actually sick?"

"Apart from the development of the tumor, nothing. I'd say it was very easy for him to focus his work stress on his sleeping habits. But psychology isn't my field."

It's probably nothing, Grant thought. Yeah, that's what they say in the movies, it's probably nothing, right before they get eaten by a giant cockroach.

Up, down, around, the gentle curve of Jennifer's waist in the mirror, a fold of sheet cutting just below the two indentations in the small of her back, like a toga in a posed picture. Beyond it, his reflection.

"So then?" she said.

"So then he booked me for a physical examination next week. I didn't protest; I'm overdue, I guess." He ran his palm along the smooth warmth of her hip. "He seemed privately pleased that he managed to trade one Mantell for another, as though I'd just go into the file in my father's folder or something." He continued to stroke her reflexively. She mumbled and snuggled in tighter.

"Hey?" he said, realizing she had slipped away. No reaction. He kept caressing her while his treacherous eyes instantly sought the mirror. Its panorama was nominal.

First there was his father's death and the hints of narcolepsy or some other sleep affliction. Then the mirror; brass encircling a lens, backed by silver ... oh, yes, vaguely malignant somehow. Mrs. Saks, plus her hex signs. Blasphemers. Fornicators. Those were the strings; where in hell was the common knot?

His morning coffee mug was still on the nightstand, the one closest the mirror. He craned to see and saw the coagulated brown dregs, like a crust of blood. He had to do the dishes more often than once weekly; chances were tomorrow he'd dump fresh-brewed on top of the scum and dust without even rinsing the cup.

Something moved inside the mirror.

He fought not to see it from the visual periphery, tried to keep contemplating his stupid coffee mug, stubbornly, until he realized that it was merely Max, bopping back into the bedroom with the arrogant, hipshot stride of a pachuco casing Van Nuys Boulevard.

And abruptly, comfortingly, he felt that Max would warn them if the mirror was plotting anything weird. Animals knew.

Sleep came easier, though he kept thinking of sleep as a symptom. No, he was simply bashed from the day.

Or maybe he was not exhausted. Not technically, not for real.

He fell asleep and reaped a few hours of peace. Then the grandaddy of all nightmares smashed into his mind, head-on, a freight train vaporizing a prairie dog transfixed by the high-beams. There was no defense, nothing he could do.

He had nobody's recommendation to use as a quality filter, and did not consult the yellow pages. He merely cut out of traffic, slewing into a curbspace bordering the first shop he saw. Paint peeled in sharp strips from the billboard overhead. It was lit at night by two senile floods hanging from top on ugly pipe armatures wired into place against the weather, orange with rust.

To Grant, the rust was an indication the place had been in business for awhile, stable in one locale.

DARKMOON OCCULT SUPPLIES

TOOLS • LITERATURE • INCUNABULA

The logo was subdued, as far as Grant's non-knowledge of such things went. It was surrounded by a fresco of stars and planetoids in half-eclipse, with elliptical Saturnian ringwork, fretted with lines (beams? rays?) radiating (force? light? Bosco?) outward.

Beams of force. Grant felt suddenly idiotic again, and he almost gunned the Pinto away from the witchcraft shoppe in embarrassment. On cue, the memory of the dream stopped him, causing his backbone to horripilate coldly even in the thick heat of urban summer. His teeth were tightly set; his jaw muscles nudged a baby migraine toward maturity. The Pinto idled. He smelled or imagined petrofumes bonking away at his headache, worsening it. Almost as an omen of inevitability, the motor stalled out - committing him.

He grabbed the fat candle in its paper wrapping from the passenger bucket, along with the graphite-smeared pages of pencil rubbings, and did it.

He jolted awake, or dreamed he did, staring into the mirror again. The past played back "Monty" Mantell, sweating, furtive, rushed up to his Etruscan marble fireplace, mouthing words Grant could not understand beyond identifying their pattern of repetition. He shot them out anxiously, below his breath, in the desperate cadence of the slightly mad, fumbling for a butane cigarette lighter, grabbing the black candle on the mantle. The fat wick touched the fire and sputtered as though wet, at last catching. Sweat-drops of relief broke freely and Grant's father almost smiled, still muttering the incomprehensible litany. His free hand ditched the lighter and went for his coat pocket, digging, still furtively, for something small within. He appeared more normal, more in control now, the image of resourcefulness Grant usually ascribed to his father.

The black candle slipped from his grasp and bounced onto the carpet. He grabbed wildly to intercept and missed; the wick was still improbably alight. He forgot whatever was in his pocket and tried to retrieve the candle. He bent, then fell as the hematoma in his brain burst.

Perhaps he could still see, Grant thought with a shudder. Perhaps his father's wide, unfocused eyes noted, as they fogged over in death, the candle, crisping a brown oval into the new shag carpeting, five inches too far from his outstretched hand. His final breath eased out, in no hurry. The wick extinguished itself A web of gray smoke uncoiled toward the ceiling.

The inside of Darkmoon Occult Supplies' front door was festooned with tiny brass bells. Grant's eyes quickly dealt with the chaotic junkyard of merchandise and decoration and zeroed in on the store's only occupant.

"Hey man," said the apparent proprietor, a man with a long ponytail of black hair topped by a French beret. Black leather vest over a neon-red T-shirt overwhelmed by a black image of a bare-chested, love-beaded Jim Morrison, with the Doors logo in blocky letters. Black mustache, waxed at the tips. Black goatee. He cupped his hand over the phone receiver crooked into his shoulder and said, "Welcome to Darkmoon. Browse away; I'll catch up with you in a second?'

Grant nodded as a tirade from the phone drew the man back. "No, no, no." he interposed. "You're not listening. Cardamom for love spells you can buy at Lucky's. The supermarket. It's the same as - no, just buy Spice Islands; it's the same stuff. Look, Mrs. Fetters -"

Grant drifted, tuning out the chatter. Darkmoon's ceiling was a good thirty feet from the floor; stout beams of oily wood were hung with stuffed birds and odd mobiles that revolved sluggishly in the eddies of heat. The entire west wall was absorbed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of stained pine:  Numerology, Astrology, Tarot, Wicca, Satanism, Voodoo, more. Grant saw one press tape label that read Blank Books of Art. The library balanced the old of crusted leather bindings with the new of glossy trade paperbacks. The goateed clerk's voice continued to drone, patiently; he had switched topics from cardamom to arrowroot.

A gray anatomy skeleton guarded the corner of the first display case. Within were hundreds of orderly ranks and files of philtres and potions - spellcasting ingredients in cork-stoppered vials of blown glass, like tiny test tubes; larger, hermetically sealed jars of dull-colored powders. A plastic bag of "dream bones." Joss sticks of consecration incense and bottles of brown oil. The shelves to Grant's right were laden with lanterns, candles, silver knives, small braziers, tools whose purpose was a mystery. Tarot decks carefully wrapped in silk. Beyond the shelves, a rack of tabards - black, white, brown, some silk—and cowled monk's robes with braid. A card near his nose read ChaliceThurible-Athame / Set (Ready to Use). $65.95. There was a "chic shelf" of pop power objects: ankhs, pyramid necklaces, icons so commercial they were the most familiar items to Grant. A hand-calligraphed index card thumb tacked to the shelf informed him that jewelry could be inscribed with his Witchcraft Name free of charge, with a $25 purchase.

Nearer the counter was a thick wooden shelf bearing tarantulas and scorpions encased in Lucite, and a dead snake in a rubber-lipped bell jar of formaldehyde. Other floating dead things inspected him from their glass coffins. There was a small fireplace hewn from a block of weathered gray stone. Below its mantle, etched as though by centuries of rain, was the word INRUS. From a strategic roost above, a ratty stuffed goat's head glared with golden eyes. Grant saw it was a ram. Its cornucopian horns had been gilded, its dead teeth looked plastic; beyond them, a tongue that resembled a stale, petrified piece of luncheon meat.

Across the counter, powerful corporate mojo for Visa, Mastercard, and American Express asserted themselves. Everything surrounding him was priced with those nasty disintegrating pricetags he hated - even the ram's head had one, curling away from the patch of hair it had obviously occupied for years. The cooling fan of the register hummed; the blue digital display glowed. Grant thought abruptly of how the ultrasimplified logos of the Fortune 500, the top corporations in the country, were really modernized mutations of the hex sign Mrs. Saks had sworn by. IBM, Exxon, Randcorp, all used as mastheads a letter or a geometric line design that had undergone decades of refinement and simplification, like a distilling process. Using charge plates in a witchcraft shoppe exemplified the head-on crash of ancient superstition into modern technology. He considered the combination of sorcery and computers and guessed the slant must have been tried a thousand times by now.

The logo for Calex Corporation was a c inside a c, two letters linked by orthographic projection; two looking like one. Very snazzy industrial fashion. Design of and decision on the logo had encompassed an expenditure (carefully itemized and, of course, wholly deductible) in the neighborhood of $25,000. How valuable might protection and image be if they boiled away to the same thing?

His imagination jumped ahead to an image of the governing board of Calex chanting the Lord's Prayer backwards; all those constipated execs prancing around in the buff and impaling a stray cat on a spike for sacrifice... it was beautifully obscene.

"...but that was Mrs. Fetters making her daily call."

"I'm sorry?" Grant had not noticed the counterman hanging up. You did it again, stupid - he had blanked out, had gone away and not noticed.

"Mrs. Fetters, jeez." The man in the black vest spread his hands across the fingerprinty glass of the counter. "She has a standing account here. Calls in with her daily order. Has these spellbooks specifying really hard-to-get items, you know? Like clove oil, paprika, A-1 Sauce ... And every day I tell the old broad that in this century we have supermarkets. I'm broadcasting; she's not receiving." He shrugged. A button pinned to the lapel of his vest read So Mote It Be, goddammit.

Grant dropped a tiny Indian tetraskelion on a leather thong back into a display box between them. "But you oblige her."

"She spends a coupla thou a year here, my friend. A veritable patron, in the old, renowned sense of the word."

The thought occurred; burst out: "You don't have a customer named Mrs. Saks, do you?"

His eyes narrowed. "You a PI? Hey, I got all the entrapment flubs I need this year, ace." The humor drained from his face, leaving it swarthy.

"No, no" Grant said, trying to restore order. "Just a vagrant thought. I knew—"

"Never heard of her:" he said, relaxing.

"Oh." His attention returned to the package, the papers he had brought. "I was wondering if you could tell me about these."

The clerk took the candle first, hefting it in his hand, not opening it. "Yeah, I said to myself when you came in, 'this guy ain't no practitioner’, you know what I mean? Now, I don't care one way or the other - I mean, we exist but to serve." He stepped back for gesturing room. "But it's been my experience, limited though it may be in this game, that, ahh - guys like you who wander into places like this, your newspaper reporters, your snoops and PIs, your tourists - usually wander out shaking their heads, like I'm the one who's crazy. Without purchasing anything. This ain't a library, John Henry. You planning on wasting my time, or you got a legit interest?" He placed the wrapped candle back onto the counter, pointedly, and waited with folded arms.

"Legit enough to even allow for a consultation fee:" Grant said, without grinning.

"You've just entered the realm of the occult:" the clerk said, smiling wide and toothy, looking like Rasputin in a beret. "I am Jade Wing, your humble guide." A stage bow.

And the meter is now running, Grant thought, amused.

"And this thing:" he said, unfurling the candle like a toilet-paper streamer from the windings of sack, "this guy is ... ahhuummm ... tallow candle. Made out of sheep fat. What'd you do, leave it sitting on your dashboard in the heat? Dumb." He flipped it in the air; caught it. It glistened with beads of oil prompted by the temperature.

Grant remembered now:  He had not shown Jennifer the candle. He'd left it in the car. Gradually the sweltering heat had molded one side of it to the juncture of seat and backrest; now the thick, greasy cylinder had a crude corner.

"You're gonna ask me what's it for." Jade Wing said from behind a pointed finger. "Basic spellcasting ordnance. Like I said, sheep fat. You can't buy it at the Mayfair Supermarket with the chip dips and bargain liquor?'

"Or cardamom:" Grant said.

"Yeah, right! I mean, you may have noticed, but they don't make that many black candles. Gotta get 'em at an occult dimestore like this, or maybe mold 'em yourself." He stroked his goatee. "Presuming you have a fat sheep." He joggled his eyebrows and winked. "The M-16 of witchcraft. Use it for almost anything?'

"You're beginning to sound less like a 'practitioner' yourself?'

"Oh, hey - this is a pickup. I mean, don't kid yourself, I'm a knowledgeable employee. I did the groundwork. But this place isn't mine. I can tell you've never met Annabella. Miz Darkmoon. A very strange lady. Wears her hair in a huge Victorian bun; long dresses, like Morticia on The Addams Family. Too much eye makeup by half. Long fingernails. I mean"- he set his fluid, expressive face into neutral, as though posing for a sculptor - "do I look to you like some kinda warlock?" He shook his head at the density of the uninitiated. "Man, I look like Joe Suburban next to the regulars."

"How about these?" Grant produced the three pages of white typing bond on which he had done pencil rubbings of the designs on the headboard of the brass bed. "Can you tell me what these symbols mean?"

Jade stared, squinted, stared again, his eyebrows arching into a little peak of intrigue. "Hey wow?' he said. "What a mess." He fanned the three pages across the counter, and with a nod of permission from Grant, began to sketch the rubbings into bold, black lines with an indelible marker, making small sounds of recognition, yeah, yeah, and this goes like…

"Bells ringing?"

"Tiny ones, my man. I know some of these, but some I don't. Have to check the shelf; get some references. Just a sec, okay?" He was already moving.

"Sure." Grant was perversely pleased to see that whatever books Jade needed were obscure enough to be slotted into the very topmost shelves. He dashed up the ladder like a lithe, rakishly dressed lizard.

The bad part of the nightmare had followed the mirror replay of Montgomery Mantell's death.

As if the moment his father's life had winked out was a cue, Grant's eyes snapped open to meet themselves, in the mirror. It was, not like surfacing from sleep; he awoke feeling more like he had just wrestled out from beneath a massive weight that had immobilized him and blotted out his consciousness by force, some dark fugue he now feared Dr. Byrd had pinpointed with hideous ease. He saw the reflection of his face -not the vampire demon, but his own normal face. He saw the reflection of the shining brass bed in which he lay. And he saw something else. The image of his father shaded to transparency; the candle smoke fogged the room. In the mirror, the bed was alive with writhing, naked bodies. Diaphanous hands fisted the bedpost knobs, sweat-sheens dulling the brass. Ghostflesh jerked together soundlessly, coupling in an abstract that rendered numbers and sexes indiscernible, a thrusting frenzy of bestial rut. Grant lost his breath. He was not in the reflection. And Jennifer was not in bed beside him.

They've got her was his only panicked thought.

His hands grabbed uselessly through the twisted rills of sheet. She was gone.

He damned his brain for making his eyes accuse the mirror so readily. But she was not among the orgiasts. Was the triphammer pounding of his heart against his ribcage evidence that he was awake? Was this still the dream, the nightmare?

Mockingly, the faces of the madly fucking troupe seemed familiar. If Grant's presence was real, they did not acknowledge it. The melding bodies boiled together, wrenched apart. The wisps of dead candle-smoke began to dissolve them.

Grant focused his eyes painfully. They watered, as if from the stench of a putrefacting corpse. They saw.

Beyond the bed, in the darkest corner of the room, the reflected blackness of his real room, behind him, he saw a blocky shape overseeing the tableau. Its ursine skull cut just short of the canted reflection of the ceiling. It watched with faceted diamond eyes, eyes that glinted hard blue-silver with the lust to turn the coital ritual into a carnage of feeding.

It was black, unfathomable, definitely there.

It shifted its attention from the group to the observer, the nonparticipant, the silent watcher beyond.

The sound Grant made was primal, scoured clean of civilized distraction. His left hand swept the heavy coffee mug free of the night-stand and hooked it into the face of the mirror. Both disintegrated. A down-shower of steely glass splinters exploded toward him with an ear-grating, metallic din. The shattering noise swept him beneath an avalanche of sound; needlelike shrapnel sought him, and he shielded his eyes with a forearm and screamed, a long braying sound that chafed his throat and failed to exceed that of the deadly hailstorm of breaking glass.

He uncovered his eyes at last.

He saw himself, peeking out from behind his hands, panting hard now, still alone in bed. Jennifer was not reflected because she was not there at all.

Naked, he scrambled from the bed, stealing yesterday's clothes from the bathroom, hurrying out and slamming the bedroom door. Max wasn't around, either. Quickly, too nervously, he grabbed cash, keys, and the pencil rubbings he had done of the brass headboard days previously, during the polishing stage. He fumbled them and they fanned. When he gathered them, he dropped his keyring. His movements began to betray his panic. He fled with a hard slam of the front door.

He could not force himself to recheck the bedroom. He knew that if he had, he could have verified that the coffee mug was gone from the nightstand and nowhere to be found. And that the mirror might be intact, unbroken, still waiting.

The beige business card on Darkmoon's bulletin board resolved into readability:  MISS MIRIAM - Profundo conocedor de las Ciencias Ocultas y Consejero Espiritual de Fama Internationale.

He was back again, confused.

Spanish, stupid; it's a foreign language, remember?

Fortunately, Jade Wing had not noted him. He was still mountaineering among the dust of Darkmoon's bookshelves.

Safely locked into his Pinto, Grant had finally discovered Jenny's note - laid blatantly atop the pencil rubbings, totally overlooked in his, er, altered state of consciousness. Signed love. A surge of 100-proof idiocy wormed his cheesy grin to a rictus of embarrassment. She had probably kissed him goodbye for the day and he had probably grunted and rolled over.

Her answering machine would do him no good; he'd turned up a Hamburger Hamlet and begun to drink coffee - to help his mind get linear again, and then until he could no longer sit still, unacting. Beds That Eat People; hadn't he caught that at a grindhouse somewhere a year or two back? Awake, in the real world, it was no longer the supernatural histrionics of sleazy horror films that unnerved him but the reasoned likelihood that he might face-first into his banana-creme pie, with no twinge or mental klaxon of warning - and then he would be alone, with the dream-state.

The eyes had been like mean little chromium ball bearings, he thought - rather the way Max's eyes had glinted in the mirror, earlier, And he had definitely heard the sharp crack of the heavy porcelain mug introducing itself to the fragile glass.

Looking at the note signed love made him feel more a renewed occupant of the real world. It was like a notarized letter of transit for hazardous terrain, folded now into quarters and stowed safely in his shirt pocket. He had reread it a hundred times. Jenny almost never left written evidence of her passage or feelings. It would take longer to discover whether she was a letter writer or not.

"Still with us, ace?" Jade Wing was leaning toward him, elbows on the glass, head propped in hands.

Again, Grant refolded the note and pocketed it. "I have some other questions - more general, I think, than -"

Jade held up a hand. Stop sign. "If it's about the notice board, that stuff is Annabella's fault. I can't endorse individual covens. The competition knows automatically, and they toss revenge magic at you for favoritism." He balanced forward on the counter to peek at the Black Forest cuckoo clock mounted near the ram's head. "Hey, noon-and-a-half. Lunchtime!" He squatted, dropping out of sight, and Grant heard him rustling a paper sack around.

"Do you have to leave?"

"No sir" came Jade's voice. "Annabella's out sick with the shingles. Ran right around her waistline; made her walk funny, so she's home trying to magick it away. I'm marooned here till nine tonight. A lot of the regulars don't come in till dusk anyway. I mean, at this moment I got nothing better to do than help you, if you'll be patient. Undivided professional attention is rare to chance across, y'know?" He surfaced with a fistful of fudge cookies, building a little column with them on the countertop next to the books he'd selected, popping them into his mouth whole and dusting the crumbs on his chinos as he riffled through one text, marked a place, consulted another, munched. Grant wound up bringing him a Diet Pepsi from the 7-11 on the north side of Beverly Boulevard.

"What are your other questions?" Jade shouted hollowly as Grant re-entered. "Maybe I can put all this into some kind of perspective if I can get a bigger picture."

"You're supposed to be the expert," Grant said as Jade cracked his cold can and drank. "Tell me what all that has to do with, uh, fornicators."

Jade tapped the rubbings. "The reason this looks so confusing is that it's a bunch of different symbols run together, as far as I can tell." He drew a pencil circle around one, to isolate it. "See? There you have a variation on the Greek cross, that thing you were looking at awhile ago." He pointed to the display box. "A swastika. A pagan fertility symbol, a solar emblem signifying the female principle in Nature." He circled another. "This little squiggle is a rune for the succubus - female sexual demon - and this one is for the incubus."

"Male version of same?"

"And this thing is called the satyrica signa the sign of the satyr. A little penis shape. And here's a set of 'Lilith bars’ a kind of perverted cross. Know your Bible?"

"Lilith was supposedly Adam's first wife. Supposedly a succubus. But this thing over here is the Zracine Vile - signifying spirits that tease you when they're benign. When they get pissed off, they kill you. The hexagram enclosing the symbol is protective. And most of these symbols are in octets, groups of eight, enclosed by octagons. Eight is the number of regeneration and again, fertility. But over here are some perfectly mundane astrological signs - the barbed M for Scorpio; the 69 for Cancer. In astrology, the eighth house is the house of death." Jade shook his head, appearing honestly perplexed. "Are these from a gravestone, or a wailing wall somewhere I don't know about?"

"They're from the headboard of a bed. The symbols are all along the frame, on all sides, and the foot-board"

"Jesus. Carved out of wood?"

"Solid brass?"

"Are you serious?" He skipped it. "Bright yellow brass or dull gold brass?" He waggled his head. "You are serious?'

"It's bright yellow."

"Then it's brass with a low copper content. Called 'high brass.' Know anything about brass, ace?"

"It's a bitch to polish."

"Okay?" Jade was clearly eager to explain. "Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. High brass is about seventy percent copper or less. The more zinc, the tougher - that's called 'cartridge' brass; they make bullets out of it. Into that you put a very small percentage of lead, to improve machinability - high-wear clock parts are made of leaded brass - plus tin and nickel to increase resistance to corrosion and wear. Enough nickel lightens the color more. Are you with me so far?"

"Copper, zinc, lead, tin, nickel" said Grant.

"And iron. Mix 'em all together and you get brass. Each metal has protective significance in one form of sorcery or another. Is it a big bed? All one piece?"

"Super kingsize. And completely covered with symbols like those." He felt on the brink again, ready to slam the brakes.

"Looks like what you got is the biggest goddamn protective amulet in history." Jade wiped his lips. "If I was a righteous fornicator, like Aleister Crowley, I'd kill for that bed."

"I'm thinking about selling it" Grant said, to bait him. "Maybe Crowley would be interested?"

"If he was alive. He died in 1947. He was what is lightly referred to as a voluptuary He sort of stirred the occult together with Rosecrucianism, Eastern religions, a lot of coke, heroin, and sexual gluttony. He was an alloy. Believed that orgiasm allowed mystic communication with the forces of magic; that each orgasm he had took him closer to becoming one with the power, understanding and mastering it. He started his own church, even established an abbey in Sicily. His gospel was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’"

"He'd put the bed on the altar?" Grant was almost lost.

"The bed would be the altar for somebody like that," said Jade, flustered. "Don't you get it? With a bed like that, you could whistle up sexual demons, imps, incubi, succubi that could do things to you they've never even dreamed of down at the Leather Castle. And you wouldn't have to worry about them gobbling you up afterward. Or during. The protected circle inside the bed is like a pentagram. See, succubi, for example, are designed to seduce mortals, and usually wind up frightening them to death. Inside the arms of the bed you've got nothing to worry about; you can fornicate your little heart out, and the forces of darkness can't lay a glove on you."

"What about sex with a normal person?"

"Who can say? It'd make good sex into great sex, great sex into transcendant sex - do what thou wilt, literally."

"Could it cause nightmares, sleeping sickness?" The morning's overdose of coffee was starting to pump acidic bile up his throat.

"Not the bed. But if I was a bully, and couldn't punch you out because you were inside a fence, I'd still try to lob rocks at you over the fence, you get what I mean?"

"Wear me down... "Grant said, with no inflection.

"If something - some entity or force - was pissed off at you but only capable of pestering you long-distance because you had protection ...?" He raised open hands; Quiet! Sabe? Half of Jade Wing's statements curled up at the end, sounding like questions even if they were not. Grant had known this peculiar pattern of speech since grade school.

"So if I had protection, so?"

"The bad guy might sock you with dizziness, fainting spells, or bad dreams. Sudden feelings of personal danger. Vertigo. Hair loss. Everything from fear to pimples. The Navajo Indians call it the ghost sickness. It feeds on the ego." He smoothed his stiff, gleaming mustaches between his fingertips.

"I don't know any demons." But I might have inherited one or two.

"You don't have to. They might know you, though. Easy." He pulled a thin volume from the bottom of the stack he'd brought and let it fall open to a page marked by a mauve ribbon - "here. You light the candle - it doesn't matter that it's been lit already - and recite this, over and over." He indicated a short paragraph. "Might help if you did it on the bed. Keep saying it for, I don't know, five minutes or so. It's simple. Fewer words than the Equal Rights Amendment. Just make sure the candle doesn't go out, or you have to start over."

Grant felt like fainting. Evil spirits had nothing to do with the feeling that surged up inside of him as Jade rambled.

"Mind you," he said. "Unless you get specific, a lot of this is conjecture. But you seem to be going pale at key moments; I'd wager that you've felt the pull of the old strings, supernaturally speaking, and recently, too. Stop me when I get outrageous." He restacked the books, the rubbings, and stuck his pencil and marker back into a cup shaped like a skull. "But of course, you don't really believe in any of this shit, do you?" Eyebrows up.

"Certainly not," he said, returning Jade's corner-of-the-mouth smile. "I'll take the book just as a curio?'

"Born pitchman, am I not?" he said as he punched it into the humming register. It peeped and clicked and burped out a skinny receipt designed to read Blessed Be just shy of the sawtoothed perforation.

Grant unclipped a fifty and folded it double in his hand, making ready. "Tell me one more thing."

"Business is so brisk I don't have a second to breathe," Jade said, opening his arms to indicate the empty store.

"What do you know about the Spilsbury Murders - cult killing, happened in 1959? Could that have had something to do with witchcraft or some kind of cult or coven?"

"Never heard of it."

He slid the fifty across. "Keep the change. For consultation rendered?'

Jade and Ulysses S. Grant stared each other down for an instant. "Where ya off to now, ace?" he said, tucking the bill away.

"To talk to a little old lady who can tell me about the Spilsbury Murders." He nodded. "Thanks for your time."

"It's your time," he said. "You bought it. No sweat - as soon as you walk out, somebody else'll roll in. That's the way things work around this place?'

Before he left, he used Darkmoon's phone to try and warn—no, no, ask Jenny not to go back to his apartment alone, to let them meet at her place. He left the message on her machine. Then he made the drive back to Avalon Circle.

Mrs. Saks was already dead.

He later thought that perhaps he had pounded on Jenny's door a bit too hard, rattling it in its secure frame, very possibly stirring a neighbor. Stupidly, he at least startled her into taking her time answering the door, lest the knocker be 61-year-old Mr. Jensen from down the hall, horny and drunk again. He watched darkness swirl around the dot of light in the bull's eye of the door peephole.

The raven hair fell to mingle with her deep-burgundy robe. She waved him in without the expected admonishments, sighing heavily, and that made him feel sufficiently dumb. The jump he had just given her was not entirely gone from her eyes yet. She watched him attempt to recover from his fumble by fading around it.

"Where the hell have you been?" Instantly, he regretted the line. Pro forma soap opera shorthand for emotional scenes.

She would let it pass - it was in her nature, he thought - but not without retort. "You look like hell yourself." She let him shut the door himself, and preceded him into her airy and clinically ordered kitchen. Everything in Jennifer's apartment appeared to have been recently uncrated by designers, lovingly reconstructing a diorama:  Quarters of Modern Professional Woman. Magazines arranged oh so artfully on the table; agate ashtrays spotless; espresso machine gleaming; kitchen tiles as radiant as those in a floor-wax commercial. At first, the entire display had made Grant feel uncomfortable and shabby. He soon decided he liked it. Other people, he supposed, would complain that it was too reminiscent of their parents' house. He knew, certifiably, this was nothing like his parents' house. He knew from experience that Jennifer did sit on her sofa, despite the even, directional scape of the fabric nap. From experience, he knew Jennifer had done much more acrobatic things on that sofa.

The sofa did not betray the things it had witnessed.

She had given up the idea of touching him in greeting for now. It would be awkward, inappropriate. Atonement was due. But she despised the inexorability of the ritual, so said, "Sit, you. We shall back up and start again, since I don't want either of us to be mad. It's not worth it, not at this time of night. Not for us." Water was a boil and coffee was premeasured. Of course she had expected him. Maybe. "And I won't apologize for being out of touch. I did get your message on the machine. I had to run out. A chore I couldn't avoid." She favored him by looking back for a reply. "You staying?"

"Huh?" He stumbled mentally. "Yeah. Of course."

"I don't want to bother being domestic unless you're staying. You're very late. And I haven't been able to get in touch with you, either."

He blundered about for a place to begin. With his dream, with the hideous logic chain forged at Darkmoon Occult Supplies?

With the contrite, elderly woman he had found doing sentry duty on Mrs. Saks' front porch?

"Just a pity, young sir, a shame. One of those awful vans, with the whirling lights, took her away this afternoon. If you met her, of course, then you knew she was carrying around too much, you know. Like a side of pork. Poor, dear woman. My heart couldn't stand a job like that, and neither could yours, for long. It would just burst. I bet the doctor says her heart just POPPED from the overload, like a circuit breaker. The least teeny bit of tension or stress. Or excitement."

Or how about a hulking, creepy, bearish manifestation, come a-calling to stamp her out before she could tell one Grant Mantell damning facts about the Spilsbury Murders? It might not be capable of crossing Mrs. Saks' hex sign ... but as Jade Wing had advised, it could lob a few rocks.

Grant considered the coffee, almost made. He was not sure he needed any more stimulation this night.

Max's nails clicked on the kitchen floor. A warm, damp, pink-black nose pressed into Grant's free hand. The dog sat his head heavily upon Grant's knee and proceeded to dust his jeans with white hair.

"No barking at the door allowed," said Jennifer. "He has better-developed manners than you."

The incident with the mirror that morning seemed years distant. He released a tired exhalation. "Remember what they told you about acne in high school? The self-renewing cycle. Don't worry about getting pimples, they said, because worrying causes them. Talk about a fixed game." He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, then ruffled the dog's head without looking. "Now I'm thinking about crap I don't want to. But I can't help it. I can't stop it. Now, I can't."

She was pulling things down from shelves, keeping her back to him, he thought, because he had sinned earlier. Now he could tell she was making extra work for herself, averting her eyes. All he heard her say was: "You're scared you've got it. That disease you think your father had -"

Suddenly the word narcolepsy swelled up to ridiculous zeppelin size in his head, becoming unmanageable for the narrow limits inside which he wanted to confine his explanation. Everything fizzled. "I'm terrified I've got it," he said in a small voice. "I'm scared I've got it, and it's driving me bonkers in some weird chemical way, making me see phantoms, giving me nightmares to feed the superstitions. Another goddamn cycle, like a hungry little cancer, chomping away. Auto-cannibalism of the sanity, to the point where a missing coffee cup sends me into an untethered panic."

"Hang onto this one." She handed over a steaming mug, eyes still direct and dry.

He preferred not to exchange meaningful silences. "It just figures, you know. Now that I've come into all the cash I'll ever need, it so happens I've also got" - he flubbed the word; had to force it out - "a disease. And inherited insanity. I can afford the best hospitals. Custom-tailored strait-jackets, when the hallucinations get really pro."

"Stop?' She sat within reach, knees poking from the division of robe.

"Stop thinking about it? That's what they'd say in high school - don't think about getting zits all over your face or you'll get 'em - and thinking this thing to death is what will shove me off the proverbial edge. Did I mention the nightmares I'm having about the mirror are progressive? More information each time; definitely freaky enough to certify me for a private closet. Classic pattern of decay. Did I mention that I've gone in for occult consultation?" A wild laugh squirmed free and sounded unhealthy. "Did I mention I'm about this far away from actually believing a corpulent little old lady was somehow killed by the forces of darkness this morning? Jesus H. goddamn Christ." He let the mug warm his hands. Max, bored with this trifling, checked his dish to see if anything edible had appeared in his absence.

"So wallow if you want," she countered sharply. "But if you're going on that kind of drunk, get your terminology right. Try corybantiasm, I quote, 'a sleepless delirium accompanied by wild and frightening hallucinations.' Not narcolepsy. Try getting a definite prognosis if you really think you're sick. Get a different doctor. Stay away from your father's camp. And why not just dump the fucking mirror - no antique is worth this kind of anguish." Clunk - her mug came down like a gavel on the breakfast bar.

"You really have been listening," he said, as though at last recognizing her through a fogbank of vertigo. He raised the cup and tasted chocolate, cinnamon, coffee, cream, all spiked with something that imparted a nice, subtle bite.

She made a futile gesture, as if trying to encompass the improbability of it all. "Suppose your mirror isn't haunted, Grant?"

"Then I guess we're back to the stuff that bothers me a bit deeper?"

"No, I mean, what if it's the bed that's evil and not the mirror?"

"Now who's being superstitious?"

She leapt to correct:  "Assuming, just assuming for a moment that there's any profit to be had from that line of logic." For the record, she qualified:  "And not that I believe it, anyway." She killed a bit more thinking time by drinking from her own mug, then picking up the slim silver cigarette case from the counter. Its mechanistic Deco engraving caught light. Trapped it. "By the way - is this yours?"

Disorientation crept up his skeleton. "No. They're yours?'

Her expression told him she was being unfairly toyed with. "These are lady cigarettes, doll, but they're not mine. I wouldn't smoke these things. They'd kill me dead." She smiled, shrugged, put the case aside.

A sophisticated little jest, Grant thought; that's it. He tried to hold down his unease. Grow up, spud, learn some adult humor, get some subtlety into your wit. Keep up with her. Forsake the puns and fart jokes, huh?

Do nothing. Pretend you get it. And let her play with the wolves awhile.

"Okay" she said. "So - think about this for a moment, Goodman Mantell. Your problems are all sleep-related, from the nightmares to the real-or-imagined illness. Think of what a holding tank for fear a bed could be - your new bed could be. Think of all the fears beds are party to. When you were a little kid, how many things about your bed scared you?"

"I had at least two boogeymen in residence underneath," he said, warming to the idea. "There must've been some kid somewhere without one. I wouldn't let my feet hang over the edge; I still don't. But it was a place of security, too - where else can you hide under the covers, except in bed?"

"But that security was a result of the fear, the thing you were hiding from. I used to think there were monster hermit crabs who wanted to clip my bare toes off with their pincers. And think - when you get older, schedules start to victimize you. You fear being up too late, fear your parents will whack you for reading under the blanket with a flashlight. Then you fear oversleeping - you'll be late for school. Late for work. Then you fear not sleeping enough - what am I doing to my body?"

"And then there's my father," Grant said, hating the way the progression formed a neat, ordered chain. "He resents sleeping at all because it detracts from work-time with Calex. His body starts compensating and he immediately thinks he's sick, and starts worrying over how such a sickness could ball up his high-gear corporate life." He suddenly felt his stomach roll. "Pimples."

"Think of the attendant fear standing in line, ready, when sex becomes an issue in life," she said, pleased now with the wealth of examples. "Fear of the first time. Very powerful; very scary. Some people worry about loss of virginity; more people worry about how they'll perform. Fear of missing an orgasm, or messing one up, or not feeling what you think you're supposed to. A million fears regarding the person who has consented to get into such a ridiculous position with you." After a beat, she added, "Fear of impotence."

"God, do I hate the sound of that word," he said. "Another one that feeds on itself. You either best it, or just have to find somebody who doesn't scare you so much..."

"And how many people die in bed?"

Now that, he thought, was terrific PR for what inane waterbed ads called "sleep systems." A lot of people died flatbacking it in their own, comfy, familiar beds, without any special supernatural assistance. Death and beds. Deathbeds. Could a long enough association between the two lead to some kind of causal relationship? A coffin, to be sure, was just a narrow bed with silk cushions and a lid.

"No bedsores and senility, not for me, not at this rate," he said. Jenny's brewed concoction was beveling the sharp corners in his head.

"I can think of better ways to go," she said, inclining her head downward, her eyes darkening, having much the same effect as the drink. "Enough for one more?" She indicated the glass pot, the tiny silver pitchers, the condiments on the counter.

"Sure, I -" He stopped cold. Something, a thought, had just fallen out of his head like a chunk of rotten insulation. It's happening again! He clenched his fists. No, surely it was the mad whipsaw of tension-stress; having made it intact to Jenny's, he relaxed (let his guard down?) and had momentarily forgotten what he was going to –

He gave his coffee mug a secret-agent glance of doubt. No, that suspicion was even dumber.

He looked up; saw her watching him with a most peculiar expression. The mug made him remember.

"The mirror," he said, giving over the cup. "Jenny, I've got to go back to the apartment and see if the mirror is unbroken, if the mug is still gone. See if I fantasized this whole thing. I need you to come with me. Remember what you said about being alone with the damned thing? If this was all a hallucination, then I've got my mental stability to fret about. But if it wasn't - then I've got palpable proof."

"Of what?" she said, appearing derailed, annoyed. "Either a busted mirror or a coffee cup that's MIA. Truly substantial evidence, my love."

"To me it is, yeah!" He nearly shouted. "I know the goddamn thing was shining back at me when I left. I pitched the cup at it, and broke it, and didn't break it! I know—"

"I'll go, I'll go, cease fire." She took the cup from his hands and returned it, steaming, full. "But in the morning, Grant, okay? I'm shagged." She braced him, placing her hands on his shoulders and pushing her own shoulders back. Her vertebrae pop-pop-popped. She sighed in relief. The belt of the burgundy robe gave up a few inches. "Seriously?"

His reserves of iron were crapping out. "No, Jenny. Now. Don't you get it? I can know one way or the other, now, tonight, and I need you well, to notarize what I find out."

She tapped away his iron with her touch, seemingly absorbing it through her fingertips. "No, yourself. If it's such cosmic proof, it can wait till sunrise, because I need you right now." She guided his hands into the slack of the robe. "Pause a moment to let it sink in, boy."

The solid rise of her chest, between her breasts, seemed to be raging with warmth. He squashed the nutty urge to ask if she was running a fever. An imp stationed near his ear counseled him not to blow it twice in one night, and capitulation began.

Her hand pushed his to the knotting of belt. "I don't have a stitch on under this thing," she said, her breath carrying her voice to him in soft little clouds. "You might have guessed."

He croaked out a syllable of agreement. The thin belt surrendered faster than an Italian infantryman and she arched into his grasp.

"I don't want you to go right now," she said. "I don't want to go. It's night out there, Grant, and now you've got me scared of it. Love me instead?"

The attitude of her face was a picture Grant had imagined on a thousand nights he had spent alone, and he shut up protesting, for his own good. He stifled himself despite the renegade interior voice, the imp, warning him that manipulation of this brazen sort was a diversion one of the bad guys might pull. One of the enemy; one of them. He tried to see clues in the familiar agate-gray eyes of his lover. The newly poured coffee began to cool.

Bed was an utter disaster.

He sat in the cold concrete night of the parking garage below his apartment. He chuckled. It was a small, fatal sound; a noise of self-destruction.

"I'm going. Over there. Right now." Still groggy with new sleep, she had said, "No. Not yet." He said okay; she had rolled over. Then he sneaked his clothing out of her bedroom on tiptoe. Edging out the door, he heard a final syllable: "Don't."

He did not attempt to join the ends of the circle by leaving her a note, signed love.

Don't.

Perversely, the center of his attention had become Jenny's digital clock. He had watched it tote up elapsed time as he kissed her once more, caressed her again, and nothing else happened. More lost time, Panic. He felt displaced, goading his own erection as though he was inside a different, uncooperative skin. Coaching had never been needed before. He came up mechanically hard and lost it before he could even move, before his brain could pester him about the trouble he was experiencing. The second time was worse, pyramiding his frustration.

Jennifer's calm disclaimers only angered him inside. You're exhausted distracted frightened tired. It's all right. It's not necessary. You're just—

Impotent. The reflex cliché locked smoothly on, extracted blood and detached. Getting old, ditto.

He thought disgustedly that excuses like age were still decades away. Not only that, but through it all his apartment, his bedroom, was still waiting with open arms and maybe jaws, perhaps getting itchy for action.

He thought of boffing Max on the snout to keep him from thundering through the living room, wagging and rowfing, but instead mutely motioned him out the door. He'd gotten it into his pinpoint doggie brain that there was A RIDE to be had, and he would wake up the entire building should Grant refuse him a chance to stick his head out the car window into the mesmerizing slipstream of moving air. He piled himself into the suicide seat of the Pinto and panted. His breath was awful this morning.

Grant thought of the clock, counting time, and booted his door open. "Okay, dogface, let's go do it."

On the way up, it occurred to him that the culpability for last night's performance might not be entirely his - what if the brass bed was some kind of sexual exciter, as Jade Wing had claimed, the way the mirror seemed to be a paranormal videotape deck, rerunning the past?

Past tense operative, he thought. Was, not is. He had broken the mirror yesterday morning. Maybe.

His rioting metabolism was in hard contrast to the mundane view inside his door. He was over cranked, attack-ready, flushed full of fresh adrenaline, and everything looked damnably regular. The rickrack he'd spilled off the desk was still in the same position he'd abandoned it on the floor. Yet something else, a calm resonant mental tone, quietly contradicted the apartment's masque of normalcy.

Perhaps it was the set of air in the room that told him the apartment had been entered and changes unobtrusively worked.

There was no need to cautiously ease the bedroom door open with an extended foot (the sound of its slam the day before rolled back to him now, full volume). He had begun to twist the knob when Max nosed blithely through ahead of him.

In just a few days of ownership, he had become accustomed to the way the big mirror beamed light around the bedroom, formerly the dimmest box in the place. That light was gone now. The scrolled brass frame hung dark, like the pit of an empty eye socket, or a television with a kicked-in tube. Tiny motes of brass-yellow glinted feebly. The mirror glass was salted all over the bed, the carpet, the nightstand, in glittering splinters, shiny and slim and pointed like the fangs from a burnished mechanical rattlesnake. They broadcast a galaxy of light points across the ceiling, sharp white. It was broken, all right, shattered into a million million polished smithereens. He waded into the densest spill of broken glass, his shoes imbedding needled fragments into the carpet. He bent and retrieved a cup handle snapped open to porous tooth-white on each end, a curve like a skeleton's knuckle joint. Chunkier, triangular wedges of the dead coffee mug were plainly mingled with the obliterated mirror's metallic remains.

"Don't walk on the glass, Max," he said, lacking anything else.

His decision was already made. If he was crazy enough to hallucinate the mirror whole, the cup vanished, then one more spurt of lunacy could not curse him any more before calling the medics - or finding himself a razor blade.

"Come on, Max, we gotta visit the car again." The tallow candle and the spellbook from Darkmoon were still in the Pinto. He had left them behind, thinking that to tote them up to the apartment before seeing might jinx what he was to discover. He felt sure that deep inside he did not want to believe, no. Now it made no difference to go through the motions, complete the dance as a matter of style, neutrally, since sillier things had already been done.

On his way out it occurred to him to case the kitchen.

He knew what he had. Between the dust of the cabinets and the grease of the sink, he owned three large dinner plates, two salad plates, two mismatched short-stem wine goblets, a few plastic baseball trading cups from 7-11, a Pyrex bowl for all purposes, some Melmac plates he never used, and four coffee cups - one bowl-shaped Shafford cup with no saucer and three identical dark brown mugs. The unbroken pair would be in the kitchen.

He looked and found one mug, dirty. He looked twice. He began to search. After inventing unlikely hiding places - in the refrigerator, under the sofa cushions - he stopped and still had exactly one mug accounted for.

Yes, there was a chance Jenny might have busted it and slipped it into the trash and forgotten it. There also seemed to be a chance that she had broken it on purpose, more recently, in the bedroom. She had a key to his apartment; he'd been gone all day yesterday.

Jenny. Jennifer. Preternaturally beautiful and obviously well off. Why would she have anything to do with him unless - Mrs. Saks had told him you'd best destroy whatever's left.

The tallow candle was yielding now to the dashboard and windshield, no longer even remotely a cylinder so much as an amorphous mass inside the paper. It smelled like stale bacon. Max chased Grant happily down the service stairs. Avoiding the elevator forced him to fry off loose blood sugar. As he shut his door, his phone began ringing. He ignored it.

Let her come on her own.

Her presence could render him vertiginous, almost always had. She wobbled him. Could make him just a touch weak in the knees. A barely noticeable form of control ... or mere proof of the intensity with which he realized he wanted her?

Sure.

"What about you, old pal?" he said to Max. "How real are you?"

Max sneezed explosively, as if to vindicate his actuality. Certainly nothing metaphysical could sneeze or fart with Max's style.

Maybe the dog merely served the purpose of helping to snare him in the first place. Let's be thorough now, not reluctant, he thought; let's run this little extrapolation to earth. Dogs were a soft spot of his. The current apartment (like all the others) was too small to keep one, and his list of second-string wants perpetually included a canine buddy. But if Jenny was something other than ... if she was different in some way, wouldn't Max sense it, and react as he had to the authentically bad vibes of the mirror? Didn't animals know?

Grant camped out on the brass bed with his souvenirs until Jennifer's form filled up the bedroom doorway. He heard his door close and imagined the number of paces across the living room, and there she was, having obviously rolled out of bed and into jeans and a loose, billowy work shirt. Her hair was free, mussed from the rush.

"I'm conducting an experiment in pop craziness, the kind we generally ascribe to the Boulevard loons," he said to her silhouette. "And if nothing comes of it, I'm entitled to feel supremely stupid. Should that happen, you may not want to be everything for me anymore. But if something does happen ... god, then I've got a whole additional set of problems, don't I?"

Now she did not talk of doctors, or urge calm, or coo reassurance, or protect her innocence with a flood of examples. She had helped him with the chain of conjecture that led here. Motives could be dealt with after the fact. She said what she had said earlier, and now the word chilled him.

"Don't?"

Her breath was labored, he noticed. What would've happened if he'd answered the phone instead?

"I can't stop you, can I?" she said.

"I'm afraid not, Jenny. I mean afraid. Not knowing scares me witless. I don't know that I've ever loved anything, either —maybe I never spent enough time contemplating it - but I'd apply that word, love, for whatever value it's worth with you. But my brain can't just disengage or ignore things. And that means if not today, I'd do this next week, assuming my days weren't numbered." The words came out shakily.

"I understand," she said. "I mean, I know. It's the way you are."

"What the hell else can I do?"

Max, put off by their sloth, sought his place beneath the stereo shelf. Grant abruptly felt like a general abandoned in a trench during a banzai charge, his heart racing because Jenny had not budged from the doorway. She would not come near the bed now. He gained some engine of protection, Mrs. Saks' reedy voice said inside his head. But he was taken anyway.

"You can let me tell you a story," she said finally, the hurt plainly clogging her speech.

"I'm listening." No concessions. You're committed, boy.

"Once upon a time there were some no-talent Hollywood leeches." There was no sarcasm in her tone.

"They got off by claiming to be attendants of Cybele; whether they actually believed in such a nature goddess doesn't matter. It was just a thin license for fucking their brains out at ritual orgies. They managed to attract the attention of some jaded business mavens, ledger hacks who wanted to cop a feel on the Hollywood action they'd always coveted, and become part of the big, glittery Movie Machine. They got to bare their butts and indulge their wet dreams in exchange for bankrolling this erstwhile Bad Actor's Glut. Eventually, the financial grease permitted a few of these no-talents to slide through into the filmmaking mainstream. The Business Administration dropouts formed a big, bad corporation. And their Olympian sexual repertoire began to get eccentric."

Grant wondered if Aleister Crowley had fancied himself a corybantic. Or if Jennifer knew how sharp her teeth could look to someone else, in the dark.

"Blood got spilled," she said. "Then imbibed. Some of these worthies got 'accidentally' killed. The group began to study, delving into ways to make their orgies more radical, once they'd passed beyond mere torture and murder. Cybele had nothing to do with the kind of special assistance they eventually fomented. Their custom-made patron. It whistled up all manner of brand new sexual diversions. But it was a newly-born thing, hungry, and not a little bit insane. It was like a nuclear pile. The group discovered that in order to keep going, they would require protection against the benefactor they'd created ... or it would consume them when it tired of sacrifices. In due course they contrived a way to keep from getting gobbled up. Everything stayed copacetic. The smarmy occult rumors helped the film careers along. Jase Spilsbury became a minor star; his was the orgy mansion, the demon spa. Colette Nichols, Bryan Thorne, Davis T.J. Stone, Julia Cushing-Jones - all prospered. And the new corporation that spawned them broke ground in plastics and petroleum at the right time and became a mega-monolith. That part I think you already know about."

She had not moved. Grant could not even make out her lips in the bad light, telling the tale.

Blasphemers. Fornicators.

"The club, however, would not countenance splitters, and when one man wanted to pay accounts and leave, they voted no. Easy. He was a resourceful man, with a facile mind that had elevated him greatly inside the Corporation. He arranged to quite audaciously steal away their hallowed protection, at night, practically from under their muzzles, and without it they were lost. Their pet monster scooped them up on the night of May first, 1959. Walpurgisnacht, coincidentally - a night when witches and demons and so forth are supposed to swarm forth to revel amidst unwary humans. That's pop occult stuff, though, too fairytale. They sure didn't believe in it. It was clearly a cult murder; one of Hollywood's first.

"The beast they'd created, however, did not evaporate at their passing. There was still the rogue member of the Club."

"Say it," Grant said dully. "My father."

"He shut away the protection where it could shield him and occasionally availed himself of the pleasures the Beast could offer. After a decade, forgetting became easy - he never truly liked his ex-cohorts. And soon he got around to the homework they had all neglected. The existence of the Beast was threatened and subtle combat was engaged. As he looked for ways to vanquish the nuisance he'd helped to call up, the Beast tried beguiling him into giving up his protection."

"He was baited with a beautiful woman," said Grant. "One he kept to himself. Outsiders shrugged her off as some mystery bimbo; no big deal." He did not have to ask why his mother had divorced his father; why the money had flowed in but the contact had been sparse all these years.

"An alternate avenue of attack, a gradual blood clot growing quietly in the brain, finally had the desired effect. Stupid Beast. With the death of the last believer, it dwindled away to nothing. The bait it had abandoned survived it by flowing naturally toward the only outlet possible - the son."

"The son." You're of his blood. I can smell it!

"I'm perfect for you, Grant. I can't help but be - emotionally, sexually. There's nothing malign involved with actually becoming corporeal, being real unexpectedly. Accidentally. And there you were, with your simple emotional stresses, the answers to which were so easy for me. There you were. Your existence helped make me a fact. I'm real. And you looked so helpless when we met, I ...," A trace of her customary humor seeped into her recollection. "The more real I became, the more I fell in love with you. I couldn't help that, either. And I never wanted to leave you. Don't ask me, but ... the mirror somehow stockpiled everything it witnessed. And the bed was the charmed circle. Surely you've noticed how sex on it is. But now you're dabbling in things that could erase me. I wasn't lying when I said I was scared."

Her voice quavered now. It was too convincing, Grant thought, hating it. "I saw the Beast in the mirror; it still exists."

"No. That's the past; it was only showing you the past."

"Then why did you sneak back here and break it?"

He heard a sigh come out in the dark. "You seemed so convinced you were seeing things I thought I could solidify your problems into reality. Without the glass the visions would stop, and you'd eventually believe the disappearance of your coffee cup into it was a hallucination. An overwrought mental state I could nurse you out of; magic mirrors, no. For the same reason I tried to get to Mrs. Saks' house ahead of you."

"You killed her?"

"No." He thought he could feel her sheer frustration. "I went to her house. That's why all you got on the phone was my machine. I knew about her but never suspected she was tangled up in the occultism and had gotten the Beast after her ass, as well. She was obviously inside when I knocked. When I wouldn't leave, she started screeching things about smelling what I was in God's eye, and how she had been tempted with the figure of her dead husband. Just screaming— totally out of it. So I left. I could only hope you wouldn't take her too seriously if she told you some embellished riff about the Spilsbury Murders."

"Sounds like she might've wailed loud and hard enough to make her heart explode," Grant ventured. "It also sounds, therefore, like the Beast is still with us. A hematoma, a coronary, my nightmares, hallucinations and -"

"Don't you grasp?!" She was angered but perfectly in character as Grant knew her and exasperated by what seemed his congenital male thick headedness. "It's not me you have to be afraid of, it's that Dr. Byrd, it's your father's Calex buddies - they're the ones interested in starting the whole stinking cycle up again! That's why they're so anxious to buy that property out from under you —you haven't heard from them, but you will. Why Byrd wants to poke and prod you. They're holding off now because of death protocol, a grace period between you and your father. If there's one thing they respect, it's protocol. And they'll be the death of you, when they find they can't groom you!"

"What about you?" Again, it sounded too logical to Grant. Diversions, successful ones, always sounded good, were well planned, like battle strategy.

"I don't know. And I don't care about any of them. You have the savvy to steer around the greedy ones, the incompetent ones, the ladder-climbers that started all the bad things. I just want to leave. I need to know if you have enough faith in me to throw the junk away, get it clear of them. No hocus-pocus, no candles, no visions. Melt the goddamned bed down and sell it as lamp chains. But let's leave it behind."

"Toss away my supposed protection, Jenny? Sounds like something the old Beast would cotton to real fast."

"Oh, god, I know how I must sound!" Her voice cracked with tears, hopelessness.

His thumb was marking the page Jade Wing had recommended in the book. "Let's try an alternate scenario," he said, "just for argument's sake. Devil's advocate time, right? Let's propose that the bed, being a huge protective amulet (bless you, Jade Wing, for the jargon, at least), is the only roadblock in the Beast's way. Its power is already diminished, and the bed retards it from getting more serious, more real. So Mister Beast, while it can't get physical, can still harass me with visions, nightmares. Grant suspects a relationship between the bed and the Beast he sees in the mirror. Bad news. The Beast needs to eighty-six the bed before Grant can investigate and maybe find a way to rub it out. Little Jenny trots along and smashes the mirror, strictly to help Grant with his head problem, but coincidentally helping the Beast - since Grant will now not see any more disturbing revelations. Little Jenny beats Grant back to Mrs. Saks, again strictly to help Grant, and Mrs. Saks' heart bursts before I can grill her about my father. And then little Jenny finally gets around to spinning this tale for Grant - when were you planning to let me in on all this? And her closing remark is 'Gee, Grant, get rid of the bed, huh?’" He let the book drop open to the place Jade Wing had marked. "Little Jenny begins to look like the Beast's hole card against oblivion. I think that going through with the candle trick, all the way, since my father never got a chance at the finale, might make everyone here honest, for good. Or not so good."

"And it might destroy me. If your father had managed to complete the recitation, I wouldn't be here."

"But according to your own story, you might have ended up as a participant in my father's demise. Bait for Mister Beast. No? Then how about this, Jenny: If you've been absolutely straight with me, this little spellbreaker might not do a damned thing to you."

"You're gambling." She did not approve.

"I don't really think so. Your presence, just standing there, constitutes a fair argument for you're being a good guy. Max - whom I am convinced is a real dog - likes you. And if you're not lying, then you gambled, by breaking the mirror without knowing the consequences in advance. You gambled on saving me the most painless way and my nosiness botched the plan. You weren't sure what would happen. Some thing, like the Beast, would be sure, I think. And - also if you're not lying - you went to Mrs. Saks and stood right underneath a protective hex sign. If you were a bad guy and could do that, Mrs. Saks would've died a long time ago. Yeah, I'm gambling now. I'm betting that you've become real enough, strong enough for the bed or the words in here not to matter."

"Assuming you just haven't lost your mind," she said, her tone acknowledging the small hope he'd made implicit.

"If I am crazy, you've got a lot of explaining to do for that story about Spilsbury and the Beast" he said, almost smiling. "Let's get this over with."

"Wait," she said, hands coming up. "No. I guess not." She shook her head wonderingly, sniffed. "You have to do it, don't you? If I'm lying, I'm a threat, and the only way you'll really know if I'm lying is to..." Her extended hands dropped to her sides. "I can't even kiss you, before, just in case." She wiped away tears. "I can't even cry, because it might be a con."

A surge inside him insisted this was real. She was real, and her love for him was chewing up her insides. I can't not do this. His fingers snapped the butane lighter to life, and the wick of the lumpy tallow stump sputtered and caught.

"A moment," she said. Strength tried to slither away and was recaptured. "I'm going down to your car to wait. If I know you at all, you ran off and left it open. Let's pretend I went to check to see if it was locked. You come down looking for me. If you see me sitting there wiping my eyes, then all is well, and we can fight later. And I won't say I love you, because by now you either know it or you don't. I don't want to just loiter here, with you watching, in case anything does happen. That's strange, isn't it? I should know whether something should happen. Or shouldn't. But I don't." Her voice stayed low and level, like a worker, newly fired. "Goodbye, then. Lover."

"Not goodbye," he said as she turned to leave, and he reckoned he saw her eyes glint toward him, briefly chromium in the dim light. "Not ever."

Jennifer was gone. She closed the front door behind her, but only after Max, anticipating another jaunt in the car, perked up and followed her out hopefully. Damned pointy-eared turncoat. The gentle way Jenny closed the door was more horrible than a million doors slammed hard against nightmares.

Grant would never see her again.

Once again he was here in the brass bed, by candlelight. This time he was utterly alone, and his nose told him the sheets needed changing. The odor of the candle made itself thickly evident; he could hear the wick sizzling in the absolute quiet. There was no way the candle could tip over, or roll away, as it had in his father's hands. Summer heat plus the Pinto's dashboard had conspired to reform the tallow cylinder into an Impressionist mini-pyramid. Grant read aloud.

After the flat, parched echo of his own voice died, he sat there like the village idiot. He had expected the air in the room to roil, to hear a distant, unearthly howl as the teardrop of fire flickered while he recited the words. He made it to the end of the passage. His hands were shaking. Nothing provocative happened. The sun did not break the clouds.

Max sat in the cockpit of the Pinto, licking his toes. His tail started wagging, in hopes of A RIDE. There was nothing so dramatic as a note using the word love and ending in midsentence. There was no residue, no evidence. Jennifer could just as easily have hailed a cab for parts unknown. Max's tail ceased moving as Grant sat down hard on the oil and soot-stained concrete, his back pressed to a hubcap, and wept the first honest tears he had known in twenty-eight years. The dog cocked his head, sympathetically.

Before he cleared out of Los Angeles for good he made a lot of phone calls. He told Toby Wolff, the photographer, that Jennifer had pulled stakes for the gauntlet of modeling agencies in Manhattan, and indeed, this was an impression Grant's own gut feelings clung to - that she had merely walked out of the garage and out of his life. It was the way many people dealt with death. The lost one was assigned a status of permanent incommunicado, making them unreachable instead of obliterated. He felt certain that some blinking mental telltale-lamp would have gone dark if she really was dead ... provided that she was ever really alive. She had been alive enough to photograph. And Toby Wolff had chalked up a lot of photographs. They all hurt to look at, even the bad ones.

With the help of a rented van and some able bodies from Starving Students, Grant engineered the transport of the bed, mirror frame, the candle and book, plus every shard of broken glass up the Pacific Coast Highway, to a secluded lookout called Point Pitt. In the middle of the night, the load went into the ocean and the movers pocketed big tips. Grant felt good when he saw how fast the baroque brasswork sank into the boiling whitecaps of seawater. Up at Point Pitt, the water ran deep close to shore. The admonition of the late Mrs. Saks still nagged, however:  Fire cleanses. Not water. That sort of detail was important to the folks who kept Darkmoon Occult Supplies in business. But the act made him feel relieved in a bitter, minor way, and upon his return to the city he left an extra hundred bucks in an envelope for Jade Wing, slipping it through the door slot at an hour when even Darkmoon's lamps were out. Go and try to bribe the forces of darkness, sure. But it, too, felt correct.

The inheritance funds were tapped and new lawyers and accountants were engaged. The proper city officials got their palms crossed with baksheesh. Grant's representatives secured Mrs. Saks' property, tore down her house, and dedicated the resultant residential park to his father, via a bronze plaque. Calex never got a hold of the property, and the plaque stands there to this day.

Max happily rode shotgun as L.A. shrank in the car's rearview. Grant wondered if the dog sensed, or knew. He wished he could know if Max had sat thumping his tail while Jennifer walked quickly out of the parking garage ... or phased into thin air like a lap-dissolve in a TV commercial. He wondered about the dog, but not too much, because that was the road back to paranoia and lunacy.

Instead, he drove north to begin waiting.

He forced himself not to notice when Max's brilliant, clear blue eyes began to darken into a unique shade of agate-gray.

CALENDAR GIRL

Brett Deitz was fourteen years old when he first saw Drea Wiseman. Even with fold creases trisecting her body and a staple rammed through her midsection, she was the most beautiful woman Brad had ever seen; at least, that's what he decided after he'd jerked off to the photo for the tenth time. The magazine became the first thing Brad ever actually stole from his Dad, which is to say, his father winkingly permitted Brad to "borrow" it and never asked for its return. Mom had not been consulted, and Brad inferred that she did not need to be advised. It was a small, harmless conspiracy at first, the sort of watershed that makes a kid feel grown up.

A week before Brad turned seventeen, he succeeded in nailing Joanne Pennyworth during a dusk-to-dawn horrorfest mostly composed of Hammer Films monstrosities. Neither of them cared about the endangered species status of the drive-in at which they finally achieved mutual intromission; it teetered precariously on the rim of extinction while Brad turned another corner in life that made him feel even more grown up. If there were bare tits onscreen, Brad missed them because he was sunk into the real things. Joanne was one of those rare redheads with genuinely red nipples, and later they had laughed because they had steamed up the windows of Brad's Mustang with their heat. On three previous "dates" - so called because there was really no other word that covered social excuses for sexual contact - she had hand-jobbed him to orgasm, on a memorable fourth occasion she had fellated him, and Brad had more or less returned the same courtesies to her. Each time he had climaxed, he had visualized Drea Wiseman's face, from the magazine, and imagined her lush body coiled or unfurled for him, as in the nine photographs (with three costume changes) that accompanied the centerspread. On the night of the drive-in, Joanne had shown up bearing condoms, and when Brad climaxed he definitely saw her face and not Drea's. Joanne bit her lip when she came and Brad had fetched her a napkin from the snack bar to dab at the dot of blood; he found the tiny wound unbearably erotic. Their relationship eventually ran away to wherever young love and lust vanishes.

Brad wondered what Joanne Pennyworth was up to today. Probably brided and bred, long ago, her name changed, perhaps several times. He knew now that he had not "nailed" Joanne that night; rather, she had enveloped him. The penetrative teen conquest imperative proved insufficient to describe how he had felt inside of her. He would always remember Joanne, but not in the sort of mental space he still reserved for the foldout of Drea Wiseman.

Brown hair and brown eyes in golden light, clear polish on the nails, no jewelry, and somehow she doesn't impress him as some tart who would spread for a magazine. The gaze she lends the camera is inviting, not salacious. The little stat box lists useless personal trivia, probably fabricated, but for some reason Brad believes her age as given —21.

That would make her 53 or 54 now, he calculates as he sees a hand-lettered sign on the Boulevard which reads SEX TAPES 3/$10 OLD PORNO • OLD ADULT BOOKS • "COLLECTOR'S" MAGAZINES. Sun-bleached videocassette sleeves littered the yellowed windows of a narrow storefront; the display inventory was a weird melange of dated hardcore, dated stereo gear, lots of incense and paraphernalia, and stacks of printed matter older than all the other junk combined. Several of these ragtag emporia fought for dominance on the Boulevard and featured no real specialty; they were part thrift shop and part junkyard with liberal dashes of dust and fake nostalgia. The employees invariably seemed stoned or spaced out enough to answer just what you see to virtually any question, and their ability to make change was not to be trusted.

It was the faded cover of one of the magazines in the window that had arrested Brad's attention, and within minutes, he owned it. He opened it right on the street and there was Drea Wiseman again. She looked different in broad daylight, but then, these magazines were traditionally perused under artificial light, in private. The colors mismatched Brad's memory of them. But it was the same magazine he'd liberated from Dad nearly three decades back.

Drea had not changed. She was still beautiful, lush, available for him. She was still twenty-one years old. That evening, somewhat guiltily, Brad masturbated to the photo. Later that night, less guility, he did it again. Drea Wiseman had made him come more than most of his girlfriends or relationships - the hormonal wish list of collisions, drive-bys and near-misses which made up the history of his love life.

Brad Deitz had gotten married at age 35. The bride who had consented to this merger was named Suzanne Dalton, an advertising manager for a small publishing company who helped Brad get his first masthead gig as a magazine art director - skin, naturally. After six months on the job, Brad had louped so many layouts of naked female flesh that all he could see were the pores, bad bones, and disastrous complexions begging computer makeovers. Thousands of soulless eyes making empty come-ons to the camera. The seduction of it, the romance, had been leached away, and the sterile leavings of artificially-moistened genitalia in macro close-up failed to move him. He dumped his surplus of romance into his courtship of Suzanne, hence the wedding.

It was not a bad marriage. Suzanne had one restaurant for each day of the week and dined rigorously at six p.m. every day. Sometimes Brad had to rendezvous with her, in a synchronized Day Runner way, or risk piling up more rain checks. She always left a kitchen, a bathroom, or a closet looking undisrupted by the passage of anything human; frequently Brad's only clues were moisture in a drain, or mild leftover condensation on the shower door, or one of the evenly-spaced clothes hangers repositioned a degree out of true. He allowed her tidiness to influence his habits but never gave up that residual affection for occasional clutter or spontaneity; in fact, she came to depend on his fancies to keep their lives unusual. Their lovemaking was like installments in a serial - first conventional, then outlandish, now naughtier than six months ago, next week nice and cuddly - as though it was graphed according to a blueprint Brad could not see. It was certainly varied enough. Other men complained about not wanting to even see their wives naked anymore; Brad had always been curious about what the wives were saying, in their circles. Brad never tired of seeing Suzanne naked, or making love to her. It was not a bad marriage.

Suzanne engineered their divorce like a military extraction from an exodus zone. They split everything evenly and fairly. She left no imbalances. She only took what was hers, and relocated to New York, were she landed further up the corporate ladder. It could reasonably be said that Suzanne left their marriage in better shape than when she had entered it, but Suzanne did everything that way. The only consolation offered by Brad's friends was on the order of you should be relieved she didn't really nail you, and clean you out. No one disliked Suzanne, even after she was gone. Brad would enter what was formerly their shared apartment and sometimes wonder what was different about the place. He did not feel bad, exactly; his friends had convinced him he had no reason to feel bad. But Suzanne was gone, leaving Brad alone in the company of retooled foldout girls. Later, staring at a Risque calendar, Brad noticed that they had been husband and wife for two years exactly, to the day.

Brad benefitted from several office rebounds, and quickly learned to file those interludes properly, and not fuck in work territory. Suzanne sent regular checks until all their plastic was balanced out, then Brad never heard from her again, not even holiday cards. He was mooning about that, morosely, on the day he met Jennifer Spikers by literally running into her. She had brought her photography portfolio to the editorial cubicles of Risque - one of the twenty-seven titles produced monthly under a company banner encompassing everything from Pubes! to Just Past Jailbait Magazine - and had collided with Brad in the corridor to the elevators. She soon scored a richer proposal from a competing company, and Brad had scored Jennifer, and eight months after that, he was mooning and morose again.

The depthless gazes of the women in the magazine spreads chided him:  We told you so.

He pin-balled onward for several more years in this fashion. The woman who had most recently crashed and burned on him was named Molly Sweidenvelt, and Brad was in the post-relationship process of mentally reviewing the liaisons of his entire life. One periodically tried to recall all the names, the faces; it was surprising who was abruptly forgotten or who suddenly surged forth in memory. He was walking down the street, striving to remember Jennifer's last name, when he had spotted the magazine in the window, the one featuring Drea. His first girl.

Inside what they called the "Raw Room" his co-worker Philippe had just scattered a new stack of slides on the big lightboard. Every one of these vaginae wanted to be a movie star.

"Philippe, you remember Drea Wiseman?" He showed Philippe the magazine, handing it over as if it were a classified government document.

"Before my time," said Philippe. "Didn't she star in a sitcom or become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader or something?"

"No." If she had, Brad would have collected video.

"You know who'd know? Cherique. She's been den mommy to all these exhibitionists since the dawn of recorded history. Before 1990, even."

Cherique - real name, Melissa Cordoba - was stuck somewhere in her middle sixties, dyed her hair to match her bright orange lipstick, and still affected a rhinestone-bedecked cigarette holder. She called everyone "sweetie" but Brad suspected she knew not only the real names and pro names of everyone who had ever glided through the Risque offices, but never forgot any of them. She was the Number Two of the whole enterprise; the only life form with veto power over Cherique was the Old Man himself.

"Sometimes y'know I think about doing me a book titled The X-rated Whatever Happened To," Cherique commenced in her Los Angelicized Bronxese, firing up a Nat Sherman the color of a traffic cone. "Excepting that it would be too sad, y'know, what with all the suicides and some of the murders and then there's the AIDS. Still, sweetie, I don't think there's a day passes in this office that somebody don't ask me about whatever happened to so-and-so, and usually, if they didn't die, they wound up having kids or getting married. I think Drea Wisernan's name was really Carla something, and she did that actor for awhile, the guy who played the gigolo in New York? Then she had a kid by some French artist, I think. She was in exactly one movie, under a different name, too - Ramsey Rushmore. Not a porno, a real movie. It had one of those, titles like Extreme Implant or Terminal Force. Ask me again tomorrow, sweetie, and I'll probably make more sense."

Brad located a sell-through copy of Forced Confession at the same Boulevard shop that had the old issue of Drea's magazine. It had been released direct-to-video in 1987 and featured no then-nascent celebrities. None of the cast of nobodies were credited with other movies in the generic blurbage on the cassette sleeve. The director was Italian.

Twelve minutes in, there she was, in lopsided Eastman color pink with age. Fourteen minutes in, her top came off for the first time. The rest was more or less along those lines.

"I missed it when it premiered at the Chinese," said Philippe the next day, in the Raw Room. "My tux was at the cleaners."

"Whoa, I'm twisting in the backdraft of your acid Wit," said Brad.

"Nice bags. Did Cherique know her?"

"Not usefully. Hey, where did these come from?" Brad snatched a new slide off the light board and squinted at it against the ceiling lights. "That's McCabe's latest goddess. I didn't catch a name."

"It's Drea. Look - she's a twin sister?" Brad began sorting the other slides of McCabe's latest drop-off. "I'm not kidding; look."

Philippe shrugged. "Nice bags."

"It's her, Phillipe. How old are these?"

"I can hear your heart beating faster. Are we infatuated today?"

"How old, Philippe, fucker?"

"These are the opposite of old. These are not Dream Girl. These were shot last Thursday. There's a little date on each one of them. Y'know, the kind of thing a professional would notice right away?"

"Do you want me to bring you a tampon for your mood; maybe you can jam it all the way into your ear?"

"No, because you're gonna want to take the slides, and you're gonna call McCabe, and I'm gonna have to finish this whole wretched layout by my lonesome, and stop me when I veer from the truth."

"You're a prince, Philippe?'

"You're a queen, Brad."

Brad knew better than to fart around with McCabe's answering machine, which he had never known to be actually picked up during a call in all of recorded human history. He drove straight to the photographer's house, taking the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving the top down.

McCabe's Malibu aerie was all flat white angles and too much glass; the sort of balconied showoff place onto which a realtor would tack half a million just for the view. The seaward windows usually got boarded up every time some new hurricane checked in from Hawaii; they were still covered with plywood in honor of El Niño as Brad stored his car in the elbow of a turnout that could park nine vehicles end-to-end. Most of McCabe's cars were home.

McCabe waved Brad to a sofa facing the ocean through a single unboarded window and installed a drink in his grasp - a virtually uncut Scotch that nearly took Brad's breath away. He lent his own photos a two-second glance. "Sela Brownlee; so what? Did I fuck her? Sure."

"That's not what I wanted to talk about."

"That's all anybody ever wants to talk about, Brad-lad. Fucking and getting fucked. Who's doing it and who it's getting done to. When can you fuck, how long can you fuck, how soon can you brag about it. It is the basis of all power, all human desire, and most ambition. People groom themselves according to notions of fuckability. They edit their lives to make their personal stories fuckworthy. If you don't aspire to fuck someone, then you aspire to fuck them over, and thus achieve a goal or desire, which usually boils down to fucking someone else. We're pretty predictable, as a race. Cheers."

"I think this woman is Drea Wiseman?"

One of McCabe's eyebrows arched. "Boy, there's a blast from the past. What were you, about two years old?"

"Older than that. Old enough." That struck Brad as peculiar, since lie's always assumed he and McCabe were roughly the same vintage. Now, in the tricky light partially afforded by the board-up, McCabe definitely seemed older. Perhaps it was his gruff, paternal delivery. Or maybe it was the fact that McCabe hadn't had so much gray when Brad had last seen him, several weeks ago.

"Drea Wiseman is old enough to draw Social Security, if she hasn't OD'ed by now, or blown her brains out, or been croaked by cancer or AIDS. Most of these chicks don't enjoy happy endings. Look at the pictures again. That's not Drea Wiseman with an expensive makeover and a good wig, posing for one of those stupid Sexy Moms Over Fifty spreads with the stretch marks airbrushed out. That's Sela, who wants to break into acting and be known by a single name only. She'll be a sensation until next Veteran's Day and then nobody will remember her except Cherique."

"You're blowing my fantasy, McCabe."

"Sorry. I've shot so many of these chicks with a camera that I think I want to start shooting them with a gun, maybe save them a little heartbreak. Then they get on their knees for you, and take your dick in their hand, and their eyes get luminous and seem to fill the universe, and what do you know, I keep snapping away, even though some days I feel like the Grim Reaper, collecting souls on proof sheets."

"You've got to look at this." Brad pulled the copy of Risque from his briefcase. "I mean really look at it?'

"Don't have to?" said McCabe, recharging both their glasses. "I shot it. Two sessions, summer of '73, I can show you the proofs if you want. I'm the guy who suggested the clear polish on her nails."

Brad's heart gave a slam that seemed to bow his ribs. He almost blushed. Instead of lunging at the opportunity, however, he said, "What are you not telling me?"

McCabe looked directly into his eyes, holding his gaze for the first time since Brad had entered the room, then chuckled. "That's much better."

"I don't understand."

"You understand more than most. Come on."

Most of McCabe's career files were stored in seventy lateral filing cabinets, stacked double along a corridor as long and wide as Death Row. They were labeled with adhesive numerals. Whatever treasures they contained remained unmolested. McCabe led Brad past every single one of them and into a room with a lot of slanted drafting tables, lightboards and broad, flat work surfaces. It reminded Brad of the Raw Room, if one could ever conceive of the Raw Room as uncluttered.

Stacks and stacks of Drea Wiseman awaited his inspection. Fully clothed, naked, daytime, by nightlight, by moon shimmer, in shadow, close-up, far away, demurely shy and spread out like lunchmeat on a cutting board. It was a feast, and Brad was meant to gorge, and when he did he found that his brain could not hold enough of her. This was all static photographic evidence; it added Drea's existence up to a still picture. At least the Drea in Forced Confession had moved.

"And here's Sela Brownlee." McCabe portioned out a generous file of the new kid.

"What're those others?"

McCabe riffled the label tabs. "Hm ... Nadia Dröeste, Brady Caverston, Milicent Rich, Leigh Micheline, Rexanna Schott, Corey Rose?'

They were all Drea Wiseman. Different hair, different eye stylings, but all Drea. Brad paged through a mental timeline from 1979 to 1986, to 1992, to ... Sela Brownlee.

"Jesus H., McCabe?" he whispered.

"Pretty weird, huh? So now that you're digesting this world-staggering information, what do you think you might do about it?"

"This is …" Brad groped for adequate hyperbole. "Unprecedented. This is an article ... no, a book, at least ... this is ... McCabe, I've got to find her."

McCabe leaned against the door jamb and exhaled heavily, rubbing his face. He looked, in that moment, like a very old man, decades distant from Brad's generation. "No chance you'd just kinda give this up and let me put away my files?"

"Are you nuts?"

"Nab, I can see the light in your eyes. You're not gonna let go of this?"

"No way, masked man."

McCabe sipped his drink contemplatively. "I thought you might come to that." He extended a folded slip of his own letterhead paper, already written up. "Here's where you'll find her."

Further up PCH, practically to Point Pitt, as the sun gradually sinks into the horizon line of pre-storm chop. Brad imagines the thunderheads are steam produced by the extinguishing orb. It's in a big hurry to set, and the faster the road darkens, the faster Brad drives, making the night highball toward him. Salt accretes in damp white scales on his windshield. He is well past the posted limits as darkness takes over, well aware that he is forcing himself to rush toward the night, the storm, and the things he hopes he might find inside.

McCabe had scared him by handing over Drea Wiseman in a single folded page, even though her existence, insofar as it concerned Brad, had begun with another single folded page. Brad had wanted secret files and dusty evidence, a process of excavation rewarded by discovery. Surely McCabe does not spew forth referrals to everyone who had ever gotten turned on by a centerfold. Brad feels stupidly like a guy viewing a Pointillist and seeing only big dots.

Nobody is laughing at him. Yet.

The address is a walled Spanish cliffside retreat thoughtfully constructed to sluice off the assault of sea storms. No neighbors. Amber, insect-proof bulbs ring the wall and lend the compound a sodium glow against a night now insistent upon rain. The first drops speckle Brad and nest in his hair as he reads a framed, typed sheet telling him what to do with the intercom.

The iron gate buzzes and admits him to a courtyard. His hair is already soaked as he waits on the next door - three times as wide as he is, massy, struck crudely from wood. It resembles a drawbridge hinged on one side. The entry to a fortress. He suspects most of the house is hidden away in caverns snaking through the rock below him.

Too late now; he's drenched.

"You're Brad?"

"No ... I mean, yes, I ..."

She is already holding a folded green towel and she is looking at him the way a person might look at a citizen sprawled on the sidewalk before saying, Are you all right? She is wrapped up in some kind of leather-belted silky black top that swims around her when she moves; her slacks match and the whole ensemble is almost dressy. He expected her to be barefoot in her own home and she is wearing shoes like she expects to conduct business. She looks exactly like the Drea Wiseman in the 1974 centerfold except that now her hair is a deep, burnished mahogany and there is more of it, casually horse-tailed back. Brad's vision telescopes vertiginously and for a horrifying instant he is afraid he might faint dead away.

"It's you," he says.

"We'll see about that. McCabe called me." She leads him in and hands him the towel, indicating he should follow her, but they have not touched yet. Brad watches her walk and it seems to amaze him.

"Mind you, McCabe wouldn't have called if the circumstances weren't special. Sit over there." She points at a chrome sculpture of a chair meshed with a kind of rubber webbing. Brad glances at the sofa. Of course not; he's wet as a fish. He dries his hair, grateful that he can hide behind the towel for only a second. She brings him a tall glass of sparkling water and a flute of something that turns out to be a pretty refreshing Rhine, slightly spicy, not something that will render him sleepy or more idiotic. "No, drink the water first," she says. Brad does as he's told and is mildly shocked to find his body craves the water as though dehydrated; he drains the glass. "Now you can sip that," she says. "Okay ... so what makes you so special?"

"Are you Drea Wiseman?"

She smiles to herself as though Brad has just asked whether she's female, or human. "Yes, now what makes you so special that McCabe would call me about you, and send you all the way up here in the rain?"

"I ... uh ..." Brad has no idea, so he says so.

Again the smile. "I like that. You don't lie if you don't know."

Already Brad is seduced, and he wonders if she is playing him out, feeding him the line that precedes the reeling in, and the devouring. He compels himself to stay level. "I'm not sure; I can tell you what I told McCabe."

"That'd be a good start." She settles in to listen. She can see Brad marveling at her all the way. This is nothing like a wet dream or a fantasy; Brad feels completely out of control, like he's just shit his pants on a city bus, and he comprehends why Chinese clichés warn people about wishing for things.

He unspools the story of the foldout, thankful he left the damned magazine in the car. He is not seeking an autograph, and why would Drea need to see an obsolete magazine, anyway?

"My name is Sela now." she corrects him, making him more a boob. "Brownlee."

"Yes. Go ahead."

He is being given permission to display himself in an embarrassing way, and suddenly he wonders about hidden cameras, recording devices, maybe in the potted ficus next to him. Then he wonders why he has not brought a camera, a tape recorder. And all the while, his mouth keeps talking. He talks about Drea, and Nadia, and Brady, and Milicent, and 1979 to 1986, and 1992 to now, and -

"And so you might conclude by saying that in one way or another, you've been looking for me ever since you were, what, a teenager?"

"I didn't want to put it that way," Brad says. "It would make me look more sheepish that I already feel."

"You can relax; it's okay. How old are you now? Pushing forty?" Brad makes a face.

"Already crossed that Rubicon; that's okay too. Kind of begs the next question, doesn't it?" Drea - Sela gets up, crosses the room, gets refills for both of them. They still have not touched. Brad has no idea of how much time has passed, but it is still raining, in fact, water is bath-tubbing down from the sky in harsh sheets. "I could tell you that I age well. I could tell you that I'm a different person, despite an amazing resemblance, and that you have been somehow tricked by the light, by romanticizing old photos, by projecting onto still pictures. But you still haven't told me what makes you special. Why you?"

Brad senses that he is failing some kind of quiz, and based on the assumption he might see this woman, this stranger, only this one time, he digs deeper and finds a confession. Instead of prattling on about magazine dates and pursuing Milicent Rich to find Leigh Micheline, followed by Rexanna and then Corey, he tells Sela about his dad. He talks about glimpsing the face of Drea Wiseman while losing his virginity at a drive-in, and marrying Suzanne, and getting dumped by Jennifer Spikers, whose last name he now has no trouble remembering. He replays his intense conversation with McCabe, about how finding Drea Wiseman means articles and money and publicity, and maybe a book.

Sela reacts as though she has just received a mild electric shock on some pleasure center; things seem to align for her. "I've watched them try to expose Bettie Page, like boarding a bug under a magnifying light," she says. "It's disgusting. They printed those police photos of her when she was arrested. Those pictures damage what she meant to the people who loved her image. And when she's dead, full disclosure will help murder the mythology. I don't know about you, Brad, but I need to believe she'll always be that Bettie Page." She framed her hands, view-plating a picture in her mind. "You know what I mean?"

Brad says that he thinks so, lost. Her voice is giving him an erection he has to cross his legs, nonchalantly, to obscure.

"I know why you're special," she says. "You won't give up. Not ever. You'd be surprised how many obsessive people do. You feed them a bite of contrary evidence, you exploit their need to disbelieve the unbelievable, and they're satisfied. They give up and go away because they think they're found answers. Sometimes - rarely - people find it in themselves to countermand their default setting for rationalization; it's a double, she had a younger sister, it's someone made up to look like her, it can't really be her, why, she'd be a hag by now."

Blood pounds in Brad's temples. How is he supposed to conduct his life after he leaves this place? "But McCabe seems to know what's what."

"I have a deal with McCabe; he shoots my photographs. And I trust him, and soon I'll have to ask if I can trust you."

She has the power to make Brad's desire seem frivolous. He thinks - really thinks - for a moment, then says, "How?"

"I need you to tell me if everything is the same." She stands and loses the blouse and the light makes her the same color as in the magazine, so many years back. There are no tan lines and few dermal imperfections, and Brad is looking at her in a way that can only be described as respectful, even though she is removing her slacks and now stands less than four feet from him, naked except for the shoes, which have enough heel to mold her legs as she turns. "You'd know, you see. You'd recognize if anything was wrong or different, and you would tell me, yes?"

"Yes," he says, very softly, fighting not to lose his voice.

She beckons him up and kisses him. Their lips are the first flesh contact, which quickly spreads. His hands explore her as hers reconnoiter inside his clothing. In her mouth he can taste every lust he ever experienced, desires so familiar they are like necessary organs shielded by his bones.

"Can you help me?"

He regards her eyes, inhales her breath, and does not need to answer.

"Can you help me stay the way I am, the way you've always loved me? Can I trust you?"

"What can I do? What did McCabe do?"

"He gave me ten years of his life. I would ask for ten of yours, for this thing we are about to do." She points toward the ocean. "Out there, in the storm. I'll take you out there. And I would ask for ten years."

Brad has already spent close to thirty years, he realizes, in transit toward this room and this moment. He is willing to eagerly agree to this bizarre proposition, and not solely for glandular reasons; he not only wants this woman, who is named Sela, tonight, but he needs her to actually move in and occupy one of the spaces of his life, exactly tonight, during this raging storm.

"Please say yes, and help me," she says. She removes her shoes and opens a big sliding glass door. The rain sizzles on the terrace and a vigorous breeze snaps burgundy curtains inward. It is not cold, merely wet and alive.

When they are naked on the sand, they too are wet and alive and anything but cold. Their connection is magnetic and unyielding, more akin to the elemental forces prompting the storm than to any mere collision of flesh, of lengths, depths and widths. Every one of Brad's pores seems gently threaded to those of Sela; when she moves, he feels the tug all over his skin. When he comes the first time he swears he can feel his own semen being ducted out of him as though pulled by a strong alien gravity. Sela has but to shift a minute degree, and meet his gaze with eyes that shone violet in the storm-glow, and he becomes erect inside of her again - that is all it takes. He would not peak with a mere orgasm and be deprived of the warm embrace into which he is so blissfully sunk. He feels her climax, like a powerful fist, cradling him with deliberate gentleness and the tease that such control might be quickly and unexpectedly overridden. Most feelings of security held the danger of becoming suffocating traps, like quicksand. But for those who could ride this treacherous tide, the raw current gushing through Brad's body came as close to defining genuine ecstasy as any thought or sensation it had ever been his conceit to experience.

They outlasted the storm.

Hours, still, before sunup. They started a blaze inside a capacious flagstone fireplace, and tended each other's needs.

"Ever since I was old enough to have sex," said Brad, "it was never a question of who I wanted to fuck, but who would agree to fuck me. I thought I had to pursue women. A teenage boy is just an enormous gland, and like most teenage boys, it never occurred to me that girls had sexual cravings."

"Excepting sluts, of course," Sela said, amused by watching him talk half to the fire, half to her.

"The first time I aspired to a girl - a woman - who, as it turned out, wanted me right back, I figured it must be love."

"Reciprocity is a bitch. She wanted you, so you concluded this was the love you'd heard so much about ... and it turned out that the emotions were different for her, I bet."

"Yeah - she just basically wanted to get laid, and didn't want to be called a slut. If I had a virtue before I was twenty, it was discretion, mostly because I was terrified of revealing anything to anybody. She had already been through so much more than me, and had just hit that phase where she needed to vary the menu, because she was afraid of closing doors too early on relationships that were different than the ones she knew how to control."

"And her name was ...

"I remember it, alright, the way you're supposed to remember the name of the person who relieved you of the curse of virginity. That's one myth that's true. But I'm going to keep it to myself, okay?"

"That's kind of charming," Sela said. "That privacy thing is hardwired into you, isn't it? Now I'll have to wonder if you're lying, and can't remember her name, or if you're telling the truth."

"I'm telling the truth."

"It's that discretion thing, right?" She saw his expression and smiled. "Relax. I already have what I want from you, and I'm enjoying this part, too." She watched until she was sure he hadn't been wounded. "What became of her, that long-ago love?"

"Married a guy who impregnated her and beat her up a lot. They knew her as well in the E.R. as they did in Maternity."

"And you lost track of her, once she'd made that wrong choice?"

"Don't misunderstand me; I wasn't exactly gloating. The memories that stayed with me were of her, before all that. She knew how to say amazingly appropriate things; things that had me thinking them over hours later. They amazed me, anyway..."

"You matured."

"I saw her face in passing strangers for a long time after that. But that part is a fantasy. It never would have worked out for us, together. It was my idealization ... just like my idealization of you, in the centerfold."

"Well, congratulations, Brad, because you've just matured again?"

"By exactly ten years, according to you. And there's no trick to it?"

She frowned. "Trick?"

"Yeah. A twist ending. The little unrevealed detail that traps me into a devil's deal, you know - like, I age ten years, but they're dog years, so I actually become 70 years older in the blink of a lash."

Sela chuckled at that one. It was throaty, full-bodied; to Brad, the sound percolated with honesty. "No. Nothing like that."

He examined his face in an ornate mirror next to an iron coat rack where most of his humid clothing still hung. "Looks the same. I've never had a smooth complexion."

"You'll notice little differences, but you can afford most of the hit. You can subtract ten years from most normal people and they'll never notice. Isn't that what some careers do, or parenthood? One day you look in the mirror and realize a big chunk of your life sneaked away. It happens to most everybody."

"Except you." Brad flashed on the centerfold again; the way her eyes had changed from brown to violet in the middle of the thunderstorm.

"That's because of you. You made me immortal in one way, in your mind; since you came this far, I decided to let you help me stay as I am in a slightly more practical way."

"What about McCabe? He said he ... that is, that you and he ..." Brad thought suddenly and uncomfortably how much older McCabe had looked tonight, compared to the last time they'd met.

"He probably said it to bait you, but I made an arrangement with McCabe a long, long time ago."

"He's your official photographer. Your only photographer."

"It's more than that. He had an ache inside he had to evacuate, a lot like you. I needed ten years bad enough that the lack of them forced me to become a recluse for a while. There wasn't anybody like you around then, Brad. And McCabe was messed up over some model he'd fallen in love with and fucked up somehow. He gave me the years I needed and I leached the pain out of him."

"And you trust him."

"Yes."

"What did you do with it, the pain?"

"It was a pain I could handle. Assimilate. I needed the years more. Now time has done part of my work, and people like you come looking. Not many, but enough. Fewer still are willing to come this far, and indulge me. Now, please let me kiss you goodnight. Get out of here before the day starts."

She had softly liberated some heartmeat pain from him as well. Brad could feel a buoyancy inside his chest despite her calm announcement that it was time for him to go. She had been kind to him in a way that should not be spoiled by words spoken aloud; that would be as inappropriate as snapping a Polaroid and asking her for an autograph on his way out the big door.

So she kissed him, and she meant it, and the door closed behind him, and it was over. Back in the car, southbound, he frequently glanced at the magazine there on the seat next to him, but he never opened it to look at the pictures, not once.

He had told her about those he had met, married and mated, women who had left neither residual flavor nor pang of regret, who had walked out of his life one after another, leaving that life as ordered as Suzanne's closet. There were no crippling lows from which he could not recover because there had been no equivalent highs of passion, save one.

It would be easy to drive back to the city, to have a quick drink with Philippe and graze Cherique's cheek with a kiss, maybe drop a card in the mail to his ex-wife. None of this would matter because his friends had had no more impact on his life than his lovers; the people of his existence mattered as little as outmoded fashions in a thrift store. He wanted them to mean more, but each of them failed to portray the character parts imposed upon them. Save one.

His personal affairs were so neat they could he wrapped in a single business day, but what was the point?

Brad slowed his car into a wide U-turn on the coast highway. It was still early enough that no traffic existed to stop him. Then he headed north to spend the rest of his years, and no one ever saw him again.

THE FALLING MAN

In the Major Arcana of the Tarot there exists an almost forgotten twenty-third card.

The known cards are called "keys," and are said to correspond with each of the Paths of Life, or to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Fool has no number; it is the card that melds the ends of the circle of twenty-one. The Fool is generally depicted as an inexperienced youth about to step off the edge of a precipice, denoting the passage into maturity and the need to choose a philosophy — to gain wisdom or embrace the bliss of ignorance.

The forgotten card is The Falling Man. It stands outside the unending circle formed by the cards of the Major Arcana. It is a wild card, a skeleton "key." Its subject is the victim of irresistible forces of chaos, caprice, or circumstance. Reversed, it denotes concealed manipulation and too much control.

Catching The Falling Man in your Tarot throw is like having your car totaled by an uninsured illegal alien. It is the one card that forces readers to dissemble, and soften their evaluations. Their eyes avert, because the eyes cannot lie and make things better.

So, as with all unresolvable irritants, The Falling Man has been swept under the rug. But it is as unfailing a force as the gravity it depicts, and its influence persists in defiance of historical subterfuge, touching each of us to this day.

The Rolodex card was yellow at the borders with age, and the little man thumbed it up just as the grandfather clock in his office bonged out midnight in sour brass tones.

He released a tiny pah noise of disgust and hoisted himself from his desk chair, which creaked as his spatted high-button shoes slapped the floor. Standing, he was no taller than he had been while sitting. He fought his way over to the clock, battling the sheer clutter of the claustrophobic aerie in which he had secreted himself. Old habits of residence were difficult to change. His progress across the rat-hole cubicle kicked up a wake of dust, and made a legion of tiny insects interrupt their literary dining to scatter. Antiques and geegaws packed the room, and the grandfather clock presided over the darkest corner like an ancient idol. Both the clock and the railroad watch the little man wore on a fob read nine-thirty.

He dealt the side of the clock a savage kick that made the chimes within clatter rudely. Loose gears rattled and a terrified mouse fled the premises. Then the mid-range tubular gong sounded once - the half-hour toll.

The little man wore a gray pinstriped suit with tails, a silken vest, and an ascot. His brushed top hat hung on a peg overlooking the desk, and was the sole part of the ensemble not spattered in white plaster dust. The Reverend Charles Dodgson might have asked the little man to pose on the spot.

Along the obstacle course leading back to the desk, the little man paused to peer out a congested, porthole-like window. The entire city of Los Angeles stretched away below, a quilt of light chasing the horizon in every direction. The view was one of the reasons he had maintained this office, away from the eyes of the world, for so long.

"M-hm. Yes, indeed." The little man had developed the habit of cataloging things to himself in a mumbled undertone. It was a personal monologue with an audience of one. "Aahh." The urban view replenished him. Perhaps it was the thought of all those electric lights, and all the lives upon which they shone.

Back at the desk, he glanced at the foxed Rolodex card, then let it drop to the blotter. He wrested open a persistently sticking drawer and rummaged. To the light he lifted a delicate masque of blue glass. Attached near the right eye was a slender, wand-like stick, for holding the masque to one's face. Its features were feminine; its eyes, blank holes deftly cut in the glass.

"Very good" the little man said to himself.

As he sat to resume work, he switched on a refrigerator-sized Victrola and hummed along with Bruce Springsteen. Because he was doing what he was best at, he smiled pleasantly as he worked.

At the last possible moment, Peter Deutsch stepped back from the waiting elevator doors and let the car go up empty. He took the stairs. His entire day had been spent in boxes just like the elevator of his apartment building; chrome and glass cells that hummed and conveyed him from one meeting to the next, with black commas of ground-out cigarette butts punctuating the utility tile of their floors. It was seven floors up and he was wrung out, but Peter wanted to walk.

The stairwell was another box, an enclosure of steel and stone, a clean, well-lighted place. Thank you, Papa Hemingway. A box just like all the conference rooms in the Studio City bowl, where it was rumored the majors constructed their monoliths with movable walls, so that hapless employees could discover their need for fresh jobs by clocking in to offices that had become blank walls. They did not just change the names on the doors; they dispensed with entire rooms, as easily as twisting a new face onto a Rubik's Cube. Peter had not lost his job, but his patience was waving good-bye. He had spent - no, invested - a shitter of a day batting his skull against the concrete stupidity of TV moguls and their yes-persons. Preproduction arguments over the TV-movie Sinner had been raging for eight weeks; the script was in its ninth rewrite. Peter could only compare the erosion of his soul to spending a year in court. His sanity was being swiped a chip at a time. His creativity had retreated, shrieking, behind a massive writer's block. Today Sinner had been passed on to the fifth in a series of pinch hitters, not counting the husband-and-wife team who had conceived the original script and would now get a "story by" credit. Peter was still to direct. Wasn't that what everyone in Hollywood supposedly really wanted - to direct?

Like everyone else embroiled in Sinner from the publicity flacks on UP, Peter was trapped, hemmed in by contract boilerplate, committed to work in which he had, today, lost the last vestiges of interest. "A sizzling look at the real power plays in the boardrooms and bedrooms of high finance," Sinner was glitz-encrusted bullshit from head to toe. All jiggle and soap and lies, with all the right advertisers to buttress that all-important American consumer ethic. Sinner perpetuated the dumb myth that if you weren't wealthy and wasteful and wanton, you were just nobody, dahling.

Peter had spent the day being poisoned by that mind-set, and no purgatives offered themselves as he plodded upward. The climb was the only way he could ascend on a day like this. He pushed out self-pity and began brewing a full pot of anger. He should have taken the goddamned elevator.

Thirteen steps. Turn. Thirteen more. Tucked into his armpit was the junk mail he had pried from the gangbox downstairs. On the fourth-floor landing he let his leather brief drop to the waffled metal and paused to squint at what the stack had to offer. The stairwell floods afforded harsh light. The abundance of trash - YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON $50,000!! - was balanced by the sinking certainty that another twenty-four hours had just passed without a peep from Damon about the independent-feature backing he was busy scaring up in Vancouver. Another day without the Mailgram or phone call that would permit Peter to chuck Sinner with what the good old Romans termed the digitus obscenus. On Damon Fletcher's say-so Peter would be packed and northbound to "do us some art." It was a joke. Objet d'Art was the title of the project; the screenplay collaboration that had wrapped both men up in the embrace of true love. If the money came through and the picture got made, there was no doubt that a distributor would rail at the fartsy title and change it to Art Object, or maybe Lewd Mating Positions. The magic word was saleable. Just now, the challenge was creating the film, not what to call it when it was whole.

But the wonderful world of directors' hats held no laughter for Peter today. He thumbed desultorily through the balance of the mail stack.

He would have ignored the folded page as a shopping center flyer if he hadn't spied the red wax seal holding the page ends together in an envelope shape. Then he registered the weight, the quality of the thick, linen-grain stationery. There was no Addressograph label, no stamp. It had been inserted into the box apart from the mail delivery. Peter gave it his full attention for another thirteen steps.

The icon embossed into the cold wax was unfamiliar to Peter. At a glance it appeared to be a woodcut outline of a human figure, arms extended, apparently in flight. He used his thumbnail to pry the seal away without breaking it. He shifted the briefcase to his other hand and halted on the stairs in order to tilt the page to the light to read the precise black script.

It was a poem, to him.

He recognized the paraph of Alea's signature before he was a third of the way through the verse, and his heart began revving. She had come back. Serious adrenaline began to punch through his system, making him giddy in a hurry. He smiled, and then bounded up the remaining tiers of metal stairs, his chance at fifty thousand dollars fluttering into the narrow, dark abyss between the flights.

As he opened the door his eyes were stung. So was his mind. She knew of his fondness for candles. At least a hundred were very carefully burning in his living room. Still buzzing from the stairway fluorescents, his eyes took in meager golden light. There was just enough to see his way by; no more.

He knew better than to call out her name. A trail had been left.

He dropped his jacket into the darkness where he knew a table to be; he grimaced as he heard it slide off and meet the floor. A marble pedestal had been deprived of its Kleinst nude sculpture and repositioned in the front door's sightline, halfway across the sunken circle of the living room. On it were a tall yellow taper, burning in a pewter holder, a crystal flute of what he took to be Mumms 1979 Rene Lalou from past experience, and a note, on the same linen paper, folded into a pup-tent shape. Peter became aware from the pain in his cheeks that he was grinning like a fool.

Finish Glass before leaving Table.

Remove coat, shoes, socks, Tie optional.

Proceed to Kitchen.

On the butcher block table in the kitchen were an identical candle, glass, and note. He felt less nervous about all the burning candles when he saw, close up, the care that had been taken to cup them and provide for wax drainage. All his tinfoil had been used up. While the first glassful of bubbly fizzed coldly away in his stomach, he lifted and sipped the second. By the time the second was down, the first was speeding to his head. No dinner. Too late now, and who cared? He unfolded the next note.

Bring uncracked Bottles from Fridge.

Proceed to Hall.

By now Peter's fear of hidden fire inspectors had mysteriously evaporated. His coat-rack had been moved to the hallway, and on it hung his chocolate-colored bathrobe. His fingers tingled when he tipped the third glass to his mouth. A very pointed trail of evenly spaced candles lit the path to his bedroom.

If you are still wearing Clothes,

please discard them on the Rack provided.

Finish Glass and proceed

at once to the Final Room.

The door lay ajar by three tantalizing inches. His glass in one hand and the two champagne bottles in the other, he nudged the door open with his knee. The bed was a gigantic four-poster job in waxed ebony. Dark sheets. No silk or satin crap; that was strictly for the oilier passion-pit mentality. The corners of the room were unfathomably dark. Several strategic candles threw almost imperceptible highlights.

The big bed was empty.

He was two paces into the room when she pounced from behind, whirling him around into a kiss so thorough that both the bottles and the empty flute hit the carpet. She gathered him into her arms, working at him, wanting him so hard that she had to hold him in place to keep him from falling. They stayed that way for a long time. Then she broke away and pulled back just far enough to let him see her hold a finger to her lips before she retrieved the wine and drew him closer to the bed. Talk, its questions and details and problems, was for later.

Tired? He could feel electricity crackling from the tips of his fingers, his toes

They did not hurry, like eager but inept children. They had time, and their hunger did the rest. Elsewhere, beyond their hearing, was the studied chuckle of a little old man.

"I think I'm falling in love with you."

That was the last thing she had said to him, the last time they had made love, five months ago, the night before she had vanished with no preamble and no heartrending but oh-so-predictable note. Once he had tried to nail her down on who she really was, what she really did for her living, she evanesced out of his life. The days had elapsed one slow century of hurt at a time, long enough for Peter to conclude that the dormant emotions she had kicked back to life in him were just the usual Peter Deutsch overreaction. Hollywood hyperbole. That decided, he had to then deny the rightness of the things she had told him, the unspoken validity of the small, telling things she did for him. He had to abort the changes and resonances begun within himself. Opening up - to anybody - was contrary to his will, and when he noticed his own willing vulnerability, he resisted.

His ex-wife Kathryn had cared not at all for such subtleties of temperament; to him, it was a costly emotional effort; to her, it was too little too goddamned late. She did not wish to entertain Peter's feeble tries at dropping his shields. Alea honestly wanted to help. She nurtured, never coaxing. It was proof that she was different, and this scared him. To Peter it was a natural fear, and she had anticipated this, and come prepared to defang it. Peter would have dismissed such reassurances from anyone else, including Kathryn, as saccharine. In the real world no one bothered to help the way Alea did. That final night, Peter had told her he loved her; the words were a giant step for him. Hours later she was gone, and he reminded himself of another of his old personal rules:  You only sabotage the relationships that are the most important to you. Then came the day sunk in poisonous meditation, the mental scourging. The bitterness returned and settled in for a long stay. His insectile plates of emotional armor began their inevitable recrystallization. Then came Sinner.

At her note, he had come running. There was still that much left.

She moved above him in a slow and sinuous way that nibbled his control down to nothing. Her hair, in a brisk chop, made bangs, framed her face, and hid her eyes. He hauled in a deep breath as tremors bucked him, and grasped her rolling hips. The last thing he saw before he shut his own eyes was her smile, the lower lip nibbed between her teeth. Maddening sounds started somewhere deep inside her; furry little noises of pleasure issuing from the core of the diaphragm and flowing up and out like dark wine. They were as unique as her scent, her taste, her movements. She knew what she was doing. And she knew just how to do Peter Deutsch.

They had only argued once. It had been a disagreement manufactured by Peter (who had been known to defend the faulty side of a question merely to gratify his debate Imp - more fallout from the competitive mind-set). The topic was long lost; what Peter would always remember was the way it had concluded. When it had become hopeless and repetitive, she had said, "Peter, you're wrong, you know it, and I am going to crown you with an ashtray ... if you don't start making love to me in the next sixty seconds."

That had knocked his pins out, all right. If he could train a film crew to perform with the unerring sense of timing Alea exploited so casually in her speech, he would be in the cockpit of the smoothest-running, most envied machine in the industry.

Alea had manifested shortly after the shipwreck of Peter's marriage. Mrs. Kathryn Deutsch had moved on to become a power broker in Malibu real estate. Dissolution was the mere breaking of a contract; SOP in Hollywood. You broke one pact to ink another, better one. Peter walled himself up behind twenty-hour workdays, not sleeping so much as lapsing into an exhausted coma close to predawn. One day he jolted awake, sheened in panic sweat, as though surfacing from an unsavory nightmare. His eyes opened and he found himself surrounded by acquaintances instead of friends, manipulators in the chairs of allies, and vampires leering from behind the lies that had admitted them into his bed, his Day Timer, his life.

The albatrosses pecked at his eyes. There was no one to cling to and no place to flee.

Then, Alea. Timing. Clichés had never applied to his life before.

Being with her now brought a lunatic sensation of effervescent optimism. The moguls in their steel boxes became a straw threat, insubstantial, unreal. Fatigue ran away and was supplanted, by vigor. Being inside of her solved his problems, made him feel… safe.

He gasped when he felt her muscles lock him up down there, almost as an expression of his very thoughts. He was staying.

It was against logic, of course, but he had penetrated her in a way that surpassed the physical juxtapositions of mere fucking. Sunk into her, impossibly secure, his limbs and brain charged themselves with psychic strength from the lode she offered. Until it was his turn.

He pushed himself up and kept hold of her hips, pulling her aboard his lap. She grabbed his shoulders to lift herself, and began to drive herself onto him, the gradual increase in sensitivity to friction making her cry out, as though fighting against the new climax. He felt every contraction along with the lush pulse of her blood. She fell back without resistance, one of her throaty, quiet laughs expelling from her lips, and he stayed with her. One more thrust into that loving grip was all it took to completely divorce him from rational thought.

The shorter candle stubs began to wink out in the way dead suns, far away, extinguish themselves and become nonexistent in a second.

The dwarf selected a spatulate blade and carefully planed blood-colored clay from the monster's right shoulder.

Strewn about the litter of the studio were current issues of Cosmopolitan, Self Working Woman, Mademoiselle and more, all open to advertisements featuring male models. Here were the lions that women-conscious sponsors chose to sell their products to the feminine half of the population. Studly-yet-sensitive. Wild-but-secure. Artistic-yet-upwardly mobile. To the monster, the dwarf gave the nose of one, the cruel-but-kissable lips of another, the brush cut of a third. He paged from one glossy spread to another until he located perfect toes. He needed muscular-but-not-steroidal pecs and triceps. The easiest item to scare up was a great butt.

On no page could the dwarf find worthwhile eyes. All were metallic, dead, detached. Billboard entrepreneurs favored that uncaring look. The dwarf's artistic sensibilities were abraded; he gazed into the robot eyes of these thoroughbred fashion plates and felt all men objectified.

As be carved, he hummed, taking his time, spacing out his snifters of Napoleon brandy to make the last bottle stretch to the conclusion of this current commission. His specially mixed medium was cool and pliable, receptive to the even strokes of the blade. He smoothed rough patches with spit and a gentle finger. Each caress nudged the monster closer to his visualization; each touch of those cigar-stub fingers brimmed not only with schooled sculpting talent, but with genuine love. Soft curlicues of clay rimmed the worktable and stuck to the leather soles of the dwarf's shoes. More than once he leapt onto the table to loom over his creation, rubbing flaws to sleekness, his touch leaving heat trails. The living molding the inanimate, delighting in the friction of contouring the common into something extraordinary. He gave the mouth a succulent downward turn. He made both nostrils exactly the same size and shape - that was a detail you never found in real people, one even the most perceptive would fail to notice.

M. Rogoff would notice, and applaud his audacity.

The dwarf scooped a handful of fresh clay from the pail and added it to the monster's penis, kneading it to the proper proportion. On a whim he spit some brandy into it. He decided against omitting the foreskin.

When the brandy flask was down to the depth of a finger, there remained the riddle of what to do about the monster's eyes. All options seemed cold and predictable. The diminutive sculptor laid down his tools before he attempted too much, and messed up what perfection he had already wrought.

He blew his nose loudly on his denim apron and rinsed his hands in a tub sink installed low to the floor. The arrangement of the studio, with its body on the slab, held the ghostly overtones of an autopsy theatre.

He used a potter's cut-off needle to pry clay from beneath his nails, and felt a perverse urge to snap a few Polaroids of his new work. The terms of his verbal contract forbade a visual record. M. Rogoff's instructions were as precise as ever, and from experience the dwarf knew them to be well-founded. Contracts such as these were best honored.

Perhaps more brandy might lubricate the artistic faculties, he thought with a sly grin. But when he fished into one capacious trouser pocket, all he brought up was a noisy bunch of small change.

At first his eyes dismissed the pair of bright, newly minted copper pennies. Then his attention shot back to target them. They were pristine, lacking scratches or tarnish; they released a musical jingle when he tossed them about in his small palm, contemplating. His heartbeat sped up, and he wondered if the great genius M. Toulouse-Lautrec had ever felt similarly flushed with joy at such a lightning stroke of inspiration!

Humming once more, he dashed the last of the brandy into his glass, and returned to the worktable. He would be able to finish tonight. Then he could contact M. Rogoff.

This was shaping into grand sport indeed.

Peter wanted to hold her hair in his teeth. He embraced her with his arms, his legs, tactile evidence of how long he had starved, how badly he needed someone. He clung. Alea slept.

It had not been an endurance run or point-scoring session. Peter was well-versed in the dance steps of the sexual-politic superstructure of this town, and if need belie could play that in-and-out game with the best. This wasn't that. The points emphasized by their lovemaking struck him as healthy ones.

He remembered what he had labeled her when he first saw her.

The theme of the classic Hollywood party is Business Is Pleasure. The talented and monied are shoved into elbow-rubbing distance; the mechanism is greased with expensive eats, lots of free alcohol, controlled substances, and the usual catalog of incentives. Peter thought of a chess match with all the players in seedy rented tuxes; the pawns in the game were the hookers, the coke, the prurient come-on to sign one's name. Self-important introductions were made between future bedfellows ... amid future bedmates.

Peter had reported for duty at Damon Fletcher's insistence. Slap on your happy mask, Damon repeated all the time. It never hurts to meet the execs. He relished thrusting, parrying, coercing. The lies he ran past producer-types slid right off his carapace. Peter had felt conscripted; his visibility would buttress Damon's huckstering. Tonight Peter did not feel like a player. He knew he would suffer this soiree and probably not even get to hang out with Damon all that much. Damon never let his own moves dirty his psyche - to him, it was lying to liars, stealing from thieves. Peter always wanted to bathe afterward. But he let himself be badgered into attending. That was how badly he wanted to make Objet d'Art with his fast friend.

All they needed was ... well, it was obvious, or Peter never would have rung the doorbell.

The clockwork ground into motion and by one a.m. was clanking purposefully along like a wind-up Godzilla toy. Peter smiled at strangers and powered down straight bourbon, instantly gaining an axe-murder of a headache. At Damon's bidding he bared his teeth and shook the proper hands. When Damon was swallowed by the hurly-burly of happy-hour negotiations, Peter stayed behind, a marionette with clipped strings. It was for the best. His bullshit allergy was raging tonight, and he knew he would only muddy whatever pond he stepped into.

He retreated to the far end of a vast flagstone patio, where he could be alone with the rainbow brilliance of Los Angeles spread out below him. He felt pleased with himself in that fatalistic, brink-hovering way that comes from overwork, plus seeing the kitchen help pour dishwater scotch into Chivas jugs. He sat down. Tonight, he just did not have the energy to do it.

Alea shifted in his grasp with a groan, twisting halfway around in the bed. He held the palm of her hand to his lips. Kissed. The hand caressed his face, dropped to his chest, and snaked the rest of the way down. He stiffened instantly at her touch.

And so he stared sourly into his glass. No answers there. He abandoned it on the low brick wall without sipping further. Letting the faraway light defocus before him was more comforting.

Nobody introduced her. She was just there.

"Drink this."

He looked up at her voice but did not really see her. He passively accepted a delicate glass of what looked like sauterne, because it was extended toward him.

Oh christ, I've been made. He could not keep the hostile resignation from his voice. "Start anytime, honey." He tossed a mocking toast in her direction with the wineglass.

"No. You're wrong." She let silence hang for a few moments. Peter was surprised that she did not launch immediately into a spiel. She sat near him on the brick wall, and watched him, until he spoke.

"You'll forgive my vast repertoire of social gaffes," he said gruffly, not caring if she did. He still had not seen her. He kept his eyes on the tree line below the patio. "I am engaged in the only pastimes that give me any pleasure right now. That is to say, getting squiffed and pissing on total strangers."

Another pause of what could have been a minute. Then:  "Self-pity is a deadly kind of luxury. You're slopping it all over the place. It's coming off you in waves, you know."

"Mm. I'm overdoing it. It's like all the dope in town - not what it's cracked up to be." The yellow wine was crisp, and very cold, and not a sauterne at all. Peter's palate was at a loss for identification.

"You can talk," she encouraged.

He thought he also heard you've been wanting to talk for a long time, but it did not come out of her mouth. The comeback that shot up from his mental shuck file ran: Oh, a hooker psychiatrist; that's a new twist, you should pardon the pun. His gut cancelled it. The back of his throat suddenly ached with the need to put the payload of acid in his mind somewhere else. She was a stranger. She had asked for it. If puke got on her when it erupted it was her own damned fault. That's what it came down to: emotional vomit.

The wineglass was in his hands. He gazed at some infinity point beyond, in the darkness. He spoke not to the woman but to her voice. He was stark sober now, and his own voice was a deadly monotone. The forces etching his life emerged with a succinct kind of violence, like the confession of an utterly relaxed serial killer:  You see I thought the solution to all my problems was to use myself up faster and when that failed I decided a slow lingering death was better than a short, sharp shock, and so commenced the erosion that kills everyone here, when your sanity dribbles away a dram at a time until you're empty, babe, you can't get a hard-on at thirty-five, or groceries without three pieces of ID, and the traffic cops aren't kidding when they pull you over, and the stench of petrochemicals and madness permeates your clothes, and you have to keep your fingernails manicure-clean because otherwise you'll see the dead tissue hiding there, the residue of all the faceless people you fucked over to get ahead, and you think of all the claws that have YOUR blood dried beneath them, and you dwell on this psychotic paranoid craziness until everything even the rag-pickers and shopping-cart ladies haunting the Boulevard, reminds you of how berserk this lunatic hostel is, they call this living, and your brain builds its own padded cell, hurling up high walls to trap you inside and keep you apart from the predators who suck at your life, your needs, until you become a brain-dead paycheck junkie, until you can't care anymore, until you spend an entire year in court because your soon-to-be ex-wife wants to impress her new sex toy, the attorney, until you gladly grind out bilge designed to anesthetize hausfraus and their blue-collar hubbies out there in Television Land, until you walk like a robot to stupid social jousts like this one, slapping on a death-mask grin for the neo-bohos and airheads and thrill addicts and people who've become walking ghosts, dead without realizing it, because

Because.

She finished for him once he was tapped out. "Because you can't run anywhere else. Because with all the options available to someone like you, there is still no place to run. Except in circles."

"Social circles," he said with a bitter little smile. She brought him another glass of yellow wine. A very peculiar sort of buzz was coming on; he felt weak, drained, yet purged and somehow more clearheaded than before. He was suddenly in debt to this woman he had not acknowledged with his eyes. He was embarrassed. With Kathryn, he could never find words like these, or get past his chagrin at actually voicing them. It wasn't part of the deal, the contract. If you ever talked of such things, the razors came out. People rolled their eyes and pointed and never caught wind; before you knew it you were shunned, ostracized, worse than dead.

When he accepted the second glass, he looked up and began, a trifle too offhandedly, "Look, uh ... I usually don't..."

He saw her, for the first time truly saw her, and his heart and stomach seemed to swap positions with a thud.

"Don't apologize" she said. "Don't back off. You've just been as honest with yourself as you have with me. How does it feel? Better than pity?"

His head swam. Had all the booze slid home at once? With a silly kind of awe he asked, "Are you a - what do they call it - an empath?"

"No?" Even her voice was hypnotic.

Peter's arm still hung in midair, holding the glass. She was so...

"My name is Alea. Now you relax and I'll talk awhile?"

Peter always remembered that, too.

Both bottles of champagne lay dead on the floor, the two fingerprinty glasses shot down alongside them. Alea did not awaken so much as trade some of her sleepiness for some of Peter's consciousness. This time it was she who imprisoned him in her arms and legs, grinding with an almost desperate fervor. A wholly unanticipated orgasm picked him up and shook him. She could bring him back as many times as she wanted. And as they fell exhaustedly horizontal, she spoke to him in that low and musical whisper his mind knew so well.

"Welcome home."

In a sense Peter was the one who had gone away. It did not need to be said.

That was how it all began, or rather, resumed. Over the next two weeks Peter Deutsch gradually realized that the alien landscape he explored with Alea was a place he had heard so much propaganda about in his lifetime. He'd thought it a myth and never taken it seriously. Myths were inapplicable to his life. Like clichés.

"Love? I haven't the dimmest notion of what love is," he told her. "Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything..."

"You're wrong. You know a lot about it."

"Yes?"

"You know what it's not, from experience." Her eyes were a tawny fulvous color, with black-ringed irises shot through with mellow flecks of amber, much like the aptly-named tigereye. They always met his directly. "From what I've seen, you've got a good grasp of the theory."

"What are you talking about?" He shook his head with a little-boy grin. Twice he had tried to defuse the subject by being funny; twice she had deflected him.

"You love rather than saying you love. Beware of people who need to hear the words all the time. You love me with your speech, with the things you do, with the way your eyes love me, all the time. You make love to me even when you're not making love to me."

"Gee, thanks. Subtlety was always my strong suit." He felt a faint irritation at being so obviously exposed. But it was true - he thought about her while working, while driving, upon waking, constantly, pleasantly ... perhaps a bit obsessively?

Certainly some possessiveness might be permitted in his case, if he kept it to himself. She was fascinatingly enigmatic. She told him things about himself that were unnerving because they were so dead on and cut around so much sweet, meaningless badinage. A misty eyed portrait she was not. Yet she could exude vulnerability while remaining aloof; she could be direct and artfully ethereal at the same time. Sometimes her sheer control made him feel like an unruly adolescent. It was not so much his ineptitude as her mystique - as though she was capable of instructing her pheromones specifically where to go, and what to do.

Alea, simply, seemed more comfortable with the idea of love. Peter had always considered it beyond his reach, de facto... which was how their conversation had drifted around to it in the first place.

Kathryn had dismissed Peter as a man whose need for a psychological aspirin could always be solved by a bed-slamming, blindingly good fuck. Damon on the other hand, had always suspected there might be room in Peter's life for another human being. But after Damon had met Kathryn, he decided that capacity for friendship would never get a chance to emerge. Or escape.

Friends never actually understood, thought Peter. If they did, they could not help. If they did help, they could only go so far - never far enough. Before, he would have felt stupid attempting to explain to Damon how someone like Alea could draw the will to love back out of its dungeon. Now he thought that he should at least try to explain it to his friend, because he felt sure it had happened. The old Peter, the one pouting at the party, would not have even tried.

He had done her feet and shoulders; now she was doing his. "So - is caring so inadmissible in your life?"

His knotted muscles loosened up under her strong, steady fingers. "No. Just infrequent, that's all. You can't be good at something you've only tried once?"

"Sometimes, Peter, you act as though you're waiting for me to get to the part where I finally reveal just what it is I want from you. The hidden agenda that will permit you to revert to your old walled-in self and justify fire-bombing another relationship ... because nobody will ever truly be good enough for you."

He shifted, suddenly uncomfortable, revealed again. "Wow, I'm sorry if I gave you that—"

"I know, I know," she overrode. "Let me finish. I want you to know something. You are good, Mister Deutsch - very good. At everything you apply yourself to. You stimulate me intellectually, excite me physically, please me generally, and -" she picked at her words, trying for meaning and hitting a difficult patch " - and sometimes I worry that there will come a time when I fail to keep up with you. You're what I want. You're what I think I need in my life. I have freedom and I can count on you if I need stability. Don't sell yourself short. You've fooled yourself into believing that I have no problems or worries and that I'm the rock you can hang onto. You need a great deal of attention and devotion ... but that's okay, you deserve it. You deserve everything good in the world, and I want to be everything I can for you. But don't ever think that what you and I have makes one of us superior, especially not me. If you're leaning on me, understand that it's mutual. As long as we both lean against each other, neither one of us will fall down and go boom."

She tilted his head back, and he saw the imploring expression on her face, a shade of their future together, and it squeezed his heart. She was not invulnerable either. She had been hurt too, sometime, far back. It showed in the way her hands stopped stroking him, in the shininess of her eyes as she spoke.

All his previous desire for her was outshone by the way he wanted her now. And thought he needed her.

"Oh yeah. One more thing. I love you, too."

It was a word he still tripped over. If he had run across the word joyous in a screenplay, he would have sneered at it. Now it described precisely how he felt. He was hooked. Joyously hooked. You could never anticipate the snare that would get you. That was how it got you.

"You can't know how long this has taken me," he said in a diminished voice, thinking perhaps she had known all along. The moment was gem-perfect between them. It radiated. Another night lay ahead, and another beyond that...

He felt content at last. Another silly word to pin down the warmth inside him, too long absent.

The next time Peter saw Alea, she was enthusiastically fucking someone else - or something else, since it probably was not even human.

"I love you! Why do you treat me in this abusive way?"

The little man's bulb nose was red. After slamming the door to his office he slapped his thick-coated arms vigorously, doing a dance in place.

"God! Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula! My darling City of the Angels, my goddess, tell me why you are so unseasonably cold this time of year!" He doffed a gray stovepipe hat whose crown was canted forward with age and abuse and unwound himself from a thick crocheted muffler. "Humph! No answers as usual. Only subzero torment!"

A response issued from the darkness behind the big desk. "Indian winter. Who can say?"

The voice was not warm, either. It was a reedy buzz from a crooked-lipped mouth that hated to squander, in speech, time better spent drinking. It pronounced words off-center, with an accent. A stranger might be left with the impression that a huge French cockroach had journeyed far just to scare the little man by addressing him from behind his own desk. But the little man's startlement was momentary.

"Very funny, Maurice." He tossed his hat toward the tarnished rack. He never missed. The visitor flinched, anticipating something heavy and deadly.

"Wah!" The dwarf's feet flashed in the air as the top-heavy desk chair upended and dumped him on his butt. Moths fled toward the ceiling and jostled paper floated like big cartoon snowflakes.

The little man would never let the dwarf see the hint of a leprechaun smile on his face. He had to keep a tone of disdain in his voice. "You know, Maurice, it annoys me beyond mere words when you burgle your way into my office. My office is my sanctuary, my cathedral and here you are, using the font for your toilette." He tugged off thin gloves a finger at a time.

The dwarf, in the light now, shook his head and walked around the desk with his peculiar rolling gait. His head barely cleared the desktop. He lifted a stack of ancient manila file folders from the seat of a bar stool that rose from the chaos, placed it on the floor, clapped his hands of dust, and scampered aboard. "Sorry," was all he said.

The little man sniffed. "I did ask you not to, you know."

"But ... Monsieur Rogoff ... I ..."

"Yes, yes," The little man waved a dismissive hand and used his muffler to rub his nose back to warmth. "You wish to impress me with your stealth and expertise in all things. Fine, good. I am suitably dazzled. I would not summon you at all if I lacked for faith in your multifarious talents, yes?" No need to stroke the dwarf's ego more than necessary, he thought. His brow wrinkled. "And should you do it one more time, I shall find myself forced to engage equivalent talents elsewhere, yes?" It hung in the air. The dwarf was silent. The little man took this as an acceptance of terms, and terminated the topic by saying, "Ah. Good."

The dwarf sanded his stubby sculptor's hands against each other. "To the task at hand, then?"

"Mm. Yes. Once more into the breach, and all that, yes? But on the way over here, Maurice, I was thinking ... a few changes, a few variations on the normal theme. This time I want something for myself. On this case, we get a little extra, I think."

It was clear to the dwarf that his employer was still doping out what his intended deviations from the norm might be. This was stimulating; almost as good as a full flask of cognac. "There is danger, perhaps?" he said, eyes a glint.

"No. As a matter of fact, I want spice, not salt."

"But ... improvements on your classic procedure, Monsieur?" The dwarf checked the grandfather clock. A lot of theoretical time had been lost. The clock was always wrong. So they had never possessed the time to lose in the first place. To Maurice, if it was ten past anything, he deemed himself late for his metronomically recurrent cocktail hour.

"Improvements? No?" The little man picked out a careful pathway toward his desk and draped the muffler beside the hat. "As I said - seasoning. A good cut of meat is delicious without seasoning. Sometimes, with the right spices, it can become even better, yes? Not that I wish to equate my work with meat, especially dead meat. Did you bring the death mask?"

"At your feet. You nearly made me crush it."

"Mm." The little man reached into the carpetbag he found next to the desk chair and lifted out a hemispherical plaster bust. He turned it in the light, admiring the strong, archetypally masculine peak of the nose, the brainy forehead, the almost ruthless cut of the mouth. The eyes were blank white convex surfaces. They always were, on a death mask casting. The featureless chalk-toned eyes seemed sealed, locked, mortared up from the inside. On the masque of flawless cyan glass the little man had utilized earlier, the eyes had been holes - equally devoid of detail, yet ingresses, permitting passage in either direction. The glass had been polished, glossy, seductively cool to the touch. By comparison, the plaster half-face was a riot of rough texture; from it still ebbed the heat of its injection and hardening.

That, thought the little man, was a small but apt illustration of the difference between his own work, and that of Maurice - the littler man.

M. Rogoff laid the death mask next to his Rolodex. "And the body?"

The dwarf palpitated excitedly. "Oh, Monsieur! A true work of art. I have outdone myself. Only the most exotic raw materials, coupled with my secret formulae! By my watch, three entire days of curing the medium. I nursed it, yes, I baby-sat it. I think this one may last five, even six entire hours!"

That brought the little man's eyes up. Six! Unprecedented, even for Maurice. The dwarf sitting high across from him had a face like a baked apple, bad teeth, and darting black seeds for eyes. He wore threadbare rags, coat upon sweater upon shirts. Sometimes he smelled unpleasant. Nothing exterior hinted at the ability within that compact and eccentric package. His newest monster was good for six hours. Someday Maurice would reach the little man's own level of craft and skill. Someday he might become capable of making them the way M. Rogoff himself made them. But that would be all - Maurice, sadly, would never cultivate the other talents that the little man wielded with the same measures of care and adroitness.

That was exactly why the little man needed, on this job, to vary his technique somewhat. Thus, spice.

Now that the monster was ready, and he approved - even of the too-perfect nostrils - it was time to click on the switch and watch the whole vast machine go up and down.

Today's cockfight over Sinner had been postponed due to the line producer's dental appointment. Stupid.

Peter strolled down two offices, nodding and smiling at the receptionists and scurrying workers. The xerox machine was down, and a panic was simmering. In places like this, the xerox machines were always down.

Finding a vacant office was easy. Someone had gotten promoted or cashiered. He put his feet up on the desktop, empty except for a blotter, an in-out box with a broken strut and no papers, and a digital clock. The telephone was a given. If there had been no desk in the vacated cubicle, there would still have been a phone.

Peter punched in Damon's number in Vancouver.

Damon laughed out loud for a full thirty seconds before catching his wind. The revenge was tasty. Make those studio munchkins pay, pay, pay. "Still with me, Damon?"

"Jesus, yeah. You're a beautiful man, Peter. Let's talk for a couple of hours."

Peter couldn't damp down the huge, loony grin on his face. Even if nothing had happened, it made him feel good to talk to Damon. "Five-to-ten odds that that club of lawyers and doctors you corralled together are still sitting around trying to equate you with the movin' pitcher biz."

"Au contrai re, ace," Damon said. "A bank account was born yesterday, and you and I are the proud daddies. Five hundred large. You see, it's that time of year again, and those lawyers and doctors discovered a sudden burning urge to invest. The point-five gets us the loan for the rest we'll need. Is the name Flying A-Hole Productions okay by you?"

Peter was glad for a hearty laugh, because the news had otherwise struck him speechless.

"You and I are set, captain. You have but to plonk your ass on a redeye and make an x on some contracts. Of course, I've gotten pretty good at forging your signature, so you don't really have to -"

"This is going to knock her out," Peter whispered.

"Oh - by the way, guess who's interested in the part of the smuggler? Lawrence Banks."

"I have to tie off this mess here, first, and -"

"Banks got interested as soon as I told him you were involved, and that you were the guy who wrote and directed The Big Casino -"

"I haven't even told her about Objet d'Art yet. I wonder if—"

Neither was receiving the other, and their conversation sounded like the madly overlapping dialogue in a Howard Hawks or Robert Altman movie. They both clammed up as if by telepathic agreement. Then each said, "Hold it!" in chorus. They wasted the next few seconds of prime phone time giggling madly.

Peter would have to re-read the Objet d'Art script for the hundredth time. Maybe on the plane. More crucially, he would have to review his contract for Sinner to find whether it would be easier to dump it or do it fast. Nothing in a contract was non-negotiable. You could even change the date on top if you used the right kind of baksheesh. Like brandy into coffee, his thoughts gradually sank into priority order and were assimilated.

Alea floated to the top.

"Peter? This is gonna knock who out?"

"Oh, christ. That's right. You don't know yet."

"Who her? I mean, which her is 'who'? You know what I mean."

Peter chuckled, then sighed. "That's some question, really." His brain filled up with her. "Her name is Alea. I don't really know how to begin this ... listen, Damon, you've got to meet her; she's ... I mean, let me tell you about her!"

"Aha - my friend, your overpowering verbal ineptitude clues me that this is no couch-versus-starlet routine. Unlike the cheap, sleazy affairs littering your past, as perverted, disgusting, and downright illegal as they were. So how're you doing?"

"You don't know how good I feel, buddy. With Kathryn I was never such a wonderful person."

Damon's ready sarcasm was blotted out by the silence of growing awe. "Peter. Dear Peter. All of a sudden this sounds like something that is very real for you."

All the things he wanted to say funneled down to a telling smile. "Yeah. God help me, Damon, she's important to me. She pulled me up out of the quicksand. A friend and a lover."

"Whew." Long-distance static crackled. Damon knew what this meant without having it spelled out. "I thought you were in an emotional nosedive you'd never pull out of, ace. I gave you about two more months, max, before you tied one of those GI Joe plastic parachutes around your wang and leaped off the top of the Black Tower. Nude Director With Uzi Hoses MCA Execs During Death Plunge. But you sound one hundred percent. You actually sound happy. I don't think I've ever seen you do happy before..."

"I'm a fucking rocket. With you and her both, I'm on the verge of the highest high you've ever seen in your chemically enhanced life. I've got to tell her the news!"

"Hang back. First tell me where you met this angel."

"It was - " He felt the jump-start jolt of memory. "It was at that party you roped me into attending. The one at Shepard Bonnard's little hedonist villa in the Hills."

"There were dozens of women there; if I saw her I probably forgot her immediately."

"No, Damon, you'd remember Alea if you saw her even for a second, and she was with me nearly the whole time. You knew everybody on the guest list. Are you positive you didn't see her?"

"Whoa, boy. I know where you're headed. Listen. I was in hustle mode. I probably saw her, didn't track, and moved on. Next case. That party was like a subway car at rush hour, and a lot of pretty kiddies were on the carousel, and nothing personal. Okay?"

"Yeah, right. Sorry."

"Trot her along if you can. Scenic Vancouver. Use a gun if she needs convincing."

They both laughed. For a while they repeated themselves, more to run up the phone tab than to insure memory of particulars they already knew inside out.

Peter sped down Cahuenga West, leaving the sunroof on his Mazda open in defiance of the cold snap. The bracing rush of air made him cocky, exuberant. These were sensations that were too long in coming home. For someone like Alea, Damon's news flash could not be contained by another phone call. Peter marveled. What had not been real an hour ago he was now going to deliver in person.

Out of the garage, up the elevator, double-timing down the corridor, he rehearsed, whispering to himself as he dredged up keys and unlocked his apartment deadbolt.

He shut up as soon as he was in. It was as if the very timbre of the air inside his home had tripped sensory alarms planted in his flesh. The door swung quietly back and the very ambience of the room hit him as sour, skewed. Something was wrong here.

His face crinkled the way it normally did when he smelled something offensive. It was not unlikely that he was walking in on a burglary in progress; an innate and nonspecific caution deep in the pit of his stomach warned him that if he was going to proceed, he should do so without a sound. He walked heel-and-toe, circumventing the sunken living room, sticking to the carpeted areas, breathing with jailbreak shallowness and not feeling a bit ridiculous.

In an insane fit of humor his persona vacated his body in order to observe the action through the eye of a director. Here is the ominous establishing shot of the hallway, shrouded in darkness; here, the Arriflex shot, jerky and hand-held, traversing the hall with that oddly cocked point of view that tips what we're seeing as being through the eyes of the butcher-knife wacko as he creeps up on the bedroom door. It is ajar by inches. Of course. More cinematic that way.

Alea made a noise.

It was like a gasp for breath, hard, distinct, perhaps cutting pain loose. A flashbulb image of Alea in jeopardy welled up but Peter suppressed it. The thudding of his heart was making his throat and temples pulsate. It became difficult for him to inhale.

She had made that sort of sound with him in bed. That was what kept him from bursting through the door in the role of white knight. Now a new image played across the screen of his mind, one that could not be shoved down. By the time his hand touched the bedroom door it was almost as if he had willed that dreadful picture into reality by the sheer force of his concentration.

Again, as on the night of the thousand candles, Peter saw his own empty bed. The room was lit in faint gold tones by the track lighting on the ceiling; the rheostat was turned up about halfway. The sheets, blankets and pillows were strewn across the floor like the trail of clothing he had left on a night not so long ago. His view tracked along from the bed until he saw them on the floor.

They were enthusiastically missionary.

Peter watched a round, almost girlish ass thwack up-out, down-in, with the frenzy of a machine. Alea was beneath, feet in the air, legs bent at the knees, hands hooked so she could rock backward with each thrust. The man on top was sunk into her like a baby into a cradle. Broad shoulders, muscle-knotted back, short, badly styled dark hair. He pushed off into a quicker, rabbity pace as she enwrapped him, legs and groin rocking faster. Her feet, angled down in a dancer's point, flattened back as orgasm rollicked through her. Peter had never noticed that before. She clutched at him, pulled him down to meld with her, gasps tearing out of her throat. With a suicidal detachment, Peter marked the ascension and declination of each cry - up, up, peak, plateau, down, down, down, down.

Then laughter. It rose, as familiar to Peter as pain.

A steel web, strands thread-thin and ice cold, constricted around his heart.

Her partner uttered not a sound.

Instead, he pushed up from her just enough to turn his head and glare directly at Peter through the two-inch crack in the door. His pupils were solid disks of bronze; they caught the overhead light and glinted as though chatoyant. Peter knew he was not visible, yet the eyes transfixed him, shimmering copper from lid to lid, no irises. They locked with his own eyes and held. Slowly, the man, the thing atop Alea, smiled at him. It was vampiric, hideous; the face seemed to rupture and shift thickly like molten wax.

Peter reeled from that malignant gaze, sucking in a startled breath and groping blindly for support. His knee bumped the door and it swung freely open. Alea's incubus was still staring at him with its death's-head grin.

The plans of attack that had capered through Peter's brain - of kicking in the door, of doing violence, of using stealth and surprise-freaking them, of doing the manly thing, the macho thing, the mad reactionary thing - all shrivelled to nothingness under the targeted power behind those inhuman eyes. Peter froze.

Alea's voice unfroze him.

"Peter. Get out of here."

Her tone suggested that his intrusion had been expected. The resonant and calm modulation of her speech was even more frightening than the soulless gaze of her demon lover.

Peter began to tremble. No stopping it.

The lover with the sculpted torso devoid of moles or blemishes resumed fucking her, penetrating to the hilt, his buttocks clenching with each push. Alea's hands scampered over his body, grabbing the protruding shoulder blades, touching the smooth small of his back, cupping his ass, her fingernails leaving white and bloodless indentations in the perfect skin.

Amputated from those eyes, that smile, Peter swallowed hard and stumbled back. His body forced him to flee on a purely autonomic level; his mind was stunned and shut down. Numbly, stupidly, he slammed his own apartment door behind him as he fled into the corridor.

In five minutes he came back.

He had run like a gazelle down the stairs. He took the elevator back up. It had not taken him long to wrest control, to come back into himself. In the grip of his right hand the claw hammer swung pendulously. He had gotten it from the Mazda's trunk; a carpenter's hammer, a foot-long haft of wood terminating in several pounds of drop-forged steel. Two metal wedges cinched the head solid.

Peter smiled pleasantly at the elderly woman in the car with him as the numerals blinked upward. The two poodles at her feet yapped and danced. Peter smiled. The woman watched the numbers and pretended not to notice the crazy roadmaps of dry tears that formed a shiny latticework on his face. He was disgorged on the seventh floor. His smile remained cemented in place.

He was thinking of what he could do to his visitor's face with the hammer, what the claw-end would do to his unearthly eyes, how the vee of the claw would become clotted with hair and blood and skull and brains, oh yeah.

He unlocked his door normally, shifting the hammer to his left hand. Everything was unchanged inside. He shifted the tool back because the biceps were better in his right arm - more swinging momentum, more impact. He moved back down the hail, strolling now, skin tingling, ears pricking for sounds, but otherwise totally composed.

The smile hung improbably on his face, like a mortician's final joke on a corpse.

He used the head of the hammer to push the re-closed bedroom door open again. The hammer thunked heavily against the hollow-core door, which rasped back along the carpeting. The knob bumped against the back wall.

The trailers were over and it was time for the main feature.

The bed was still empty. But this time, so was the room. Five minutes, and they had cleared out.

He glanced around, double checking, the metabolic backwash requesting permission to throw up now, please. He fancied he felt his soul emit a soft hiss of relief. In a second, he knew his fall had been aborted. What might have happened was not going to happen. The thought of what he had intended did not sicken him; it became a dull ache that settled in alongside the others already imprisoned inside him. He could deal with it. The apartment was empty. Alea was gone.

Again.

His big mirror, five feet on a side, was canted against the bedroom's west wall. He caught sight of himself. He looked haggard and old. He thought of the body bills he had run up on his compulsive all-night shoots, using caffeine as collateral for one more hour, dexedrine caps for one more night. He thought of where his life had been invested, of karmic loans, and considered the hammer in his hand, his gaze moving from it back to his own face, as if requesting not absolution, but just a simple explanation.

This was the crash point. Crash, as in bankruptcy, as in the Great Depression, as in what happens when you slit a computer's throat, as in that's all there is and there ain't no more.

He planted the hammer into the center of the mirror, into his own burned-out image. Crash.

Crouching behind the seventh-floor door, Maurice monitored the corridor through the rectangle of wire-gridded window until Peter Deutsch emerged from his apartment. The man was disheveled, off-kilter; there were slivers of glass in his hair. His eyes hung in purplish sockets. They saw little, recorded nothing. Maurice thought of feeble bulbs flaring their last, then smiled.

They almost always looked this way when the fun began.

The elevator doors met, terminating his view of the lost man with the hammer still depending from one fist. Maurice eased the fire door open. He had blocked the latch with a slip of cardboard. Since there was never much traffic within these high-rent filing cabinets, he quickly padded down the corridor, his nudity of no concern. His comically exaggerated phallus bobbed from thigh to thigh like a bell clapper.

From behind his ear he plucked the key, fabricated several days back from a wax impression, and unlocked Peter's door. He vanished inside, water slipping past oil.

The smashed mirror was strewn about the bedroom floor in ten thousand pieces. Maurice did not even slow his pace, and wicked silver barbs punched deeply into the soft soles of his feet. A jagged, five-inch wedge caught and pierced, erupting through the top of his right foot just behind the big toe. The point jutting from the split flesh was dulled with gobs of red clay.

In Peter's bathroom Maurice gave the counter mirror a jolly salute, then gouged out his eyes with the white points of his tapered, perfect fingernails. Two clay-smeared Lincoln pennies rang merrily as they spun in the bowl of the sink. He pushed the stopper down to keep from losing them. Then he unfolded the ivory-handled Gay Nineties straight razor that had been presented to Peter as a birthday gift, used once, then left on display ... where it could do no further damage.

Maurice jabbed the point of the stropped blade into his throat below the Adam's apple. A drop of oil oozed forth. He held firm and sliced shallowly floorward, stopping at the root of the penis.

The monster, gutted, eyeless, was still standing before the mirror. Still smiling.

Maurice's stubby hands eased out of the monster's chest and grasped the lips of the slit. He shucked the entire carcass like a scuba suit, and once he was out it piled up bonelessly on the floor. He herded the rubbery mass together, scooped it into the bathtub, and cranked the shower tap to full hot. While steam clouded out from behind the pebbled glass door, the dwarf grabbed one of Peter's bath towels and mopped sweat.

In moments the shell of Alea's non-human fuckmate had dissolved and escaped into the pipework. Now it was just several gallons of liquid clay headed for the city sewer network.

Jingling his pennies, Maurice fetched his carpetbag from the bedroom closet. He pulled out wads of his own clothing and replaced them with the jeans and tee shirt worn earlier by the monster (to get him into the building). Maurice had known Peter Deutsch would be too preoccupied to ever notice the extra, alien bag amid his own closet clutter.

When he raided Peter's bar for a congratulatory nip, he discovered some excellent vsoi and decided to liberate the bottle. It had gone very well tonight. Now it was time for M. Rogoff to work the magic, as only he could. Time now to fire the clay lovingly initiated by his master's hands. The next item on Peter Deutsch's agenda was the blissful hell of M. Rogoff's kiln.

One more thing, I love you, too.

Peter paid pathological attention to packing. This, too, was an autonomic thing, this ability to pack for a trip in a great rush and not forget a toothbrush or a checkbook or a needed file folder. A skill his shell retained when the rest of the relevancies of his life had dropped away. Stuffing balled socks into a sling bag, he let this skill run frill auto, trusting that nothing critical was overlooked. He sensed, if only subdermally, that once he closed the door of this place and boarded the jet for Canada that he would never return to his home.

"Home" had lost all meaning for Peter in the past few hours he had slept preparing to abandon it. Until Alea, home was never what he'd called these rooms where he bathed and slept and never quite found the time to put in the oak shelves, or order the deskwork, or hang pictures, or invite peers for diversion. It was an enclosure that kept at bay certain inconvenient elements - heat, smog, rain - and imposed a sameness that was simplicity to ignore. It was a numbered door in a corridor of like doors, mazed into a floorplan that mirrored itself above and below and beyond. The building was a vast filing cabinet for people, an upscale address stocked with all the amenities. It was a mail slot individuated by initials and a phone number with a taped message.

Never a home, not truly.

It was the place where he had made love to Alea. That made it a home. They had never had sex anyplace else but on his carpeting, his mattresses, his iron-gray pillowback sofa group. Few areas in the apartment had not had their virginity violated, but it struck him that they'd never gotten naked at Alea's place, or a hotel, or anywhere but here. Home was the place where he and Alea had made love.

But this was also the place where Alea had fucked and been fucked where she had enjoyed spreading her legs for something that did not look totally human. Where she'd told Peter to get out.

Betrayal seemed to seep from the waliwork. This was no longer Peter's place.

Slow rage steamed in his gut, subsided, marshaled again, until his mouth tasted foul. The wraparound picture windows showed him the Hollywood lightscape. Damon Fletcher had told Peter about Hollywood in all its bilious glory; here was a place where nothing was guaranteed to be lasting or sincere or real. No causes, no motives, no blame to be placed - this was Hollywood. It was where they worked because they could hack it and millions could not. Schwab's was boarded up and the Brown Derby shut down. Grauman's Chinese had been Mann's for more than a decade and the famous Tiny Naylor's drive-in coffee shop was history.

Hollywood.

Peter was supposed to be progressive, tolerant. Simple sexual infidelity had nothing to do with his anger. And the Pacific Ocean was not really wet.

Jealousy was a dragon with emerald eyes, one he had to engage in battle to deny what he felt. All the tender and private moments, and telling interludes between two human beings in sync, had been cleared away by a fierce possessiveness as frank as a jamming signal. The soft confidences he had shared with her were now drowned beneath thick, oily waves of selfishness and anxiety with a suddenness that sent the bowels plummeting and struck the brain comatose. He had heard her make those sweet sounds he thought reserved only for him, heard her laugh in a crushingly familiar way.

Sir, you got took, sir, and fell hard, sir, and offered the knife your shieldless back, stupid, and…

Truth buffeted through the windows of his mind and knocked asunder the card house he had been tilting together. Alea's feelings had been not only reciprocal, but had radiated from her and come home to him two hundred percent. She had never been seduced. Despite the fact that Peter was wounded and hurt, he could not honestly round-file the one truth that defied the prime rule of Tinseltown: She had not used him for anything.

The bedroom scene played countless encores in his head. He was well into triple-digit reruns - the flash of Alea's cinnamon skin, the flush of intraorgasm heat; shock-cuts of moisture and motion and love-grunts and the too-perfect monster filling her over and over. . . and two inhuman eyes full of molten copper. The memories stung and flew away and zipped home to sting again, like subliminals tucked away between frames of film. Unfair. Subliminals were supposed to be outlawed.

At first he'd been destructive, throwing things like a petulant child, punching the refrigerator so its contents rattled and broke. He hit hard and opened up his hand. The blood calmed him, cycled anger out and exhaustion in, let him trade seething rage for false despair. He cried. Time elapsed. He did not drink.

He stared toward, but paid no attention to, Nicholas Roeg's Bad Timing, unspooling in the predawn on cable. Art Garfunkel, who had sung of sounds of silence, was fucking a dead woman because he was obsessed with her. The TV became an insect tonal noise, snowing Peter's inputs and insulating him from the sounds of the city. He fell asleep in the wing chair, packed but not departed. Dreaming permitted him to hear Alea's voice almost at will.

Peter. Get out of here.

It was the same dark, soft voice that had once ordered him to leave his sperm nowhere but inside her. Doors opened by playful sensuality slammed with amplified violence because Alea's words held the unique venom of being unforgettable. They seemed designed to brand themselves into his memory. Peter had been neutered; his manhood wiped out by a single soft sentence in the dark. How could anyone fight artillery like that? How in hell to scour away the shame of turning and running? Nothing could win him back that lost dignity.

It hurt to think of Alea, but he was unwilling to forget any facet of her. He would not blank her out even if it meant his own survival. She had melted into the palpable Los Angeles darkness as easily as a wraith. Peter would not have thought it so simple to merely erase a person who had so much sheer presence that he thought of her anew every thirty seconds or so. Too many unfinished conversations hung between them, too many moments yet undecanted.

The bright chrome feelings he had embraced were oxidizing now. Alea had been a wish-fulfillment practically from the beginning. To get her back, what could he do, what might he give up? Damon's voice welled up inside him, laid behind a sardonic echo track: You actually sound happy.

"Happy," Peter mumbled, and woke up.

A key was ratcheting in the front door lock. All Peter's sensory knobs cranked to full tap. His vision targeted the door and his heartbeat hit runaway.

Light sheared in from the corridor and a small, hunched shape darted inside, hurriedly slamming the door. Peter heard furtive breathing in the renewed darkness, followed by a muffled slapping, as though the intruder was hastily brushing himself off. Then came the shuffle of short, waddling steps across the carpet, then a voice.

"Merde! Flaneur, indeed! Pah! Is not even a loafer entitled to a small, eh, restorative - urp! - nip now and again?" The voice was brackish, and seemed to emanate from somewhere near the floor, as though the speaker were muttering from the bottom of a well.

Peter bolted out of the chair, still woozy, trying for a good Clint Eastwood tone and missing: "Who the fuck are you!"

"Ma foi!" The dwarf's volume matched Peter's. He jumped, clutched at his chest, got tangled in his own feet and tumbled into the two-tiered section of sunken living room. Peter, unmoving and not quite buying all this, watched the dwarf scramble back toward the front door. It was like blundering into the third reel of a silent movie comedy; he had no idea of what was going on, but it sure looked funny.

"Hey." His voice came out conversational, comic. He sprang for the door and easily intercepted the tiny interloper, spinning him about and shoving him back. He blocked the door with what he hoped was an aggressive stance. "What do you think you're doing here?" It was hopeless and trite. He would have cut it from a script.

The dwarf smiled with forced ease. The dirt on his face cracked. "Heh, heh ... I clearly have stumbled, ah, literally, into the wrong apartment, Monsieur. I, em, I ... am down the hall... "His eyes were rheumy and flammulated, and the special aroma of bargain port wafted up from his soiled and threadbare coat. Disturbed fleas settled.

"You are not down the hall," Peter said. "You will be out the window very shortly if I don't get a straight answer from you, you sawed-off little pisswah." Yeah, that was manly, he thought. It was taking all he had left at full power to toss a scare into, a dwarf.

"Well, er, Monsieur, I ... "The voice trailed off. The cheesy grin remained. The dwarf shrugged.

"Let's have a drink, you and I," Peter said. Changing tack was a good way to keep the upper hand. "Sounds like you could make good use of a spot or two. Shall we?" He waved the dwarf toward the kitchen, but the tiny man did not budge, unsure, nervous. "Come on, come on. A drink is what you want, right?"

The dwarf looked around to make sure Peter was addressing him.

As he approached, Peter thought of Poe's character groping around the rim of the Pit. Once the dwarf was settled onto a stool at the breakfast bar, Peter pulled down the Chivas.

"Ah, good!" said the dwarf. "I was going to request something more potent than wine."

"Ice?"

"Do I look like a barbarian?"

"No offense," Peter handed across a thick-bottomed highball glass. The dwarf gulped the full whack and handed it back for more, smacking his lips.

"Sounds like you're in trouble for goldbricking, mate," Peter said as he poured.

"Eh?" His eyes never left the glass.

"You called yourself a flaneur, a goof-off. You always so charitable to yourself?"

"Of course not!" He banged the glass on the countertop for emphasis. "It was him. My employer. He watches. He checks. God help you if you fuck up." More scotch was within range and his truncated reach was sufficient to win it. When he made the grab he eased his hold on the bundle of keys he'd kept fisted tight and they hit the polished bar-top with the jangle of small change.

Peter recognized Alea's keys as much by their unique sound as by the snapshot glimpse of them he caught before his guest executed a noisy recovery and swept them into a dark, dirty pocket.

The keys were grouped, Peter knew, by a circlet of ball-and-socket gold chain, not plated, but apparently solid gold. Where a conventional person would have attached an oval Gucci plate with embossed initials, or one of those stamped metal ticket facsimiles for eats or Les Misérables, there was a tarnished brass knickknack the size of Peter's thumbnail. It was rectangular, with a raised border like a miniature playing card, and enclosed a deep-cut contour of a human figure, arms extended - the same outline that had previously appeared in bas-relief on Alea's waxen seal. The figure no longer looked to Peter like it was flying. It looked like it was plummeting toward some uncertain and ugly end, helpless to arrest its fall.

The dwarf downed two more burly swallows of scotch and muttered on about his philistine boss. Peter canceled the lunatic urge to laugh in favor of strategic timing.

He watched the dwarf's glass ascend, then caught him with a mouthful of liquor. "You made some kind of mistake?" he said. "Involving Alea?"

"Oh, no, she was perfect. But I'm not supposed -," His gaze bounced up to Peter's triumphant face as the firebolt of Chivas burned its way down the wrong tube. It was a perfect double-take. He spluttered and turned an alarming shade of scarlet, veins bulging at the temples as he spluttered and gagged. "Zut!You!"

"You thought I was just a fellow burglar, right?"

The dwarf mopped at himself.

"See, pal, I'm an absolute security nut. Only Alea had the key combination that would open the front door. I changed the upper deadbolt myself; not even the building manager has a key to that one. But you did."

Swallowed air resolved into a broad panic fart. "I - I only saw your - back before."

"Tell me about your employer." In a taut suspense script, the next line would be:  His name, for starters. Peter leaned across the counter and pointed. "His name, for starters. Window's right over there."

"Monsieur Rogoff." The dwarf's tone was exasperated.

Peter thought that alcohol and self-interest were melding to get admirable results so far. "And does this Mister Rogoff know where Alea is?"

The dwarf shrugged again, sighed. "Ah, Monsieur. She is gone for always. Of her you will never see again." Said with the species of bogus regret the French believe is terribly sympathetic. "She was very beautiful ..."

"Does Monsieur Rogoff know where she is?" Peter's face crimsoned, his eyes growing starkly white.

Maurice recoiled. "Monsieur Rogoff knows - everything!" He hiccuped and silence lagged between the two men.

Peter poured himself a belt - over ice - and tipped it back.

"You will take me to meet Mister Rogoff tonight?"

"Oh, no, Monsieur, I cannot! He would terminate me! Not for any price!"

"I didn't name a price." The dwarf's protest sounded a bit too rehearsed, so Peter kept on his deadly smile and lunatic-calm demeanor. "I'm offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – a chance to get back to the ground floor via the elevator instead of the fast way. Cheers."

Maurice lent the window a queasy glance. "It is useless for me to argue, I suppose."

"Bingo," Peter toasted. "Or splatooey."

Maurice winced at the indelicacy. He regarded his empty glass as a gallows-bound convict might his final taste on this world, with regret that he had not made it last longer. "Ah. So be it, then."

"I'll need my keys back to seal our little pact," Peter held out his hand.

The dwarf's phoney expression of camaraderie under fire dissolved into an acid look of daggers and poison. He rifled within his several coats, kicking up dust and gnats, every contortion punctuated by a grumbled checklist of curses in French, just in case Peter did not sense what an inconvenience he was causing.

But he relinquished the prize.

Peter's grasp closed on the keys, affirming their reality, his heart surging almost as if he had physically recaptured Alea herself. On its tiny ingot of gold, the man-like figure fell, and fell

Kind of like the pose Maurice would strike on the way down, as he picked up speed. If…

"Don't fret, Shorty." Peter felt gruffly hale now. "I'll put in a word with your boss, after he and I take a meeting." He hesitated just shy of the sunken portion of the living room. "Unless, of course, you really do know where Alea is right now." He raised his eyebrows and considered the window again. "Hm?"

"That is something I wish with all my heart, mon ami," Maurice said in his saw-toothed voice. He spread his open palms in a theatrical gesture of impotence. "But, truly, I cannot say because I do not know. If Monsieur Rogoff wishes to divulge more to you, he shall."

Maurice's exaggerated courtliness was as grotesque as his expressions of sympathy were patently false. Peter found himself wishing for a pistol, something big and phallic and lethal, loaded with lead wadcutters. A mushrooming slug to the head; instant checkout. He was still thinking of death, and that was inappropriate, and he glimpsed in a flash just how absurd he was.

Play tough, he thought. Let's see if you can maintain a degree of physical intimidation for this little errand, at least. Can you keep it up?

"I think I might just be able to charm Monsieur Rogoff," he said. "Just look what I've done for our relationship in such a short time. Move. Now." It was essential tough-guy dialogue.

Maurice belched, picked snot, moved as ordered.

The grandfather clock stubbornly bonged four times. It was two-fifteen in the morning.

"Useless!" the little man snorted from his vantage, at one of three high, narrow windows that took up most of the north wall of his cramped quarters. He was far up enough from street level, that security bars would have been paranoid in the extreme. His exasperated comment formed a corona of mist on the chilly glass; from across his customary anarchic disarray, the cantankerous clock endured another of his mordant glances. "Old World craftsmanship ... don't make 'em like they used to ... pah!"

He fantasized sweet-talking the senile timepiece closer to one of the vaulted windows, then defenestrating it. It was fully twice the little man's height and might offer a heroic struggle, if it could anticipate anything other than a splendid view of nighttime Los Angeles all the way to the Hollywood sign. He could watch it somersault end-over-end as it achieved terminal velocity, the building's floors blurring past ever faster, and then the sweet harsh kiss of impact, the sundering of oiled mahogany, the splintering of joists, the glittering spray of cogs and gears and an end to years of temporal suffering.

He remained at the window, imagining himself a thane in a high keep, and watched as car headlights curbed on Highland Avenue and extinguished. The railroad watch in his fob pocket declared the arrival of two-fifteen a.m. Maurice, as expected, was spot on.

The Victorian clutter of the workroom resembled the overstock of an antique shoppe and a thrift store, ignominiously mingled by one of California's over-hyped quakes. There was no obvious regard lent to cataloging, and none for display - the little man knew how to locate whatever he might require. He gently shifted a dust-laden afghan, so as not to precipitate a barrage of sneezing. He thought:  I am healthy but I am old, and would spare my pipes the violence. Beneath the afghan was a maplewood chest, rough-hewn like a rural coffin. It might adequately accommodate Maurice, should the dwarf ever decide to decease. From the chest the little man lifted out a cloudy bottle of very old, venerable brandy. Maurice's well-earned reward, for Peter Deutsch was a prize of rare worth. The little man resisted the temptation to puff the dust from the bottle, remembering to spare his pipes.

"Our Mister Deutsch has no idea of just how valuable he is," the little man said to the bottle. "Eh?" He hummed and laughed, in the manner of a child at play alone. "Right about now, our dear Peter is waxing tragic, pillorying himself in the most classical terms imaginable!"

He settled back in his creaking office chair and steepled his fingers expectantly. "Hm. Some people just don't appreciate good melodrama."

Peter Deutsch vacillated between waning anger and bewilderment, both dwindling to irrelevance in the face of his ever-amplifying exhaustion. He lifted and dropped each foot, climbing stairs again, thinking that the only reason people like great altitude is that it provides such a wonderful view when you fall.

Hysterical laughter seemed the most viable of all his options.

The dwarf, Maurice, no last name offered, had directed him over the hill of Hollywood proper, then to the ancient Bekins warehouse that loomed against the southern skyline as a decaying smog-tarnished colossus, way the hell down Highland Avenue. It looked like a decrepit Deco-era dirigible hangar.

Then came the chain-link barricades, the locks and fences. Maurice, like a rat, seemed able to squeeze through any opening the size of his head. Peter was forced to scramble over. The rusty coil of razor security wire sharply depreciated the value of his tailored shirt. A deviously crooked nailhead did likewise for his trousers, once Maurice had lifted open a rotten plank hatch much like an old root-cellar door. Down in the darkness, Peter deftly sank ankle-deep into a cold engulfment that wasted both his shoes. Then Maurice led the way up flight after flight of groaning metal stairs barely a yard in width and sandwiched between mildew and verdigris-encrusted walls, like some forgotten fire escape. Peter's hand came away orange whenever he gripped the rail, which came and went like a cruel practical joke. He yawned. He was sweating. His socks were soaked through with something vile. Keep climbing.

He was crazy, all right, to be following a dwarf who had burgled into his life with maddeningly vague tidbits about the fate of the creature he'd once thought of as a human being named Alea. Alea, who right now symbolized his entire capacity for love, sealed up in a bottle and thrown overboard. He felt as if his entire life had blown a tire.

He thought of freeway wrecks, of the shucked husks of destroyed tire treads, of disintegrated safety glass, of tardy paramedics and lives permanently off-course thanks to an errant second of high-speed traffic. Some people who worked in Hollywood commuted from San Diego. Three hours plus, coming and going, nearly a fifth of each waking day consumed by travel and drive-time radio and maybe, just maybe, a collision that could unmake your existence. It could all change in an instant. Crash.

Peter kept climbing.

He began to hear the wind cooing through the structure; thought he could feel the mammoth building swaying. It was an illusion, of course. His body told him that he was nearing the very top. In Maurice's wake he completed the final flight of risers, then wrestled past an acre or so of junk in an attic the size of half a football field - the discards and obsolete detritus of hundreds of past lives. Then came a narrow stretch of planks laid across fat girders, sloping slightly downward, then more junk, now enclosed by close walls reaching not quite to the dim recesses of the ceiling.

Then, incongruously, came an office door with a tarnished brass knob. The pebbled glass was cataracted to ivory at the borders and held despite a heroic, curving fracture through the lower left quadrant. Flaking gilt proclaimed the MORRIS BUTTS DETECTIVE AGENCY. Detective Butts had gone wherever failed private eyes go, decades previously. The door was still in the world, and its glass was lit from within.

Maurice beckoned. "Enter." The door creaked. Peter thought:  This is not real life. This is an episode of THRILLER and I'm about to meet Boris Karl off

"Is it Deutsch as in Sprechen sie Deutsche?"

Peter nodded. A small man behind the desk was squinting at a crumbling Rolodex card.

"Maurice, show Mister Deutsch to a seat. The bar-stool will do."

Peter's eyes tried to deny the input - the little man's vest, the faded dignity of old silk, the swallowtail coat in gray pinstripe, the musky ascot and vintage pearl stickpin. He noticed a watch fob, and, in a fall of light beneath the desk ... spats? The costume was natty, but had suffered rigors of wear. It made Peter think of that odd mixture of senility and majesty which characterized elders whose minds could lock with crystal-fine resolution into the minutiae of the Depression, yet got only fringe reception on the here-and-now. He watched the little man pay meticulous attention to the flicking of dust - real and imagined - from his outfit.

"My young friend," the little man began while Maurice was still peering about for the location of the barstool. "Permit an introduction. The name is Rogoff."

"Monsieur Rogoff" Peter said vacantly.

A courtly nod, modest. "Thank you. Is something amiss, Mr. Deutsch? You're staring at me as if I had a third eye. Oh, Maurice, it's over by the clock, for heaven's sake!"

Maurice grumbled and heaved. Butlering was beneath his station.

"You look like one of those Hollywood Boulevard loons," said Peter. "The ones in the castoffs and theatre costumes you see picking in the litter baskets at three in the morning."

"And just now, you, Mr. Deutsch, look like a news composite of a crazed killer." He waved Peter's notice toward a foggy bureau mirror leaning atop a dresser missing all of its carved knobs. "Or perhaps more relevantly, a hammer murderer, eh?"

Maurice gave up trying to hoist the barstool and instead cleared it off and scrambled aboard. Let the new guy get his own goddamned seat.

Peter saw, staring back at him, an overused face, barely organized around manic eyes, darkened, hollowed. His hair was lank and dirty and sticking forth in windblown licks. The corners of his mouth were pulled back in a smile he could not feel. His face was numb; but here was that face, grinning. Several days of stubble coarsened the view. He could have been a denizen of the alleys himself.

"So let's forgo snap judgment by appearance, hm? Let's go for the meat, the substance, the inner man, the details - and not the 'high concept,' as you might say. If I may presume." He seemed enormously pleased with his own banter, his face aglow, ruddy and elfin.

Peter abstracted past his own image in the mirror and took in the little man's bulb nose, the eyes like glittering chips of black quartzite. In defiance of cliché they, in fact, twinkled. His facial topography seemed to indicate the little man spent a great deal of time smiling. His hair was white as duck down, healthy but clipped very short, like that of an old Navy man. Peter rose, considered all the junk again, and sank his hands into his pockets. "I'll stand." He thought of poker.

"There is a question that brought you here," the little man began. It had the quality of a rehearsed speech; dialogue, a script - perhaps that was why the tone seemed weirdly jolly to Peter. "It caused you to follow Maurice into this strange place. Why bother? You're a fellow who knows how to cut his losses. Why indeed? I've devoted a goodly amount of meditation to my response to the question -"

Peter fixated as though seeing Rogoff for the first time ever. "Where is she?" His voice was a whisper.

"Ah, precisely! That question!" A look of vindication fleeted across the leprechaun countenance. His hands fiddled with air. He was excited. "I shan't tell you she does not exist, as Maurice might have awhile ago. That sort of answer was designed more for ... urn, titillation, don't you think? Wouldn't serve my purpose, now that you're here. And I surmise that your patience is probably as worn down as your demeanor. I notice everything, you'll notice..."

M. Rogoff's voice was drubbing and hypnotic; Peter had to remind himself to ask again: "Where is she now?"

"Ah. I put it to you, sir: Would you like to see her again; now, tonight?" M. Rogoff tossed Peter's card onto the desktop, and reclined to relish the effect. Good scenes were Peter's business. Here was a man who could appreciate pains taken. "Academic, really. Of course you do?'

Peter fought the surging anger inside himself. He wanted to face this monsieur evenly matched, emotionless. It almost worked.

"Of course I do." The rage, swirling crimson and cobalt, seethed just shy of boiling, and Peter's voice was low in the oppressive room.

"And the car you have brought with you, I presume it is a two-seater?"

"Oh, Monsieur!" exclaimed Maurice. "Such an automobile! Flashing green lights, little bells that ding when you leave your door ajar. Paine voices that tell you to fasten your lap belt. Like something from that space movie!" Maurice had liked Star Wars a great deal.

"Don't hasten to invite yourself," M. Rogoff told the dwarf. "Mr. Deutsch and I have several private business matters to discuss, In the meantime, Maurice, as a reward for your sterling service, you'll find a bottle of extremely old brandy on the bookshelf right behind you, next to the clock. Also an envelope:'

M. Rogoff rose from the desk, his height not changing all that noticeably. He flexed his hands into a pair of white linen evening gloves and fetched down the brushed top hat from its wicker roost. He directed Peter to pick up a large Gladstone bag in brown leather.

Peter's toes were almost touching the bag. He had rehearsed a lot of angry things to say - good, raw, punchy stuff— but could bring none of it to the surface. He remained speechless, as though dubbed into silence. It all seemed to follow some predetermined course no matter what he did.

M. Rogoff indicated the room's only door. "Come along, Mr. Deutsch. We are going to attend a party. Don't worry - we shan't stay long."

Maurice had screwed around on the barstool to locate the brandy that had been shelved right behind him the whole time. As Peter and M. Rogoff picked their way to the door that once belonged to Morris Butts, P.I., Maurice said, "Just behind me! You are too crafty, Monsieur! To change the scent of the bottle so that my seasoned nose could not inform me of its presence, that is wickedly clever, Monsieur, bordering almost on cruelty" At the threshold of the door Peter heard a cork pop. The dwarf's final words to him stopped him short. "Be wary of the Monsieur," he told Peter. "He is a sly one. He could sell the Devil's own lost soul back to him, with interest!"

Night colors flowed across the streets like liquid neon; the air smelled vaguely of impending rain, giving the cold a sharper edge. Alea had blended into the blue-on-blue juncture of L.A. sea and sky, embraced the velvet black of the city's night, and tilted herself seamlessly into invisibility. Peter's flesh tingled with her presence, as if she had become a chameleon, and all he had to do was look hard enough to see her again, there against the vapor lamps and slick tarmac and the heavy, wet air.

By this time of night, everything was closed, and that impression summed up Peter's state of mind. He felt locked out. Her loss was like a scalpel sewn up inside of him, and he craved her the way a battlefield craves silence and sanity. He knew defeat. This is how it ends, always. Alone, wearied, never quite brave enough to finish it all.

M. Rogoff pointed; Peter drove, keeping his eyes on the road until he could think of something to say.

"Maurice," he said after a few more northbound miles.

"Hm?" M. Rogoff was bestirred from some private reverie. He was doing just fine watching the sights and sounds from Peter's big, fancy motor car.

"He was terrified you were going to cashier him for leading me to you."

"Oh. Mr. Deutsch, Maurice's instructions were explicit. Specifically, he was to be caught by you, and he was to reel you in by whatever avenue best suited your mental state. Maurice is a talented chap though to tell him so goes straight to his head. Unlike spirits. If he used his intoxicated-dwarf ploy on you, be sure it was a sham. He drinks constantly, but I've never seen him drunk. I have seen him drink five longshoremen-types under the proverbial table with virtually no deleterious effect."

"You mean he's like that all the time?"

"Mm, yes, give or take."

They caught the Hollywood Freeway. All of Peter's roads in life seemed to lead inexorably back to Studio City. He was about to ask again where Alea had gone when the little man interrupted.

"You seem on the brink of giving up. Please don't. Not sportsmanlike. Tonight shall be quite an educational night for you, Mr. Deutsch. All you shall experience, even my seeming inattention, has vast relevance to your problem, which centers on the woman you have named Alea." He sounded like a low-budget swami.

"I have named— ?"

"No explanation I could offer, here, in traffic, would make any sense to you right now. It is better to just show you. Dwell on this, in the interim: You never would have met her, if not for me. Nor lost her. She is no longer a part of your life because her core purpose has been served."

An angry stab of feeling in Peter's gut, perhaps the scalpel, slicing away, told him a desecration was being enacted. His eyes steeled and would not admit the image of the little man in the next seat. "So this is all your fault, is that what you're telling me?"

"No, no, no, Mr. Deutsch. It's my job."

He wanted to scream, to slow the Mazda to a tire-rending halt and pummel the little man in fury, to jump the curb and paste a pedestrian, to somehow vent all the frustration and defeat, to cut to the chase. To terminate this two-bit melodrama and end Rogoff's bloody endless narrative. But his passenger cut in ahead of him again.

"Oh. Look. Look!"

They flashed past a three-dimensional billboard the size of a parking lot turned on-end. It presented to the world - noisily - the latest live-action spectacular attraction of the Universal Studios Tour. See it now. It was not a request.

Monsieur Rogoff is a master of misdirection, Peter's brain advised, oddly, in Maurice's raspy voice.

See it. Now.

The freeway sloped down, lane upon lane of racing red taillights and bright speedbump reflectors and green signs offering choice exits. You couldn't see the Black Tower from the freeway as easily as a few years before; it had been dwarfed by more imposing monoliths. Peter's eyes sought it from habit - a monarch now deposed, yet still more intimidating than the bigger boys. It was a ruler-straight dark rectangle cropped into the postcard shimmer of the electric skyline, a box of black metal windowed by black glass, which absorbed all surrounding light. To question the Tower with your eyes was to peer into the plunging uncertainty of a mine shaft or abandoned well, and wonder what testy things hungered there, night vision ready to fox you if you were reckless enough to go groping in the dark.

Peter's Mazda had a sticker; it was waved through the main gate by the night guard. One of the studio's vintage jokes was that a corporate presidency automatically opened for the person who could provide more parking. Peter now saw the trick - simply clock in at three in the morning.

M. Rogoff was probably waiting for him to ask what in Satan's butt-hot Hell they were doing here. Peter decided to deny the little man the satisfaction of being so goddamned right. Familiar aches began to roost in his shoulders and spine; crossing the studio lot's threshold brought all the fatigue and frustration of Sinner home to his bones. He shrugged, felt them slide away. It was amazingly easy to shuck any sense of obligation to Sinner; it had become trivial, disposable.

Above, the Tower reached to blot out the stars. M. Rogoff was looking reverently up one broad black flank. Lights nicotined the tinted panes at the very top. Elsewhere in the building, and throughout the backlot, workers were braced against the predawn cold and getting eyestrain in cubicles, attending to what the moguls, in their exquisite simplemindedness, called product.

As they approached, another man in security livery unlocked the big lobby doors from within.

"Wasting time," said Peter. He was so tired he was leaving words out of his sentences. "Can't get in without a pass."

"You mean an invitation," said M. Rogoff. By means of elementary prestidigitation he produced a stiff white card. The guard grinned at the trick, nodded toward the card, and admitted them.

M. Rogoff stopped, made room for himself, and bowed formally. Then he led Peter. "I believe the lifts are this way."

Peter knew bloody well where the fornicating elevators were, thank you very goddamn much.

"You're about to ask one of those questions again," M. Rogoff said, punching the up panel. "Just wait. Wait and see."

Anodized doors parted with a ding. Peter thought of big, nasty single-edge razor blades sliding wide. He held fast, worrying his lower lip.

M. Rogoff browsed him, bottom to top. Then he smiled and went first.

The door gofer looked at Peter quizzically. Suspiciously. "Excuse me, sir," he said, "but that is hardly the proper attire for this -"

"It's fine, Dolph" M. Rogoff interposed. "He's with me." The gofer retreated. "This evening's soiree is a masque, Mr. Deutsch," said Rogoff.

Peter stared as though consulted about particle theory or recombinant DNA.

"A masque. As in Ba! Masque. Yes? Or the grand masque of the Red Death, as recounted by Poe?"

Peter closed his eyes as slowly as a turtle, to try to keep more headache from leaking in. It did not work.

"A masque. A masquerade. Where people wear masks."

For some goofball reason all Peter could think of was music. Mahler's lush Symphony #10; the Adagio. The "Bus Station" theme from Tangerine Dream's score for Near Dark. Gabriel croaking about red rain; Exene Cervenka crooning on hungry wolves. Thirty seconds elapsed and his double-crossing memory reminded him to think of Alea once more. The abrupt, scary ending of "She's So Heavy;" as unpredictable as the slamming cell door at the finish of Eurythmics' "Room 101." If you donned your mask - your masque - backwards, did the devil get you with his subliminals?

No mask. No costume. Peter mumbled "Hammer murderer" to the gofer as he entered.

Three interconnecting suites commanded a westward panorama of the Valley, the middle room the one with the bar - opening onto an Astro-Turfed rooftop patio. Peter could smell dance sweat and Turkish cigarette smoke. Ice clinked. Strangers laughed; the sound was piercing and harsh. A spider-like disc jock deftly puppeteered a five-turntable spread, spot-lobbing random tape spikes into the gutters between tunes, a different flavor for each room. Butthole Surfers howled through "Sweat Loaf" in the chamber containing the bar. Further back, E. Power Biggs did his Bach thing on Harvard's Flentrop pipe organ. 'Gasm rollicked to the end of "Cock Knock" and was supplanted by the Ramones bellowing "Beat on the Brat." M. Rogoff and Peter were standing in the Big Chill chamber. Etta James wrapped up "The Blues Don't Care About You" and the jock set the Temptations to spinning. A CD unit waited its turn while the rotating vinyl discs broadcast soft petroleum rainbows.

"Wondrous!" said M. Rogoff as the intro to "Psychedelic Shack" hit speed.

Grotesques and arabesques whirled; the dancers spilling through the door and engulfing part of the patio. Easier breathing there, amidst the frenzy. Typically Hollywood. They were all trying to out-Herod one another. Tonight the predominant peer-clique brag of choice manifested in the preponderance of masks crafted by an ex-Las Vegas fashion designer named Russell Zanoza. Killer momentum, gathered around midnight, was still peaking.

"So colorful and alive!" M. Rogoff, again.

A worthy in a jeweled frog mask and leather tuxedo blundered into Peter, drenching his shirtfront with fresh pina colada. He did not ribbet. He said, "Sorry, love," and bobbed off, leaving Peter to swab himself with cocktail linens. His garments were three days stale. He found himself queerly grateful that their odor had just been neatly masked by a socially permissible accident.

When he saw M. Rogoff again, the little man was holding a straight double scotch toward him. He expected a bon mot about quenching the inner man now that the outer man was drenched. Mick Jagger began to sing of chainsaws on the Bois de Boulogne a room away.

Peter killed the scotch with a grimace, fortifying himself against what promised to be a long charade. Ahh. M. Rogoff took his free hand and led him, like Fred before Ginger, cutting through the throng to home in on the bar. Long tables supported the savaged remnants of chips, dips, cheeses, rumaki, jumbo shrimps, chicken in Chinese mustard, assorted fondues (now cold) and crumb-strewn hors d'oeuvre trays. An Iranian with a mole near his mouth drew endless espressos and cappuccinos from a steaming brass faiyima. Milk hissed into froth.

M. Rogoff located a high stool. "We shall - how should I say? - hang out here, until we fade from notice. Until new faces obtrude. Finished with your drink? Hm, perhaps you could give Maurice a manly contest. No matter. Do have another. It might render you less hostile toward what I shall reveal to you."

The noise quotient was jarring, yet despite all the aural competition, Peter could capture every syllable. M. Rogoff paused a lot when he talked, enunciating like a scholar who knows the camera is on.

"Wasn't she beautiful?" he said clearly.

Peter began to smell the slant. This was like dialogue. He was supposed to say, wasn't WHO beautiful? He sipped his scotch. It was good, aged, the real stuff, not like the bogus Chivas at Shepard Bonnard's party, where he had met the who woman. It seemed centuries distant, but it was easy for him to replay that party now. Here were music and dancers and an available patio.

"I thought she was a party whore. In fact, I think I called her one?"

"Yes. Your hostility was returned with understanding and love. Beautiful. I really cannot conjure a superlative for her, Peter; she was so superior. And there was the benefit of excellent timing. Timing is everything, is it not? You could not have met her at a more opportune time. You were thrillingly ripe; as vulnerable as a safe-cracker's sanded fingertip."

"Misdirected. I fell for a con. Sue me."

"Peter." M. Rogoff had become familiar, easily shifting from the formal Mr. Deutsch. Peter lent it no notice. "I do not take my work lightly. It was not merely a charade, as you think."

"No, it was your job?" Peter mocked.

"Am I correct in saying that when you met Alea, you were - I believe the common parlance is:  'Going down for the third time?' You were being thoroughly abused by shallow and predatory people, yes? And you were lucky enough to receive exactly the reinforcement you required at just that precise moment. You were not deceived."

"Just fucked." Sour.

M. Rogoff considered his own small, fine hands in their white gloves. "Sexual compatibility is my forte."

"Not what I meant." Peter said. He was annoyed enough to speak while not looking at the little man. "I demonstrated one last jog of faith and got shucked and hung out to dry. I wanted not just anyone, but her. I wanted -"

"Mr. Deutsch." Mannered, again. It had the desired effect - it got Peter's attention. Time for serious goods. "Do you always get what you want?"

The caperers beyond, the dancers and laughers, had melted into an abstract living artwork of flashing colors and crude motion. The noise seemed to fade back further still, to die a small death. Peter watched for a very long minute.

"No," he said. "Never. When I did get what I wanted, for once, I could hardly believe it. I doubted."

"Ah. Ahum! Now we're back on track. Nobody can recognize perfection right off the beam. You can't. I can, rarely, but only because I do the planning. It took time for you to learn that she was perfect for you. Just what you wanted. That matured into just what you needed. Correct me if I err?"

"Great timing. Perfect," Peter's voice was losing inflection, lifeblood leaking from an uncoagulated wound.

M. Rogoff was excited now, prodding the thought chain ever-forward. "And when she began to seem just a tiny bit too perfect to you?"

"She displayed weakness. She admitted self-doubt to me. Showed me a crack in her armor of perfection." He ran playback in his head, then shook his head ruefully. "I didn't fall for it. I swan dove. And hit like an anvil into a duck pond."

"But all because of me, Peter. It was all my doing. I love art a great deal."

Peter had fought hard to loathe the image of her face, to summon aversion-therapy at its most brutal. Alea was evil; she had been the destroyer; hers was the fault. Despise her that you might cleanse her from your mind.

It didn't work. It was a patchwork membrane of rationalization too fragile, too transparent for his anger to sustain. Even if Melvin Belli and Perry Mason slapped him with irrefutable documentation that she was a berserker, right here right now, Peter knew that he would never be able to talk himself into hating her.

"Peter?" The repetition of his name had a succoring effect. Peter might have used the same technique to hold the attention of a happy dog. "Peter it simply could not be permitted to last. There was the work to consider, after all. You had Objet d'Art and your friend awaiting you in Canada - a definite first step down the path you've craved for so long. The path that leads to the artistic recognition you need as fundamentally as love. But for you to venture there an easy cynic, embittered, walled away from honest feeling, glib and shallow... ," M. Rogoff sighed. "At the point I injected Alea into your life, you had been working too long, too hard. You had been through too much. Your divorce. The courts. The psychic decay. Unfulfilling labor. No end in sight. You had inured yourself to pain so heavily that no honest emotion could ever shine through your work. Not even the pain itself. Can you see it now, comprehend it?"

"Bullshit." He hated perceiving only edges. Outlines. And he hated the idea of being outgunned by a little old lunatic who lived in a Bekins warehouse. He drew scant solace from the fact that this wasn't the most humiliating thing that had happened to him recently.

"You're trying to get me to believe that if I'd taken Alea with me to Vancouver, I would've turned into a romantic klutz on Objet d'Art?"

"If you had gone without meeting her, the film would have been too dark. Too unforgiving of humanity. If you had taken her there, it would have become worthless hackwork. It would have been a very - ah - cute film."

The scalpel stirred, slicing Peter's stomach into strip steak. Cute was a word that had been mated with his directorial output twenty times too many. The Curse of "Cute" was on his head. VARIETY - Cute concept; pedestrian execution. Cute characters. Cute enough to matinee for one week. HOLLYWOOD REPORTER - No depth; fails dismally. But cute idea nevertheless.

Peter to Damon Fletcher, a week before the party at Bonnard's: "Cute! Fucking cute! I would put my left nut in a garlic press and give it a mighty squash for the paparazzi if I could just evade that goddamn four-letter word just once!"

Damon to Peter: "Nahh. You’d be down one huevo and they'd just look up a synonym." They'd both laughed.

M. Rogoff's voice assumed a lectorial hue. "If you protect yourself from feeling intense pain, you also erect an equally impenetrable shield against being intoxicated by pleasure. Tipping the balance became ... ah paramount. How could you be expected to produce anything of honest artistic significance?"

The little man had in his mind a sepia-toned picture of Maurice, at work sculpting his monsters. Talking to himself, but also vocally coaxing the blood-colored clay into behaving. Investing tears, first the spicy salt ones of anger, then the honeysuckle tears of joy. Sacrificing a mouthful of his precious brandy to knead into his creation. M. Rogoff knew these emotions, and his speech to Peter was born of rough experience.

"Alea served her purpose for you. Are you not now packed for Canada? You're telling yourself that distance is the answer, that escape will win you perspective. What you are not prepared to acknowledge is that now, as a result of your travails, you are girded for the challenge that Objet d'Art will be for you. Alea's work was accomplished." His eyes sought the dancers. "She could not be permitted to last for you, any more than she can be allowed to last for that gentleman over there."

Peter followed M. Rogoff's gesture past the dancers. "Willard Pell?" He recognized the writer instantly, even from behind. They had been introduced in the ebb tide of business. With the debut of his second novel, Come the Wind, Fear the Storm, Pell had been hailed as "the new Salinger" by Publisher's Weekly. He took seriously the advice to relocate to Hollywood. A dumb movie was produced from the ground up remains of his premiere book, Jackals, and the offers that sprang from his second novel all died in development hell. Pell could thrash out scripts as well as any word-processor chimp doing TV, but had ignored, the movie-biz truism that the execs don't pay you for pretty writing - they pay you for the bullshit you are expected to endure, selling your talent to people who have none of their own. Pell made money. Book Number Three somehow never materialized. He tried not to let the great big cogs of the machine munch him too much. Now he stood at another elite party, being seen, a touch overweight, a touch egg-eyed, one more Hollywood victim in a roomful, disinterestedly watching a teller of party tales struggle his way ineptly through some humorless anecdote.

In a crowd where blithely bared tits, mooning, and ostentatious gropery formed the behavioral norm, Willard Pell was holding hands with a blonde woman whose back was also turned toward Peter.

M. Rogoff pretended to hunt for pineapple juice at the bar. "You wanted to see her. There she is."

"Sexcrime" fired up. From the room beyond, "Addicted to Love."

Peter pushed off his stool and instantly felt the scotch slugging him. He executed a sort of dreamy beeline for Willard Pell - the only other attendee not in costume. Like Peter, he did not require one. They were both clowns. Fools, but in the medieval sense.

As he reached to tap the blonde woman's shoulder she spun as though they were waltzing. She held to her face a masque of immaculate blue glass which complimented perfectly the azure of her gown, a floor-length job in drifting gossamer. Cuts of it lagged in the air like Indian veils with each of her motions; they wafted to rest as Peter stood unmoving, trying to see through the masque.

He saw that the blonde hair was not a wig. Details piled into his toil-worn and prostrate brain:  Same height. Same general build. The planes of her face, even concealed by the masque, were different. He knew the lips would be fuller - the upper with more pronounced peaks; the lower more rounded and plumply sensual. The cheekbones would be more Scandinavian. Her hair, her massy handfuls of natural wheat-blonde hair, left her scalp in a different pattern, framed her face in a new way.

Gone was the tiger-eye; through the cut cyan glass he could not see the amber flecks he'd expected. Peter thought of Tragedy and Comedy with their eyeballs gouged out. Glass could be sharp and sneaky. The eyes, the only humanity the glass masque would permit him, were the amplified blue of the Arctic sky, a color you saw if you held a flawless blue-white diamond to the sun. Peter fancied he saw a borealis in each.

She removed her masque - it was on a wand - and smiled at him. "Have we met, sir?" It was neutrally pleasant; an open, civil smile for an as-yet-unintroduced friend.

He tried to say her name and his voice drowned. His hand tried to reach for one of hers but didn't quite make it.

Willard Pell cast a nervous glance - he had to - toward his clique before cutting in and snatching the hand Peter had missed. He was almost petulant. "Uh - Peter?" He stammered. "Why, Peter Deutsch! I'd ... um ... like you to meet my fiancée, Michelle -"

Her smile harpooned Peter, and emptied him of hope. It was more notice than he'd given her upon their first meeting, at another party, so far away now, and her smile had not changed in any way. Peter knew its form indelibly. And now, in its depths, he saw nothing of himself, nothing for him, nothing whatsoever.

"I'm sure you've seen Peter's work, love, he's the one who - ah, directed, right? - Mad Horizon, and -"

Her teeth are identical. Peter thought through rocking waves of disorientation. The veins in her neck trace exactly the same way. Her smile, her eyes.

"Geez, what was the name of that miniseries you did for Daystar last year?"

It was bullshit, pungent, Hollywood's finest kind, and Peter was expected to spoon it up like everybody else. It was why the pay scale was so high. "Dead Steady," he said, empty of inflection.

The woman smiled at him diplomatically, from a vast distance, as Pell leaned forward. "Peter," he whispered, "What in hell is the matter, man? You look like a sack full of curb scoopings." The writer's face was a runny amalgam of mild shock, slight embarrassment, fair-weather brotherhood, light revulsion.

You deserve everything good in the world.

From the stool, M. Rogoff nodded, a buoy in a typhoon. Already Pell's group sought some detour from Peter. It's okay - he's been drinking. Peter backed off with a choked-off utterance he hoped sounded apologetic. I heard he actually signed to do that garbage script for SINNER. He had to get back to M. Rogoff. He hasn't been the same since his second wife dumped him, I heard.

His mouth was amazingly dry. M. Rogoff handed him a delicate stem goblet of amber wine.

"You see?"

Peter gulped the wine, then pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to whiten flesh against bone. He renewed his long-distance overview of the woman in the blue gown. "It is. Christ. It's her." His face was contorted by a soft wonder. It was nearly awe. Beneath it, the anger remained, on hold. "What have you done to her? I don't understand how this can happen. Who - ?"

He was cut off by M. Rogoff. "Ask me just who I think I am; that's next." He patted Peter's shoulder. Good puppy. "Now we can go talk a bit in a more salubrious atmosphere. And eat. I'm famished, young man. These cocktail calories just won't suffice."

Peter tried to stop the little man as he gave up the barstool. "No. We can't. Can't go. I can't just leave her. Here. Like this."

M. Rogoff took his hand again. Frankenstein leading his feckless creation. "Dear Peter. My friend. She is not yours to leave, or take. Can't you understand?"

Peter did not understand.

Peter. Get out of here.

The party sloshed noisily into the hole left by their departure. Five minutes later, it was as if the director and his eccentric little companion had never been there at all.

In the elevator, M. Rogoff tapped the panel for the sub-basement and the doors knifed back to frame the chintzless underpinnings of the Tower - concrete corridors, stacked cardboard boxes, cold fluorescent tubes; workers' restrooms, dead inventory.

Peter remembered the tunnels. Universities had them, government buildings had them, Disneyland had them, and the Tower, that maze of shape-shifting modular offices and incredible shrinking tenures, had them in spider-web profusion. They were the secret panels that the veepees and attorneys used to shuttle script revisions, executive edicts, and angst from one soundstage to another. They accommodated electric golf carts. M. Rogoff and Peter hoofed it.

The tunnel into which M. Rogoff led him was damp and poorly lit; Stage 13 was gloomy and oppressive.

"Where are we now?"

"Safest place in the world," said M. Rogoff, his voice booming in the stage's cathedral acoustics. Light bled into the vast and empty blankness, then gushed, and Peter's pupils shied from the brightness as he saw a bank of lighting rheostats with M. Rogoff's white-gloved hands on the levers.

They were standing in a graveyard. The little man's eyes sparkled with their own interior current.

It was a movie sham-Necropolis, larger than death, an exaggeration. Studding a carpet of gray moss were chipped and canted monuments, custom-eroded to highlight their uniform age and decay. They were boxy and massive; the names emblazoned upon them, ostentatious. Lost memories that had never existed. Tombstones of this ilk were illegal now in sunny Southern Cal. Ordinances demanded that grave markers lie flush with the turf to facilitate grounds keeping.

This was not real. Peter's eye shifted to director mode. The set was huge and visually contiguous; shots could be effected from almost any angle. Tinder-dead prop trees leaned upward without off-camera support. No visible wires. A forced-perspective crypt stood in arrogant shadow against what he assumed to be a large sky cyclorama, shaded for twilight. It would dissolve to an impressionistic limbo once the smoke hoses were turned on. The whole gag was a monster movie; vintage 1940s.

They were beyond backstage, two paces deeper than behind the scenes, alone in the dark heart of the cinema beast.

This evening Peter had been shown what he'd asked to see ... and the sight had ruptured a valve in him, greedily suctioning out the dregs of his emotional pain. He'd been left giddy and reeling. He felt just like Wile E. Coyote on the downside, snoot bashed crooked and eyes crossed, just as the cliff ledge shears away an inch past his clutching toes. The plunge into the bottomless blue of Alea's new eyes had rendered him vacant even of pain, and everything might somehow come out all right - if only he did not look down.

"Peter?"

Chemical mist seemed to follow M. Rogoff down into the middle of the cemetery. "Don't gawk back at the reality we just left. Do come forward, into this one." He resumed his window shopping amongst the tombstones. "That Forest Lawn. Pah! A disaster area. Immortality of a most repugnant sort. Ah. Right here, I should think." Peter waded in and caught up with the little man at a stone oblong like a tipped-over refrigerator. The name etched into each face in florid Gothic characters was DEUTSCH.

M. Rogoff cracked his Gladstone bag. With a magician's flourish he shook out a checked tablecloth, spreading out the creases atop the gravestone, which rose to waist height. "Voila!" Next came neat plastic cases containing summer sausage, a wedge of white cheddar, a cluster of green seedless grapes. A skinny loaf of sourdough bread followed. No preservatives. A pair of matching goblets in hand-blown green glass. A knife. A flagon of wine with a crooked cork.

"Good heavens!" Peter said. "You forgot the candies."

"Tut, tut." M. Rogoff withdrew a pair of thin tapers. They were wilted into bow shapes. "Light these, please, while I eat. I'll try to be satiated by the time you arrive at the next of the questions burning into your soul." He set about slicing precisely into his viands. "Isn't it intriguing?"

Peter balanced the first lit taper into a puddle of melted wax. It froze and held. The candles smelled of jasmine. This time he spoke his line on cue: "Isn't what intriguing?"

"Two hours ago, all you could think of was seeing her again." M. Rogoff chewed and swallowed a mouthful of bread and sausage. "You'll notice she wasn't on your mind again until I mentioned it. Have some more wine?'

The bottle unstoppered musically, and Rogoff poured more of the mystic yellow wine Peter had already sampled at the party. They watched as amber liquid met green glass and produced a mellow blue light. Its taste made Peter hungry. He filched a disk of sausage and reluctantly let it bring his appetite back. He had tried to run too far powered by alcohol and stubbornness alone.

"What is the next question burning in my ... you know."

"You wish to know - why you? Why all this pain for you."

Almost everything M. Rogoff said hurt. This did not. Instead of feeling exhausted, Peter was beginning to feel tired, yet capable. "Isn't there enough pain for everyone? Did I get a double share or something?"

"Yes to the first question, no to the second. You were specially chosen. I never choose frivolously. Ah. See? You can hold the steamroller impulses of youth in check. That's refreshing. It allows an old man like me to indulge his sense of the dramatic. Some of us can't help viewing life from the proscenium arch, don't you know." He popped grapes into his mouth as conversational punctuation.

"I noticed," Peter said. "Presto change-o." The scalpel jabbed his soul; took a biopsy.

"Pah! Even our dear Mr. Pell shall derive ultimate benefit from his private pain. But only for his art, and thus, for himself. There is another great novel in his future."

"He loses a blonde and gains a magnum opus by suffering? Terrific formula for success you've worked up, there. Maybe you could bottle it. How are you at suicides?"

"No need to get caustic, Mr. Deutsch. Hear me out. You have much more to accomplish than does Mr. Pell. That woman will serve the purpose for him the way her Alea incarnation did for you. But you are not merely going to make an artful film. I would not have selected and cultivated your emotions and brought you here if that were all. I need you to do still more. For me. Permit me a touch of uncertainty as I search for the correct words... you are very special and I've never tried to present a case like this before."

"Hm. I owe you so much."

"You shall. What do you think of what you saw upstairs tonight?" M. Rogoff's voice notched down into dead seriousness.

Peter had devoted some meditation to that one. "It implies processes I don't even want to consider.

"Au. But regardless, you still love her boundlessly, and would do nearly anything to win her back, correct? You see the path as insane. The destination to which it leads is quite rational. That's not linear thinking." He speared a shard of cheese with the knife, using it to point at Peter. "You, sir, are a true romantic."

The draughts of amber wine were buffering Peter's adrenaline and calming his raging stomach. His head stopped hurting. He felt extraordinarily lucid. "And you - sir - have never been in love. Of course. Have never made such an ass of yourself."

"Au contraire, dear Peter - how do you think I got this job?" That was good for one more near-overload of Peter's circuits. His eyes flashed up to meet the little man's. Trauma lurked in there, laying ambush.

"Oh, I know what you're going through about now," M. Rogoff proceeded. "And I'm very good at what I do. You are proof?'

"Great. I feel like shit. Which, according to Willard Pell, I also look like. Doggy doo, to be specific."

"Normally, I would have been finished with you the other night," M. Rogoff elucidated. "And now you would be in Vancouver, morbidly filming a depressing box office failure. Naturally, you'd continue to work. But you'd never get better than average. Better than 'cute.’"

Again the scalpel, poking minute holes, starting leaks. "But I had to go and get chosen by you," said Peter. He toasted the little man with a smirk and found his glass empty. "Wonderful. But what for?" The pallid cemetery fog stank of CO_2, and dry ice. "Now what?"

"Now your career will regain lost ground and sail into the black." M. Rogoff was still eating. "I tell you now that this shall be a project that shall dwarf all your previous achievements - ahem! - drawing its inspiration from the most unusual of biographies." One gloved finger jutted skyward as he struck a declamatory pose. "My own!"

Incredibly pleased with himself, he held the pose and watched Peter's awareness dawn by degrees. Peter's glass drifted down. He shook his head, then spoke, to the gravestones. "Son of a bitch. It really is true. Every single person in this goddamn town WANTS TO GET INTO THE FUCKING MOVIES - !"

The little man recoiled a half step, hat tottering, his chin pulled in at Peter's outburst. "I was hoping you would accept your good fortune with a bit more, ah, decorum. Peter, I was expecting a tot more gratitude."

"Gratitude - !" Peter had quickly learned he could discomfit his opponent by screaming. He enjoyed watching the little man flinch. In fact, this felt pretty goddamned good.

"What has happened to manners, respect?" M. Rogoff was running on, like a dribbling faucet, back in monologue-land. "That is what one reaps from tilling a solitary field, I venture. Hm! No sense of peers, of community! One loses touch, I suppose, eh? Well! I am not accustomed to such ... extreme and -"

"Stop prattling or I'll yell again" Peter overrode flatly. He sensed leverage. Maybe now was the time to haggle.

"Young man, as of this moment you know more about me and my work than any mortal. I've outlived generations of my ... well, my subjects."

"Your victims."

"Mine is a story that needs to be told, and by someone of your fine sensibilities," he continued, suddenly seeming no more confident than the hungry independents and self-conscious on-spec writers Peter routinely fielded as a necessary evil.

"You're not kidding?" He felt groggy. "You actually believe I'd do something like that for you?"

"I'm not a child, Peter?" M. Rogoff turned his tone cold and pragmatic. He was quite adept at speed-shifting. "You would do anything for even the slimmest chance at getting Alea back, if only for a moment, so you could tell her the lines you so need to tell her."

A shudder squeezed its chilly egress up Peter's backbone. He had dismissed Alea from this weird equation, concentrating on how best to blot out the dull ache of loss. Now the boneyard made hideously logical sense. This was the ultimate Hollywood pitch:  the deal making over comestibles, complete with clandestine bribery and the ceremonial proffering of perks. Have your girl's machine call mine; we'll do lunch. Sometimes such words were the invitation to one's own execution. Now Peter perceived the proposition, and it provoked a shiver in him despite the warm glow of the booze.

M. Rogoff gave the nail one more good whack before Peter could react. "Now - given that you must learn literally everything about me in order to faithfully represent me in a script, why not then take the next step and do it? Take my actual place in the world. My inheritance is yours."

"Wow. Such a deal." Peter was hanging tough.

"I am a durable old wretch but I shan't last forever. Maurice, as you've seen, would make a lamentable replacement. This art form demands so much more - excellent taste, finesse, a stringent sense of proportion, stylish choice-making, and, most critically, timing. That last, I think, is a specialty of yours?"

Stylish choice-making, thought Peter. Some choice! It reminded him of those dumb comparisons you make as a child:  If you could pick the way you hadda die, what would you pick?

Peter assessed the man who had engineered his emotional destruction, a man now tossing him a pitch so unhinged that all he could do was hang on and fight to pay attention. How weird could it get, and when would it quit?

Don't sell yourself short, she had told him.

"Mind you, I am not going to shuffle off the coil anytime soon. Past the chore of my biography - I don't wish to die undocumented, you see - how would we resolve the wrinkle of having two men qualified for the same unique and esoteric job?"

"Why don't you be so bold as to tell me?" Peter rolled his eyes, impatient as a tourist at a border-crossing. Was there or was there not a hope of seeing Alea again?

"Delighted to." He paused for effect - he did everything for effect - and dabbed wine from his lips with a corner of the picnic tablecloth. "We give you, as your first assignment, a case I am emotionally incapable of processing objectively. I have been holding in the backlog file a case in which I have a personal interest. That prohibits my involvement. I'll need you to handle it. Eh - finish your cheese. Peter. Don't, tell me you've come this far, reached this high juncture and are still capable of disbelief? Yes? Would you prefer some sleight of hand as reinforcement? Elementary magic? The cup-and-balls trick, or the magic slates?"

Peter shook his head no, and finished his cheese.

"It is my misfortune, and perhaps the world's, that neither I nor my position are genuinely unique, as I've said. You'd think one of me would be enough, as you've said. But, in fact, there's someone else." He tapped off into an almost moonstruck sigh.

The relays in Peter's brain clicked positive even as he gulped to swallow surging hilarity. This was all getting a tad too nineteenth century. "A woman. A woman who does what you do. Your opposite number...?" He let it hang.

"With whom," submitted M. Rogoff, still munching, "do you think I was in love, Peter?"

At first, Peter's laugh was only a strangled noise. "I don't believe it." He murmured this knowing what rotten dialogue it was. It's crazy, but it just might work! Or: We can't stop now for a lot of silly native superstitions! He believed it, all right.

"Would you care to consider the processes that implies?"

M. Rogoff returned the smile, made it encouraging. He urged Peter, with a nod, to continue. "There's a woman ... "said Peter, "the woman and you want me to ... to...?"

"Exactly," said the little man, proud that Peter had read his basic plotlines accurately.

That was all it took to burst the crumbling dam.

Peter laughed out loud. The laughter, freed, ripped from him. He hooted and capered and slapped the bogus tombstone with his name on it. He sucked wind and giggled and choked and blew forth vast salvos of laughter, possessed and scruff-shaken by mirth. Fake fog hightailed it away from his lips. His sounds made monstrous echoes.

"You want -" By now he was gasping. "You want me to bring you two back together?"

"Who knows?" M. Rogoff overdid his shrug. "The woman is bloody near impossible. Intractable! Contentious! But look at your own crystalline reasoning! Look at what you've just told me and deny you are exactly the person I require. Deny that I have chosen correctly!" He recharged his goblet with triumph, smiling too.

"You were in love with her." It was honest incredulity.

M. Rogoff waved his hand. "You were in love with Alea. She began as you are now; her first step was also the fine vintage you are enjoying at this moment. I amplified her astonishing capacity for giving a lover exactly what is needed. By consenting to allow me to amplify you similarly, you shall not only function at the apex of your talent, but you shall become like her ... therefore closer to the essence of what she is. No two works of art are alike."

He raised his full glass in a tentative handshake toast. "So, sir, why don't you and I both get started?"

Consummation time. Time to ink the pact, to get on with it ... or go sniffing for a new deal.

Peter's gaze was magnetized to the little man's free hand. The spotless white glove now held aloft the masque of cyan glass he'd last seen in the possession of the woman now called Michelle. It absorbed the light. M. Rogoff placed it gently, almost reverently, between them in the center of the monument.

Abruptly, Peter knew the graveyard as pure facade - saw the baby spots and lighting rigs bolted to the overhead ironwork. Saw the wall padding and seams. To the peripheral left he saw refrigeration vents and the squat, oily smoke generators. They had a hydraulic stink about them. Real dust swam in beams of ersatz twilight. He saw the machines and gears that made it all so atmospheric on film, and hesitated.

Not real. This graveyard was a Bastille of illusion. He lifted the blue glass masque and saw the ghost of his old face flowing over its smooth contour. The image hit one of the eyeholes and dropped in; cloudy water down a drain, one swirl and gone.

Then came the ticklish feeling that the teleplay for Sinner, probably in its eleventh revision by now, was going to stay tented on his dining room table, destined for coaster service. The hair on his forearms raised as though charged.

In Peter's head, the voice of the little man, always two steps ahead, always so goddamned sure. Now your eyes are supposed to flare, and in a spasm of rage you smash the glass masque. Ready? Action.

"We should get started?" It was not a question; not really a repetition. "Since I already know this story by heart, we should get started, huh?"

Almost casually, he spun the masque back toward the middle of the checkered tablecloth. They were playing chess, for godsake. It clattered - the sound of real glass being threatened - but did not break.

With an irritated puff of breath, M. Rogoff bent forward - the height of the monument stone was a nuisance - and slapped the masque with the flat of his hand. It made a death sound like fracturing a mirror tile with an elbow inside the rolled-up sleeve of a flannel shirt. When the little man lifted his hand, Peter saw the masque had gone to sand the color of Bimini diving water and a thousand sharp tongues and slivers. The eyes were gone.

M. Rogoff picked points of blue glass out of the palm of his hand. Some were seated deeply. There was no blood. It looked to Peter like film of the fragments being meticulously inserted, like pins, into the cushion of M. Rogoff's hand, projected in reverse. Little punctures. No blood.

"Are we happy now?" said the little man.

What in hell did he have left? Peter reached for his own goblet and stopped short. The sound of the masque breaking had startled him; this sound of glass disintegrating against the stone bearing his name. It was hewn of actual mineral; it had to weigh a ton, minimum, no bullshit. Why wasn't this a foam rubber fake? Papier-mâché?

"Mr. Deutsch?"

Staring at the broken, eyeless face of the ideal lover, Peter swallowed his goblet's last sip of yellow wine and broke it, experimentally, against the stone. Crash. Rock beats glass.

"Oh, good," said M. Rogoff. His tone did not mock. It was appreciative.

He thought of all the deals that had been near enough to soil him. The lies, the ass-covering, the grabs and misses and fervent wish that nothing stinks too much beneath the teak paneling when the first weekend box office grosses roll in. Everybody gets what they want except for the ones behind the scenes, where someone always got trodden, where one more ethic wound up dead and rotting. The way they sucked you in was with the felicity, the seductiveness of their offers. The way you kept control was by calling the setups. The essence of survival in such an arena was to insure that the fall guy was never you, and as a director, Peter had only understood that power one way. Until now.

Inside him, the scalpel excavated; uncaring.

The little man needed an apprentice. A biographer. A matchmaker. And beyond. Peter knew what he needed, or rather, knew with sky-blue clarity who he needed. A perfect deal, and a perfect excuse to break all those old pacts, with escalators and incentives.

Even for the perfect deal, Peter did not think he could sign his name in that sort of blood.

The little man cocked his head, as though reading his thoughts. "Peter? I don't personally believe in gods or devils or deities vain enough to capitalize their own pronouns. I believe in people. I certainly believe in myself, and I love doing what I'm good at - arrangements. I had felt sure I'd come to the right place and chosen the correct candidate for my very special offer. This matter is no trifle to me. But now it occurs to me that even I, with my spotless record, might have erred. If so, I heartily apologize. You are, naturally, under absolutely no obligation to accept my offer."

The phrase was so clichéd it reminded Peter of the junk mail come-ons his eye automatically dismissed. YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON $50,000! He experienced brief phosphene flash pops of being able to engineer love, processes; to multiply a million fold the pain he had been convinced he'd felt.

"Peter, if you did not know the story by heart, you would not be standing across from me now. Don't you think that I know my job?"

The scalpel ceased prodding and gave Peter a gallows tickle. He found himself helpless to resist one more yank of the chain.

"You mean you wouldn't be just a tiny bit disappointed if I told you to get stuffed?"

Blood evacuated from the little man's face in a rush. His own goblet slipped between slack fingers to break apart on the monument stone. Wine flowed into the checkerboard weave, darkening it as a good, robust Red might have. Lees spattered the fragments of cyan glass on which her special smell still faintly lingered.

"Thought so," said Peter, realizing that the little man would know the breaking of glasses to be a very traditional way of sealing a bargain. He did not need to be told. Peter was getting the hang of this sort of thought. "Never mind. Just kidding. So when do we start?"

As artificial twilight yielded them to genuine night, the two men walked together from the graveyard, discussing, with much expressive waving of hands, how - precisely - they might begin.

A buck impelled into death by a speeding car has no concept of why its concert of musculature feebles into painful unreliability, or for what reason it finally crumples to earth, husking autumn air. While the planet whirls in its orbit, the buck dies with no sense of event, not even feeling chosen, just as the automobile lacks, a sense of having been selected by the creature into which it is destined to crash. On freeways with no mouth and no terminus, it rushes headlong until it stops or flies free of the path. Animal and machine, primitive to modern, hurtling together in shared ignorance, cognizant only of motion and impact and pain.

And so in the lost card of the Tarot, The Falling Man falls forever - unaware of how he was precipitated, or whether his plummet will end in a soft, corporeal cloudbank or in the fatally unyielding flatness of a round Earth. His role is to guide superstitious mortals in their affairs by continuing his fall for eternity. The card cues a Path of Life not trodden in symbolic soil, but inscribed upon the wind itself, as transient as skywriting, as fundamental as oxygen, as mutagenic as love.

MONSTER MOVIES

The green ones were Martians. The orange ones were Indians by deferral, since they'd stopped making the red ones. Light brown ones were Mexicans; darker brown, Negroes. Yellow - Chinese. That left green. Martians.

Jason popped the M&Ms before they could smear a rainbow across the warm palm of his hand. Commercials were so full of owl shit.

Oblivious to the classroom natter he sat, letting the excitement build, as it always did on Fridays. The first thrilling temblor struck early in the week, whenever the new TV Guide hit the racks. It oscillated until Friday night at 11:30, when his pent-up anticipation went bang.

Plain M&MS were the prime taste (Peanut M&Ms were for perverts), followed by Lipton's iced tea and Lay's potato chips. Texture was embodied in a fortress of musty cushions and Jason's ammo stack of magazines, the elder issues furry or lop-eared with handling. The unforgettable aroma was that of the tubes inside the Motorola console firing, scorching off dust.

Nothing good seemed to last; good stuff was forever being stolen, and to Jason the red ones classified. He had always liked them best. Their candy shells seemed hardest, therefore the most fun to chip artfully away with your teeth. They stayed crunchy the longest. And now they were supposed to be bad for you and had been outlawed. Nobody had warned him, so that he might hoard up a stockpile. His father had mentioned something vague about red meaning Russian and Russian meaning Communist, and thus the true reason for doing dumb things like meddling with the colors of candy and disrupting the universe of children.

Jason was not a child. He was nearly twelve, and he owned his own bike and radio. And his personally cultivated Friday-night ritual was about to commence.

Fairchild tossed back his second Tanqueray martini of happy hour and scoped the catch of the day.

Diffused to soft focus by the neon haze and cigarette smoke of the lounge, all of the women in attendance looked tasty and desirable. He knew from experience that up close, the ratio of physically attractive eligibles would nosedive fifty percent:  about half were actually as good as they looked.

Once they opened their mouths, the odds crashed another thirty percent.

Benjy, faithful bar ramrod that he was, had stocked the snack dishes with smokehouse almonds today. Fairchild's fingers dallied in a silver clamshell. Best just to nurture a comfy buzz and cab home. Cable was all titties and gore; the late show, all TV reruns, and most assuredly not what it used to be. Fairchild felt betrayed. Home, then, to an early bed and perhaps a fat, sleep-inducing novel. After one more jolt from Benjy. Weekends sucked.

Lacquered nails tapped the shoulder of his Verri Uomo suit. "Psst, hey meester. Buy a drink for a real lady?"

"Why, Ms. Masterson. Thank whatever gods are left."

She moved in close so he could hear; the din was amping up. "I think it's safe for you to call me Kris; we've been off the company clock since five. Come on, I've secured a booth. You can sit and tell me what in hell you're doing, cruising this meat rack. Unless you've got to go?"

From Fairchild's barstool vantage his own apartment was no longer succoring, a shield against the world. It had become a dank trap.

She hailed Benjy, then slid in opposite Fairchild, the swish of her smoky hose lost in the cocktail din. He imagined the sound - silky, sinuous, calculated. What was up?

"Well," she said. "This is the biggest victory of my business day so far."

He raised his eyebrows. Let her call it. Automatically his hands sought the martini glass, the almond dish.

"You didn't say no."

His smile was genuine, and he was pleased. "Are you kidding?" He opened his hands toward her, shrugging, as if her virtues were obvious to any fool. Not beauty; his brain amended. More like magnetism. Her hair looked fulsome, tactile. The lines framing her mouth were pleasantly human; the mouth itself tempting, beneath frosty gloss. Her nose made her face impress too aggressively. She was aware of this and turned it to her advantage when she chose. Her eyes were the best - the irises clear as Zeiss lenses, bordered with green-flecked black rings, so stark and powerful that she kept them damped behind wide executive glasses with spidery white frames. Turn her down, was she kidding? Her posture was charm-school perfect, her legs distracting, her voice commandingly husky. She looked about two inches shorter than him. He imagined the way a serious kiss would tilt her.

"I was just scrutinizing the male element in this joint. Half of them are tuned to Age-Wave, half to metal rape music ... and most, to dead air." She was drinking Long Island iced teas.

"Not much room left for anything with a melody?"

She saluted his observation with her glass, ruefully.

"So clearly, the fields are fallow. I have decided to take bull in hand - or something - and declare that the time has come for you, Mr. Fairchild, and I to have a talk about us?"

"Us?" Thus far he was being a moron in the banter department.

"Mm-hm. You heard right. You. Me. Us. And the first misconception we need to chuck off the sill is the excuse about how you don't dare approach me because of bow it might look, me being above you, corporately speaking. I have been dying for you to say more than hello ever since the Fullerton conference. Do you remember when that was?"

He could not forget. In his mind it reran, overexposed, her image searing hot-white as she strode into the boardroom:  attaché case, flunky in tow, power suit, girded shoulders, legs to die for; god, every man in the room must want her. That had been ... a couple of weeks ago?

"Four months." She pointed, for emphasis. Simple high-gloss nail polish, no silk-wrapped bullshit. She'd done it herself. "You sure know how to hurt a lady. Four months, during which I haven't invited you anywhere, either. I could plead prior commitments. Truth be told, I think we might be equally chicken. Care to grab a stab at Excuse #2?"

"Sure. It's too soon after the divorce," He mimed a tiny violin.

"Yours? Or mine?"

"Yes?" That brought on their first shared laughter of the evening. A foundation, in case they cared to build something.

"I guess that makes it time to impose a testing criterion. Always good company procedure. You have to list your faults. I'll go first." She sipped her drink and worked up a mischievous expression. "I don't just wear these glasses to read. I wear flats when I'm not trying to thrill strangers. I don't sleep in the nude. I despise cats. If I drink too much I think I'm too gorgeous and that my jokes are all hysterical. They aren't. I'm a workaholic. I don't plan on being anybody's mommy. I listen to my answer phone to see who's calling before I pick up. That's not everything, but now you can start."

He duplicated her ritual with the glass. "I wear tinted contacts. I eat too much Italian. I punch elevator and crosswalk buttons more than once. I'm drinking more and enjoying it less. I talk about getting 'back in shape' someday. Except for coffee I always skip breakfast. I think clothes do make the man. I terminally adore old monster movies."

"Those things from the Fifties? Giant bugs and UFOs?"

"Yes. Especially the Shock Theatre package." He could see she did not know what that meant. No one did, these days. He shrugged dismissively.

She raised a hand, as if in grade school. "For me it was beach movies, Elvis. In neighborhood theatres. Oh, by the by, congratulations on your promotion."

"Thank you, ma'am." He flipped open a leather wallet and did a bit of prestidigitation. "Check out my new card."

Her eyes narrowed. They were potent at any volume. "You're not thinking of trading that for mine, are you?"

He looked up and fumbled for a response, thinking now that pulling out his card had been artificial, gun-jumping, stupid

"Because every man I've ever met has insisted on giving me his business card. A casebook of shitty and shallow relationships, summed up in a stack of paper rectangles. It's too goddamned easy to collect them." Some past hurt turned her gaze bemused, maybe wistful. She averted her eyes and extracted a cigarette case from a calfskin clutch bag.

He decided to wax Germanic about it, to cover his noise with a louder noise. Rather than stowing the card, he held it over the pebbled orange globe of the table candle. His name, J. ADRIAN FAIRCHILD, browned, smoldered, and then crisped left to right. The card stock was quality and took its time burning. He offered it to her.

Her eyes approved. "Apology accepted," she said as she held his hand to steady the flame, then leaned in with her filter-tip. They both watched the card eat itself, until it was a curl of black in the ashtray, its stored energy gone forever. The ashtray was identical to the silver nut dish.

"Fire mesmerizes," he said. "Like boiling water or snow on a TV screen. Or a cursor on a computer."

"Pyromania as recreation; now there's a blast from the past. Remember when you were a kid and set fires to see them burn? Fire was forbidden. Uncontrollable. That's why I liked to watch it."

"Not me. It was oppressive, undiscriminatingly destructive. It turned into a childhood fear I had to get over."

They traded enigmatic looks, instead of cards.

"You did, I see," she said, indicating his own pack of Winstons.

"A subtle acknowledgment of mastery over that old fear. How'd you come to smoke?"

"My parents told me not to, the way they told me not to play with fire."

Smoke puffed out with her mild laugh. "I always did the opposite of what my parents ordered. They ordered me to pray before bedtime and I retaliated by proclaiming myself an agnostic at the ripe old age of ten ... just as soon as I found the word in Dad's O.E.D."

"I invented my own private religion," he said. "A congregation of one. Let me tell you about it."

Dusk was bringing on a landmark night.

At the Hilltop Liquors magazine rack, Jason discovered that his long-ago fan letter to Famous Monsters had proven worthy of print. His legs shook and turned unreliable; this was literally the first time in his short life that anything this enormous had coalesced into printed history around him. He was ultimately forced to walk his bike partway home, pausing at every intersection to page back to where his name was writ large in bold black and savor his own words, inscribed with monkish patience months before, over and over, until what he had to say on his college-ruled paper was purged of the tiniest error. He had signed his name with a modest flourish, then written it again underneath in the same careful block lettering used for the body of the letter, just in case his fancy signature proved illegible.

He reread it a hundred times between the store and his driveway, throat dry, heart thundering, triumphant.

At dinner, his father misunderstood, over praising Jason for "getting published" as though cracking Uncle Forry's letter column was level with the achievements of Mary Shelley, or Bram Stoker, or Gaston Leroux. They had created brand-new monsters with their pens, monsters with names, monsters that had not existed before the writers thought them up. Jason found himself unexpectedly belittling his own accomplishment, just to press past his father's well-meaning lack of comprehension. His stepmother, who had bought him a copy of Freckles, which had collected dust for months on his bedroom bookshelf, thought the letter was "nice, dear" after wrinkling her nose at the photos of the Creature from the Black Lagoon throttling an oceanarium worker, and Lon Chaney Jr., as Mary Shelley's monster, carting off Evelyn Ankers. Jason's stepmother looked at the letter but did not see what Jason saw. To contravene her would be as self-defeating as brushing his teeth with cherry Coke. Parents could be so frustrating; between the two he could neither brag nor be humble.

Still, sundown came and his pulse quickened. Sometimes the best stuff in the world was not for sharing.

In monster movies, sundown usually signaled the start of the good stuff.

One critical factor of Jason's Friday-night logistics was adequate provisioning. He picked at dinner, leaving room for the goodies to be raided later. A cursory run-through of homework permitted him to dismiss school from his world for the next forty-eight glorious hours. The triad of upstairs rooms was already empty of his older brother, Marcus, who had trotted off to dinner with Monica McMillan and would be spending most of the evening attempting to plumb the mysteries inside Monica's skirt and blouse. She was one of Buddy McMillan's girls ... and if Marcus and Jason's parents didn't cool it with the embarrassing jokes, Jason might not ever have a future with Laurie, currently the youngest of Buddy's brood.

Two years back, girls would have been unthinkable.

Jason's parents liked to call the third upstairs room the "TV room" which was akin to calling Revenge of the Creature just another movie. To Jason its purpose was more sanctified. The TV Guide for this week had promised potent mojo indeed:  The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost, and The Mummy's Nurse, all kicking off half an hour before midnight, with a Twilight Zone repeat.

Bulling through the haul from nine to twelve was the toughest; he knew that a triple feature that late at night would knock his body out too soon and he'd sleep through the crypt cave-in at the climax of the final Mummy film. But he was too agitated to nap. Napping was for little kids. The ability to stay up late was proof of incipient adulthood. Snooze now? No way. He passed the time boning up on Mummy minutiae.

Famous Monsters contained most of what he sought, augmented by Castle of Frankenstein (which he was growing to like better and better; here was a magazine unafraid to say a movie was a stinker from time to time or to print photos of naked women getting fanged by British bloodsuckers). For a balanced news view there were the second-string publications - Mad Monsters, Fantastic Monsters of the Films, Horror Monsters - and the Mad Magazine approach of For Monsters Only. Jason tended his pile of monster mags with the reverence of Egyptian supplicants for the dreaded Scroll of Thoth. He read again what an idiocy it would be to dare to break the Seal of the Seven Jackals, and the aroma and texture of the brittle pages of the older issues made it easy to imagine the smell and feel of Tana leaves.

The first Mummy of note was Im-Ho-Tep, Karloff, Thirties. While Jason maintained what he thought to be the accordant degree of respect for what Forry J had dubbed the classics, he favored the more dynamic monsters of the subsequent epoch. Universal Pictures, Forties, after they dropped the growling, propellored plane from their logo, when any monster in the gang could be depended upon to come lurching back for more. Kharis was who Jason preferred to think of when you said Mummy. He favored the idea of a monster who could kick butt despite obvious structural disadvantages. Kharis dragged one lame foot; his right arm had curled into a crippled claw and frozen against his chest; the conflagrant finale of The Mummy's Hand had welded his right eye shut forever. Kharis was a handicapped monster, for christsake. You could outrun him, sure, but he'd catch up while you were sleeping, the tortoise beating the hare, and Kharis never gave up or stopped, ever. Jason visualized a business card, gold, bordered in diamond-shaped Cleopatra eyeballs and bird-headed guys wearing skirts. Vengeance Our Specialty. Slow But Inexorable.

Kharis was implacable, determined, and mean. He even strangled a German shepherd that barked at him once. The sound of a dog barking in the night could still suggest to Jason that perhaps Kharis had found some excuse to serve him with a personal termination notice, and perhaps he was shuffling silently up the front walk right now. Jason's stepmother would discover his wide-eyed, almost-twelve-year-old corpse at breakfast time. His father would exclaim that, why, those grayish marks on his neck look ... almost, well, like mold.

That had been the original justification for the fortress.

An important component of Jason's Friday night setup was raiding the TV-room sofa for cushions with which he constructed a sort of open-ended pillbox, facing the screen. It was superior to a mere monster blanket (not to mention more snug and certainly more grown up), and the fortress helped enclose Jason and his supplies within the influence of the picture tube and its monochromatic shadow plays. His tradition was to kill the lights and entrench with the sound turned down until the Twilight Zone faded in, just him, deliciously alone in the dead of night with his monster movies. Beyond the rearward limits of the fortress there was nothing to see, save darkness, a buffer between Jason and a world of retribution.

"Put that way, it really does sound like a classical religion," Kris said.

The bar traffic had gridlocked, and two uncollected empty rounds loitered on the table between them. His butted smokes were mingled with hers in the clamshell ashtray. Their tab kept their booth locked down during the lounge's prime trolling time, and they stood secure against assault from all corners. They held, oblivious to the fleshshoppe/slave-bazaar ambience and in spite of the clamor level. An inversion layer of smoke hung stubbornly and rendered all sights beyond three feet of the booth ghostly and nimbused, as though viewed across a moor clogged with swamp gas and St. Elmo's Fire. He had begun ordering water chasers to keep from dehydrating.

"Your basic coursework in classic monsters always reminded me of the hierarchies of Greek and Roman gods," he said. "More like the Egyptians, actually, where the roles were separate but equal. No real pecking order; no monster was especially more powerful than another. The focus is on the mythology of genesis and transformation; how they all got to be card-carrying monsters in the first place."

Her existence in the corporate mega-structure had been defined by ladders, and the idea of equal power equally portioned held a special appeal for her, whether it was among monsters or vice-presidents. "I heard the movie companies just invented a lot of that stuff - about how the Wolf Man only wolfs out during the full moon, or how Dracula can't hack sunlight."

"I thought you weren't allowed to watch those things when you were a kid." She laughed at something personal. Her smile involved her eyes every time, with an effect more soothing than any cocktail. "I don't know what sort of youngster you were, sir, but as I mentioned awhile ago, I generally considered any parental ukase to be a gauntlet cast down. I invented the most elaborate hookup imaginable for reading after curfew. My bed was tucked into a nook below a semicircle of cupola windows on the second floor of our house - a big old rambling coastal thing in Florida. By hanging my comforter between the edge of the bed and clamping it to the wall molding with clothespins, I made a lean-to. I sneaked a 25-walter into my bedside lamp; normally all my parents had to do was look out their window and see if the cupola windows cast any light on the lawn. My weak light bulb outfoxed 'em. If I heard them coming up the stairs, I could kill the whole outpost in ten seconds flat'

He nodded, mouth full, anxious to reveal his own version of the subterfuge she had just outlined.

"I had one of those rough-hewn wooden treasure chests, the kind you buy in Mexico? It was hasped with a cheesy brass padlock. Guess what I kept in it?"

"Doubloons?" Her lips encompassed a sliver of bar ice. It slid into her mouth. He could feel his own tongue cooling. "Human skulls? Some nasty-ass boy shit I'd rather not know about?"

"Lipton's Instant Iced Tea." He said it with newscaster gravity, as though copping to the sale of bomber specs to the Russkies.

Her glass hesitated midway. "You're not serious. You mean I'm sitting here chatting up a man who actually... "She pressed back from the table edge. It was like opera, in its way. "Omigod."

"Yeah, I know. Child molesting pales. Necrophilia is more forgivable. But I feel compelled to bare the true ugliness of my soul to you." He clasped hands over heart and sought divine sanction in the direction of the ceiling.

He reminded her of a bargain martyr. "You're starting to drip."

"No doubt. Anyway, I drank tons of Lipton's, more than any soft drink, and my measures in composing a glassful would shame NASA with their precision. If I didn't get my tea, I'd die. I powered it down by the gallon but mixed it one glass at a time. Some procedures you just don't rush."

"Or compromise - like the rules in monster movies."

"Exactly." He pulled the green olive off its pic, thinking of stakes and vampires. "My stepmother - Wicked Stepmom - took a dim view of my guzzling what she called 'caffeine product' on school nights. And water didn't make it - it wasn't a flavor. I couldn't sneak tea up to bed, but I could take a glass of water from that cold jug in the fridge. I made sure she saw me pouring that water and taking it with me upstairs at bedtime."

Child's mischief glinted in her steady return gaze. "You conned her. Because up in your room you had your pirate chest with the instant tea inside."

"That, and sugar, in carefully purloined margarine tubs, plus long-handled spoons I had to keep from the Dairy Queen. Napkins. I couldn't manage your light setup, but I did have candles and matches."

"You little turd. So you were probably up way past the witching hour, grinding your teeth to sleep."

He swatted this serve back. "While you were skulking around with your nose in ... what? Nancy Drew? National Velvet? Dick and Jane Hit Puberty?"

"Sherlock Holmes. When I found out the Speckled Band was a snake I nearly wet my bed. No sleep that night."

"What, no boogeyman alarms? No tucked-in sheets?"

She shook her head vehemently. "I hate that. Still do. I have to poke my feet out or I feel trapped. Another fault for the list:  Hospital corners are too confining."

"Gee, I thought I was the only one. We ought to keep this to ourselves. The mob might lynch us by torchlight."

She surveyed the singles on the hoof. "My. Yes. Definite bounce-a-quarter-on-the-blanket types. All the men in here have the same haircut."

It was easy to laugh with her. "It's actually a vinyl skullcap they swap on a timesharing basis. Even some of the women are wearing it. See?"

They mocked the players around them. Kris had a way of holding in cigarette smoke that was terrifically contemplative. When her thoughts were organized and ready for articulation, the smoke would then stream out in gray plumes. "Well, despite all this peer pressure I think I still turned out fairly unimpaired." She executed a stiff little bow. "Thanks for not contradicting me. I really have to visit the Ladies."

He had always used cigarettes primarily for gesticulation            elucidating some point with an unlit smoke, then pausing to ignite it, almost as punctuation. With no audience, he felt no need to enkindle a fresh Winston. He tapped it back into its hard pack. When she returned, he watched her cut through the lounge's bustle - great legs, to be sure. Traffic jammers. Her eyes favored him with another smile, as though they had shared a secret.

They talked rationales, and another Long Island iced tea was conquered. "My family moved all over the country," she said. "New classmates virtually every year. Families aren't tied to towns or states or even other family members anymore. People get divorced so routinely."

He saluted that. "Parents die."

"And there are no constants. Except the bad stuff— the disruptions, the adjustments, the constant restructuring of your life. Tough on a kid. Ultimately there's no one to really depend on, except yourself."

"And the Creature, and the Mummy, and Frankenstein's friendless Monster. They're weird looking, they're alienated, they're picked on, and they're so dependable that when you're a kid it's almost blasphemy to think that Midnight Frights won't still be dutifully on the air when you're aged." He said the word with a comic downward twist of mouth.

"You know, it's funny. All those monsters in all those movies frightened me. Yet I kept their pictures, cutouts, taped to the wall where I could even see some of them in the dark. They scared me, sure ... but once the sun was up I couldn't wait to make sure they were still there."

"You didn't really fear then," she pointed out. "You respected them."

He lifted his Winston pack, drew, and fired up. "Is that intuitive, or are you just preternaturally astute?"

"It's both. Plus intellect, style, and great legs. Made me the success-hungry power bitch you see before you today. Your superior, I'd say, if it didn't make me want to start giggling." She did anyway, helplessly.

"I think you're right. Them, I respected. Loved, even." He could see the coal of his cigarette bouncing back from the lenses of her glasses, combining with the candle flame already living there, and the sparks of her inspirations, nebulae dancing in her eyes.

Whoa, back off on the gin for awhile! he thought.

"Family and friends might fall apart or move on or betray you, but those monsters were always there for you."

"Not always," he said. "But I agree. I was unusually forgiving where they were concerned. Those movies frequently lost track of their own rules. I compensated. Instead of being offended when the Wolf Man got offed with something other than silver, I made elaborate justifications. Sort of the way TV evangelists can twist a Bible verse to mean anything they want. Creative reinterpretation."

"Were you especially religious as a kid? Conventionally, I mean?" When she saw the sour expression cross his face, she said, "Oh. I see. Dumb question."

The Twilight Zone was the one with the thing on the wing. Good warmup. Jason sank back and let the cushions of his fortress embrace him.

The Mummy's Tomb was two Mummy movies in one; its first half consisted almost entirely of flashbacks from Kharis' debut feature, The Mummy's Hand. His entire cinematic chronology, therefore, waited for Jason within the palm of a single night, and for once Channel 13 and Midnight Frights got the order right.

To all those who violate the tomb of Ananka, a cruel and violent death shall be their fate!

Princess Ananka had been Kharis' girlfriend, back when he wasn't the Mummy yet. They weren't supposed to be fooling around. Then Ananka croaked from some lady disease, so Kharis swiped a tea chest full of Tana leaves that would bring her back to life. Which was ... sacrilege! So the Egyptian guys caught him and cut out his tongue before wrapping him up and burying him alive to guard Ananka's resting place for eternity. They fed him soup made out of Tana leaves to make him into an immortal sort of night watchman, and everything was cool until a bunch of guys from museums started digging everything up. Ananka began this habit of getting reincarnated as gorgeous women living in small rural towns in the USA, so after Kharis bumped off everybody related to anybody who had bothered her tomb in the first movie, he had to keep chasing her around. Usually the High Priests of Arkhon (swarthy guys wearing medallions and fezzes who knew how strong to make the Tana-leaf soup) fell in love with whatever version of Ananka was currently wandering around the woods in a nightgown. And that usually pissed Kharis off to the point where he'd smear the priest by the end of the movie. Getting shot or set on fire didn't bother Kharis much; that he could go three thousand years without going to the bathroom puzzled Jason more. And the world supply of Tana leaves had to run out eventually, even though that carved coffer always seemed full up.

Various High Priests of Arkhon gravely maintained that if one fed Kharis too much Tana-leaf soup, he would become - ominous musical sting - "a monster such as the world has never seen." Kind of a TurboKharis.

For that, Jason could hardly wait. He just hoped he was not distantly related to anyone who had ever seen a pyramid.

The World War Two vintage of these films permitted Jason invaluable access to the social and courting rituals that had, no doubt, influenced how his parents had turned out. All the women were frail, shrieking things. They fainted a lot, in order to get carried around by either the Mummy or the good guys. Said good guys had pencil mustaches and black hair that gleamed like casket polish. Everybody smoked a lot; it was adult and sophisticated. Jason took mental notes, mimicking the cigarette gesticulations with a toothpick. Secure in his cordon of night, his fortress awash in silver light, he could study the behavior of adults in black and white without getting interrogated or yelled at. Or worse.

Sometimes the heroes were foolhardy enough to try taking on the Mummy fistwise. It was the only time their oily skullcaps of hair ever got mussed. But exhibiting bravery by slugging Kharis usually won you the fainting girl ... unless you got your voicebox imploded in that bandaged vise-grip. Kharis just sort of pinched your neck shut, and you ate pavement faster than a snipped marionette. He had no reservations about choking girls, either. Or dogs. Just glurk! And dead.

After prying potato-chip shrapnel from between his teeth, Jason theorized, holding his toothpick, mannered, between his index and middle fingers and jabbing it toward the TV's iridescent eye as though debating a crucial point with the screen. He had read about the transmutation of fossilized dinosaur bones. Maybe beneath Kharis' rags, after thirty centuries, was a skeleton of solid iron. That might account for his invulnerability, and why he did not crumble to ash whenever one of the Basil Rathbone lookalikes clouted him with a club.

During The Mummy's Ghost, Jason gobbled up the scene in which Kharis makes the museum security guard go bye-bye forever. As the victim thrashed, he busted a huge plate-glass window. Famous Monsters had tipped Jason to the fact that Lon Chaney Jr. had accidentally gotten wounded during the filming of the scene. Jason fought not to blink, and there it was, by god: two big dots of blood on the Mummy's chin. Real blood. Real actor's blood. Unplanned bloodshed, captured on film for all time.

Wow...

Against tradition, Kharis, even though he was a monster, usually got the girl by the final reel. In this particular installment, Princess Ananka's reincarnation began to age into the real thing as she was being lugged away, having fainted. She grew this broad streak of white in her hair, then got all wrinkly just in time for her and Kharis to waltz into a bog and leave hardly any bubbles. The End.

Until The Mummy's Curse, when the bog gets drained, and guess what happens.

Jason must have drunk several quarts of tea, if what he peed out was any clue. In defiance of his stepmother's admonitions about caffeine product, he dozed off ten minutes into The Mummy's Curse but awakened in time for the crypt cave-in at the end. Once a monster got mashed, good old Universal Pictures would wrap things up so fast it made your eyeballs throb. He liked the idea of falling asleep during a Mummy marathon, then waking up to find himself still safely within the fortress and the world of Kharis, where the hard and fast operational rules handed down by the High Priests of Arkhon were constant.

If you fell for this week's Ananka reincarnation and Kharis found out so much for your fez-wearing status, bub.

Only on Friday nights like this did rules make any sense to Jason. These rules he could pace and comprehend. Unlike those of his parents.

"I'd say atheist, if I didn't find the theist part so ... prejudicial. Godish."

"You're talking to a wobbling agnostic, remember?" She tapped ash. "The conventional stuff was already superfluous for you, even redundant. That's clear. You didn't need a prefab holy writ because you already had one inside those monster magazines. You had your own communion wine and ceremonies. You had your pantheon of deities - Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Dracula, and especially the Mummy."

"Kharis. Who sprang full blown from the box-office receipts of Im-Ho-Tep."

"See? You even joke about it mythologically. Don't underestimate magnetism like that. Jesus, you even had a fixed weekly time for worship."

Oh, Kris was very good.

"It's tough to convey how important that was, once," he said, sucking the water from a template-formed square of cocktail ice. "My generation fell into the interstice between theatricals and videotape. It was a brief span of years in the Sixties during which a kid had to depend on Midnight Frights or risk never seeing I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It's easy to get homesick for the ritual aspect of camping out Friday nights, waiting for the monster movies to commence. Faithfully."

"One thing you never realize is how fleeting a period like that can be in your life." She tried to head him off. "But a time machine would be useless, you know. Because it would be impossible for you to warn your younger self how fragile some moments in time can be. You couldn't do anything... except maybe spoil the fun."

"Like trying to explain to a kid the difference between an agnostic and an atheist, I suspect."

"The nomenclature isn't really cardinal," she said. "The underlying emotions are. I think my parents sensed that. They were fairly noncommittal - or open-minded, to be fair - about their daughter's interface with belief systems. Common sense and thrift and, later, wit were more valuable. I think they were more apprehensive about what species of boy-monster I'd eventually drag into their parlor to soil the throw rugs. Turns out they were right ..." She made a face in remembrance of the day she had decided white knights were extinct. "You could arguably call it a learning experience. Vietnam was a learning experience, right?" When the flash-replay of her love life finished behind her eyes, she caught up with the question she'd asked earlier. "So, let me rephrase: Were your parents religious? Was it a problem?"

"My brush with 'conventional' religion," he said, making quotation marks in the air with his fingertips, "was akin to a car getting sideswiped by a bus - the kind of accident where the car gets totaled and the bus drives on with a ding in the bumper. Soon after my dad married Wicked Stepmom, she decided it would be 'spiritually' prudent to inflict me on a Christian Sunday-school class." Again the quotes, stirring trails in the smoky air. "Or vice versa. My brother, Marcus, was exempt. Why? He was older. And he, for whatever reason, attended grownup church with Wicked Stepmom, without a fight. Maybe he was doping out religions for future use. Anyway, like Mojo doin' rock 'n' roll, I found myself compelled to do the Sunday school thang."

"Trapped like a rodent in a holy Catch-22. Looks like God really wanted your ass."

His laugh came out crooked; more a snort. "Not for long he didn't. He'd already rounded up a kid in the class named Eric Lowrey. I sat in his vacant folding chair. He'd died of leukemia, just like my real mom. His mother was teaching the Sunday-school class, and she nailed me, mine being the new face and all. I got sniggered at for never having read the Bible. So I bit her back; I knew about Eric's death and remembered what my mom had looked like the last time I'd seen her in the hospital. I was six or seven; they had brought her out in a wheelchair and she was all blotchy. I'd had no concept of death then. By the time I was pushed into the Sunday-school class, I'd formulated some pretty definite ideas. Rules for death. And I concluded that if Mrs. Lowrey's 'god' had killed my mom, then he or she or it deserved to get run over by a bus. He or She or It spells horsh'it. And I said to her, 'You don't really believe that Eric is in some place called 'heaven' you can't really see ... do you?’"

"Omigod."

"Yeah. It hit the fan, no lie. Poor woman burst into tears. Bet your ass she filed a full report."

"Oh. Oh, no." She covered her face with one hand, then peeked out between the fingers. "What happened to you?" She spoke softly. Harsh words might leave dents.

"I didn't have to worry about attending Sunday school much after that. I got grounded for three months, two of which were June and July. I got a thorough yelling at." His words came out in a huge exhalation of smoke. "While Wicked Stepmom was bellowing and asking me just what did you think you were doing, she finally lost it and backhanded me. She wore this massive emerald ring that split my lip in three places. I stood rooted, unmoving, scared, crying my head off. I thought, goddamnit, I'm almost twelve, I'm nearly a teenager at last ... and here I am, crying. Baby. I sure didn't cry when my real mom died."

He took a drink, aware it was melodramatic. Kris let it ride - in fact, she sipped her own, to balance, to encourage.

"She hit you."

"Mm. Pow. "He swatted air to demonstrate. "Having perpetrated sacrilege, I found myself playing Town Heretic. I had tampered with her religion ... so she destroyed mine. Burned it down. Funny - just like the lab going up in flames at the end of a Frankenstein movie. Conflagration bashed down monsters better than Raid on roaches. She tornadoed upstairs to my room, and tore all the pictures off the wall, dumped all my magazines into a trashcan, and set fire to it in the back yard. I'll never forget the sound of that trashcan being dragged down the stairs. Clunk, clunk, clunk; worse than blows in any beating. I watched out the window. A line had been drawn, you see; a new rule set up without warning. Now I couldn't leave my room, couldn't even go downstairs for a glass of water. Everything in the can went up in smoke while I stood there watching and doing nothing, and after it was clearly hopeless, I turned away and went into the bathroom. There was blood all over my chin. My lip was swollen and felt novocained." His fingers, remembering, sought scars where there were none.

Kris watched him snub the half-smoked Winston. The twisted wreckage bled tendrils of gray, then gave up for good.

"Next weekend, no monster movies," he said. "I missed The Thing and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I tried waiting until my parents hit the sack, then sneaking into the TV room and watching with the sound and brightness knobs turned way down. Until Marcus ratted on me. Pow, again."

"It's almost Shakespearian," she said. "Brother betrays brother. I used to try to read in the dark. When the moon was full and bright, you could. Hell on the eyes but exciting in its way, when you found out it was possible. Your mom, did she -"

"Stepmom."

"She didn't burn the magazine with your letter in it, did she?"

"She only missed that one because it was in my school pack with my books. I carried it with me everywhere, feeding off it. Eventually I read it until it fell to pieces. Whenever I opened it up I was afraid she'd pounce and take it away. It never took her long to make the stairs when she suspected I was up to no good."

"The barking dog," Kris said, with a hint of a smile.

"What? Oh." He had passed the memory, and now it receded the way a sleeping town dwindles behind a train in the night. His mouth had become quite dry. "You know, contrary to this blather, I'm really not a nostalgia nut. It's too rosy. If I was inside the skin of that twelve year old, this moment, I wouldn't relive how great those movies seemed to me. What I'd feel again would be the terror, the impotence of what it is to be that age."

"And Wicked Stepmom? Did you ever reach detente? That sort of thing seems to take forever when you're a kid?'

"She eventually forgot it or found new things to be angry about. But that didn't bring back my magazines or erase what happened. In fact, she erased it; she never mentioned the incident again. She died not long after I left home. Pharyngial tumors. Her throat closed up and she died. Ironic, huh? But you're right - I did respect the Mummy. Kharis was my pal. It was Wicked Stepmom I was afraid of, Freud preserve us."

"I knew you were a boy who loved his mummy."

They cracked up. She had seen how this reverie might turn wet, and she wanted to yank him out of it. It worked.

"Hey," she said. "It's nearly eleven. You have to think about leaving soon; you're working tomorrow." She held, slyly. Clearly she was not going to dash for an exit herself, just yet. Sip, puff. "I like this. We've been here for hours that have passed like minutes, talking like old buddies, with hardly any social bullshit." She toasted this sentiment with a modest nod.

"Bullshit makes the world go 'round. It's our day-to-day coin. You'll pardon the residue? Sometimes it's difficult to shut down the alarms in your skin - the ones that order you not to try, not to get involved."

They clinked glasses.

Mischief had sneaked across her countenance again. "Oh - just so you'll know. I fully intend to close this evening with a kiss that deserves immortalization in a book of bests."

He could not stop the arch of his eyebrows, nor blank the pictures her words thrust into his head. It was past the time where the will she/ won't she game retained any flavor, and she knew it. The struggle toward the easy comfort they now felt in each other's space had been long in arriving for both of them, and to cap the event with a quickie would be sordid and inappropriate; it would vindicate the predatory callousness all around them. To rush matters would be like gulping Veuve Clicquot - no savor, and certainly no latitude for appreciation.

She had foreseen this and jumped ahead to the perfect answer. Just enough spice. He no longer wondered at her obvious administrative talents.

Her own thought chain would never become public record, but it turned her smile into a cherished, private thing. In the smog of the lounge, her clarity dazzled. "What I'm talking about is my lips, stalking yours," she said. "Most people are lousy at osculation. You'd better not disappoint me, because I'm taking a huge chance here. And no, I'm not normally so flamboyant."

"Blame the booze."

"Actually, I'm a sucker for that little boy."

"I doubt most of the yupsters here even know what osculation means." It was his conversational escape hatch, and he used it to dodge the ripe red blush her bold words had set to creeping up the collar of his Pierre Cardin shirt. "Fish-lip kisses. Yucch."

"How about the car crash of lips, the kind that chips your teeth? I hate those. Or those wormy kisses, where the lips are ashen and cold. French-the-cadaver."

"Hm. And then we have the Neanderthal oral rape kiss."

"Ow. Yes. The onrushing mouthload of meat. Suddenly a tongue has invaded your face, a quarter-pounder boxing your tonsils. And it reminds you of the last time you woke up face down in your pillow and couldn't breathe, except the pillow wasn't soaked in saliva."

They wrung out a bit more fun at the expense of amateur kissers everywhere. Somebody should start a school.

"Not guilty on all counts" he assured her.

"Good. I just wanted you to contemplate this forthcoming kiss for awhile. The kiss with which we shall end this evening. You were beginning to look a touch blue, kiddo?" She let her tongue-tip test her lip gloss, just a flicker, a tease that brought his dormant blush flooding to the surface. "Aha. Good sign. I did it again."

"Evil," he said. He rode it out; there's no way to duck a sneak attack by your own metabolism. He parried. "You have to promise not to faint, though."

He thought about the kiss a lot over the next hour or so. If this was torture, he never wanted it to end.

After midnight it began to rain. Droplets tamped brittle leaves of pulp-paper ash into black muck, and the lingering ectoplasm of smoke was beaten down. The trashcan's sides had blued, then scorched and peeled in the hot shimmer of the fire. Its contents grew more insubstantial the wetter they got. The rain made the dross of combustion collapse upon itself. Soon there would be nothing left.

Getting outside took Jason a lifetime. Thousands of heartbeats, pints of paranoid sweat, a triple helping of jumpy stealth, with a veneer of patience he strained against with each tic. Window to shingles to trellis, the ground a blurry dark void somewhere two stories below, the footing on the roof treacherous, yet irresistibly inviting. To not venture out, to remain uncertain for the rest of his life, would be the ultimate horror. His friend, the darkness, was with him, rendering him invisible and keeping from his eyes sights that might have kept him off the roof.

It was cold, and he regretted having to creep out barefoot. But his stepmother might notice wet shoes the following morning, and the surface of the roof was slickly waxed. Hairy.

The can in the middle of the back yard still exuded heat; Jason could feel it from three feet away. He groped for the steel lip and tentatively snaked both hands inside until they collided with the topmost mound of cinereous residue. It fell away at his touch.

Tears were sluiced saltless on his face by the rain as he felt the bones of his magazine stack crumble and puff into soot beneath his fingers. This time he was not crying, merely running off at the eyeballs - internal emotional pressure seeking the easiest vent. He was in control now and okay. He was not so successful keeping his teeth from doing a castanet dance in the wet, windy chill.

Logic demanded remains; even cremation left something. Dust was enough to recorporate Dracula. Fire could never totally obliterate the good Doktor's namesake monster ... could it?

The magazine had landed, bent double, on the very bottom of the can. The glossy cover and front and back pages had peeled away a sheet at a time as they had browned and shriveled, heat pounding paper back toward basic carbon. From the edges inward it had tasted flame and succumbed to crawling buglike embers, neon orange, burrowing their feed paths in the darkness. They spat and hissed as the rain killed them. A finger-length of binding glue, still hot enough to sting, clung to a smatter of barbecued pages the size and shape of a round-shouldered paperback. Jason's questing grasp had stumbled across the prize.

One Famous Monsters had pulled through. Some of it, at any rate. About a third.

Back inside, he sank his hands into a basin of warm water to shock back feeling. He washed his blackened feet, listening to Marcus snore obliviously in the next bedroom. How could Monica McMillan bear the noise? It sounded like a foghorn with a crawfull of snot. Maybe she hadn't actually slept with Marcus yet. Yeesh.

The magazine remnant, Jason decided, was fragile as mummy dust itself, and dead. Best not to attempt life support. He unlocked his tea-stash chest, scared up a candle, and struck a Blue Diamond match. The tang of ignition stung his nostrils and caused the bite of pages in his hand to expel a postmortem smell like dirty ashtrays. It weighed nothing. By candlelight he parted the page fragments.

A single picture of the Mummy had survived the inferno. The entire photo had been magical - Kharis hoisting Elyse Knox's (fainted) form onto a crypt slab while an oil slicked Turhan Bey watched, from The Mummy's Tomb. The center had pulled through:  half of Kharis' profile, truncated by a binder gutter where the magazine had been stapled.

The corona of char made it resemble phonied parchment. Jason flaked it away and used scissors to trim it to a tight shot. He taped it safely inside the lid of his treasure chest. Other salvaged portions followed.

The pressure of Kris' lips on his had blessed him with a spontaneous erection.

She tilted her head, cradling the nape of his neck with one slim hand, gracile fingers tickling the fine, rising hairs there. Her eyes were slitted to black and wet with the sight of him. He saw them close. The best stuff happened in the head. He heard her inhale nasally, as he had, neither of them daring to break the seal.

His brain got full up, outdistancing him.

Her teeth caught and caressed his lip with the slightest excruciating pressure, and her own mouth proved as generous as his imagination. So commenced the tango of brushing and sampling, tempo accelerating, that divorces adults from all reason.

The pit of his stomach slid giddily into zero-gee. Alone in the foyer of her building, she had beckoned and he had RSVPed in kind, both of them in a hurry, hearts like cheetahs wildly battering their cages of ribs, the anticipation of tasting her nearly boiling forth and blowing off his scalp. Their mouth work grew hotter, more fervent, starving strangers taking what they needed, then waned to a gentle softness, friends now, with time, a calm eddy of passion. So much could be said just with lips, without words.

Their embrace slid and wound and wrapped tight. They fit. In that instant he realized how it would feel to be sheathed inside of her, shed of their workaday business armor, caught in the grip of cunning musculature. This time he could hear her stockings whisper past each other, and the sound flinted sparks behind his eyelids.

She offered her throat, and he began in the delicious hollow where jaw and ear and neck cojoin. By the time he had chewed his way to her shoulder and the arch of trapezius, she was berserk and trembling. She returned a nibble of her own and he felt gooseflesh shoot all the way down to his heels.

He had not been kissed this way nearly enough in his life. Nor could anyone ever be. No matter how fast you ran, some things never stopped stalking you.

The following Friday night was historic, damned near a religious experience.

At Kris' behest, via intercom, the foyer sentry permitted Jason to elevator up. She awaited him, arms folded, chiding stylish tardiness, leaning against the threshold of her open door, just barely inside of a deep-cut evening number that swiped his first few breaths and made promises that knocked his train of snappy patter right off the rails.

"Hi, stranger," she said, and kissed him again.

He had been a skinny kid who had turned out a thin adult; something metabolic. No swap of hair on top for gut on bottom. He remained symmetrical. His eyes were brown, almost generic, behind long, almost feminine lashes. These eyes caught and held, their gaze frank, frequently challenging, but open and friendly for those who had the backbone. Right before bidding adieu to his 20s forever, he had asked why some people found his facial package a threat and was told "It's the 'stache." He lost the goatee but kept the 'stache as his first line of defense. And now he stood awash in mellow amber light, Kris embracing him full length, and wondered like a fool what had attracted her, thinking that the sum of his outward masque made a difference. Fooled, even in honest romance, by surfaces. His marriage had been a surface thing. Snapshots had boasted the perfection of the union; pictures constituted hard proof of happiness. Photos were important, especially to parents, but he had never cared to prove anything to parents past the age of eleven. Judging from what Kris had mentioned about her first husband, some samaritan ought to introduce their two exes; united they could live the illusions fostered by their mommies and daddies and shoot lots of keen pictures to prove what fun their programmed, dead lives were. Hi, Mom!

"Hi, stranger" he returned, unable to stop the grin. Too boyish.

Dinner was catered, and throughout Kris reserved some secret amusement, extra baggage to her usual smile which she declined to illuminate until dessert and digestifs. Crystal and wine and tapers did unforgettable things to her eyes.

"Okay." She cocked a thumb toward the living room, where a sparkling panorama of cityscape waited beyond floor-to-ceiling glass. "Here goes almost nothin?'

She led him toward the sofa group and he made a joke about heeltap. When you tried to get the last drop out a glass, it coated the glass on the way out and never emerged. Her solution was to refill the glass. Things were at that precise stratum of silliness.

She sat him down and, with very obvious pride, enumerated the items ranked before him on the low coffee table. The arrangement was shrinelike.

"From your left," she said, "Lipton's Instant. Your own personal Tana-leaf high-octane liquid-fuel input." Next to the jar was a carafe of icewater. "For completeness' sake. I'd prefer you didn't actually switch to this stuff right now because this Moet is bloody good."

He nodded gravely.

She lifted a flat; opaque plastic bag by one corner, holding it gingerly, like undusted murder evidence. "Do you have any conception of what this thing costs in real money?"

"Jesus Christ -Famous Monsters!"

"In what they call fair-to-good condition. I call it criminal. Have you ever been to one of those grotty little shops? They're full of people who -"

He dropped the foxed magazine open on the table, as though afraid to mangle it. "There's the photo. Almost exactly as I recalled it."

"- Yeeucch. I don't want to guess when they bathed last. Anyway, attendez-vous. I presume your lightning intellect has by now divined the intent of that stack of videotapes, there. Now hold out your hand and close your eyes."

"Sure you're not going to put a snake in my hand, Sherlock?" He shut up when he heard the rosary-bead click of his palm filling with candy.

"They've been putting the red ones back in for some time now," she said. "Remember you told me they'd banned them way back when because they thought the red dye was carcinogenic? Turns out it was guilt by association; there was never anything bad about the red dye used in M&Ms. But a different red dye cursed all red dyes. It took all this time for the dust to settle."

"God." He deposited most into a dish on the table, then popped a single M&M - bright red - thoughtfully, as if sensitized to the possibility they might vanish again at any moment. "This is truly weird, Kris. Incredible. I think I'm nervous."

The Martians had landed, too. He ate one.

She scooted closer and soon her hand was on his neck again. Soothing. He likes to be petted.

"I thought I oughta check out these here Mummy movies in case I was missing something fundamental in life. Backstory from a lost age. Here, I need your help."

They denuded her corner group of cushions and set up for a triple bill.

"I'm notorious for dozing off midway through. I think I mentioned that."

"I guarantee you will not fall asleep."

"Ever think of putting a white streak in your hair?"

She raspberried him.

"Guess not." He toed off his shoes before her big-beam TV screen. Her sofa had offered more building blocks. The fortress was an improvement over the old version. Only the bad stuff had been left behind. Until now the good stuff had not been for sharing.

They had been putting the red ones back for some time now. He had simply failed to notice.

"Peelers," she said. It was what she had called pillows as a child. She settled in, barefoot, legs tucked, achingly attractive there in the semi-dark, a champagne flute to her lips. She had fathomed him well and knew just how much anticipation was good for him.

On the screen, Kharis lurched again, pinching shut the necks of the Banning descendants one by one, shuffling ever onward, for love, the vigilant caretaker of a hopeless and unconsummatable devotion.

"A toast," Kris said. "Here's to dark rooms, things that go bump in the night, staying up past bedtime, and magic shadow shows."

"And being grownup enough to know what to appreciate."

"Humph. So practical." She frowned.

"Cheers." They clinked. It was good old crystal, thin and musical.

"Cheers."

The concrete canyons surrounding Kris' highrise worked acoustically, like cathedral archways, bringing to them from an unknowable distance the sound of a dog barking, shortly past the witching hour. It stopped abruptly. Somewhere, in some other dark bedroom, a child might remain wide-eyed until the predawn, in fear of barking dogs. But not Jason. Not tonight.

MISSING,

PRESUMED LOST

The rarest form of the perpetually endangered species known as the short story collection is the book of novellas. Neither "short" fiction nor "long" - ie., novel-length - such mutant books enter the world with more handicaps than Jerry's Kids and about as much chance of surviving as Los Angeles' MetroRail project (our 50-years-too-late subway) has of dying. Novellas are not something to make the sales force smile; they are the least conventional form of popular fiction and maybe that's why writers indulge in them, despite all the danger flags and the dearth of practical markets.

Dictionaries won't help you, defining novellas as anything shorter than a novel but longer than a short story. Specifying what is or is not a novel by length alone is a conceit of fairly recent vintage; ditto subcategories such as the "novelette" - which, if you look it up, is basically another way of saying "novella?'

Thanks, scholars.

Why Lost Angels exists: Editor John Silbersack approached me about assembling a paperback original for the Onyx imprint of New American Library because my short story "Red Light" had won a World Fantasy Award in 1987. For the sake of cover ballyhoo, the book had to include "Red Light" which had already been incorporated into a collection just turned in to Tor Books - Seeing Red. The solution? Include it in both books, what the hell.

"Red Light" was not a novella and it disrupted the four-quarters symmetry I wanted for a book like Lost Angels, but it did speak to what critics later perceived as the theme of the book - explorations of love sought, lost or squandered, in a somewhat gentler tone than the splatterpunkiness of "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" or Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.

Not to bash the nail in too hard, but it's fairly easy to perceive Lost Angels and Seeing Red as one big collection representing all my short fiction work up to 1990, with "Red Light" as the hinge. The two collections came out within two months of each other.

Since Babbage Press has sanctioned new editions of both Seeing Red and Lost Angels, and since my editor, the fairly unique Arthur Byron Cover, has specified he doesn't want the repetition that seemed so critical a decade ago, it is with an odd grin on my face that I hereby get what I originally wanted - the four-quarters symmetery - and proceed to screw it up again by adding a completely new story in the same vein (I hope) as the aforementioned "theme." This will:

Provide a brand-new story, for those who care,

Make newcomers to Lost Angels feel less boned by the omission of "Red Light' and/or

Drive collectors and bibliographers straight up the padded wall.

The original cover for Lost Angels was a kind of masterpiece of wrong-headedness. Black cover, okay. No drippy lettering, that was a plus. The art was a kind of hood ornament composed around a horned skull with bat wings, the sort of thing still found on T-shirts worn by satanic teenage serial murderers, graying bikers or big-hair metal bands with names like Psychotic Brainfry. I was sent a cover flat which featured the hood ornament embossed and foiled in a variety of metallic shades, mostly bronze and gold. It wasn't great but it didn't redefine stupid; at least it might catch an eye. Naturally, budget considerations dropped the axe on the foil and embossing, and the flat cover as printed tried to approximate the 3D effect by rendering the hood ornament in the most hideous shades of DayGlo orange, green and pink ever to offend human sight. At last it redefined stupid.

But what was really horrifying was the sell copy littering this masterwork of the coverly arts. My anti-favorite is the line blurbing "The Falling Man" as "a drama of lust and death scripted by Satan!" I mean, you've got to read the story to appreciate just how goofy that is. The "father of splatterpunk" tag I'll accept; I brought that on myself. But the rest was the brand of delirious badness you win from harried publicists burdened with too many projects, scribbled in haste to meet a crushing deadline by people with much better things to do, too much access to derogatory stimulants, and not enough talent to make a difference.

(And I have always wondered:  If I'm the father of splatterpunk, then who was the mother?)

The inclusion of "Red Light" was also another way of cheating the wordage of the book up to code, since only "Brass" and "The Falling Man" were actually novellae. It's also worth noting here that while the sheer length of "Brass" and "The Falling Man" prevented their reprint in many anthologies, both stories were optioned and produced for the TV series The Hunger, which had also rendered "Red Light" and "Night Bloomer:' from Seeing Red.

PAMELA'S GET

…is a good example of an early story that got incarcerated in a file until it could grow up. It matured the way good stories are supposed to when you leave them alone for a while, to ferment. Later I went back and, for my own amusement, charted some of the arcs of symbology, particularly the ostinato of eyes, tears, and heart that governs the gradual decline of Jaime, who goes from crying buckets at the funeral in the beginning, to an inability to generate tears in mid-story, to her final tear at the end as she draws the tiniest bit of renewal from the postcard.

The story made the ballots for both the 1988 World Fantasy Award and the Nebula, and gracefully lost.

The Kipling poem is real. The evocation of "Funeral for a Friend" from an Elton John album now strikes me as overly facile, even cute, but I won't omit it at this late date, because I respect you.

BRASS

The first draft of "Brass" was completed seven years before the much-revised version saw its debut publication as a two-part serial in Night Cry, a digest-sized magazine produced by Montcalm Publications as a little sister to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (Tz).

At one point in the late 1980s it looked like "Brass" might constitute the bones of a novel, with something like five chapters leading up to where the story version began. The prologue went like this:

SUMMER 1957

The tapping at the patio doors was a cadenced knock. It was not a sound stirred up by the storm outside.

Annabelle cursed the behemoth-sized houses surrounding her own modest home. The damned castles sucked power straight out of the lines, hogging more than their share, prompting an overload somewhere. Any time the atmosphere grew fierce in this neighborhood, the power went out, and she was reduced to groping around for candles while her furniture gleefully abused her shins in the darkness.

The translucent curtains on the east door were drawn back to allow her plants some morning sunlight - provided the sun could batter back some of the overcast. Each oblong, faceted pane of the glass now gave back her candlelight in a fan of staggered angles. Outside the door, the silhouette of a man tap-tap-tapped.

Stormwinds pushed his dark hair about. She could see the strength of the breeze was forcing the rosebushes to curtsey. Then she could actually see him, as a zig-zag of lightning opened up the night sky, providing its own electricity.

It was her husband. He was pallid, naked, and smiling at her.

She risked approaching the door. She needed her glasses, but could see her candlelight touching him; perhaps he was providing his own illumination, a pale phosphorescence like dim moonglow. Either way, it let her see contours and details beyond the simple outline of his body. Like the L-shaped scar across the back of his left hand. He had survived the hardships of a German stalag without a scratch for a year and five days, waiting out the last gasps of the truncated Thousand Year Reich, only to slice his damn fool hand wide open on the radiator fan of a 42 DeSoto as his first act during peacetime.

Well, okay, second or third act.

She had loved Sam Saks, the damned fool. He was an honored war vet, strong and capable as the farm laborers of legend, yet knew how to treat a woman in bed when things got intimate.

Annabelle watched the wind fluff his wiry brown pubic bush. His cock was already rising toward her, each pulse of blood elevating it a minute distance.

Annabelle. His lips formed her name in the dark.

She went warm and soft downstairs, thinking of how his manhood could fill the emptiness that defined her life, of late. Sam could make her so full, so flushed and hot. She remembered how she used to lock her legs around him, grab his rear end and milk him dry ... and how they had once both shared laughter at their own fervency.

Annabelle.

The door was locked. She had to let him in this time. The item of equipment Sam used to call his Serpent was arched upward, fully erect now, straining toward her, urging her to move faster. She knew all of Sam's physical twists and turns; all his moles and skin patterns were branded into her memory in a mordant way only twenty years of marriage could achieve. The only scar unfamiliar to her was the one she could see on Sam's chest, when the lightning revealed it.

The one left by the autopsy.

Her hand was on the handle of the French door. "Oh, Sam' she murmured.Make me warm."

A thin streamer of shockingly hot candlewax dripped to seal the knuckles of her other hand together. A yelp of pain escaped her - and brought her back to her senses.

Sam's breath was not clouding the chilly window glass because Sam was not breathing. Because this Sam was not Sam.

She sprang back from the yet-unopened door and tore down the bodice of her nightgown. That threshold was a fortress wall for her, and the hand that had almost admitted this creature across it now collected up and thrust forth another of her many protections - her amulet, the thing she called her "string?'

"Sam" caught sight of the string and promptly began to claw at his face, screaming in the middle of what was now a downpour.

Like bugs when you turn on the kitchen light, she thought. Utilize the correct charms and bad magic evaporated like teapot steam.

"Sam" came apart like a wax doll in a microwave oven. His eyes flickered and extinguished first; they were the first line of assault, the weapons which could hypnotize and charm her. His false body bloated, bleached, and dissipated the concentrated energy it had taken to deceive her. Complete discorporation used up about fifteen seconds. Once she'd counterattacked, it never took long.

The false Sam rejoined the rain and the elements which had been used to fabricate him. There would be no further attacks tonight. Annabelle knew the rhythms of her enemy, but also knew it would never give up. She would not be forced from her home, the home she'd shared with the real Sam before he died. She'd stay here till Doomsday.

The second bit of "Brass" titled Walpurgisnacht, 1959, would have detailed the Spilsbury slaughter referenced in the story. That would have been followed by the actual funeral of Grant Mantell's father, which would have been a better place to introduce Jennifer and that's as far as it got. "Brass" wanted to be a novella, not a novel, and I've striven not to have many trunk projects in the cobweb drawer, although there are a few, including another novel I gave up after 350 pages.

Maybe I could shorten it, and CALENDAR GIRL is brand new. Nimble readers can figure out for themselves whether Brett's photographer pal McCabe bears any resemblance to the POV character of "Red Light" ten years after.

THE FALLING MAN

…was bought for publication in TZ during the editorial tenure of Tappan King, who suggested running it as what may be that magazine's only two-part story. It was bracketed by italicized commentary about the Tarot which has nothing to do with the actual story other than providing an intro and outro. Splitting the story into two parts seemed to demand additional use of this invisible omniscient presence, if for no other reason than to tie off Part One, which concluded with: The next item on Peter Deutsch's agenda was the blissful hell of M. Rogoffs kiln.

This was followed by the extract which originally (and now) concludes the story.

In the TZ version, Peter's lot in life is spelled out more pointedly by the added capper, which closed Part Two:

The Major Arcana of the Tarot - the Greater Trumps - is actually predated by the Minor Arcana, whose suits of wands, cups, swords and pentacles (signifying fire, water, air and earth) gave birth to the clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds of modern-day gaming cards. It is from the Minor Arcana that a "court card" is chosen to symbolize the person whose Tarot is being read. Called a significator, this card anchors the subject's Tarot throw and embodies certain general traits. Significators are never chosen from the Major Arcana.

There is one conditional exception.

Every so often in the whirl of centuries there is born a person who so perfectly fits that lost card of the Tarot, the Falling Man, that no other card will answer. That person, man or woman, may be caught and crushed by the card's unforgiving physics, or may be strengthened by enduring and surviving them. But it cannot be said that this card signifies one individual among billions. Rather, the individual epitomizes the qualities of the card.

That person, luckless or blessed, empowered or destroyed, is the Falling Man.

It strikes me now as superfluous. It belabors the obvious. But it might clear things up for readers who leave the story wondering why Peter winds up the way he does.

MONSTER MOVIES

"Do you have to be perverted to write horror?"

No, but it helps, especially when dealing with moronic questions like this one. A whole subset of inquiry regarding ModAmHoFic* can be summed up by such questions, whose idiot variants include "What kind of child were you?" and "Do you write as self-therapy or sexual release?"

The damnable presumption which sizzles at the heart of these questions is what really rankles me, and it goes something like this:  Deep in the heart of my normal, well-adjusted, readerly being lurks the gut sense that people who write scary stories for me to readjust have to be, well, bent somehow, and I'll just betcha it was some traumatic event in their childhood. That's pat, simplistic, illogical, misinformed, and just plain imbecilic ... and immortal. It'll never die. If you don't believe me, just pay attention the next time a horror writer guests on some talk show.

If you're still wondering why this question is so offensive, imagine asking it of a writer of anything besides scary stories.

One gorgeous Southern California day long ago, I stopped by Hilltop Liquors (still on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach) and unpocketed fifty of my very own cents to procure a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland whose cover luridly shrieked about something called The Flesh Eaters.

Hooked, are you kidding? I was nine.

Modern American Horror Fiction.

"Do you ever scare yourself?" No.

The first FM I actually owned featured Ray Harryhausen's Cyclops (from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) on the cover; I'd just missed #26, with the Outer Limits cover, and would not acquire that one until about twenty years later. I tapered off reading FM about the time they altered the binding style to make it more comicbook-like. By then I was already well along my unswerving course toward damnation.

Fun, I mean.

However, "Monster Movies" is not autobiographical. No coded in-jokes, revelations, or exposes as to why I turned out the way I did, where I get my weird ideas, or why I write stuff sometimes called horror.

"Is this character based on me?" No.

What "Monster Movies" turned out to be was the first third of an eventual triptych of stories concerned with a generational perception of classic film monsters. The follow up stories were "Last Call for the Sons of Shock" (1990, available in Black Leather Required) and "(Melodrama)" (1995, available in Crypt Orchids), with the more recent "Gills" (also in Crypt Orchids) as a satellite.

The story was original to the first edition of Lost Angels and was, for me, a good up-note on which to close the book.

Famous Monsters eventually reappeared in a modern incarnation, without the central organizing presence of Forrest Ackerman. It's sort of a zombie version of the original magazine, vacuumed clean of soul and content to mindlessly push the old buttons over and over. It's the opposite of fun.

You may have also noticed, since the first appearance of this story, that red M&Ms made a comeback. Now they have blue M&Ms , too, and trust me - they taste funny.

Once again, my thanks goes out again to the Unholy Three behind the resurrection of Lost Angels - Arthur Byron Cover, Lydia Marano and Kristina Etchison of Babbage Press, and all my love must unerringly find its way to the amazing Christa Faust.

Steven R. Boyett originally suggested the title Lost Angels, which has nothing to do with the 1989 film of the same title directed by Hugh Hudson, although its publicity suggested some great images, particularly the graphic of a Los Angeles freeway sign with the appropriate bits altered by red spray paint to form the title.

Tappan King took it upon himself to house "The Falling Man" and "Pamela's Get" in Twilight Zone, and "Brass" in Night Cry, so a lot of this book is his fault. Ellen Datlow grabbed "Pamela's Get" for her prestigious yearly anthology of fantasy and horror and it remains one of her favorite stories, which still gives me a modest measure of pride.

Thanks too to Robert "Garage Band" Sabat, Terri Windling, Marcus Nickerson, Robert Knowlton, Jessie Horsting, Anya Martin, Amy Thomson, Charles De Lint, David B. Silva, Beth Gwinn, Debra Richardson, Tim Walker, Ed Bryant, Bill Warren, and surrogate moms Roselle Campbell and Eleanor Bloch.

—DJS

January 2000

This book is dedicated with love to the memory of

SHIRLEY JOAN SCHOW

the first Lost Angel.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION (BY RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON)

PAMELA'S GET

BRASS

CALENDAR GIRL

THE FALLING MAN

MONSTER MOVIES

AFTERWORD