GHOSTS ANDO THERL OVERS

Copyright © 2001 by Lisa Tuttle. All rights Reserved. ISBN: 1-930815-28-X

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Ghosts and Other Lovers

By Lisa Tuttle

ElectricStory.com, Inc.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

“In Jealousy”: First published inObsession , ed. Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward, Serpent’s Tail 1995.

“Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands”: First published inSkin of the Soul , ed. Lisa Tuttle, The Women’s Press 1990.

“From Another Country”: First published inNight Visions 3 , ed. George R.R. Martin, Dark Harvest 1986.

“The Walled Garden”: First published inHidden Turnings , ed. Diana Wynne Jones, Methuen 1989.

“Lucy Maria”: First published inXanadu , ed. Jane Yolen, Tor 1993.

“The Extra Hour”: First published inDestination Unknown , ed. Peter Crowther, Borealis (White Wolf) 1997.

“Where the Stones Grow”: First published inDark Forces , ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking 1980.

“White Lady’s Grave”: First published inTombs , ed. Peter Crowther and Edward Kramer, White Wolf 1994.

“Soul Song”: First published inInterzone , May 1997.

“Food Man”: First published inCrank! , December 1994.

“Manskin, Womanskin”: First published inBy the Light of the Silvery Moon , ed. Ruth Petrie, Virago 1994.

“Turning Thirty”: First published inThe Time Out Book of London Short Stories , ed. Maria Lexton, Penguin 1993.

“Haunts”: First published inDark Terrors 5 , ed. Stephen Jones and David Sutton, Gollancz 2000.

Introduction:Real Ghosts

I’m fascinated by ghosts, and entertain all sorts of theories about what they really are. That hauntings are caused by the uneasy dead, by spirits unable to find rest, seems to me theleast likely explanation, about on a par with the idea that, down through the ages, people have merely imagined, rather than experienced, the phenomena we call ghosts.

A few years ago I read a newspaper article about some experimenters in England who found that the effect of low-frequency sound waves on human subjects was to make them feel shivery and frightened. More than that: the sound waves caused their eyeballs to vibrate, giving the impression of a blurrysomething glimpsed from the corner of the eye. The experimenters speculated that low-frequency standing waves might be produced by wind and other natural effects in old buildings, resulting in ghostly sightings and the notorious “cold spots” in haunted houses. Obviously, the next step (it seemed to me—not the researchers!) would be to construct a “haunted” house by using low-frequency sound waves to prove it. Not having the funds for such a project, I decided to write a story about someone who did. The result was “Haunts.”

I don’t think that discovering a physiological explanation for ghostly effects diminishes the mystery or the wonder of ghosts. Explaining why some houses might seem to be haunted doesn’t explain why people are haunted.

That’s what really interests me, and that’s what these stories are about: the relationship between people and their ghosts. Ghosts can be memories or obsessions, and, as in “Turning Thirty,” the single resolutely non-supernatural horror story included here, certain types of memory can be literally devastating, as powerful as any malign spirit. Saying that something is “all in the mind” is no kind of explanation at all; there’s no straightforward dividing line between the thing that happens and how that thing is interpreted by the people it happens to.

“Haunts” started out almost as a science-fiction story, an attempt to suggest a rational explanation for ghosts—but ghosts won’t be pinned down so easily. Block off one exit and they will ooze—or explode—through another. No matter how much is rationalized or explained away, a core of mystery always remains.

In my teens, like the narrator of “Haunts,” I hung out with a group of friends all eager to see a genuine ghost or UFO, make contact with the other side, or somehowprove the supernatural was, or was not, for real. We huddled around my Ouija board for hours, haunted graveyards, and drove off in pursuit of a mysterious “ghost light” in south Texas. No, we never proved anything; I’ve still never seen a ghost, despite living for many years in England and Scotland, both countries with a much higher spook count than Texas. I’m no longer quite so eager to see one in real life, but I remain fascinated by ghosts in fiction, my own as well as others’.

How people react to the unexplained tells you a lot about them; every bit as much as their relationships with other people. For me, the idea of a small group of people in a haunted house has always been much more suggestive than Jane Austen’s favorite formula of “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village.” My literary influences, as far as I’m aware of them, include M.R. James, Robert Aickman, and Shirley Jackson.

As I looked through my previously uncollected work to decide on the table of contents, I noticed the way certain situations, themes, and ideas reappeared. These stories, most of them written in the early 1990s, are nearly all “relationship” stories—and mostly about love affairs. The title announced itself as inevitable: here are stories about strange relationships—with ghosts, with lovers, and with ghostly lovers.

Despite the thematic link, the stories are different enough, I hope, to be enjoyed not only one at a time but also as a sequence. Some are romantic; a few even have happy endings; but most, in the great ghost story tradition, are meant to disturb and unsettle, rather than comfort, the reader.

—Lisa Tuttle

Torinturk, Scotland

June 2001

In Jealousy

I’ve always liked ghost stories without believing in them. But this one I believe, because it happened to me.

In 1985 I went to China on a tour organized by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). I went not so much because I was deeply interested in China as to get away from London where everything reminded me of my estranged husband. Even after six months I couldn’t stop brooding about what had gone wrong and how I might have handled things differently and saved the marriage. I had just finished a book, and I had a little money, courtesy of my ex, so I decided to go somewhere far away and utterly different.

It was mostly couples on the tour, which I hadn’t thought would matter as I wasn’t looking for a new partner, but it did matter—there seems to be a powerful instinct in human beings toward pairing off, and if you don’t do it yourself, others will do it for you. David and I were the only singles under fifty, so we kept getting put together on the tour bus or at table.

Under other circumstances we would not have been drawn together. He was in the catering trade, wholesale side, with no interest in my kind of literature. Physically, he wasn’t my type: very tall, big-boned, pale-skinned, with that faintly raw look you see in some Scandinavians. He wasn’t Scandinavian: his father came from Scotland, his mother from Manchester, and he was a Londoner by birth and choice. He had big teeth and his blue eyes showed a lot of white. He was gloomy but witty, politically conscious and opinionated, and his reason for going on the tour was similar to my own.

He had been involved with a woman called Jane for nearly four years, the same length of time as I’d been married. It was over, she had ended it, finally, by refusing to see him again, and, fed up with glooming around their old haunts in London, mourning what was lost, he’d decided to try to get her out of his system by doing something completely different.

Yet neither of us really wanted to forget. What we wanted, and what we found in each other, was a sympathetic, non-judgmental listener to give us the chance to talk about our feelings.

We became very close very quickly, in the way that people sometimes will in a new environment, away from the usual cautions and distractions. China itself, so overwhelming and strange on first experience, faded into the background, of less importance than the old, London-based events we were recreating for each other, of less interest than the internal drama which was developing, the intimate heat drawing us closer and closer.

Did he listen as closely to me as I did to him? I thought he did, but maybe, while his blue eyes were fixed so attentively on my face, he was mentally rehearsing his next revelation about Jane. Or maybe he took it in at the time and then jettisoned all that unnecessary information. He must have had a greater talent for forgetting than I do, to judge from his later behavior, or maybe, being a man, he was able to do what men are always advising women, to listen, to understand, but not take it personally.

We became lovers in Shanghai, on an evening when we should have been at the theater, watching acrobats. We’d both cried off on grounds of ill health. Some sort of tummy bug had been sweeping the tour so this was a readily accepted excuse, but I felt guilty, certain that the disease would strike us for real now that we had invoked it. David laughed at me for my superstitions; he claimed to have none himself. He believed in neither ghosts nor gods.

In Shanghai we had rooms in a very posh hotel, far more elegant than anywhere else we went on the tour or than anywhere I’d ever stayed before. Nixon had stayed there during his visit to China. Staying there made me feel very grand and yet uneasy, as if I’d strayed into someone else’s life. When the others had departed for the theater, David came down the hall to the room I shared with Miss Edith Finch—it was all shared rooms; his roommate was another pensioner—flourishing a bottle of Vodka. We giggled like naughty children as we mixed the Vodka with some of Edith’s orange and toasted each other.

This may sound horribly naïve, but at that point I still hadn’t realized why we’d stayed behind together, why we were there in my room. I was so interested in his life, in his past, that I was waiting for still more revelations about Jane. I thought we would go on talking forever.

I took a sip of my drink and smiled at him expectantly. He took the glass from my hand and set it down beside his on the bedside table. Then he placed his hands very gently on the sides of my head, over my ears, tilted my face up to his, and kissed me on the mouth.

I was astonished and flattered. That must sound odd. It wasn’t that men had not found me desirable before—even during my marriage there had been the occasional proposition—or that this conclusion to our growing intimacy should have been so unexpected. But I had come to think of David, as a lover, only in connection with Jane. Jane, the unknown other, whom he called “genuinely beautiful.” This was not a phrase anyone would ever use about me. “Not bad,” “quite attractive,” even “cute,” but never beautiful. Yet he wanted me, this man who had loved a beautiful woman.

Did I want him? I’m not sure. I wanted something, but it was Jane I thought of as he pressed me back on the bed. In some ways I felt I knew Jane better than I knew David. I didn’t know her as I knew other women, as a friend, but rather as her lover had known her. I perceived her only and entirely through David, and tried to imagine him through her eyes. I don’t know if I identified more with David or with Jane, but I scarcely felt like myself at all as we made love for the first time on the bed in the posh hotel room in Shanghai. Outside it was raining, had been raining since the afternoon. The window was partly open and the damp coolness and sound of the rain came into the room along with the smell of rain-wet city streets, and the omnipresent sour-sweet fecal smell of China.

After we had made love, after it had grown dark, to the sound of the rain still hissing down, we talked. Or, rather, he talked and I listened. The subject, as always, was his affair with Jane. It was over, we both, we all knew it was over. He said he no longer loved her, no longer cared if he ever saw her again. He didn’t say that he loved me, but the implication was that my company and understanding, and this shared act of love, had finally cured him of her. Although I didn’t say so, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a kindness he was trying to do me, trying to make me feel that I mattered more than I did, or to salve my jealousy, when it really wasn’t necessary. I knew it would be a while yet before he got over Jane. She was too wonderful, and she’d been too important to him. His hurt was too raw, his obsession too intense, for a single sexual encounter to heal. I understood, and it didn’t matter to me; I wasn’t jealous, only grateful to be involved in something new, taken out of myself and the pain of my broken marriage. I didn’t say that, though; I didn’t want us to argue, and anyway, there wasn’t time. We would have liked to spend the night together, but our roommates would be returning soon, so he had to leave.

That night I had my first dream about Jane. She looked a little like the actress Jane Seymour and a little like my mother twenty years ago. Smiling and kind, she told me she was so glad David had found me, that she knew I would be good for him. I basked happily in her approval.

All the next day we were discreet, yet discreetly let a few others on the tour understand how our relationship had changed. The day after that, as we left Shanghai, we arranged with the tour leader to share a room. The trip had been transformed, as holidays always are by romance. I still feel a little annoyed with myself sometimes that I experienced so little of China, allowing my inner life to dominate everything. At first everything was colored by regrets and mourning for my marriage, then the affair with David became everything. We might as well have been in Manchester for two weeks, going from one Chinese restaurant to another and spending all the time we wanted in bed. Sexual satisfaction kept me from seeing anything very clearly. Sometimes I look at the pictures I took and can’t believe mine was the eye behind the camera. Only the ones with David in them remind me of anything. Yet at the time I wanted nothing else, and certainly he was a better cure for what ailed me than half a dozen foreign countries could have been.

The first test of our relationship did not come until we were back home in London. We were apart for a couple of days, recovering from jet lag, and then we’d arranged to meet in a West End wine bar, neutral territory. I was nervous, wondering what would happen. Would we seem like strangers to each other? Would he want to end it? Although he had told me he loved me, I knew that something said in bed, in a foreign country, could be as worthless here as the pretty paper money I had kept as a souvenir. If he treated me coldly I would feel miserable, yet I knew it would be a misery quickly overcome. What we’d shared had happened so far away that it would not be difficult to leave it behind, in the past, in China, and get on with my life alone, refreshed and renewed.

I’ll always believe that David had meant to break things off with me, but that my attitude, the mental distance I kept, made him fall in love with me. He had told me how emotionally self-sufficient Jane seemed to him, and how irresistible he found her; sensing a similar attitude in me would have hooked him.

Once he became part of my real life, no longer just a story I was reading or a game I was playing on holiday, I was hooked, too. Everything changed. I had been interested in Jane formerly; now, I was jealous.

Yet I had no reason to be jealous anymore. He seldom spoke of her now, thought of her only rarely and in a different way. The talking cure had worked: he was over her and in love with me.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about her, even if he could. I wanted to talk about her, I wanted to see her. I convinced myself that if we met my jealousy would vanish. I would stop dreaming about her. We might even become friends. I suggested to David that he invite her over for dinner, or take both of us out.

“Are you crazy?”

“Why not? You’re still in touch with her.” He had told me that once they’d both realized their affair was definitely over, and had both cooled down a little, they had agreed to stay in touch, to try to construct a friendship out of the ruins of their love. He had even written to her from China.

“We’ve kept in touch, but we never meet.”

“Well, surely you can’t be friends if you never meet.”

“Maybe someday. But not like that. She wouldn’t thank me for that, inviting her over to meet my new girlfriend!”

“Why not? How do you know? You didn’t leave her—she’s the one who told you it was over. That’s what you told me. So maybe she’d be glad to see you’re settled with somebody, she doesn’t have to feel guilty—”

“You don’t know her. And you don’t want to know her, believe me. You wouldn’t like each other; I don’t mean she’s unlikable, or that you are, only that you’re very different. You’ve nothing in common.”

“Except you. Why don’t you want me to meet her?”

“There’s no reason for you to meet her,” he said impatiently. “It’s all over between us. Don’t you believe me? Are you jealous? Is that the problem? You don’t have any reason to be jealous. She hardly ever crosses my mind. She’s in the past. I have no wish to see her, and I don’t know why you should.”

It stung, to be told I had nothing in common with this “genuinely beautiful” woman who had been—as he had told me once and never since altered or denied—the one, great, passionate love of his life. I wondered why he loved me, if he did, when we argued so much and had so little in common.

It was Jane who brought us together, and Jane who came between us. I knew too much about her, that was the problem. He didn’t have to talk about her or mention her name for her presence to be summoned. The things which were connected with her in his mind also, as if by telepathy, called her to mine. I don’t think he realized quite how much he had told me about her, how many small details I still retained. There were a few songs—“Jealous Guy” by John Lennon and “Trouble Again” by Karla Bonhoff are the ones I still remember—which I knew had been special to him and so now carried a particular emotional freight for me. I couldn’t sit on his couch (loose covers sewn by her own fair hands), raise a wine glass (set of six, a present after she’d managed to break his last two), or turn on the kitchen light (the art moderne fixture was one they’d found together on a weekend trawl through Camden Lock) without being reminded of the woman whose place I now filled.

He still wore the large, square signet ring she’d bought him for his thirtieth birthday. I wished he would stop wearing it, but he was unresponsive to hints. Once, when we were making love, he hurt me with it very slightly, but even then he didn’t remove it, he was only more careful, which in turn made me even more aware of its importance.

No matter what he said or did, no matter how much he claimed to love me, there was always the memory of Jane in the background, in my mind if not in his, keeping me on edge or off balance, bitterly aware that she had been here before me, and that no matter how much he said he loved me, once upon a time he had loved her more.

Almost from the beginning we quarreled a lot, petty disagreements, but they added up. I didn’t like his friends and he could tell that mine didn’t much like him, so we gave up socializing with other people and just went out to dinner, to concerts, or to movies with each other. That was all right, but when it came time to go home we always argued about whose home. By any objective standards, his flat in a mansion block off Oxford Street was more comfortable and more convenient than my bedsit in Chiswick with the drummer next door, but my place wasn’t haunted, and his was.

I’m not speaking metaphorically. There was a ghost. I saw her twice. The first time was very late at night. I was coming back from the bathroom and saw a naked woman just ahead of me in the hall, going into the bedroom. I screamed. When David turned on the light, I made him search the room with me. He was first worried, then puzzled, then cross. He refused to listen to any nonsense about a ghost. I must have been dreaming with my eyes open.

The second time I saw her she was fully clothed, a beautiful, dark-haired woman in profile by the kitchen window early one morning as I stumbled in to make coffee. I didn’t scream that time, not even when I saw her vanish.

Although I’d still never seen a photograph of her, it seemed obvious to me that the woman was Jane. I thought it very possible that David saw her, too, and took those sightings for brief, powerful memories. I wondered if it was his regret or undying love which summoned her spirit, or if Jane’s was such a powerful personality that she left small traces of it behind in places which had been important to her.

I’d once read about a theory that ghosts were not spirits at all but simply powerful impressions left behind by particularly strong emotions felt in that place. If you take that as an explanation of haunting, then there’s no reason why it should be the prerogative of the dead. The living should have just as much psychic energy and just as many reasons for using it, consciously or not.

I felt very glad that Jane didn’t know me, or where I lived. I could get away from her. I’ve heard people argue that ghosts aren’t really scary because they can’t do anything to you, and I know now that anyone who says that ghosts aren’t scary has never met a ghost. I knew she couldn’t hurt me, I knew Jane wasn’t even dead, and still the prospect of ever encountering her ghost again was just about more than I could bear. I was so grateful that I wasn’t the one she haunted, that I could get away.

David wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell him the truth, so I made various excuses. We argued, I was accused of selfishness and of not caring for him, but there was no way I was going to give in. Whether he believed it or not, I was afraid to spend the night in his flat. As a result of my stubbornness and his, we spent fewer and fewer nights together at all.

We were drifting apart. In my concentration on Jane I failed to see that she posed no threat. I had imagined that when he found fault with me David was comparing me unfavorably with her, and that when he was forgetful or melancholy he must be missing her. It came as a very great shock to discover that he had betrayed me with another woman, and that woman was not Jane.

Her name was Vanessa. He was guilty but defensive: he’d felt unloved, I seemed so uninterested, I must be seeing someone else, the way I always made excuses not to spend the night with him.

At that point, Jane was so far out of the picture for him that I knew he would believe in neither my ghost nor my jealousy. The existence of a new woman aroused what his talk of Jane had originally stirred back in China. I can’t say that I fell in love with him again, because I no longer think I’d ever fallen in love with him, but something in my heart or my imagination moved again, and I wanted him fiercely.

He wanted me, too, although not quite enough to drop Vanessa flat. For the next few weeks London became like China, a foreign backdrop to our internal drama. We sat for long hours in cafés and restaurants I’d not seen before nor been in since, drinking endless cups of tea and rolling cigarettes for each other while we bared our souls. We were closer than we’d ever been, desperate not to lose each other.

No longer frightened of Jane, no longer in danger of seeing her ghost, I spent every night in his flat, even staying there by myself that endless evening when he went out to meet Vanessa for the last time. I was there, waiting for him, when he came back and cried in my arms. We drank Vodka and orange until we fell over.

The next two weeks were curiously flat. It was supposed to be a time of healing, and we were especially kind to each other, devising little treats. Yet we couldn’t go on spending quite so much time together as we had been; we both had our work, which we had let slide recently. Love could not be our whole existence, which was a relief.

Things went on feeling flat, and I began to feel sour and impatient and angry with David. I knew it wasn’t fair. I’d got what I wanted. Vanessa and Jane had been vanquished. He loved me the best. I had no more reason to be jealous. I also had no more reason for wanting him.

We dragged on together for a few more months. It was a hard thing to realize, harder still to confess. It was easier just to let things go on, and to think up excuses to avoid seeing him when I could. Finally I realized how absurd it was, and how unfair to both of us, and I broke things off.

It was more difficult, more painful, and much more protracted than that sounds. David took it much harder than I expected. I don’t know whether that was egotism on my part, expecting his feelings to mirror mine, or whether it was a fatal lack of ego, that self-denigrating certainty that no one could really love me all that much. At any rate, his response, his hurt astonishment, his pain, his tears, took me completely by surprise. I had hoped I could just stop seeing him, but he let me know how cruel that was, and I had to agree to the occasional evening together, the meeting in some neutral London pub or café for “a quick drink,” followed by dragging, relentless hours in which he tried to talk me back into love with him.

When I refused to see him again, he kept phoning. I got an answering machine, and so he turned to letters. It has always been hard for me to resist words on paper, and the chance to create a neat justification of myself without risk of interruption. Writing seems like the way to truth. If we could each tell our stories unhindered, in our own good time, in our own words, eventually a complete and final understanding would be reached, and we’d be beyond guilt and hurt. Maybe we’d become the friends he said he wanted us to be. But it didn’t work. After a while his letters began to seem as much an intrusion as the phone calls had been, and although I still answered them, my replies became shorter.

Then I was invited to spend three months teaching in America. It was only a summer stint, in Seattle, but the money was good and I had friends in California, Texas, and New Mexico, and I figured I could spin it out, with visits, to six months at least. I gave up my bedsit, stored the few possessions I couldn’t take with me and didn’t care to sell, and I was off, leaving no forwarding address for David.

I stayed away for nearly a year. I can’t say I completely forgot about David, but he seldom crossed my mind. My affair with him had taken place in another country, and, it began to seem to me, in another era, in a different existence altogether.

Much happened to me in that year, but the only thing it seems pertinent to mention here is that I began to have a recurring dream. It wasn’t an interesting dream, it was just me in a house which wasn’t mine and in which I felt I didn’t belong. I didn’t know why I was there but I wasn’t worrying about it, my one concern was simply to find a way out. The dream seldom lasted long, and I always woke up before I found my way out. The house was always the same, and it was not one I recognized. Bare wooden floors, architectural prints and old maps hanging on bare white plaster walls, modern furniture, no mess or clutter, just a few leafy green plants in odd corners … It seemed like something I might have seen in a magazine, I was sure it was nowhere I had ever been. There was a feeling attached to the dream, a kind of guilty impatience with being there, which I connected with David, because it was like the feeling I’d had about him since breaking up with him. But toward the end of my stay in America I began to feel that the dream was telling me I ought to go home, that America was the place I had to find a way out of before it trapped me forever. A lot of the houses I saw in California and New Mexico were as soullessly modern and “designed” as the house in my dream.

I was getting homesick for bad weather and good conversation in damp old cluttered houses. I had stayed away too long. Yet London, when I returned to it, was strange and uninviting. There was nowhere I had to go, no one who needed me. I called around to see friends, and found they’d all changed, their lives had moved them to other places while I was away. One had come out as a lesbian, another had a baby, others had changed jobs, relationships, addresses. At one point, walking down Oxford Street, I took the familiar turning and walked along to David’s flat. I had no idea what I would say to him, I just suddenly wanted to see him, but the name beside the bell was not his.

Someone I’d met in America had invited me to visit him in Edinburgh, so that’s what I decided to do. He worked for an arts magazine and there was a possibility of some work on it for me; anyway, he said there was a lot happening in Scotland just now.

I had never been to Edinburgh before, and I liked it. I liked the sharp, cold, gritty air; the lilting voices; the old buildings; the streets and wynds; the whole atmosphere. It reminded me of how I had felt when I first arrived in London, full of energy and possibilities. It was this I had been missing in America. I stayed for a week and considered staying longer. I talked to some people about a job and to some others about a room.

On my seventh night in Edinburgh I was in a bar, waiting to meet someone. I was early and he was almost certainly going to be late, but every time I heard the street door open I turned around to look. On about the fourth or fifth time it was a woman who came in alone. Our eyes met, briefly, she looked startled, and then some kind of excitement sharpened her features.

I felt a sudden, cold apprehension. She was about my own age or a little younger, very well dressed, attractive in a groomed, glossy way, with a look of intelligence. She was exactly the sort of woman I found interesting, and if we’d been at a party, with mutual friends, I would have wanted to be introduced. At first, that is, because as soon as her face changed, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t like the way she looked at me. I turned away, toward the bar and my drink, and wished I wasn’t waiting for someone, so that I could leave, or that he’d already arrived, to provide a barrier, because I just knew she was going to come over and talk to me.

“Excuse me—this is terribly rude of me, I know but I’m sure you’ll forgive me when you know, it is quite fascinating, actually—did you ever live in Ann Street?” She sounded English. She was definitely younger than I was. The intensity of her gaze was terrible.

“Ann Street?”

“Number Twenty-Seven.”

“I don’t even know where it is. No. I’ve only been here a week.”

“Well, perhaps you had ancestors who lived there? It is quite an old house, although it’s been done up.”

“I don’t have any connection with Edinburgh. My people weren’t Scottish. Sorry. You must have me confused with someone else.” I couldn’t even ask her what it was about, I so wanted her to get away from me.

“Well, it’s very strange. You see, we have a ghost in our house—I’ve seen her myself, several times, and she looks very like you.”

I heard the street door open and I turned away, hoping for rescue, hoping it would be my friend. It was David. As I saw him, and he saw me, and the woman beside me said, sounding more annoyed than glad, “Oh, there’s my husband now. He’ll tell you it’s nonsense, because he doesn’t believe in ghosts,” I understood all at once. I was this woman’s Jane. It was her house I’d gone to in my dreams, hers and David’s. The only thing I didn’t know—and I suppose I never will—was whether it was David’s mournful love which summoned my spirit, or her jealousy.

Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands

Mr. Elphinstone’s hands were cold and slightly damp.

This unpleasant physical detail was Eustacia Wallace’s first impression of the medium, and even after she had a good look at him in the light—the large, deep-set eyes, the graying beard, the high forehead—even after she had heard him speak in a well-modulated, educated voice, Eustacia could think only of how much she had disliked the touch of his hands.

She glanced at her sister and saw that, like the others in the stuffy, overcrowded parlor, Lydia Wallace Steen was completely enraptured. She found herself rubbing the palms of her hands on her skirt, and forced herself to stop. If she had been wearing gloves, like any properly brought up young lady—if she hadn’t been such a hoyden as to lose her last pair and too careless to borrow from her sister—if she had been dressed as the other ladies, dressed as she should be, she would have known nothing of the condition of Mr. Elphinstone’s flesh.

Lydia would be horrified—quite rightly—if she knew her younger sister’s thoughts. Eustacia struggled, as she had struggled so often before, to lift them to a higher plane. Mr. Elphinstone was talking about Heavenly Rapture, Life Eternal, and the Love Which Passeth All Understanding. Eustacia found it hard to concentrate. It wasn’t that she preferred to think about Mr. Elphinstone’s hands, or about the unpleasant warmth of the room, or about the fact that she hadn’t had enough to eat at dinner, only … all these things, things that belonged to the real world, had a power that abstract ideas, for all their beauty, lacked. What chance had Perfect Love against a joint of beef or a cold, moist, human hand?

“We imagine the dead, our loved dead, as being like us; as being, still, the people we knew—our children, parents, siblings, friends, sweethearts. We think of them wearing the same bodies, with no difference, only passed beyond our ken. But, my dear, dear, brothers and sisters,” Mr. Elphinstone went on, lowering his voice dramatically, “this isnot so . Death is a transformation much greater than the birth to which it is sometimes compared. The soul leaves the body at death, achieving a new and wonderful existence. Mortality is burnt away with the flesh. There are no bodies in the afterlife, no flesh in heaven. Do you understand me?”

Heads nodded around the room. Eustacia nodded, too, wondering if there would be refreshments later.

“They are different, the dead. We cannot comprehend how different; we will know that only when we join them. The wisest course is to accept our ignorance, to accept that they are gone from us, God’s will has been done, and all is well… . But, of course, it is the nature of the living to question and to mourn …not to accept, but to want, always, to know more. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

He stopped, apparently expecting an answer. There were uneasy shiftings from his listeners, and Eustacia took advantage of this to scoot her chair a little farther away from the fire. A thin, elderly woman in rusty black silks cleared her throat gently, and Mr. Elphinstone let his dark eyes rest on her. “Yes, Mrs. Marcus? Tell us why you have come.”

“You know.”

“Yes, I know, but tell us.”

“It’s my son, Nathanael. He died at Bull Run. He was only eighteen. My only boy … I never knew the moment of his passing; I waited a long time before I heard of his death, and even then I couldn’t be certain… . For years I— But finally … I thought I had accepted it. Two years ago my husband passed on. And since then I have thought more and more about our Nathanael … worrying about him. Waking up nights fearing he was cold, or hungry, or hurting. Mr. Marcus could always take care of himself, and I was beside him at the end. But Nathanael was only a boy, and he died on a battlefield— I’ll never really knowhow he died. I keep thinking, if only I could have been with him at the end, to mop his brow or hold his hand—to give him some little comfort… . If only I could see him once more, to know that he’s not in pain, and he’s not unhappy… . Just to see him once more … just to have a message from him, would make such a difference.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Elphinstone softly. “Yes, of course. Touch and sight and hearing are all so important to us, the living. We cannot communicate without our senses; without them we cannot evenbelieve . And the dead, who have passed beyond that, still feel our needs and attempt to give us what we want … they attempt to touch us, speak to us, communicate. Yet how can they communicate without a body? How can they speak, how can they touch without flesh?”

Mr. Elphinstone’s burning eyes fixed upon Eustacia. She went hot and cold. What did he want from her? Everyone was waiting for her to answer. There was no escape. She opened her mouth and out popped: “Ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” He smiled gravely. “But what are ghosts? Of what are they formed? The dead have no material substance. They do not block the light.They cannot be seen . And if they are to communicate with us in some way, in any way, physical substance is required. Where is it to come from? Nothing comes from nothing, as the poet said. And they must have something if we are to know them. From whence does it come? Why, dear people; dear, dear friends: it comes from me.” His smile became positively beatific; his face seemed to shine. “I am uniquely gifted to give our dearly departed a brief, a transitory, yet not entirely unsatisfactory, semblance of life. Certain mediums are gifted in this way with the ability to produce a substance known asectoplasm , an emanation from my very flesh which clothes the fleshless spirits and allows them, however briefly, to live and speak to their loved ones. It is not God’s will that they should be returned tothis life, when he has lifted them to a greater one, but neither is it God’s will that those they have left behind should suffer unduly, or doubt His promise of eternal life. It has been said, truly, ‘Seek and ye shall find; Ask and it shall be given.’ So now, dear friends, dear seekers, I ask you to watch and wait as I offer myself unselfishly for the use of any spirits hovering near.”

The lamps were extinguished as he spoke, and the room was lit only by firelight. Lydia touched her arm and whispered: “Watchhim .”

Mr. Elphinstone’s eyes were closed. He sat like a statue. The others, having been here before, knew what to look for, so they were aware of what was happening before Eustacia noticed anything unusual. It was only by their rustlings and murmurings, and by Lydia’s clutching hand that she understood it was not a trick of her eyes in the dim light: there was a whitish vapor issuing forth from the region of Mr. Elphinstone’s knees, upon which his hands rested.

But it wasn’t only a vapor. It seemed to have more mass and solidity than that. Now he raised his hands to chest-level and it was obvious that this amorphous, shifting, cloudy-white stuff adhered in some way to his hands, grew out of them, perhaps. To the sound of gasps and moans and sighs from the assembly, the shining cloud between Mr. Elphinstone’s unmoving hands began to shape itself, to take on form. A human form, although small. A head, a neck, shoulders, arms … That was a face, surely? Eustacia wasn’t sure if there were facial features to be discerned in the flickering light, or if she was unconsciously making pictures, as one did when watching clouds.

Suddenly Lydia cried out. “That’s my baby! Oh, sweet George!”

Then she tumbled off her chair in a dead faint.

*

The seance was brought to an abrupt halt by the need to help Lydia. In all the turmoil of fetching smelling salts and water and relighting the lamps, Eustacia did not see what happened to the ghostly baby, but it was gone. Mr. Elphinstone, pale and worn-looking, remained aloof and said nothing as the women fussed about poor Lydia.

But poor Lydia was ecstatic. A trifle shaky, but, she assured everyone, the shock had been a joyful one, and she had not felt so well, so uplifted, in years.

“He was smiling,” said Lydia. “I never thought I’d see my baby smile again! Taken from me at three months, but he’s happy in Heaven. He’ll always be happy now, smiling forever. Such a comfort, to see him again and know he’s happy.”

It was for this Lydia had come to see Mr. Elphinstone, of course. Eustacia felt ashamed of herself for not realizing. She had thought at first this evening’s outing one of Lydia’s ways of introducing her younger sister to society and, therefore, to more eligible young men. Then she had thought the seance simply another of Lydia’s larks, like going to hear the speakers for women’s suffrage. She hadn’t realized it was personal… . Indeed, she tended to forget that her sister had ever known the brief, bitter blessing of motherhood. The babe had not lived long; had died three years ago, and in that time there had not come another to fill his cradle. And yet it had not occurred to her that Lydia might still be mourning. Usually Eustacia envied her sister the freedom granted her by marriage, but now she felt only pity.

*

For days afterward, back at home on the farm, the excitements of visiting her sister left behind, Eustacia was plagued by something wrong with her hands. She couldn’t seem to get them warm, not even by chafing them in front of the fire, which she was seldom allowed to do. For there was work to be done—there was always work to be done—and the best way to keep warm, said her sister Mildred, was to keep busy: it wasn’t worth arguing. And it wasn’t really the temperature of her fingers which bothered her but something else that seemed at odds with it: although they felt chilly, her hands perspired profusely and constantly. She wiped them whenever she could, on her apron or a towel, but it did no good. Her hands were always cold and damp.

Just like Mr. Elphinstone’s hands.

She tried not to think of it. It was too silly. What could his hands possibly have to do with hers? Was there such a thing as a cold in the hands that she might have caught from him? She had never heard of such a thing—a cold in the head, a cold in the chest, but not the hands—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. A doctor would know … but doctors were expensive. Her father, seeing her perfectly healthy, would not countenance a visit to a doctor. If she tried to explain to her father she was certain his idea of a “cure” would be the same as Mildred’s: more hard work, less idle dreaming. She didn’t try to tell him, or anyone. Embarrassed by this odd problem, she washed her hands often, and kept a supply of pocket handkerchiefs.

One afternoon as she helped her sister shake out and fold clean linen from the drying line, Mildred suddenly screwed up her face and said sharply, “Eustacia! Have you a runny nose?”

“No, sister.” She felt her face get hot.

“Where do you suppose this came from?” There on the stiff, freshly washed whiteness of the sheet glistened four little blobs of mucus. On the other side, Eustacia had no doubt, would be found a fifth, the imprint left by her thumb. She stood mute, blushing.

“Have you lost your pocket handkerchief? ’Tis a filthy, childish habit, Eustacia, to blow your nose into your fingers; something I would not have expected from you, careless though you often are in your personal habits. And so unhealthy! You should think of others.”

“I didn’t! My nose isn’t—! I didn’t, Mildred, honestly!”

Mildred might have believed her since Eustacia, for all her faults, was no liar, but she couldn’t stop, was scarcely aware of, the little furtive gestures by which she attempted to dry and hide her hands.

Mildred’s eyes narrowed. “Show me your hands.”

There was a kind of relief in being caught, in being forced, at last, to share her dirty secret. Despite her having just wiped them, her hands were already moist again. Welling up from the ball of each finger, pooling in the palms, was something thicker, stickier, and less liquid than the perspiration she had, for several days, believed—or wished—it to be.

Face twisting in disgust, Mildred held her sister’s hands and examined them. Something nasty. But it had to be as obvious to Mildred as it was to Eustacia herself that the substance had not been blown or wiped onto the hands but was being produced—excreted—through the skin of the hands themselves.

“I don’t know what it is,” Eustacia said. “It’s been happening … several days now. I told you my hands were cold. You can feel that. At first it was only the cold … then, they seemed to be wet—and now … this. I don’t know what it is; I don’t know how to make it stop.” She burst into tears.

Tears were always the wrong tactic with Mildred. Scowling, she flung Eustacia’s hands back at her, and wiped her own harshly in her apron. “Stop bawling, girl, it doesn’t pain you, does it?”

Still sobbing, Eustacia shook her head.

“Well, then. It’s nothing. No more’n a runny nose. Go wash yourself. Wash your hands well, mind. And keep them warm and dry. Maybe you should rest. That’s it. Lie down and keep warm. You can have a fire in your room. Rest and keep warm and you’ll be as right as rain by tomorrow.”

Eustacia stopped crying, pleased to know she would have the luxury of a fire in her room, and the still greater luxury of being allowed to do nothing at all.

In a family of hard workers, Eustacia was the lazy one. Lydia, too, had disliked the labor required of daughters in a house without servants, but Lydia was never idle. She enjoyed sewing, particularly embroidery and fine needlework, loved music, and was often to be found reading improving books. Whatever time she could steal from chores she invested in her own artistic and intellectual pursuits. Eustacia, on the other hand, enjoyed conversation and reading novels, but was happiest doing nothing. She liked to sleep, she liked to dream, she liked to muse and build castles in the air, sitting by the fire in the winter, or beneath a shady tree in the summer.

Although Mildred and Constance often castigated Eustacia for laziness, Lydia had formed an alliance with her, believing her younger sister was, like herself, of an artistic temperament. She encouraged Eustacia to forget her present woes by thinking of the happiness that would be hers in a few years, once she was married and the mistress of her own household. She, after all, had married well: a man who gave her a piano as a birthday present, and paid for private lessons. Their house in town was staffed by a cook, two maids, and a manservant, and there was a boy who came to do the garden twice a week. Lydia’s husband was not rich, but he was, as they said, “comfortable,” as well as being very much in love with his wife. Lydia was not so vulgar as to propose that Eustacia “marry money,” but her husband knew a number of young men who were up and coming in the business world; men who would soon be able to afford a wife. It was to give Eustacia a chance of meeting an appropriate mate that Lydia often invited her to stay and took her out to concerts, soirées, balls, and other social gatherings.

Eustacia went along with Lydia wherever and whenever she was asked, but wasn’t sure she believed marriage was the answer. She was not beautiful; more fatally, she lacked the personal charm that made men dote on Lydia. She might find a husband, but surely not romance. And even if she managed to marry a man who loved her, who was not a farmer, not poor, and not a petty tyrant like her father, her fate might still be that of her mother: to bear ten live children in twelve years, and die of exhaustion. She was not eager to exchange one form of servitude for another.

In the bedroom she had once shared with Lydia and Constance but now had to herself, Eustacia laid a fire in the hearth. The clear, sticky muck on her hands transferred itself to logs and paper but they burned with no apparent ill effect. When the fire was drawing nicely, she undressed and put on her nightgown. By that time she was yawning mightily, and as soon as she had crawled into bed she felt herself slipping deliciously into sleep.

When she woke the next morning her eyes were sticky, the lashes so gummed together that it was a struggle to open them; and it was not only her eyes which were affected. All over her face, her head, her hands, her upper body, she could feel the tight, sticky pull of dried mucus. It was there like spiderwebs, or a welter of snail tracks, criss-crossing her face, looping around her neck, her arms, and dried stiffly in her hair. She felt a myriad cracks open as her face convulsed in disgust. A tortured moan escaped her lips as she scrambled out of bed. The water in the pitcher was icy cold, but for once she didn’t mind, scarcely even noticed, as she splashed it onto hands and face and neck and chest, splashing it everywhere in a panic to get the slimy stuff off. It was not cold but revulsion which made her shiver.

Eustacia was not the excessively sensitive, refined creature contemporary manners held women should be. The daughter of a working farmer could not afford a weak stomach, but Eustacia knew that she was not so fastidious, not so “nice,” as her sisters, and this was a matter of some shame to her. Sometimes it made her angry. It wasn’t fair. Men didn’t have to pretend they were made of porcelain, so why should women? Perfection was unnatural. The body was a messy thing.

But not likethis . This mess was not natural. Thank God, it proved to be easily washed away. Calming now that face and neck and hands were clean, Eustacia poured the last of the water into the bowl and tried to judge if there was enough to wash her hair.

There was a knock at the door and before she could say anything to stop her, Mildred had entered.

“Are you feeling better this morning? Ah!” Her sharp eyes saw something and the hidden worry on her face was transformed in an instant to something else, to understanding. “It’s your sick time, of course.”

“No—” But before she could protest, Eustacia realized what she had been too preoccupied and frightened to notice earlier. She felt the wetness between her legs, twisted around and saw what Mildred had seen: the bloodstain on her gown, the unmistakable badge of her condition.

“But what are you doing up? You’ll only make yourself ill. You want to keep warm. I’ll fetch some clean towels. Now, into bed with you. I’ll tell Pa you’re feeling poorly and won’t be down today. I’ll bring you up some toast and tea, and build up the fire in here. Well? What are you waiting for?”

She made a gesture below her waist. “I … have to clean myself.”

“All right. But be quick about it, don’t be standing about in the cold … you know a woman’s constitution is at its weakest at these times.”

Left alone, Eustacia realized that Mildred had decided there was nothing seriously wrong with her. The strangeness of hands exuding mucus had been redefined as a side effect of menstruation. No matter how odd and unpleasant, because it was happening now, when she was bleeding, it was to be accepted as yet another symptom of the female sickness.

She fashioned a toweling diaper for herself, put on a fresh nightgown, and got into bed. There was blood on the sheets, but it had dried. Why change them now, when she would surely soil them again? With five sisters she had seen how differently Eve’s Curse afflicted different women, even women with the same parents and upbringing. She wondered: could Mildred be right?

But Mildred didn’t know what she knew—that her hands had been cold and damp, sweating this strange substance not for just a day or two, but for more than a week.

A hand went to her head as she remembered. Tentative at first, then, frowning with surprise, she combed her fingers through clean hair: not clotted, not matted, not sticky, not stiff. Clean.

She got up to find the hand-mirror, to let her eyes confirm what her fingers told her. She picked her dress off the chair where she had hung it the previous night and examined the skirt. But although she remembered how often she had wiped her wet, sticky hands there, now she could neither see nor feel any trace of foreign matter. Her pocket handkerchief, too, was clean, although she could remember quite vividly the horrid slimy ball she’d made of it.

All gone now. Gone to nothing. Was it over?

She pressed her fingertips against her cheeks and brushed them against her lips. They felt cold and ever so slightly damp.

So quickly it had become a habit to wipe her hands whenever she felt them becoming wet. Now, half-reclining in bed, propped up on pillows, she decided to do nothing and see what happened.

Her hands rested on top of the blanket at chest-level. She felt a tingling sensation in the fingertips, and then she saw the stuff oozing out in faint, wispy tendrils.

Her skin crawled at the sight, and a horrible thought occurred to her. What if those slimy tendrils were now emerging not only from her fingertips, but all over her body? Those prickling feelings … She gasped for breath and held herself rigidly still, fighting down the urge to leap up and rip off her gown. She would wait and see.

The shining tendrils thickened and grew more solid. They took on the appearance of ghostly fingers. Theywere fingers. They were hands.

She thought of Mr. Elphinstone’s hands, and of the ghostly form which had appeared between them, had appeared to grow out of them. Meanwhile, the hands attached to her hands grew larger still, and then began to elongate, to grow away from her into arms. She stared in wonder. So she could do it, too! Mr. Elphinstone wasn’t so special, after all.

But these hands and arms were not those of a baby. They were much too big for any baby. And there was something unpleasantly familiar about them as they grew into the chest and shoulders of a man. The head was still unformed, but Eustacia suddenly knew who it was.

It was Mr. Elphinstone, of course. He had done this to her. It was his wicked plan to come to her secretly in this nasty, ghost-like manner. In a moment his head would grow out of that neck, his face would form, and eyes would open, and he would look down on her and smile in triumph, his hands closing firmly over hers, his lips …

No. It was impossible. She would not have it. She refused.

Growling incoherently, she rubbed her hands fiercely against the blanket. The half-finished, cloudy likeness of a man still hung in the air, a face beginning to form. Once it had formed, once his eyes had opened and looked down at her, it might be too late. She might never escape his clutches. Feeling sick and furious, concentrating all her mind on denying his power, she swung both hands at it. She had imagined dispersing it, but although its appearance was cloudy, it was not made of smoke. Her hands sank into something horribly cold and slimy. It was thick and soupy, not entirely liquid, but not solid, either; something like clotted milk or half-set cheese, but worse; indescribably worse. It was something that should have been dead but was alive; something that looked alive and yet was dead. And it was cold—she’d never felt such a cold. Not a clean cold like ice or snow. This cold had the quality of a bad smell.

The feel of it made her gag. It made her head swim. But she persisted. Her fingers grasped and tore until she had pulled it to pieces, until she had completely destroyed the unnatural, unwanted effigy.

Then she got out of bed and tottered across the floor on weak legs and threw up in the washbowl. Her head ached fiercely. She rested a moment, and then opened the window. It was a cold and windy day, and she was grateful for that. The wind would rush into the room and sweep out the nasty smells of sickness: the smells of blood, and vomit, and something much worse.

I’ve won, she thought, weary but triumphant.You haven’t got me. I’m free.

Mildred came in and found her leaning on the windowsill, head half out the window, shivering with the cold but still sucking in deep, invigorating breaths of the pure winter air.

“What on earth are you doing? Do you want to catch your death?” Mildred’s hands, firm and controlling, on her arms. Eustacia resisted, refusing to be steered back to bed, afraid of the horrible remains she had left quivering and clotted on the blanket. “I felt sick… .”

“Yes, I see. You must get back into bed, you must keep warm.”

Every muscle, every bone, every ounce of flesh still resisted—until she saw the bed, clean and dry and empty, not a trace of the horror left.

She collapsed with relief and let Mildred tuck her into bed where, utterly exhausted, she fell asleep immediately.

*

When she woke, her hands were warm and dry.

Her body’s only discharge came from between her legs, and that would pass after a few days. She was back to normal. She had won. She made a face at the Mr. Elphinstone in her mind, his image fading fast, and almost laughed out loud. She was happy, with four days ahead of her in which she would not be expected to work at all, time in which she could sleep and dream and read and think. Despite the mess and bother of it, Eustacia never minded her monthly visitor; on the contrary, she was grateful for the regular holiday it brought. She knew she was quite capable of working throughout her sick time, but she certainly wasn’t going to argue with Mildred about it. Mildred thought permanent damage could be done to a woman who overstrained her constitution at such times. And a menstruating woman (not that such a word ever passed her lips) could do harm to others as well: milk would turn and bread not rise in her presence, and the scent of her would drive domestic animals wild. Modesty forbade a woman displaying herself when the curse was upon her, which meant she must keep to herself and the company of women. Eustacia thought Mildred was over-nice in regard to their father—after all, he had been married and shared a bed with his wife for years—but she was happy enough to avoid her brothers, and even more men to whom she was not related. The thought that they might notice something wrong with her was humiliating. She was happy to keep to her room and rest.

It was not until late that evening, after Mildred had taken away her supper dishes and left her an empty chamber pot and a bundle of clean towels, that she felt the tingling in her fingers again. She realized then that they were cold, and, as she tucked them into her armpits to warm them, she felt the dampness.

She stared at her hands and saw the mucus blobs swelling and stretching from her fingertips, elongating and thickening as she watched into fingers—

“No!”

Long fingers, hands, bony wrists—hands she recognized.

“No!”

Denial was of no use. It was in her, and it had to come out. She thought she could feel it seeping out of the flesh beneath her breasts and behind her knees, and there was a tickling sensation on the soles of her feet. She couldn’t keep it in. It had to come out.

Ithad to, buthe didn’t. She stared at the hands and willed them to break off at the wrists. Two disembodied hands floated free, but more of the whitish matter gushed out, forming new hands.

Ectoplasm, Mr. Elphinstone had called it. The stuff produced by the bodies of the living to provide the dead with temporary flesh.

There were his hands, his arms… . But why his? Dead or alive, she had no wish to communicate with him. If she was to provide a habitation for spirits they should at least be shapes of her own choosing.

She thought about her mother. Her mother had had lovely hands, even though roughened by toil: slender fingers, graceful, shapely hands. As she thought of them, creating them in her mind, they were recreated before her. Cloudy, milky shapes, but recognizablynot Mr. Elphinstone’s hands. They were a woman’s hands. Her mother’s hands.

She gazed at them with feelings of awe and accomplishment, unsure whether this was her own work, or if she had her mother’s spirit to thank for routing Mr. Elphinstone. She tried to join arms onto the hands, wanting to see more of her mother, but, as she struggled, she fell asleep.

Her hands stayed dry through the night, but this time she did not expect that condition to last. Indeed, her fingers were dripping like infected sores before midday.

She knew that meant Mr. Elphinstone was trying to get out. She didn’t know exactly why, but she could guess: she had read enough novels. This was not the usual way that men attempted to overpower young women, but that didn’t mean it was any less dangerous. Probably, she thought, he had been planning this from the start, from the very first moment when his damp, chilly flesh had pressed hers. She didn’t know how his ghost could harm her, or even if it could, but she would certainly not give it the chance to try.

During the next four days Eustacia successfully fought off his every attempt to return. She couldn’t stop the ectoplasm, but she could control the forms it took. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it. She came to think of it as a new kind of art, a sort of mental modeling, as if the ectoplasm had been clay, and she was using the fingers of her mind to push and smooth and mold it into the shapes of her choice.

At first, it was her mother she concentrated on, for her mother was the only person who had “passed over” whom Eustacia knew well or had any real desire to see again. But it was difficult, and not really very satisfying. Whole bodies were out of the question, requiring more ectoplasm than her body could produce at one time, so she concentrated either on hands (which were easiest) or on heads. Her mother’s head was never quite right, and the more often she tried to produce it, the harder she found it to recall what her mother had really looked like. She was not limited to the dead, so she also created likenesses of Lydia and Mildred. But even the form of Mildred, whom she saw every day, was not really very like. The faces she made were just as clumsy and unfinished as they might have been if she had been working, untutored, in clay or stone. She knew who they were because she knew what she intended. She was not sure anyone else would have recognized them.

Unsatisfying as it was, it was also the most amazingly tiring work. More exhausting than milking the cows or laundry day. After less than an hour working on another ghost of Lydia, sleep would catch her up, inescapable, and she would slumber heavily for several hours.

Yet the energy spent was worth it. Not only did her efforts ward off Mr. Elphinstone, but they temporarily exhausted her supply of ectoplasm, winning sometimes a whole day of normal life and dry hands.

If she would do that every evening, if she would spend an hour willing ectoplasmic shapes into existence before falling to sleep, Eustacia figured she could keep her peculiar condition secret and under control. But it wasn’t so easy. Perhaps it was laziness—she imagined Mildred would think so—but there were many nights when she was simply too tired to do anything at the end of the day but put herself to bed. She enjoyed playing with the ectoplasm, making faces and hands, but it was hard work all the same. It took reserves of energy she did not always have, especially by the time she was ready for bed.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to share her bed with anyone. She didn’t mind—now that she knew the stuff could be washed off, or, if left, would soon dry to nothing—the morning stickiness of the sheets or the mess on her body. Her hands were not the only source, if they had ever been. Like perspiration, the slime oozed from all the pores of her skin: from her legs, her feet, under her arms, her chest and back, even (and most horribly, because most visible) her face. Afraid that someone might notice, Eustacia took more care, forcing herself to stay awake past her usual bedtime, or waking early, or escaping to the privacy of her room on one pretense or another for long enough to do something with the excess ectoplasm.

But despite her best intentions, her body leaked, and, one suppertime, Mildred noticed. When everyone had left the table, she stopped her sister with a look and said: “You must be more careful.”

“I wiped my hands—and I did wash them before I came to table—”

“It’s not only your hands, now, is it? You’ve left a trail—no, don’t look, I cleaned it up. Father didn’t notice, nor did Conrad, but what if they should? Next time, I think you’d best take supper in your room.”

“What? But why? How can I? Every night? Never eat with the family?”

“Of course not every night. But while you’re—during your—” she nodded her head meaningfully, unable to pronounce the euphemism.

“But it’s not like that. I’m not—”

“Yourface ,” Mildred muttered with a look of revulsion. She made small brushing gestures at her own forehead, and Eustacia became aware of the by-now familiar, chilly, tingling sensation from three different spots along her hairline. Both her handkerchiefs were already saturated, but she raised one, balled in her hand, to her head and wiped away the offensive trickles.

“Go to your room,” Mildred said. “Clean yourself. I’ll tell the others you’re feeling poorly—”

“But I’m not! I’m not feeling poorly. This is something else. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not connected to—tothat —at all. And it’s not like a cold, something that clears up or goes away after a few days… . It’s never gone away at all, not wholly, not since it started. It’s a part of me now. Sometimes I can control it a bit, but I can’t make it stop—I can’t make it go away.” Mildred had never been her favorite sister; indeed, had they not been related, Eustacia was not certain she could have loved her. But that look on her face, even had it been the face of a stranger—a look of horror, of loathing, barely controlled—for that look to have been caused by her—it was unbearable.

Eustacia burst into tears.

“Oh, stop that! Stop that at once. Crying never helps.”

“Why are you so angry?”

“Because you’re being silly.”

“But why do you look at me like that? As if … as if it’smy fault . You can’t blame me—I didn’t make this happen—I never wanted it. If I were bleeding you wouldn’t tell me to stop; you couldn’t expect me just to stop; you’d clean my wound and bind it and perhaps send for the doctor—”

“I shall send for the doctor. Not now, but in the morning. I would have done so sooner if I had realized—but I can’t think there’s any urgency, if this has been going on all month, and you still walking around as if it were nothing… . Now will you go to your room, before you make any more mess? You’re dripping.”

“It’s not my fault.” Her tone was belligerent, but what she wanted was reassurance. Acceptance.

“We don’t choose our afflictions,” Mildred said coldly, looking away. “But we shouldn’t be proud of them.”

Alone in her room, Eustacia wept again. She had been very young when her mother died, and was seldom aware of missing her. But she missed her now. Mildred might have taken Mother’s role as the female head of the family, but Mildred was not her mother. Her real mother would not have been horrified by the changes taking place in Eustacia, no matter what they were. Her real mother now would have embraced and comforted her, wept with her, not kept Mildred’s chilly distance.

A pale, semi-opaque tendril was snaking out of her wrist when a fat teardrop fell, disintegrating it. Saltwater—or maybe it was only tears?—seemed to work more efficiently than plain water. Eustacia was so fascinated by this discovery that she forgot to cry.

After some time, she lit the lamp and sat down to write to Lydia. Downstairs, she suspected, Mildred would be writing a letter to be dispatched to Dr. Purves in the morning. Well, she would send a letter, too, on the same topic but from a different perspective, and to someone who would probably be of more use than a doctor. Lydia, after all, had seen for herself what Mr. Elphinstone could do. Lydia would be in sympathy, and she might know someone who could help. Not Mr. Elphinstone, but there must be other mediums—perhaps even a lady medium? Lydia, with her wide social circle, was bound to know someone who knew someone… . If absolutely necessary, some third party might even approach Mr. Elphinstone in a roundabout way. He must have realized by now that his plan to take control of her had not worked, so perhaps he could be persuaded to lift his curse.

Composing the letter was difficult. When put into words, what had happened to her sounded horrible, and Eustacia didn’t want Lydia thinking that. She didn’t want her favorite sister horrified or revulsed, as Mildred was. She had to choose her words carefully. She couldn’t say too much. She was mysterious. She evoked the spirit of the séance. Lydia must come and see for herself. When she was here, Eustacia would be able to make her understand.

*

Until the doctor arrived, Eustacia was made to keep to her room as if she were contagious. She usually never minded solitude, and was grateful for any excuse to avoid work, but what once would have felt like freedom was now an imposition. She was being punished for something which was not her fault.

Alone in her room, cut off from her family, she concentrated on extruding ectoplasm and forming it into shapes. She created shaky likenesses of Mildred and Lydia. She worked herself to exhaustion and beyond, determined to clear her system of the ghost-matter, to give the doctor, when he came, nothing to find. Let him think he had been called all the way out here for some fantasy of Mildred’s.

But it was no use. Perhaps she had been over-confident about the laws of cause and effect and in believing she had some control over what her body produced and when, for despite her labors, she woke the next morning lying in a puddle of something half liquid, half matter. And when Dr. Purves arrived in the afternoon, mucus dripped from her fingertips, her clothes clung stickily to damp flesh, and she felt trails of drool beside her mouth, on her brow, and beneath her ears.

“Hmmm!” said Dr. Purves, and, “Well, well!” and, “What’s this?” He didn’t look revolted, horrified, or even astonished. There was, on his face, a carefully schooled, non-judgmental look of mild interest. “Feeling a bit hot, are we?”

He thought it was perspiration. “No,” said Eustacia hopelessly.

“Ah, do you mind if I … ?”

She gave him her hand, and felt the surprise he did not allow to register on his face. He looked at her hand, touched the stuff, waited, watching it well up again. “Hmmm. And how long has this been going on?”

She told him. He asked questions and she answered them truthfully. He did not ask her what she thought was happening to her or why, so she did not tell him about Mr. Elphinstone or the matter produced by the bodies of mediums for the use of those who had passed over. She didn’t tell him that she could, with her thoughts, increase the flow and cause it to shape itself into images. Dr. Purves was a man of science; she knew he would not believe her, and she didn’t believe he could help her. Undoubtedly, Mildred hoped the doctor would be able to give a name to Eustacia’s disease and also provide the cure, but she knew otherwise. She knew, now, watching him watch her, that he had never seen the like of this before, and that he didn’t like it.

He asked her to undress. He examined her. He told her he was taking a sample for testing. She watched him scoop a tendril of ectoplasm from her armpit into a small glass bottle and cap it firmly. The piece he had captured was the size of a garden snail without the shell. She watched him put the bottle safely away in his bag. By the time he got home, perhaps even by the time he left this house, that bottle would be empty. Would he come back for more, or would he decide it had never existed, preferring not to know anything that might contradict his rational view of the universe?

While she was dressing, he washed his hands very thoroughly. She wondered if soap and water were a protection, or if she had now infected him. But perhaps the doctor, skeptical of spiritualism, would be protected by science and his own unbelief. She wondered how he would explain it, and what he would do, if his body began leaking ectoplasm.

“Now, you’re not to worry,” he said. “Rest, don’t exert yourself. Keep yourself warm. And clean. Wash and, er, change your sheets as often as you feel the need.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong. You mustn’t think that. Didn’t I say you weren’t to worry? Just keep warm and rest and you’ll soon be as right as rain. I’ll have a word with your sister before I go, about your diet. I’ll tell her everything she needs to know.” He made his escape before she could ask again.

She slumped back in her bed with a grim smile. She hadn’t expected an intelligent reply. She knew he didn’t know what was wrong with her, and no amount of thinking, no amount of study, no amount of second opinions from his learned colleagues, would change that. Even if he locked her up in a hospital somewhere and watched her day and night, he’d be none the wiser, because what had happened to her belonged to another realm, not of scientific medicine, but of mysticism.

She could suddenly see herself in a hospital somewhere, locked in an underfurnished room in a building where lunatics screamed and raged, watched by men in white coats through a hole in the door, and she went cold with dread. She burrowed under the sheets and pulled the blankets up to her nose with hands that were cold but, for once, miraculously dry. That must not happen—surely Mildred wouldn’t let that happen to her? But of course Mildred didn’t understand, and she might well trust a doctor who promised a cure. She wished the doctor had never come. She knew he would never cure her, no matter what he tried, and she did not want to be studied by him. If he decided she was an interesting case … Eustacia clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. She wouldn’t let it happen. Mildred wouldn’t let it happen. Lydia wouldn’t let it happen. Lydia was coming soon. Lydia would understand; Lydia would save her.

*

Lydia arrived four days later. Sitting in her chair by the window, well wrapped in shawls and blankets, with nothing to do but watch and wait, Eustacia thought she’d never been so glad to see another person. It was life Lydia brought into her room—the sickroom, her prison—life and a taste of the world she had grown hungry for.

“Whatever is the matter with Mildred?” Lydia asked as she swept in. “A face as long as a wet Sunday when she said you were poorly but—oh!” The cheerful prattle ended, the exclamation shocked out of her, when, as she bent to kiss her sister, her lips encountered not the familiar warm, soft texture of her check, but flesh slippery with a chill and slimy coating.

“I’m not ill,” Eustacia said looking urgently into her sister’s eyes. To her relief, she saw neither horror nor disgust reflected there, only a puzzled concern. “No matter what Mildred thinks, or the doctor. It is odd, though … hard to understand … hard to write about in a letter. That’s why I wanted to see you. I wanted you to see me. Because I am all right … I am stillme .

“Of course you are! Still my own dear sister. Is this some new ploy to escape doing chores? Or is that what Mildred thinks? I had thought, from the way she spoke, that it was your time.”

She shook her head. “Do sit down, Lydia. I’ll have to show you.” She was excited and scared. There was a tingling inside, a nervous reaction to match the purely physical, localized tingle in her hands. The feeling of something that had to come out. And, now, a new excitement because there was meaning and new purpose to what she was about to do. For the first time she had an audience. Was she good enough for her audience? Lydia’s response was all-important.

“You remember … Mr. Elphinstone?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And what he did that evening, and what he showed us? The ectoplasm? He did something else that same evening, to me. When he touched me. I don’t understand how or why, but he gave it to me somehow.” She paused, aware of gathering her power, of concentrating it all in her hands, which she held now before her, just above her lap. Lydia said nothing, and there was nothing in her look but waiting and wonder.

“Watch,” said Eustacia, and stared at her own hands as the thick, wavering white steam poured out of them, her fingers become fountains. Ten separate streams merged and grew into one almost-solid form: head, neck, shoulders, chest … until it was a baby floating there, its features somewhat vague and undefined but still and undeniably a baby.There.

Eustacia felt a little dizzy, and had the familiar sensation of having been drained. But she also felt triumphant, and as she looked up from her creation she was smiling happily. “There—see? It’s your baby.”

Lydia’s face had gone an unhealthy yellowish color. She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said, sounding tortured. “That’s not my baby—it’s not!” She clapped her hands to her mouth, retching, and staggered to her feet, knocking the chair over with the heavy sideways sweep of her skirts. She managed to get to the basin before she threw up.

Eustacia closed her eyes, but the noise and smell made her stomach churn in terrible sympathy. She kept her gorge down with great effort. “I’m sorry,” she said, when Lydia’s crisis seemed to have passed. “I know it must be a shock to see your baby—”

“No! That’s not my baby! How can you?”

Eustacia struggled to rise, reaching for her sister.

Lydia shrieked. “Don’t touch me! You monster!”

“But—but you were so happy when Mr. Elphinstone did it—this is the same—don’t you see? I can do the same thing—”

“It’s not the same! It’s not the same!” Lydia glared at her, and this look was much worse than the look Mildred had given her, for there was not merely horror in it, but hate. “How could you … what are you trying to do, make me miscarry?”

Eustacia’s mouth hung open. “I didn’t know… .”

“Monster! Monster!”

The door opened then—Mildred, attracted by the noise. Weeping, Lydia rushed to the safety of her older sister’s embrace. They went out of the room together and the door closed, shutting Eustacia in alone with the thing she had made.

She looked at her creation, the baby bobbing and floating in the air like something unborn. Like something dead. But it had never been alive. It wasn’t real, not a real baby. But neither was the thing Mr. Elphinstone had made, although, in the dim and flickering firelight, it had seemed real enough to eyes that wanted it to be. She understood that the situation was different here and now. But she hadn’t meant any harm. She thought of getting up and going downstairs, going after Lydia and explaining, making her understand. But she had not the energy for it. It was impossible. She could scarcely even think. All she could do was fall back in her chair and fall asleep.

When she woke, with a throbbing head competing for attention against a painfully empty stomach, it was much later in the day and the room was thick with shadows. The baby had vanished back into the nothing from which it had been conjured. She rose from her chair and stretched aching muscles, feeling as if she had become an old woman while she slept. Certainly she felt like a different person from the hopeful girl who had waited impatiently for her sister that morning. She hoped that the passing of the hours had calmed Lydia. Maybe she would be ready to listen now, and surely if she listened she would understand. She still felt Lydia was the one person in the world whocould understand.

But when she reached the door she could not open it. She thought at first it was her own weakness, and continued twisting the handle to no avail. Her wits were still so slow after her sleep that it took her some time to realize that the door to her room had been locked from the outside.

They had locked her in.

It had to be a mistake. She went back to her chair, turned it so she could look out the window, and sat down. She did not want to find out that it had not been a mistake, so she would not pound on the door and make demands that could be refused. Mildred would come up and unlock it later. It must have been locked on account of Lydia’s fright. Once she was allowed to explain there would be no more need for locked doors.

By the time Mildred came up with her dinner on a tray Eustacia was almost ready to weep with hunger and worry.

“Mildred, I have to see Lydia, I have to explain—”

“She’s gone home.”

“I didn’t mean to upset her; I have to tell her—”

“Oh, I know. It’s not your fault.” A sneer was not Mildred’s usual expression. She would not meet her sister’s eye as she spoke.

“It’snot my fault—I can’t help it—I didn’t mean it—oh, please—”

“Iknow. You’re ill.” She snorted. “I saw the doctor. I rode with Lydia into town, and I had a consultation with him. Do you know what he said? There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Not physically. He says it’s all in your head. You know what I say? I say it’s evil. Not sickness—evil. Not in your head, but your heart. Evil in your heart. And thatis your fault. You’d better admit it, missy. And pray to God to take it away. There’s your dinner.”

“Please!”

But Mildred was already out of the room without a backward look. And then came the sound of the key turning in the lock.

Eustacia ate her dinner. What else was there to do? After she had eaten she could think more clearly, but the thoughts were not pleasant ones. It was obvious Lydia would be of no help; she had been too badly frightened. If only she had been more cautious … if only she had led Lydia on a bit more carefully… . She thought of Mr. Elphinstone’s pompous speech; the way he had elicited responses from his audience; the extinguishing of the lamps. By firelight, my baby would have looked more real, she thought. But it was too late to think of that now. Lydia would not help her. The doctor had, literally, washed his hands of her, declaring her either a fake or mad. And Mildred was of no use, either, having decided she was bad. Worse than that, Mildred was her jailor, and represented her whole family.

Who was there who could help her?

She remembered the cold, damp touch of Mr. Elphinstone’s hands, and the way his eyes had pierced into hers. He had marked her then, that evening; he had made her his, although she had tried to deny it. To give in now, to go to him despite her revulsion … she would be trading one sort of imprisonment for another. But at least it would be different. Not the life she would have chosen freely, but still a life. And she would learn to use her talent: it wouldbe a talent then, and not a loathsome illness.

But how could she go to him when she couldn’t leave this room? She might write a letter, but anything she sent out would have to go through Mildred. She imagined Mildred reading it and throwing it on the fire. And even if she managed to by-pass Mildred she realized with despair that she had no address for Mr. Elphinstone.

Hopeless.

There was a tingling in her fingertips.

No, not hopeless.

She remembered how the form of Mr. Elphinstone had first emerged from her body—the struggle, and how terrified she had been. He was still there, still waiting to come out. She no longer feared him, at least not in the same way. There were other, greater fears. She was ready now to welcome him and his plans for her.

She put out her hands and let the solid smoky stuff stream out; watched as it formed into fingers touching her own at the tips. A man’s fingers, a man’s large hands, bony wrists lengthening into skinny arms, naked shoulders and naked chest. She was trembling now and starting to feel faint, but she held her hands as steady as she could and let it go on happening, thinking all the while of Mr. Elphinstone, remembering him as he had been, and as he was. Now the neck and head. The shifting clouds of his face roiled and finally solidified into bearded chin and mouth, long thin nose, high brow, and the eyes—the eyes were closed.

She stared and waited for them to open; waited to have those blazing orbs fixed on her, and see the lips move, and hear him speak. He was finished now, at least, as much of him as she could make. She could do no more. It was up to him to take over. But Mr. Elphinstone looked dead, like the baby, hanging motionless in the air.

Lydia had said that at most seances when ghosts appeared they spoke, answering questions and making cryptic remarks. Her baby of course had been too young.

“Talk to me,” said Eustacia. “Tell me what to do.”

Her breath disturbed the figure, making it bob slightly. A bit of one arm disintegrated, leaving a hole the size of a baby’s fist just above the right elbow. She cried out again, and her fingers closed on cold, dead matter. When she pulled away, sickened, she saw she had destroyed parts of both lower arms, and the hands floated free, detached from the arms. One of the hands floated up toward the ceiling, becoming more insubstantial as it rose.

Mr. Elphinstone could not speak to her, for Mr. Elphinstone was not here. She had created something that looked like Mr. Elphinstone—or like her memory of Mr. Elphinstone—and that was all. It did not live. It never had and never would. It was inhabited by no ghosts. There were no ghosts. She could not blame Mr. Elphinstone for that, nor for the fact that he could neither enslave nor save her.

She was alone in her room as she watched her dream disintegrate. She was alone with her disease, her curse, her madness—her strange, useless talent.

From Another Country

That summer Alida became aware of death in much the same way she had been aware of sex in her teens: it was everywhere around her, experienced by others; it was inevitable and terrifying and she could not stop thinking about it.

She was a woman of thirty years, unmarried, childless. She had never lost anyone close to her. And in that summer the doctors found an inoperable, malignant tumor in her father’s brain.

Sitting with her father, Alida longed to ask him about the experience of dying, but she could not, any more than she had ever been able to ask him, when she was younger, about sex. There were certain mysteries parents would never reveal to their children. Even to ask him about pain seemed disrespectful. She saw him every weekend, and usually one evening during the week as well, and when she visited she tried to be cheerful and ordinary, and to anticipate his needs, giving him the pills before he asked for them. They said little to each other. Their closest moments, then as always, were in watching television, sharing the same vicarious experience, her laugh echoing his.

And then she saw death, before her very eyes.

She was in Holborn underground station, waiting for a train after a weary day at work. The platform was hot and crowded, and Alida stared at a particular man simply because he happened to be in her line of sight.

Her thoughts were on other things—her father, a new pair of shoes, an argument at work—but she absorbed the fact that this dark-haired, dark-skinned man in early middle-age was wearing a suit which looked too heavy for the weather, and was fanning himself erratically with a foldedFinancial Times .

She saw him hit himself in the face with the paper as he dropped it, and, as the paper fell, he fell too, heavily and clumsily, his arms and legs jerking stiffly, out of control. He was probably dead by the time he hit the ground. Alida didn’t need a doctor’s pronouncement to confirm her impression: she seemed to know it instinctively, with the same certainty that she knew she was alive.

Although he was a stranger, his death made a powerful impression on her. That night she couldn’t fall asleep: she kept seeing his death, as if the darkness of her room was a screen for the film of her memories. She noticed new details—the pattern on his tie, the scuff marks on his shoes—and saw all the other individuals who made up the crowd in which he died. There was a girl in a pink dress and white cloth boots readingThe Clan of the Cave Bear ; two dirty, spiky-haired teenagers in black leather holding hands; a cluster of American women talking loudly aboutCats ; a man with one gold earring; a couple of sober, dark-suited businessmen, one of whom carried a bright blue plastic briefcase; an Oriental woman with two doll-like children; a man in black—

A man in black who had not been there before, and was no longer there after, the death.

Alida sat up in bed, struggling to breathe, closing her eyes the better to see.

A man in black.

Close to the man who had died. She saw his hand come out; he had touched the man who died. When? Before or after the paper fell? Could it have been coincidence? Just a man in a black suit among so many others in gray or blue or brown—

Except that she couldn’t see his face, as she could see the faces of all the others. And after the death, he was gone. Gone utterly, as if he had never been.

No matter how she struggled, she could not see his face, nor where he went after the death. When at last, near morning, she slept, it was to dream about the man in black, standing in the crowded underground station, watching her, watching her father fall before her and die.

The following week, Alida decided to alter her usual habit of visiting her parents on Saturday, and instead went to see some friends who were fixing up an old house in Stoke Newington.

It was a warm, sunny day, and as she stepped off the bus at the request stop on Newington Church Street, Alida noticed how many people were out: clumps of drably dressed teenagers lounging against the buildings; women in brilliant saris flowing along like the personification of summer; geriatric couples moving at a snail’s pace; young mothers trying to keep their children close at hand. The street rose and curved, and the pavements were narrow. As Alida dodged and moved along, she occasionally was forced off the curb into the road, which made her nervous, for the traffic moved swiftly, and the drivers, as they rounded the curve, did not slow down or seem aware of the need for special care.

Ten yards ahead, by the tobacconist’s shop before the bend in the road, a golden retriever was lying on the pavement, and a woman with a baby in a pushchair had paused to talk to two young men, creating a bottleneck which might be dangerous if some impatient pedestrian stepped off the curb into the road at the wrong moment. But it wasn’t the awareness of possible danger which made Alida feel suddenly cold, made her clench her teeth and walk more quickly as she rubbed bare arms prickling with gooseflesh; it was the sight of the man in black waiting just beyond the woman, baby, men, and dog.

She didn’t for a moment believe she was mistaken, that he might have been some other man in an ordinary black suit, because it was by some sense other than sight that she recognized him. In fact, from this distance she could not even see his face which was somehow—mysteriously, in the open air and bright sunlight—in shadow.

She began to walk even more quickly, almost running, in her determination to reach him before he could disappear—determined to see his face and find him ordinary.

Beside her, below her line of sight, someone else was moving: a child. And she heard a woman’s voice, sharp but tired, calling behind her: “Gavin!”

Alida realized that she was going to have to jog down into the street for a moment: either that or trip over the dog, or risk losing sight of her quarry as she pushed past the people in her way. The risk of the traffic seemed preferable.

Something brushed past her hip: still thinking of the dog, she glanced down and saw a red-haired child, perhaps three years old, running past and giggling. From behind, sounding more despairing, the woman’s voice again: “Gav-in!”

The man in black stepped forward, now, like the child, actually standing in the street. His arms were outstretched, and he bent his knees, lowering himself, reaching for the child who, seemingly unaware, was running directly toward him.

Alida was staring straight at the man in black now, and still she could not see his face. There was a glare of sunlight reflecting off the windows of an approaching car, and it dazzled her.

Later, she went over and over it in her mind, trying to figure out why she had done what she did.

She had known, on the instant of seeing the man in black stretching out his arms, that the child was doomed. Young Gavin was obviously about to die—probably to be hit by a car rounding the bend.

It would have been a normal response, not even heroic, to have grabbed the child, to have scooped him into her arms and pulled him back to safety and to the gratitude of his mother. It would have been the act of a moment, the obvious thing to do, to have thrown herself at the child. But she had not.

Instead, against all reason, Alida had flung herself at the man in black, had thrown herself into his waiting, outstretched arms, and taken the embrace that was meant for the child.

The next thing she knew was pain. A blinding agony that lanced all through her, stretched her joints out of socket and broke every bone, took even her scream and shattered it inside her agonized eardrums. She was ripped apart and thrown back together into a shuddering, wracked heap that knew not even its own name.

“Are you all right, love?”

Opening her eyes was like ripping skin off a barely healed wound; her throat was too raw for a moan. Alida realized that she was alive. She was standing on Newington Church Street, her back against a wall, and before her was a little white-haired lady—hair-net protecting her fresh perm, blue dress buttoned up to the neck, handbag square and glossy as the Queen’s—gazing at her with concern.

Alida looked down at herself and saw that she was whole, with no signs of blood or bruising, even her clothes—flowered print skirt and sleeveless pullover—undisturbed.

“What happened?” she asked, and clenched her teeth and rocked against the wall as an aftershock of pain ripped through her.

“I don’t know my love, I’m sure. I happened to notice you, and you were backing up to the wall as if you couldn’t stand properly on your own, and you had a look on your face … it was the look that worried me… .”

“Not … a car didn’t hit me?” Alida looked out at the road, past the woman’s emphatic negative, to where the multi-colored traffic glittered in the sun and surged ceaselessly past.

She saw the yellow dog panting in the sunlight, still blocking the door to the tobacconist’s shop, although the two young men and the woman with the pushchair had moved on out of sight. She forced herself away from the wall, far enough to look around the bend, and was rewarded by the sight of Gavin’s red curls. The little boy’s hand was firmly in his mother’s grip as they walked away.

As for the man in black—

The pain that was her memory of him was so sudden and sharp that she bit her tongue, finding the taste of blood a relief.

“I’ll be all right,” she said to the woman who was still worrying about her. “It’s over now.”

“Maybe it was the heat,” said the old woman. “I’d see a doctor, though, just to make sure. It might be your heart, and you can’t be too careful.”

But Alida knew it wasn’t the heat, and it wasn’t her heart. It was death, and she had survived it.

She walked on, moving slowly, for the intensity of the experience had left her feeling almost boneless. As she came to the old churchyard she went in and sank onto a low stone bench to rest. She couldn’t face her friends just yet: they would know by looking at her that something had happened, and she didn’t know how she could explain it to them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell anyone, for she expected disbelief, and she did not want to be made to doubt her own experience.

She had seen Death. She had felt it, gone through, and survived.

Despite the warmth of the day, Alida shivered. The agony was still there, on the edge of her consciousness, dangerous even to think about. And yet—she had come through. Death, like pain, was comprehensible; it had a place in the world like that other mystery, sex. And, like sex, it was both simpler and more momentous than she had imagined in her innocence.

She felt almost pleased with herself, with her new maturity. After a few more moments of reflection she was able to stand up, smooth down her skirt, and go to see her friends as if she was the same person they had always known.

She thought that was the end of it. She had satisfied her curiosity and cured her obsession; she had come to terms with her own mortality and that of others and need no longer dream of death.

But Death had not finished with her. On the bus that evening, going home, she saw the man in black perched on a seat beside a frail old woman. His face was turned away to the window, as if he was watching the passing scene. Later, she saw him huddled in a doorway between two shabby tramps with a bottle of wine, and another day he leaned solicitously over a baby in a pram, and dogged the footsteps of a heavy-set young man. Death was everywhere, and no matter how she tried, Alida could not blind herself to his dark presence. Even when she did not see the man in black she sensed him near.

She was sitting at her father’s bedside, knitting a sweater while he slept fitfully, when a chill premonition of pain made her look up.

Death came in sideways, his face turned away from her. He crept in like a crab, presenting the smooth black cloth on his back, his face against the pale green wallpaper as if he expected to merge with it unnoticed.

The tenor of her father’s breathing changed, becoming rasping and shallow, and Alida opened her mouth to call her mother, but no sound emerged. The ball of wool rolled under the bed as she lurched to her feet, and she found her legs too weak to carry her to safety, weak with that remembered, crippling pain. She stared at the intruder as he sidled along the wall, aware that in another moment he would reach the headboard, and then he would be able to lean down to touch her father.

There was no conscious decision. She was thinking of escape, of the pain she could not bear to experience again, and not of self-sacrifice. But she could not stand by and watch her father suffer. It was almost an instinctive, physical response, to push Death away—

So she flung herself across the bed, threw herself for the second time into Death’s outstretched arms, taking the embrace meant for someone else. And embrace him she did, rather than push him away; clutched him tight as if he were a long-lost lover.

His whole body was charged. As she embraced him, she felt her flesh sear wherever his touched it. It was as if a powerful electric current ran from him to her, melding their two beings into one. She felt him imprinted upon her surface, and then etching deeper. She felt the flesh melting from her bones, dripping off like hot fat, sizzling. She felt his arms binding her like chains heated white-hot, searing through her arms, her ribs, reaching her interior where her heart burst into flame.

Yet she was still alive. Alida realized she had emerged from the other side of pain, and did not understand how, when her flesh had been melted away and her bones gone to ash, mere consciousness could have survived. She became aware of her aching body, which lay across the foot of her father’s bed. She felt it begin to heal, felt her blood cool and flow again, felt her bones reconstitute themselves, felt her raw, liquid flesh solidify, and at last she raised herself up, looking timidly around the room.

There was no sign of the man in black. As for her father, he was sleeping peacefully, breathing regularly, and looked better than he had for days. The terrifying translucent quality she had noticed about his face was gone, leaving him her familiar, living father. She had taken his death, she thought, and they had both survived. She closed her eyes on tears of joy.

As the days passed, Alida’s father grew stronger. He began to eat more, and no longer complained of pain. The doctors were wary of offering hope, and seemed to view the idea of total remission as skeptically as they would the miracle Alida knew had occurred. But she knew the truth. She had won him back from death. The immediate danger had passed, and now he would live to be an old man.

Alida’s pleasure in this was complicated by what it told her about herself, and she withdrew from family and friends to brood on it.

She had saved her father, as well as a stranger’s child, from death, and she did not doubt that she had the power to do the same thing for others. It was an awesome responsibility, a godlike role she had not asked for and did not want. Was she meant to be a new savior, meant to suffer and die a thousand times to redeem the lives of others? Was she to give up any life of her own and travel around the country foiling Death on highways and in hospitals? Yet even if she had wanted that, Alida knew she could not conquer Death. She could only save a few out of the millions he marked each year for his own, and that was as it should be. She would gladly suffer again if need be to save her mother, or a friend, or some innocent child, but why should she help the very old, or the wicked, to evade their rightful deaths?

Alida decided to trust to chance and her own instincts. She would not go in search of Death, but she would use her ability when she felt she must.

In the days and the weeks that followed this decision, Alida continued to catch glimpses of the man in black, but never more than that: a sighting across a crowded street or in a passing car, or a premonitory shudder as a stranger brushed past. She thought she should have been happy in her freedom: she wasn’t being forced to make a decision; she didn’t have to die again. But she was restless and on edge, sleeping badly, skipping meals, always waiting for and wondering about the next death.

She began dreaming of death again, but this time it was not the loss or recovery of loved ones that she lived through in her sleep; now she dreamed of the man in black. Now when she slept she found herself pushing impatiently through the darkness, pulling at his arm, pressing herself against him, struggling to see his face. In her dreams pain was transformed to pleasure, and instead of fearing the agony, she longed for his embrace. Gradually this longing crept into her waking hours and she had to recognize that the lives she might save did not matter to her. All she wanted was Death.

But Death, it seemed, did not want her. Although she had felt earlier that it was her obsession with death which had drawn the man in black to her, and made it possible for her to see him when others did not, her desire no longer worked such magic. She thought perhaps it was having the opposite effect, that her very eagerness might be foiling her: death might see her not as a lover but as a threat, a dangerous rival who stole his chosen victims.

She began to haunt the casualty wards of hospitals, but although she often sensed the presence of Death, she was never able to draw close enough to touch. She stopped going to work, preferring to roam the streets at all hours of the day and night, yet no matter how often she saw that familiar black suit, it would vanish as soon as she attempted to follow. She read about deaths in the papers and heard of them on the news: starvation in Africa, a car bomb in Ireland, a machine-gun maniac in Los Angeles, and all the obituaries, all the private little deaths which took place out of her presence, beyond her reach. So many died, so many who did not have to. Why wasn’t she allowed to intervene? Why couldn’t she find someone who was about to die? Only her dreams gave her any relief, and they were few and far between as she found it harder and harder to sleep.

Alida did not realize quite how desperate her mood had become until one morning in the bathroom she found herself staring at the blood welling from a cut on her finger—a cut she’d made in a futile, half-conscious attempt to extract the blade from a disposable plastic razor.

The pain scarcely registered, but the sight of the bright red blood recalled her to herself, and she stared at the mirror, seeing for the first time how pale and haggard and thin she had become. How near death she looked.

And her eyes shifted from her own face to look beyond. She couldn’t even hold her own gaze; she was always looking for the man in black, always trying to see that still unseen, unknown face. Everything she did was an attempt to call him back to here but she knew she must not take her own life unless she really was giving up. Because she didn’t want to die—she wanted Death, and to survive death, again and again.

Twice before she had managed it—how hard could it be to find someone else who was about to die? Alida did not realize she’d made up her mind to attempt murder until she actually had her victim in range, directly in front of her and too close to the edge of the station platform, a hot wind presaging the arrival of a train. Alida had taken one step forward, and brought her hands up to push, when from the corner of one eye, amid the crowds, she saw the unmistakable black suit drawing near.

Horror froze her, as she understood what she had meant to do. Death vanished. She could not act. Around her, people pushed and shoved and clambered into the train, leaving her behind, alone with herself and her desire.

No, not desire: she had to recognize now that it had taken on the force of an addiction. It was a need which had set her at odds with herself, which had taken over her life, her mind, and her will.

But not entirely. She could still think, and she could refuse to give in. She would change. She had to.

Trembling but determined, Alida rose out of the underground onto the gray city street, thinking of how she would forget her two deaths and concentrate on living. She was too much alone, she decided; she needed to spend more time with her friends, and to find a lover.

She imagined a man in her arms again, in the warm privacy of her bed, wrapping her legs around him and pressing her mouth to his, holding him close, forcing him to be still, feeling his poor, feeble attempts to get away, feeling the power tear through him, ripping him out of life—

It took an act of considerable will to stop that chain of thoughts, and Alida could do nothing about the fact that her heart was pounding and her breath coming in short gasps of excitement—or was it fear? Alida didn’t know what to think. She had become a stranger to herself. She didn’t dare to think about what she wanted. It was as if she contained two people, and the desires of each one were incomprehensible, and dangerous, to the other.

She went on walking because it was the easiest thing to do, and because it seemed safe. It might even do some good, she thought, to walk until her mind was emptied by exhaustion. She was scarcely aware of where she went, or of the passage of time. She crossed the Thames and continued traveling southward, moving at a steady pace, untiring. She had no destination in mind, but gradually she realized that she would soon be in her parents’ neighborhood. The light was failing—it would be dinnertime, and her mother always made more than enough. She was not hungry, but Alida snatched at the idea of a meal with her parents as at an anchor to normality. They would be pleased to see her, and for a little while she might seem to be her old self again.

Her parents lived on a quiet side-road, in one of a row of large but slightly shabby terraced houses. Turning the corner, Alida at once made out the familiar figure of her father. No longer restricted to his bed, he was standing now and very slowly, carefully sweeping the dead leaves from the crazy-paving which he had laid down in place of the front garden the summer that Alida was fourteen.

She felt an overpowering rush of love at the sight of him. It seemed that in that one moment, as she saw him moving slowly in the twilight, that she recalled all that he had been to her through thirty years, the whole sound and sight and feel and smell and meaning of him in her life. She began to walk more quickly, wondering if the sound of her heels clicking against the pavement would make him turn, anticipating the slow, pleased smile that would spread across his worn face at the sight of her, savoring his surprise.

Then something other than daughterly affection made her heart beat faster as she glimpsed something—someone—beyond her father, behind him, half-hidden by the shadow of the arched entrance to the front door. The man in the black suit.

There could be no doubt. His utter stillness sent a chill through her. And then, almost as if he were signaling his contempt for her, a black-suited, pale-fingered arm was outstretched. It fell just short of her father’s stooping shoulders, but if he moved so much as a step back those fingers would touch him. And there was nothing Alida could do about it. She could not reach Death first, as she had done before. This time, her father stood between her and Death.

Her only hope was to make her father come forward, out of Death’s reach, toward her. If she could warn him in time, call him to her—

She screamed, calling him by the infantile name she’d ceased using years before, two syllables he had not heard for fifteen years. Perhaps he didn’t understand; perhaps he only recognized the terror and the longing in a woman’s scream.

The sound made him turn to look, and Alida came running, moving toward him faster than she had ever moved in her life. She saw the expression on his face change, and with part of her mind she wondered what he saw to make him look so terrified. Whatever it was, it made him step backward, almost stumbling away from her.

Backward, within easy reach—and yet the man in black did not take him. As she knocked open the little iron gate and flung herself forward, Alida did not even wonder why.

Then her arms were around her father and she was holding him tight, feeling him die.

This death was not like the other two, the ones she had received second-hand, charged and painful from the hands of the man in black. For this death was hers, and she gave it.

She felt his bones shatter like glass beneath the pressure of her arms, and when she put her lips to his it was to suck out his last, shuddering breath. She lanced his soul and let out the life, and pumped his body full of death, and then she let it fall.

No pain, this time, but only an exquisite relief, a rich, heady pleasure. She stood, breathing hard, watching the shadowed entranceway, waiting for the man in black to come out.

When he did, when he stepped into the failing light and showed himself to her, she saw that he had the ordinary face of a stranger. He was a mortal man once again, having passed the burden, or the gift, of death to Alida.

She reached out with long, cool fingers to caress the human face before her. She closed his eyes and gave him the rest he had been longing for. Letting his body fall beside that of the man who had once been Alida’s father, Death vanished about her business.

The Walled Garden

When I was five years old I saw the future. My future. After that, I was unable just to wait and let it happen. I had to go looking for it.

My sister Jean is three years older than me. As children we shared a room and had the same bedtime. I can remember her complaints about being treated like a baby—like me—and put to bed while it was still light. A docile child myself, I would sleep whenever I was told, but Jean, grumbling and protesting, kept me awake as long as she could, for company. She talked to me, and she told me stories. She loved making up stories; she loved things that had not happened. She pulled me along to explore the land of What-if: what if we moved to a different house, or what if we came home from school one day and there was no one here? What if all the grown-ups disappeared? What if people came from another planet and took us away in their flying saucer? When I was very young, it’s true, she confused me with her questions and her stories, so that sometimes I lost track of what was real and what only imagined. She made me want a life that didn’t exist; she made me cry for the loss of things I’d never known.

One summer night when I was five and Jean was eight, as I remember, she was particularly restless. Outside, it was still as light as day, a fact the thin curtains drawn across the windows couldn’t disguise. I lay there in my little bed, twin to hers, patiently waiting for Jean to begin one of her stories, when all at once my sister sat bolt upright.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s not time for bed; it’s not. Everybody else is still out. I’ll bet you the Kellermans are still playing Fox-and-Hounds. Let’s go out.”

“We’re in our pajamas,” I said.

“So? In China people wear their pajamas all the time; that’s the only kind of clothes they have. Anyway, you’ve been out in your pajamas before.”

“They won’t let us.”

“They won’tknow ,” she said. “We’re going to escape.” She suddenly leaped up and onto my bed. I squealed, pulling in my legs to protect my stomach, but Jean had no intention of tickling me. She’d only come onto my bed to open the window. I watched, thrilled and baffled. Warm air and the scent of freshly cut grass slipped into the room.

“What are you going todo ?”

“I told you. Escape. I’m going exploring. Do you want to come, or are you going to stay here like a baby and sleep?”

Jean and I lived with our parents in a three-bedroom, one-story house in Beverly Oaks, a suburban subdivision of Houston. It was a desirable, middle-class neighborhood, which had been built soon after the war. The houses—all single-family dwellings!—had attached two-car garages and well-kept lawns and gardens. I had lived there all my life, apart from three days in a downtown hospital when I was born. I knew nothing else. But Jean had spent her first two and a half years in a mysterious place called “the country” on the farm where our grandmother had lived. Grandmother had died, and the farm had been sold, before I was born. I envied Jean that other life I could never know, and I believed she explored the tame suburban streets around us in search of some secret way back to the country. I thought she might find it, too, and I wanted to be with her when she did.

Perched on the windowsill, Jean looked at me, still snug in my bed. She said, “Maybe you’d better not come. It could be dangerous. If somebody saw us—if you weren’t careful enough—if you didn’t run fast enough—”

I sat up. “I will!”

She shook her head.

“Oh, please!” I said. My sleepiness, my fears, my doubts were forgotten; all in the world I wanted was to follow my big sister. Whatever she wanted, I wanted, too.

“You’ll have to doexactly what I say.”

“Yes, yes!”

“All right, then. Come on. And keepquiet .”

Out the window and onto the grass, cool on my bare feet. Jean gripped my shoulder and her voice buzzed in my ear: “Through the Mishners’. If they see us, act normal. Don’t rush, but don’t stop. Just wave at them and keep on walking.”

The Mishners didn’t have a fence, so walking through their back yard was the quickest way to get to the alley: it was a shortcut we often took, but with the risk of being captured, for they were an elderly couple always on the lookout for someone, anyone, to interrupt their boredom.

But that evening, fortunately, they were not in sight, and we passed through in safety.

I watched Jean admiringly as I struggled to keep up with her. She was the great explorer, alert to everything, sniffing the air and looking around at familiar fences, gardens, and backs of houses we passed.

When we emerged from the alley onto Warburton Drive, Jean turned left without hesitation. This way would lead us to the bigger houses, the more expensive part of the subdivision. There were a couple of houses over there with swimming pools, and one was known as “the house with the bomb shelter.” Jean had told me stories, too, and I remembered one about a fabulous playhouse, full of wonderful toys, built by a wealthy couple for grandchildren who visited them only once a year. If we could find it, we could play there undisturbed.

I grabbed Jean’s arm. “Are we going to look for the playhouse?”

“What playhouse? What are you talking about? Don’t you know where we are?”

Her tone of voice informed me that we were in the middle of an adventure. I shook my head meekly. “I forgot.”

“We’re in China. We’ve just crossed the Gobi Desert. Everyone else on the expedition died—we’re the only survivors. Now we’re looking for the Forbidden City. No Westerners have ever been allowed to enter it and live, so we shall be the first—unless they catch us—”

At that moment, rounding a bend in the road, three boys on bicycles came into view.

“The Royal Guards!” said Jean. “If they see us, we’re dead! We have to split up—you go that way—meet me at the river later if you manage to lose them!”

She was off. I felt panic at being left alone and would have disobeyed her orders and followed, but she could run so much faster than me that she was already out of sight. Meanwhile, the enemy was gaining on me. I turned and ran toward the nearest house, ducking behind a bush for shelter. My heart thudded painfully as I watched the boys cycle past—for a moment I had forgotten that they were only children and believed they would kill me, as Jean had said. When they had gone, I emerged. Now what?

Meet me at the river, she had said, but where was the river? Like the rest of the territory, rivers were defined according to a map that only Jean could read. A river might be a swift rush of water in the gutter (but the day was dry), or a dip in a lawn, or even a street we would have to pretend to swim across. I decided to start walking in the direction I had seen Jean run and hope that she would come back and find me.

I traveled as Jean would have wanted, as if she were watching me, moving cautiously to avoid being seen, ducking behind bushes and cars, favoring alleys over streets. Gradually I left the familiar landscape behind. The houses were bigger here; the trees shading them were older and larger than those on my street. Golden lights shone from windows. The air was blue with the deepening dusk, and I began to feel afraid. I kept walking, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I wondered if every step was taking me farther from Jean and safety and home.

Then I came to a high, brick wall. This was unusual. In my neighborhood there were plenty of wooden and chain-link fences, but I had never seen such a high, brick wall. Jean would have wanted to know what was hidden behind it; she would have climbed over it, I thought.

My heart beat harder. Was Jean nearby? Had she been here before me? Was she already on the other side?

I called her name, but the redbrick surface before me seemed to swallow the sound of my voice, and I knew she wouldn’t hear. I flung myself at the wall then, fingers scrabbling at the rough surface. But there was nothing to hold, and so I kept falling back. I jumped straight up, but that was worse than useless. The wall was much too high. I didn’t think even my father could have seen over the top of it. And yet, somehow, I had become convinced that Jean was on the other side of the wall. I probably had to believe that because the idea that I might be lost in a strange place at night without my sister was far too frightening.

“Jean,” I said, whispering, since I knew shouting wouldn’t be any better, and I began to walk beside the wall, trailing my fingers along the rough surface. At the end of the alley the wall curved away and I followed it across the grass, right up to the side of an imposing, two-story, redbrick house. I ran past the front of the house to the other side, and there was the wall again.

And there, in the wall, a door.

The door was very small, made of wood, painted a glossy black. It was an absurdly small door, but at the time the unlikeliness of it did not strike me. The door was smaller even than I was: almost doll-sized rather than child-sized. I crouched down and—there was no handle—pushed it open. It swung slowly inward.

All I could see at first was green grass, the trunks of a few trees, and a flowering bush. I moved forward, on hands and knees, determined to see more. I was a small child, but the doorway was very narrow, and it seemed for a moment that I might stick halfway. But, stubbornly determined, I put my head down and pushed, scraping my shoulders and wriggling my hips, determined and indifferent to discomfort.

And then I was through. I was in the garden, and I had done it all by myself! Wouldn’t Jean be proud of me when she knew!

I had to find her. She must be here. Maybe she had found a playhouse or some other wonderful treasure that the high wall had been built to conceal. I ran across the velvety lawn, between spreading oaks and glossy-leaved magnolias, aware of the big house which dominated the garden, although I did not look at it directly. I felt giddy with excitement. I felt as if I was in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, but I couldn’t remember if I were hider or seeker. Years later, trying to remember details, I couldn’t recall anything specific that I might not have seen in a dozen other gardens. Just grass and trees and leaves and flowers, greens and darker greens glowing slightly in the twilight. And yet the air, warm on my bare skin, was charged with significance. The lengthening shadows promised mysteries within. The evening held its breath: something was about to happen.

She saw me first. She saw a child with tangled brown hair and dirty feet, wearing pink pajamas and running in wide circles on the velvety lawn, through the gathering dusk.

The child felt her unexpected presence and froze, like a wild animal, and turned her head, and stared.

There were two of them, a man and a woman. They were standing very close to each other, but not touching. Not yet. He was looking at her. She was looking at me.

We stared at each other as if we knew each other, and yet as if we had never seen each other before. There was something about her that was like my mother—like my mother disguised as someone else. I knew her and yet I didn’t. I waited for her to say my name and tell me who she was.

But instead of moving toward me, she half turned to look at the man beside her, and she reached for his hand. Then they were gazing into each other’s eyes, a unit which excluded me, and I was suddenly terrified.

*

I suppose I ran away then. I don’t remember what happened next, or how I got home. I must have told Jean about my adventure because we spent the rest of that summer searching in vain for a high brick wall and the garden behind it. We never found it. Jean lost patience, or belief. Her interests led her in other directions. But even though I stopped talking about it, I never forgot. I was sure I would find the walled garden again someday.

I was thirteen, I think, when Jean—who was in high school by then, and dating boys—bought a hair-coloring kit and streaked my hair blonde. I can’t remember exactly why: whether I had wheedled, or she had decided it was time her little sister emerged from the cocoon of childhood into a brightly colored adolescence. At any rate, it brought us together. We were happily intimate, perched on stools in the tiny, warm, brightly lit room, inhaling the acrid fumes from my hair while Jean worked with her pencils and brushes and pots and sticks of makeup to redefine my face. We weren’t using the mirror that covered the whole wall behind the sink; instead, we gazed solemnly and intently into each other’s faces. Every now and then Jean would draw back to look at the effects of her work, and my heart would lift when she nodded with satisfaction. I imagined that she was going to make me over in her own image. At last, I was going to be like Jean—I would be grown up!

When she was done, Jean took hold of my shoulders and turned me toward the mirror.

“There,” she said. “The girl becomes a woman. What do you think?”

The face in the mirror did look like a woman’s, and I knew I’d seen that woman before. I stared at eyes larger and more blue, higher cheekbones, a narrower nose, a complexion without freckles, and saw a familiar stranger. I remembered the woman in the garden, and suddenly, finally, I understood. Iknew . That woman, of course, was me.

Was the garden real? That wasn’t the question. The gardenwould be real. I had been privileged to see it, to glimpse my own future, to see myself standing with the man I would love.

I was, of course, very interested in love at that age. I longed for it, for that knowledge that would make me adult. I imagined true love striking once and lasting forever, leading to marriage and eternal bliss. The boys I knew were impossible; as for the men I did desire—actors and pop stars—impossible to imagine them wanting me. All I could do was hope that when I grew up it would be different. And now Iknew it would be. I had seen the man I was going to love, the man who would love me. It was going to happen. I only had to wait.

The memory of the man in the garden, and the hope he represented, kept me going through the next few, dreadful years. The agonies of high school and dating—or not dating. The miseries of being unchosen. I wasn’t popular like my big sister. I wasn’t clever, or talented at anything in particular, and although boys did occasionally ask me out, I never had anyone in love with me; I never had a particular, devoted boyfriend the way Jean, so effortlessly, always did.

But I would have my man in the garden, someday. I was alone now, but it wouldn’t always be so. I had seen the future. That made me special. That kept me going.

*

I met Paul in my first year of college. He was a boy in one of my classes, whom I noticed from the first day. Something about him attracted me, and when I made an excuse to talk to him afterward, about the lecture, he seemed nice: serious and a little shy. Then one day, perhaps two weeks into the semester, I was walking across the quad on my way to the library when I quite unexpectedly caught sight of him. He was standing on the grass talking to someone I didn’t know. I saw Paul for the first time at a distance, in three-quarters profile. And the way he looked—tall and fair—and the way he stood, bending his neck, stooping slightly to look at the girl beside him, went straight to my heart; a stab of recognition indistinguishable from desire. I knew him. I had always known him. I wanted him.

We were soon dating, and after a few weeks we became lovers. When we spent our first night together I told Paul that he was the man in the garden. He was enchanted. I suppose it made him feel special, maybe for the first time. And he believed me. I became his fantasy as he was mine, and he fell utterly in love with me.

It was first love for both of us, and I don’t think that either of us doubted for an instant of those first two months that our love would last forever. Even so, the prospect of Christmas break was devastating. We were still too young—and poor—to consider there might be alternatives to spending the vacation apart, with our parents, at opposite ends of the country. But after seeing each other every day and spending every night together, the prospect of a whole month apart was bleak and rather frightening. I could hardly remember what I had done, what I had thought about before I met Paul. I told him I would write to him every day. He promised to phone as often as he could.

Although I expected to miss Paul unbearably, I couldn’t help being excited about going home again. I had missed my parents, and Jean, and I wanted to trade experiences with my old school friends. Above all, I longed to talk to Jean about Paul. I wondered what she would say. At last I had a boyfriend, the way she had for so many years. It made me feel that I had done the impossible and caught up to her: we were equals at last. But I needed her acknowledgment before I could entirely believe it.

Jean’s boyfriend for the past two years had been a law student named Bill, and because Jean was now in her last year of college I more than half expected her to announce their engagement that Christmas. Instead, when I asked about Bill, she told me she was no longer seeing him. She was brisk: it was over, he was forgotten. She didn’t want my pity, which was a relief. She was my grown-up big sister, who knew so much more than I did, and if she had wanted my comfort I wouldn’t have known how to give it. Or maybe that’s an excuse for selfishness. I was too full of my new discovery to spare a thought for anything else. I didn’t want to talk about Jean’s life; I wanted to tell her about Paul.

She was interested and seemed happy for me. She was such a sympathetic, understanding listener that I told her more than I had intended. I told her why I knew this was true love, once and forever. I explained how I had recognized Paul as the man I was meant to be with.

At first, she didn’t remember our long-ago search for the walled garden, but I persisted with details until I saw it connect, saw the flare of memory in her eyes.

She said: “But that wasn’t real—not a real wall, not a real garden—”

I shook my head. “Not real in the usual sense. It wasn’t just another house in the neighborhood—it wasn’t something we could find and see and visit—not then. But it was—or will be—a real place. What I saw was in the future; somehow or other I traveled in time and glimpsed my own future when I was a kid. Maybe it was a dream, but it was real.”

Jean had a very odd look on her face. I didn’t know what it meant, but it made me uneasy. And she kept shaking her head. “It wasn’t a dream. And it certainly wasn’t real.”

“What do you mean? I’m not making this up.”

“No, I know you’re not.”

“Then what are you saying? That it’s impossible? That things like that can’t happen? Well, they can—they do. Iknow : it happened to me. I don’t know how, or why, or what it means, but it happened. I remember it; I’ve remembered it all my life. And now that I’ve met Paul, it all makes sense.”

“God, I don’t believe this,” said Jean. Her mouth was twitching, and her eyes were shiny. I felt furious with her for treating my precious secret so lightly.

“You don’t have to believe me,” I said coldly. “I know what happened; I don’t need you to—”

“Oh, you’re so wrong!”

“What do you know about it? You always think you know so much. Just because you’re always reading those old books, just because you’re older than me—well, there’s some things youdon’t know. This isn’t anything to do with you. It happened to me. It’smine .”

I’d been silly to think we were equals, to think she would ever accept me as her equal. We were squabbling again. I was reduced to shouting and stubbornness, while she had that horribly distant, superior look on her face that meant she was about to demolish me with facts.

“You’re wrong there,” she said. “It didn’t happen to you, and it’s not yours. It’s mine. It’s a story that I made up and told you one night when I couldn’t sleep. I was always doing that—you remember—always making up stories. And I found that the best way to keep you awake and listening was if I made up stories aboutyou . So I told you that one day when you were out exploring you found a high wall with a little tiny door in it, just big enough for you to squeeze inside. And behind that wall was a garden, and in the garden there were a woman and a man. And the woman looked strangely familiar to you, although you didn’t know why. Later, when you tried to find the walled garden again, you couldn’t, so eventually you thought you must have imagined it and forgot all about it. Or nearly. Because one day, when you were grown-up and married and living in a house of your own, you went out to walk in your garden, and you saw a little girl staring at you—and it was yourself.”

I wished I could wake up. “Why are youdoing this?”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m telling you the truth.”

“You’re not. It’s not. I don’t believe you.”

“Why should I lie?”

“I don’t believe you could make up a story as good as that. Not when you were eight—not even now.”

She laughed. “Oooh, a critic! Well, you’re probably right. It probably was too sophisticated for me, then. I probably stole the idea from a comic book or something I saw on television. Most of the stories I told you I got from somewhere else and just changed the names.”

I didn’t want to believe her. But her certainty was compelling. And why should she lie?

“Why do I remember it, then?” I asked. “I don’t remember it like a story—I remember it happening to me.”

“Maybe you dreamed about it afterward. After all, you must have been half asleep when I was telling it to you … a highly suggestible state.”

Later, I thought of reasons why Jean might have lied. Jealousy, the unacknowledged desire to spoil things for me because she couldn’t bear to see her little sister happy in love when she herself was so unhappy… . Or maybe she thought she was telling the truth. Maybe, when I was small, I had told her about the garden and because Jean was the storyteller, not me, she remembered it in retrospect as one of her own stories. Maybe she just couldn’t cope with something that contradicted her rational view of the world and had to force it into fiction.

Whatever her reasons, conscious or unconscious, she certainly spoiled any future I might have had with Paul. I didn’t want to believe Jean, but old habits were too strong. She was my big sister; she knew best. How could I have believed in something as farfetched as time travel or seeing the future? I felt embarrassed; it was as bad as if I’d gone on into adulthood believing in Santa Claus. And because I had told him, as well as because I had based my love on this myth, I felt ashamed to go back to Paul. I treated him very badly. I dropped him flat, treated him like a stranger when I got back to college, and never explained why, never gave him a second chance.

The man in the garden, though, was not so easily dropped. Faith doesn’t have much to do with facts or logic; it’s more to do with need, and I obviously needed my memory of the garden. Gradually, despite my attempts to disown it, my faith in the garden returned. I didn’t think about it much; I told myself that I’d stopped believing, or I told myself that it didn’t matter—but eventually it came back; it was there again, beneath the things I did and thought and felt, just as it always had been.

As the years went by I had other boyfriends, and since they didn’t all resemble one another, I don’t know how much any of them resembled the man in the garden, if at all. I had seen that man—ifI had seen him—for no more than a few seconds when I was five years old, and never again since. The only thing I knew for sure was that he had been taller than me. And since I am rather small, the fact that all my boyfriends were taller than me might have been no more than coincidence.

When I was twenty-five, and she was twenty-eight, my sister got married. Her husband’s name was Howard Olds, he was eight years older than she was, and he was rich. That was the most impressive thing about him. He was also a lawyer, and he dabbled in local politics, not very successfully. I thought he was boring and conceited, not particularly physically attractive, and—most surprisingly for Jean, who had always admired intellect above all—not even very bright. I wondered if Jean could have stooped so low as to marry a man for his money. I didn’t know the grown-up Jean very well. Although we had both moved back to Houston after college, we seldom saw each other except at unavoidable family gatherings. This changed after Jean married Howard. Everything changed after my first visit to their house.

It was a large house in River Bend, a prestigious address in an exclusive neighborhood. It had been built twenty or thirty years ago, a two-story, Georgian-style, brick house set on half an acre of land, well shaded with oaks, pines, pecans, and magnolias. And at the back there was a walled garden.

I’ll always remember the first time I saw it. Or perhaps I should say, the second time.

Because, of course, it was the same garden. I knew that, I think, even before I saw it. Jean had invited me for dinner. She was still busy in the kitchen when I arrived, so it was Howard who took me outside to show me around. Inside the walled garden it was very beautiful and peaceful. I could hear birds, distantly, and the wind in the pines. The air was blueing toward night. I looked around and made polite, admiring noises at whatever Howard pointed out, but I wasn’t paying attention to him and hardly heard a word he said. I was far too tense, vibrating inside and out, my nerves and senses all unnaturally sharpened and focused on this moment to which, it seemed, my whole life had been leading. Only one thing mattered. What I was looking for—and praying not to see—was a little girl in pink pajamas.

She didn’t come. Yet I couldn’t relax. I kept waiting. And when Howard led me back indoors, I don’t know if I was more relieved or disappointed. What a joke, if the little girl I had been had seen me with my sister’s husband! What a bitter joke, when I had believed I was seeing true love, if I had built my whole life around a misunderstanding.

I must have been a terrible guest that night. I felt such a sense of loss and such undirected bitterness that I couldn’t stop brooding. And halfway through the dinner I could not taste I was suddenly struck by a new fear: did Jean know? Might she guess? Had she recognized the garden? Would she say something? I waited in torment.

But, of course, she didn’t know. She had probably entirely forgotten the garden fantasy. Years had passed since that last, bitter conversation about it. It was my experience, not hers. It had never been hers. Of course she didn’t remember. At least, I hoped she didn’t. I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t ask her without reminding her—and I didn’t want that. If it was forgotten, please let it stay forgotten. At any rate, she didn’t say anything that night or on future nights.

For there were future nights, despite such a nearly disastrous beginning. I made sure of that. I made friends with Jean and was often invited to dinner. Jean liked giving dinner parties and I became a regular guest. Sometimes I brought a boyfriend, and sometimes she would invite a man for me to meet. I encouraged that, although I never admitted how important it was to me. After the initial shock, I had my faith back again, more strongly than before. I had found the garden I had been looking for. Now, all I had to do was to wait for the right moment to come around again.

I had made a few wrong assumptions, I could see that now. I had imagined that the garden must be mine, or my lover’s—but why should that be? It was just a place, after all; a place where anything might happen; a place where something specialwould happen when two times of my life overlapped. I might not meet him there for the first time, but in that garden I would recognize the man who had been meant for me.

Three years passed, and I was not unhappy. Jean and I became friends and shared many things—although I never risked telling her about the garden. She was already playing her part. I began to like Howard better, seeing how happy he made my sister. He wasn’t as bad as I had thought, or maybe life with Jean had improved him. And he liked me and flirted with me in a way I enjoyed. I flirted back, meaning nothing by it.

And then, finally, my time in the garden came around again. It was a dinner-party night: Jean and Howard, a couple of neighbors, a junior partner from Howard’s firm and his wife, me and Jonathan. Jonathan was a man I had recently met and been out with twice. We hadn’t so much as kissed yet—maybe we never would. By that time I had developed quite a strong superstition about the garden and liked to bring men there who were still basically unknown to me, before anything had happened. Howard teased me about all my boyfriends; Jean defended my right to be choosy, praised my good sense in not settling for anything less than exactly what I wanted. I had a few affairs, but I couldn’t really, entirely believe in a relationship which blossomed outside the walled garden; I never expected them to last very long or affect me very deeply, and they didn’t.

Jonathan was supposed to go into the garden with me. That was my plan. We were walking through the house toward the back when he was sidetracked by one of the other guests who shared some mutual interest. I kept going—the other man was smoking a cigar and I wanted to get away from the smell—trusting Jonathan to follow. But when, in the garden a minute later, I heard someone come out of the house and walk toward me, I didn’t need to look around to know that it was Howard.

And then—just then!—I saw myself, the five-year-old in pink pajamas, running across the lawn and then freezing, staring at me, eyes wide and wild as a fawn’s.

I felt a moment of disbelief, and then overwhelming despair. Why now? Why did it have to be Howard?

I turned my head to look at him. I was still hoping, I think, that I was wrong, and that it wasn’t Howard beside me.

It was Howard, of course, and my glance caught him off guard. I saw how he looked at me, and—I couldn’t help myself—I reached for his hand. And as our eyes met, I knew that I could have just what I’d always wanted.

But was this really what I’d always wanted?

Nothing was said. If there had been time, we might have stepped behind the sheltering magnolia and fallen into each other’s arms. But we heard the smooth, gliding sound of the patio door and moved apart. I think the motion looked casual, not furtive. I greeted Jonathan and even through the blood pounding in my ears I knew my voice betrayed nothing.

I was very aware, all through dinner, of Howard’s attention. But it was Jean I looked at, searching for signs of strain, unhappiness, nerves. Nothing. She didn’t know. She had no idea of what she was about to lose, and to whom.

When Jonathan and I left that evening Howard—as he sometimes did—gave me a brotherly kiss on the cheek. This time, though, his hand rested for a moment on my hip. No touch has ever excited me more or seemed to hold a more passionate promise.

I have been awake all night, thinking. I’ve been wanting this for so long, and now I can see the ending. I can have what I want, what I’ve always wanted. Is it enough for me to know that, or does Jean have to know, too? Do I need Howard to be happy? Or can I, now, imagine a new future for myself, without the walled garden?

Lucy Maria

It is a serious business when a child falls in love. When people talk about love, as they often do, as “sexual attraction,” I think of those kissing dolls sold in novelty shops, papier-mâché heads bobbing on springs, drawn toward each other inevitably, inexorably made to connect by hidden magnets. You could imagine, from the language, that sex was a set of magnets buried in human flesh. But isn’t there something else involved, an attraction of souls, which is regardless of sex, regardless of age?

I think so. When Janet, my six-year-old, wept in my arms for James, the seven-year-old next door, my own heart ached.

I have not, these past eight years, brooded much on the past. Being married with two small children and a house to look after keeps me anchored in the present, with no time for vain regrets. I married Robert on the rebound, as they say, but he is a good man, and we have made a satisfactory life together.

Satisfactory, until now. Now I sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, trapped in the past.

Can it be only coincidence that this afternoon my daughter’s unhappiness reminded me of my own past hurt, and that this evening, looking for distraction, I picked upThe Times and saw an obituary for Mrs. Edward Templeton?

Edward, I thought. Edward, who should have been my husband, is free at last. As a man he had wanted to marry me. But as a child he had given his heart to a funny little old-fashioned girl named Lucy Maria. He promised himself to her when he was a child, and sealed his fate. For what are the desires of adults when weighed in the balance with those of children?

When we were children, living in a leafy London suburb, Edward and I were playmates. It wasn’t Edward I loved in those days, but his older brother, Julian. Seven years older than I, away at public school for most of the year, Julian seemed unattainable, but I was determined. I laid plans. Edward, a year younger than I, became my favored friend.

In love with my fantasy of Julian, I was then incapable of appreciating Edward, whom I thought too young. I was the leader in all our games; I was older, and bolder, and sometimes, I am sorry to say, I bullied him. But he was willing to be led by me, even when I proposed we should explore the haunted house.

We had no idea by whom or what it might be haunted, only that it had an evil reputation. It was let to a different family every year, unusual in those more settled days before the war. The house, in its own grounds at the end of a private drive, was also one of the larger ones in our neighborhood. For a few months, in the summer of 1939, the house was empty of tenants, apparently abandoned except for the regular attentions of a hired gardener.

It was a disinclination for naughtiness, not a fear of ghosts, that made Edward unwilling to trespass, yet I taunted him with cowardice, until he gave in. We set off, in broad daylight, with candles and matches to explore the darker recesses of the house, but I didn’t really think we would get inside. We would wander around in the shrubbery and peer through windows and I would make us both shiver by claiming to see something moving in the shadows, but the house was sure to be locked.

It was Edward who noticed the open window at the back.

I stared up at the dark space between white sash and white sill and thought it was like a partly opened mouth.

“It’s too high,” I objected. “And anyway, it’s probably fixed so it won’t open any wider, the way our kitchen window is.”

“You fit in through your kitchen window. I can give you a leg up here just like I do there.”

To me that half-opened window looked like a trap. Set by whom? The house was empty, so who could have left it open?

As if he read my thoughts Edward said, “Probably the gardener makes his tea in the scullery there. He must have a key to the house. He probably forgot he’d opened the window. Give us a leg up, and I’ll go through and let you in by the door.”

His sudden keenness worried me more than the open window. The balance of power was shifting between us. Not wanting to let him see me afraid, I braced myself and offered him my clasped hands for a step up. He vanished headfirst into the house.

Would it have made any difference in the end if I had gone first? Would she have shown herself to me, or kept hidden?

I’ll never know. Edward went into the house, leaving me alone for … two minutes? Five? It wasn’t very long, but a great deal can happen in a minute, the shifting of a fate, one’s whole future life altered because of a look, a few whispered words.

He was looking livelier than his usual rather serious self when he opened the back door. “Here, you’ll never guess: there’s someone already in the house—a little girl.”

I looked around the bare, empty back hall, cross that some other child had beaten us out. “Who is she?”

“Miss Lucy Maria Toseland, she says. She’s a funny little thing—but you’ll see.” He raised his voice, calling. “Lucy?”

I pushed past him into a room full of heavily shrouded furniture and felt that uneasy prickle which accompanies the game of hide-and-seek.

“Come out,” I said, rather sharply.

“Don’t frighten her,” said Edward, behind me. Then, coaxing, “You needn’t be afraid, Lucy. She’s a friend.”

There was no response. I moved farther into the room and began to look behind the furniture, not touching anything.

“I don’t think she’s in here now,” said Edward. “She must be in another room.”

“Why is she hiding?”

“She might be frightened. She’s very young.”

“What’s she doing here, then, all by herself?”

“She says she lives here. Her parents went away and left her.”

“People don’t do that, just leave their children. She’s lying.”

“No.”

A hint of steel in that one word; something I’d never heard from Edward. I looked at him in amazement. “Did she saywhen they went away?”

“She doesn’t know … she’s only little. She said a long time, but it can’t have been, she can’t have been on her own for long—she’s too tidy, her hair’s been brushed, and someone’s tied a ribbon in it—she could never do that herself. She’s wearing ever such a funny old-fashioned dress with petticoats, a bit like that one in Granny’s picture, remember?”

The flesh on my arms tried to crawl up to my shoulders, and for a moment I knew the truth.

At that moment, Edward ran off, calling: “Lucy, Lucy Maria, please come out!”

Although I wanted to leave, I was more afraid of being alone, so I ran after him, hearing, just ahead of me, his glad shout: “There you are!”

I found him in the front parlor. The curtains were drawn against the ruinous effects of sunlight, and the atmosphere was dim and vaguely subaqueous, but I could see well enough that he was alone.

“Here she is, you see, she’s shy of strangers.”

“Where?”

“Just here.” He gestured, then frowned. “Lucy? Now don’t be silly, Lucy, I told you she’s a friend—you said you’d come out; you mustn’t hide anymore.”

I watched him wandering around the ghostly shapes in the dim room, bending and turning as if searching for a hidden child. The doorway I blocked was the only way—apart from the windows, which had not been opened—in or out of the room. No one had passed us in the hall, and there was no one here now. Which meant there never had been.

“Well done, Edward,” I said. “Points to you. You had me fooled, all right.”

He turned, frowning slightly.

“It was a good one, but I’ve rumbled you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your little ghostly girl in the old-fashioned dress. You made her up. And I believed you. My word, youhave learned how to tell them, and no mistake!”

His hand came up in an oath. “It’s no story. She was here. Honestly, I was talking to her just a minute ago. And of course she’s not a ghost—she’s a little girl.”

Edward wasn’t joking. He really had seen and spoken to a little girl who wasn’t there. My back prickled and I whirled around, terrified something might be creeping up on me from behind, and although there was no one there, once I had started moving I did not seem able to stop, but went running pell-mell for the back door, letting out a low, wailing moan as I ran.

He called to me to stop, but I couldn’t stop. My role as leader, the need to save face, these things didn’t weigh with me at all in my panic. I didn’t even slow down until I had reached the gates at the end of the drive, out of sight of the house. There I paused, panting, feeling guilty for having abandoned him. But I could not, to save my soul or his, make myself go back. It was pushing my courage to its limits simply to stay where I was and wait as the minutes dragged themselves past.

At last—it might have been half an hour or more—he came into view, walking slowly, looking bemused by my obvious fear. “She wouldn’t have hurt you, you know. She couldn’t hurt anyone.”

“But she’s dead, isn’t she? She’s a ghost?”

“Ye-es,” he said uncertainly. “I suppose. I tried to touch her and my hand passed right through her. There was nothing there. I could see her, but I couldn’t feel her at all.”

“Oh!”

He looked at me. “Yes, it frightened her, too. She doesn’t know she’s a ghost. She knows something is wrong, but not what. She has no idea about being dead, no idea at all.”

“What does she think has happened to her?”

“She says her family went away without her; she doesn’t know why she didn’t go with them, or how long ago it happened. Before they left, there was something, something about her parents, something someone did to her which frightened her a great deal, which I couldn’t understand, and then she said they all went away, taking another little girl who looked just like her, and they didn’t hear her when she cried.”

*

It was Edward now who wanted to go back to the haunted house and I who kept finding excuses. I had another reason for preferring adventures closer to home, as long as it was Edward’s home, and that was his brother, Julian, back for the summer. I liked rainy days the best, days when Edward and I had to play indoors, days Julian often stayed in, too, reading books or listening to the wireless. I was happy just to have him near, to look at him, and when he spoke to me, I was in heaven. One day, I remember, he taught us card tricks.

As I was drawn to Julian, Edward was drawn to his ghost. He argued with me in vain, and finally, one morning when I turned up as usual on his doorstep, his mother told me that Edward had already left—for my house, she assumed.

Of course I knew where he had really gone. I held out for as long as I could, but, as the summer passed and Edward seemed quite happy to play without me, pride, curiosity, boredom, and jealousy all worked in me to overwhelm my fading memory of fear, and finally I told Edward I would go with him.

He had stopped asking by then, but he seemed pleased. His love for Lucy Maria was not exclusive; he wanted her to have friends, for others to know and love her as he did.

The day we went turned out to be the gardener’s day; we caught sight of a stocky, overalled figure as we rounded the curve in the drive and beat a hasty retreat. I wasn’t sorry to put off the visit to another day, but Edward fretted all through the afternoon, and insisted on going back after tea instead of waiting until morning. He said that Lucy Maria was expecting us, and he couldn’t let her down.

But the scullery window was locked. Not merely shut, as he had learned to shut it so a passing glance would see nothing wrong, but latched shut from the inside. The back door was locked, the front door, too. I was relieved, but Edward was frantic as he ran around the house, trying every window on the ground floor.

“Can’t your Lucy Maria let us in?”

“Don’t be silly! If she could do that, she could let herself out, couldn’t she? She’s a soul without a body, she’s helpless, she’s trapped—you don’t understand at all, do you?”

“How should I understand? I’ve never even seen this creature. For all I know, you made her up, to tease me.”

He stared at me in disbelief and, I think, dislike; made a tortured sound, and turned his attention back to the problem of the locked house.

His agony was so obvious I felt ashamed of myself. I had also noticed how low the sun was. I grabbed his arm. “Ned, I’m sorry. I know she’s real, and I’m sorry about the window, but, look, it’s getting late. Let’s go. We can come back in the morning. I’ll come with you, and we’ll have the whole day to find a way in. But we have to go now. If we’re late, they may not let us out tomorrow. It’s not your fault. She’ll understand.”

“Grown-ups,” he growled, like a curse. “It’stheir fault.” But I knew from the slump of his shoulders that he had given in.

As we walked away from the house he kept looking back and suddenly he stopped. “There she is, she’s watching—see?”

My eyes followed his pointing finger to a first-floor window and I saw: a little dark-haired girl in a white dress, ruffled pantaloons below, standing very still and looking out.

“You see? That’s Lucy Maria.”

I saw. And then she was gone, and I was looking at an empty window, blank as a sightless eye.

A primitive, unthinking terror possessed me. For the second and not the last time in my life, I ran away from that house, and from Lucy Maria.

*

Did Edward go back? Did he manage to get inside? Did he see Lucy Maria again?

I don’t know. Before I saw him again, before anything could be resolved, it was wartime, and the summer was over. I was packed off, with Mother and the babies, to relatives in Wales. Edward, too, was evacuated—but I only learned that later. I was not to see him again for many years.

Edward alone of his family survived the war. His parents were killed in an air raid, and Julian died in action in 1943. I had the news in a letter from my father, who had no idea of my feelings for Julian, referring to him as “the brother of your old chum Edward.” It was curious; I hadn’t seen Julian for four years, and might never have seen him again even if he had lived, but the news hit me very hard; in some ways, I feel as if I never really got over it.

My formal education came to an end at about the same time as the war. There had been talk about teacher training, but I knew I didn’t want to teach. I lived at home—this was our new home, in Berkshire—and commuted to London to do a secretarial course until I got tired of it, then drifted about between coffee bars and house parties, occasionally working at some undemanding job.

In 1949 I still spent my weekends at home in Berkshire, but during the week I worked in a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, and shared a flat in Holborn with three other girls. It was in the bookshop, ten years after I’d last seen him, that Edward Templeton came back into my life.

I looked up as I always did at the sound of the bell that rang whenever the door opened, and thought he was an unlikely customer. A broad, open, very English face, fair hair, clear blue eyes untroubled by the clouds of intellect—I not only knew the type, I knewhim .

“Julian.” Maybe the news of his death had been a mistake, and all the years I’d lived since no more than a dream.

I don’t know if he heard me. I’m not even sure I spoke aloud. He came further into the shop, to where he could see me. I was staring at him, as unselfconsciously as a child and as unable to stop. I was afraid he would vanish.

“Itis you,” he said, and the sound of his voice broke the dream. “Remember me?”

“Edward,” I said. “Of course.”

“I saw you last week, in a Soho coffee bar, and I thought I knew you, but I couldn’t think how. Then I remembered … but by then you’d gone. Somebody said he thought you worked in a bookshop, so I’ve been searching ever since.”

“I can’t think how you recognized me. It’s been ten years.”

He looked me up and down, and I felt myself responding to his gaze. “Mmmm. You’re bigger now, of course, but otherwise you’re just the same, only prettier. How could anybody forget those eyes? Anyway, you recognized me too—don’t deny it.”

I didn’t feel like explaining who I had seen in his face. “Well, now that you’ve found me, what are you going to do with me?”

“Take you out to dinner—for a start.”

There were a couple of other boys I was dating at the time, but Edward was soon the only one. Within a few months he had proposed marriage, and I accepted. We did talk about the past, in the way that lovers always do, marveling at the twists and turns of fate which have brought them together, but I never told him of my love for his late brother, and he never mentioned Lucy Maria. It seems strange now, but I had put the whole haunted house episode completely out of my mind.

It was as part of our search for a home to share that Edward suggested we take a look at the suburb where we had first met as children. I objected that it was inconvenient, unattractive, too expensive, too far from our friends… . Laughing, he stopped me.

“All right, all right, we can’t live there. But let’s go and have a look at the place for old times’ sake … a romantic walk together along the paths where we used to play. I haven’t been there since before the war, and I wonder how it survived. What do you say?”

I said yes, because it was obviously what he wanted. It seemed a small concession.

“Remember the haunted house?” he asked, after we had looked, from a distance, at his old house and mine—both of them, we agreed, much smaller than we remembered.

Haunted house. The words gave me a queer little shock and I shook my head in automatic denial, before I’d had time to think.

“Don’t you? That’s funny. I thought you’d never forget it. I thought you might never get over being so frightened. The things that children think will last forever… . So you don’t mind if we go there now?”

I began to remember. “Not inside.”

“I’m not proposing we trespass, no.”

At the sight of the posts which marked the end of the private drive I felt a premonition, or a memory, of fear.

“You were such a brave girl, much braver than I was. I could never understand how you could be afraid of her.”

“You mean the dead can’t hurt us? Maybe not, but people have always been afraid of ghosts. They don’t belong in this world, they’re intrusions. They can’t be trusted. Isn’t that reason to be afraid?”

“She wouldn’t have harmed you, or anyone,” he said. “She couldn’t.” And he walked faster as we came in sight of the house, so that I had almost to run to keep up, and when he stopped, suddenly, I almost ran into him.

He didn’t notice, transfixed by something he had seen. I followed his gaze, knowing already, so that when I saw it, too, I didn’t know if it was with my present eyes or in memory.

“Lucy Maria,” I said.

Then she was gone.

He turned to me. “You saw her too?”

I was shaking, but he didn’t notice. I managed to nod, unable to speak.

“Poor Lucy—still trapped here, still alone—”

He ran to the house, but the curtains were drawn at the front so he ran around to the back. I noticed, as I followed, that the lawn was overgrown and the shrubberies looked a little wild. It wasn’t a wilderness; it was still being tended, but obviously not as carefully as ten years ago. It was hard to be sure, with the curtains all drawn, but it seemed likely that the house was unoccupied, and that the pattern of temporary rentals continued, with occasional gaps.

“Maybe we could rent it,” he said.

“Us? Live here?” The idea was nightmarish.

“Then she wouldn’t be alone. We could take care of her.” His eyes glowed. “I made a promise when I was a boy that I would come back and save her. And if I couldn’t help her escape I would stay with her, and look after her, and make sure she was never lonely again. God, how could I have forgotten?” He shook his head, looking rueful. “I thought it was a dream, or a kid’s game. But it really happened. She’s real. You know she is; you saw her, too, in the window. She’s still waiting.”

He looked at me hopefully. “Oh, do say yes, darling! You’re not afraid, are you?”

I was afraid, but, as always with him, ashamed to admit it.

“She can’t hurt you and—don’t you see?—we can help her. We were helpless when we were children, but not now!” He grasped my icy fingers and held them in his warm hands, willing me to feel what he felt.

I looked into his pleading, eager, loving eyes. Loving someone is wanting what they want. I said, rather feebly, “But what if she doesn’t like me? She didn’t, you know.”

“Nonsense! She’ll love you when she gets to know you, just as I do! She’ll be like our own child.”

I knew I would not have refused if Edward had been pleading on behalf of some living, displaced child. For we had talked about adopting war orphans, about sharing our home, our love, and our good fortune with those who had none, creating a family around us immediately, without waiting for the children who would be born. It might have seemed odd to anyone else that the first child we adopted was a ghost, but this ghost was real to us, a part of our shared childhood. I couldn’t pretend not to believe, and I had no justification for my fear of her. Really, if I examined it, wasn’t my chief emotion jealousy? He had loved her. Something in his passion stirred the memory of Julian, and the long nights I had wept and prayed and wished to have been allowed to save him, or at least to do something for him before he died. Like mine, Edward’s childhood sweetheart was dead. We both had our dead … and we had each other. It wasn’t fair of me to be jealous. Why not be generous?

“If it’s not too expensive,” I said.

“Darling!”

He embraced me. Over his shoulder, I looked at the house, wondering if Lucy was watching. I shut my eyes and kissed Edward back.

*

The owner of the house was a Miss Toseland. I wondered if she was a sister or a cousin, or perhaps a posthumous niece, of Lucy Maria. She employed an agent, of course, to deal with property affairs, but Edward wanted to see her personally. I wasn’t sure why. She agreed, reluctantly, to receive us at her home in Hampstead the following Friday morning.

She was an intimidating figure. Not tall, but rigidly upright, a woman in her seventies with snow-white hair and eyes so dark they seemed as black as her old-fashioned dress. Like birds’ eyes, I thought: there seemed no human feeling behind them at all.

To my astonishment, Edward was not intimidated by her coldness, and we had scarcely been seated in her gray and lavender sitting room before he’d told her the house was haunted.

“I don’t believe in that spiritualist nonsense,” she said. “So if you’ve come to try and convert me, or to try and get money out of me for some scheme, you may as well leave now.”

“I’m not a spiritualist, but I’ve seen something, and I am curious to know if the phenomenon has been reported before.”

“Certainly not.”

“Did you ever live in the house?”

“I did. As a small child. Our family left to live abroad in 1879 and we never returned. I have not set foot in that house since the day my parents carried me out of it, seventy years ago. So you see, Mr. Templeton, it is quite useless to ask me about any so-called spiritualist phenomena in that house.”

“You had no experiences yourself, as a child, living there?”

“I have no memories of that time. I was, of course, very young when we left.”

“Did you have any sisters?”

“Several,” she said dryly, and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“Lucy Maria?”

“I beg your pardon?” She looked startled; it was the first emotion she had shown.

“Was one of your sisters called Lucy Maria?”

She stared at him. “Iam Lucy Maria.”

I looked at him, looking at her.

Softly he said, “You lost something in that house, long ago. Something very valuable got left behind.”

For a long moment they sat with gazes locked. Then, stiffly, with great determination, she stood up and reached for the little silver bell on the mantelpiece beside the clock. “I don’t know what your game is, Mr. Templeton, but it isn’t going to work. I am neither so foolish nor so rich as you seem to think.” She picked up the bell and rang it.

Confused and humiliated, I stood up beside Edward, unnoticed by either of them.

“This isn’t a con game, and I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you this for your own sake. There is something in that house you can ill afford to live without.”

She laughed a little, not sounding amused. “I have done without it for seventy years.”

The maid came in. Miss Toseland said, “My visitors are leaving.”

“You have lived without it, of course, but perhaps you wouldn’t like to learn later that it had been destroyed through carelessness, or that someone else, not you, had profited by it… .”

“Someone like you?”

Edward gave her his steadiest gaze. He was the very picture of the honest Englishman, the man everyone instinctively trusts. When I read Conrad’sLord Jim , I pictured Edward’s face. He said, “I thought it only fair to tell you. Before you rent the house again, to me or anyone else, go there yourself, first. Go through every room. Satisfy yourself that you know what is there. Don’t leave it to someone else, no matter how much you trust him.” He turned to me then, putting his hand lightly at my waist. “We’ll go now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

“Wait.”

We were at the door. Edward turned back.

“You won’t tell me what it is, this valuable thing?”

He shook his head. “It would be better if you saw yourself.”

“And if I ignore your advice?”

“I shall do as I planned and rent it through your agent.”

“The honest thief?” There was a pause. Then, to the maid she said, “Tell Bayley to bring the car around. My visitors will be traveling with me.” When the maid had gone she said to Edward, “I should tell you that my chauffeur is also a skilled pugilist. I always feel quite, quite safe with him.”

“I’m sure you should.” Edward was smiling and relaxed.

“Would you point out this valuable object to me personally, once we’re in the house?”

“I think you’ll find it yourself without any difficulty. But of course if you need my help, it’s yours.”

She left us alone in the sitting room while she prepared to go out, and I pounced on Edward at once.

He seemed surprised. “I thought you understood. Miss Toseland is Lucy Maria.”

“But she’s not dead!”

“Not physically, no. But the ghost in the house is her soul. Something must have happened to her when she was a child, just before the family moved. I wish I could remember what she told me. Perhaps an illness or some violence from which she almost died … or maybe it was a spiritual death, some shock which split her. Miss Toseland lived, but she grew up without a soul.”

I found it remarkably easy to believe her a woman without a soul. “But what was all that about a treasure? She’ll never rent it to us now. And why on earth should you want her to go to the house?”

“To bring them together again. She can rescue Lucy Maria; she’s her only hope. If they can be reunited.”

“And if they can’t?”

“We won’t have lost anything by trying. A rich old woman will think I’m mad, or a failed confidence trickster. If she asks again I might pretend to believe some painting there is by an old master.” He smiled and stroked my cheek. “It will work. I feel certain this is the right thing to do.”

*

We had never approached the house in a car before, but it made no difference. I felt the fear as we passed the gates at the end of the drive, and I clutched Edward’s fingers, seeking reassurance.

“How strange to return,” murmured Miss Toseland.

“Why did you never come back before now?” asked Edward.

“There was never any reason. The house belonged to my father, until his death, and then to my brother. When it came to me in due course I had no personal use for it; as a rental property it was better left in the hands of a competent agent.”

The chauffeur stopped the car in front of the house and got out.

“Is it as you remember?” asked Edward.

The old woman was staring up at the house. “I don’t remember.”

The chauffeur opened the door for her but she did not move. I could see that she didn’t want to get out, didn’t want to go in.

“Does it frighten you?”

That made her move. “The impertinence!” Resting on her servant’s arm, she got out and we scrambled after. She marched up to the house and unlocked the front door with hands that scarcely trembled.

In the front hall she looked at him challengingly. “Where will I find this treasure?”

He cocked his head as if listening. “Upstairs. In the nursery, maybe.”

She snorted. “Nursery, indeed!” She turned toward the stairs and, swifter than the chauffeur, he sprang to her side, offering his arm.

I felt a pang, the register of a betrayal, and I looked at the chauffeur as if we shared it. His face was unreadable, and he didn’t look at me, but at his mistress, who allowed Edward to help her mount.

At the top of the first flight she had to rest. She was breathing heavily, and with the hand not clutching Edward’s arm she reached toward her throat uncertainly. “I feel … I … is it not dark in here? Is it not cold? Bayley, get my— I feel … I …”

We were all looking at her. We all saw it happen. The taut parchment of her face seemed to crumple and shred, and the black ice of her eyes melted into something warmer and brighter. Then she laughed: the clear, high, sweet trill of a happy child. She laughed, and she jumped up and down and clapped her hands for joy.

“Oh, Ned,” she cried, in a child’s voice, not Miss Toseland’s cold, refined tones, “you’ve done it—I always knew you would! I’m free!”

And she flung herself at him, hanging on his neck like someone much smaller, and covered his face with kisses.

Bayley must have thought she’d gone mad. His mouth hung open slightly as he stared.

I knew better. And, as I watched my fiancé holding another woman close to him, allowing her kisses, welcoming them, smiling with a foolish, fond delight, I also knew worse.

This was what he wanted. This, more or less, was what he had planned, or at least hoped for.

My eyes met his. His smile was tempered a little—he must have seen my anguish—as he said softly, “I have to take care of her. You do see that? I promised her. She doesn’t have anyone else to love her. You understand?”

I did understand. That added to the horror of it. I couldn’t even blame him. He had loved her as a child and he loved her still. I understood, and I loved him, but I couldn’t live with him. I turned around and ran for my life.

*

It was my mistake to believe that all ghosts are of the dead. The living, too, leave ghosts behind them. If it is true the dead can’t harm us, the same can certainly not be said of the living.

Sitting in my kitchen all alone as the night wore away and morning came on, I thought about the living and the dead in my life, eight years after Edward had gone, as I thought, out of my life forever. I wondered where he was now, what he was thinking, how he was feeling with Lucy Maria dead. It had been another mistake, I realized, to think that I was “over” him, or that he was out of my life, or ever could be, until both of us were dead. I was so lost in my thoughts that I did not notice the sounds of movement from another part of the house until my husband appeared in the doorway, in his dressing gown, asking sleepily if something was wrong.

I stared at him. For a moment he looked like a ghost to me, and I thought that if I waited he would disappear.

The Extra Hour

An extra hour, that’s all I want. One more hour in every day for me, for writing. Then I could finish my book, and—well, that would be a start.

Of course, I could be working on finishing it now, moving it along a little bit more, advancing another page or two or three toward the end. David thinks I’m up here in my corner of our partially converted loft, working on my novel instead of drinking wine and watching a video with him, instead of grading papers, or ironing, or any of the other more useful or sociable things I could be doing, and what am I doing? This isn’t writing, it’s doodling. I don’t deserve an extra hour. I have one—one hour, almost every night, all to myself, my writing time—and look at how I waste it, daydreaming and doodling. If I had another hour, wouldn’t I waste that, too?

No I wouldn’t. One hour isn’t enough to do anything—but two can be. I’ve had two hours up here, writing like a demon, going downstairs feeling spent and satisfied and with something to show for my time. If I had two hours every day—

But it’s just not possible. There aren’t enough hours in the day, or not enough energy in my body. I tried the traditional surviving-on-less-sleep routine, but I couldn’t sustain it. Somebody, maybe not me, would have died. If I didn’t have a job already—but I do, and I’m good at it (which I might not be at writing) and we need the money, and when I’m home I want to be with my family. After all, I wanted this family—nobody forced me to get married and procreate. Trying to carve out another hour for myself, insisting on it, would be unfair to David and the kids, and even, ultimately, to myself, my deepest needs.

But I need to write, too. Or I think I do. These conflicting needs wouldn’t be so in conflict if there was just one extra hour in every day, an hour I could have just for myself. I wish… .

Two

I heard a clock strike the hour. I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I reacted as if it were an alarm. I jumped up without pausing to wonder where the clock was, whose it was, or what strange time it kept until I was on my way downstairs. And then I saw a door where one shouldn’t have been.

It was just at the turn of the stairs, in the wall we share with the house next door. If there really was a door there it would open onto the Corkindales’ staircase, and my first thought on seeing it was that our neighbors had knocked through to our property, and I was furious.

How dare they—and I put my hand on the knob, and it opened.

I was so astonished by what I saw that I walked straight in. The door swung silently shut behind me. No room like this was in the Corkindales’ house, or in any house along our road. This was a room from my dreams.

My daydreams, I should say: if I were a rich and famous author, this was the study I would have.

The walls were paneled wood, lined with books or hung with paintings. Gold velvet draperies at the far end concealed either a window or another door. On the floor were Oriental rugs in luscious, luxurious shades: apricot, cinnamon, crimson, and teal. There was a deep leather armchair with a reading lamp standing behind it, a chaise longue, and an elegant walnut escritoire, but what caught my attention was the plain oak table with everything needed for writing: a jar of sharpened pencils, a stack of notebooks, a dictionary, a directional lamp.

Wherever this had come from, wherever I was, I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. I went straight to the table and sat down on the chair in front of it and picked up the notebooks. They were full of blank pages and smelled delicious. I chose a pencil and took possession of the room in the only way possible: I began to write.

It wasn’t my novel. I started a new story. It seemed right.

I didn’t manage to finish it, quite, but I wrote pages and pages. I don’t know how long I wrote, because I wasn’t wearing a watch, and although it was the sound of a clock striking which had brought me there, I didn’t see one in the room. I just wrote until I was too tired to go on, until I didn’t feel like writing anymore. Then I closed the notebook, stood up, and walked through the door and back down my own familiar staircase and into the sitting room where David was still watching his video.

He looked up at me in surprise. “You’re down early. Not inspired?”

“What do you mean? I wrote ever such a lot; I thought you’d be in bed by now.” Then I saw the time on the video recorder and did a mental double-take. According to it, I’d been upstairs for half an hour.

It was then that the strangeness struck me full force. I rushed out of the room and back up the stairs where—of course—I could find no mysterious door.

But the story I wrote in that room exists, and it didn’t before. I don’t have the notebook, but I remember it perfectly well. I know I can write it again, and as a second draft it will be even better.

Where did that story come from? When did I write it? The only possible explanation seems to be that I fell asleep at my desk. I must have nodded off and dreamed the whole thing in about five minutes.

Three

I’ve finished the story—“Wings”—and it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

I’m ditching the novel. It doesn’t interest me anymore; there’s something static, predetermined about it. For a long time I’d been telling myself I was only tired because I’d been thinking about it for so long, but I’ve decided that if it bores me it would bore anybody else, too. Liberation!

There’ll have to be a new novel, but just now I haven’t a clue about it. I’m going to write another story next, semi-fantastic, yet at the same time very ordinary, full of the quotidian, about a woman who loses her place in her own life—as if life were a book one read. About time and memory, fear and desire, the tricks the mind plays—like the way I dreamed myself into “somewhere else” in order to find the time I needed to write. I haven’t felt so excited about writing in ten years.

Four

It happened again. I went back.

I was working on “Irrevocable Decisions”—which isn’t the neat, sweet short story I’d thought it would be, but just keeps growing—as I had been all week. Two nights running I’d been up late with it, well past my usual hour, and lack of sleep was telling on me: I nearly dozed off on my way to school. Luckily, David was driving. He said I must have an early night for once, and when he couldn’t talk me into giving up my hour at the desk, he made me take an alarm clock up with me.

Hateful things, they are. I didn’t want to be interrupted in mid-flow, I didn’t want to be shocked out of my writing dream, so I wrote against time, obsessed by the presence of the clock all the while I struggled to lose myself and forget it.

I did manage to lose myself in the writing, but I was still so keyed-up to expect an interruption that when I heard a clock strike I jumped up without really noticing that this sound was not the irritating electronic buzz of a travel alarm.

Only halfway down the stairs did I remember, when I saw the door again.

Full of pleasure and anticipation I went through and straight to my table. I picked up notebook and pencil and, set free from time, returned to my story.

I wrote until my vision blurred and my handwriting was a pained and drunken scrawl. I longed to put my head down and close my eyes. Maybe a short nap would help.

As I stumbled across the room to the chaise longue I thought that when I woke I would be stiff from sleeping at my desk in the corner of the loft. I should go downstairs now—but I was too tired to go any further.

Against my expectations, against what seemed like reason, when I awoke I was still there in that room. It was as if I’d only dreamed I’d lost something, and woke to find it was still mine. I was so happy. I jumped up and went back to the writing table, back to work, as invigorated as if I’d had a full night’s sleep.

But although I was eager to get on with my story, I was thirsty. I really fancied a cup of tea. If this was my ideal study, I thought, there must be a kettle, and likely an emergency stash of food. So I got up to have a look.

Maybe the presence of a white china tea-set on top of a low cupboard had struck a subliminal chord. Inside the cupboard I found an electric kettle, two bottles of still water, containers of powdered milk and loose tea, and a tin of digestive biscuits.

“All right!”

I filled the kettle and plugged it in. While I waited for it to boil I investigated the bookshelves. It was pretty amazing I’d managed to resist their lure for this long. Most of the books were duplicates of my own, downstairs, but there were also some volumes I’d always wanted and never managed to afford: the OED, all of Pevsner, the letters of Henry James, lots of big, glossy art books, and just about every useful or interesting reference work I could think of.

In spite of the powdered milk, my cup of tea tasted especially delicious, the way it does when it’s most welcome—after hiking up a mountain with friends, or after a dismal journey in the rain. It was as good as that first cup of tea after Rachel was born. When I’d finished it I went back to work. The ending was in sight. Many of the sentences I wrote were clumsy, crippled in some way, but I knew it didn’t really matter. This was only a draft, a sketch. I would take more care when I rewrote; now, the important thing was to finish.

I didn’t linger afterward. I wrote “The End” in huge letters, and then left the room, clutching the precious notebook to my chest.

But as soon as I was back on the stairs the notebook, like the door, had gone.

Only the story was still there, achieved, finished, in my head—and I knew I would be able to write it again from memory.

It feels so real, what happened to me, but it must be imaginary. No time passes while I am away. I don’t actually go anywhere. So what happens? Maybe, just as I come to the turn of the stair, I suffer a sort of brain-wave, fall into an incredibly rich, vivid, real-seeming dream for what feels like hours, only to snap back to consciousness a few seconds later, and continue going down the stairs, under the mistaken impression that in that gap I’ve written forty pages, had a nap, and consumed one cup of tea and six digestive biscuits …

I have heard of people dreaming epic novels overnight, and supposedly in the second before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes: time doesn’t work the same way subjectively as objectively, everybody knows that. I’m surprised Oliver Sacks hasn’t written about this phenomenon. God, what if it’s the first sign of a tumor or brain lesion or something? I can’t see going to a doctor about it, and describing my “symptoms.” This symptom’s a gift; I don’t want to lose it!

Five

Going there—should that be ‘going there’?—is dependent on a mental state which I can’t simply produce at will. I have to be writing, and immersed, utterly concentrated on what I’m writing—which can be anything, this journal, or a story—yet there must also be something in me which holds unhappily apart, frustrated by limits, angry, dissatisfied, waiting for the bell. It doesn’t happen when I wait for it or try to will it, and it hasn’t happened these past two weeks when I’ve been using David’s laptop to type the final draft of “Irrevocable Decisions.” I wonder if it’s because I’m typing—“keying in” I guess it’s called now—rather than writing. It doesn’t feel natural to me; I hate reading words on a screen. When I have a pen or pencil in my hand and the smoothness of paper racing away beneath, everything is different, my writing room draws closer.

Six

I began a new novel last night and straightaway—I’d only written a page—I heard the clock strike.

My first reaction was not pleasure but irritation and some dismay. Oh, no, and just as I was getting started! I was tempted to ignore it. I had to remind myself that it wasn’t really an interruption—it meant I would have even more time to write. All I had to do was leave one desk and notebook and take up at another. Then I could write for many hours, not just one.

So I went and wrote until my hand ached, and then I stopped and made myself a cup of tea. I couldn’t tell which cup I’d used before—both were clean, although there was nowhere to wash up—and the biscuit tin looked as full as the first time I’d opened it.

I prowled my domain. There was no hurry. I could stay as long as I liked. Not since I became a mother had I known the luxury of the time I had now: time to waste, to lazily work up to writing, to get in the mood, or to slowly wind down. Nobody was going to yell at me to come and look, come and help; there was no ironing to do here, no papers to grade, no cooking or washing up. I was tired, yet the hour when I’d have to get up and go to work was drawing no closer. I could stay as long as I liked and still have eight hours in my bed.

After a good browse among the books I wandered over to have a closer look at the pictures hanging on the opposite wall. There were two portraits: they looked like reproductions of oil paintings, but I didn’t recognize them. There were few clues to era, but I guessed early twentieth century. One showed a woman, nude, seated, presented in side view but half turned away as if to hide her nakedness. She turned back to stare out of the picture with a bold, somehow malicious stare which made me uneasy. The other portrait was of a man in an old-fashioned military uniform, sitting on a yellow chair. The chair made me think of Van Gogh, but the painting was not in his style. At first I thought I preferred this picture, but after a moment I began to suspect there was something wrong with it, or with the subject. He wasn’t a man, after all, but a woman in disguise: a deeply unhappy woman, unwillingly disguised.

I turned away to the other paintings, which were watercolor landscapes, pleasant, uncomplicated studies of the sea and sky, with no people in them. They made me wonder about what was outside the room, so I went over and opened the drapes and, for the first time, I saw.

It was day—early afternoon, to judge from the autumnal light, and the city that should have been there had completely vanished. Stretching away before me was open countryside: rolling downs dotted here and there with copses of trees. In the distance, shining like a silver coin, I could see a lake. I saw no buildings, no roads, nothing man-made, not even the electricity pylons and telephone poles which have penetrated everywhere in the world I know. Not only the city but civilization itself seemed to have withdrawn, leaving me utterly alone. I looked down, and the house I owned with David had also vanished. I could see no doors or windows below mine. It appeared that I was in a tower built of stone.

I was utterly lost. Where was my family, my home, my world? Panic gripped me, and I ran for the door. The sight of my own familiar stairs when the door opened wasn’t enough for me, though—I had to race downstairs and then outside into our tiny back garden where I could see the sodium orange glow of civilization in the night sky, and smell the chilly, polluted air of life as we know it today.

“What’s the matter?” asked David, hovering in the kitchen, his hair in little tufts like eyebrows raised in astonishment. I was so pleased to see him. Love for him surged through me, warming me and making me tearful.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Oh, I just suddenly thought how lucky I am to have you!”

He put his arms around me, puzzled but pleased, and I began to kiss him with enthusiasm, so happy and relieved to be safely home again. One thing led to another, and then to bed.

Seven

It doesn’t frighten me now, the view from that window. It’s like everything else there—mine, even though I wouldn’t consciously have chosen it. But it stands to reason that if I could have a room of my own, furnished exactly to my taste, expense no object, I wouldn’t want a view of the backs of houses to go with it. The country outside reminds me a bit of the South Downs, where David and I went for our dirty weekends long ago, and a little bit of that place in Scotland where we went for our first family holiday, just after Phoebe was born—only it’s much wilder, obviously much more remote, than anywhere I’ve ever been. No rising smoke, no flocks of sheep, no footpaths, no signs of any other human habitation. There’s only me in my tower.

Spring arrived between one visit and the next. I opened the window and breathed in the pure, fresh country air. I spent about ten minutes just watching the birds and some rabbits hopping about. I’m not so driven now; I know that when I’m there I have plenty of time to think, read, daydream—I don’t have to scribble furiously the whole time. I can plan what I’m going to write, and things I won’t. I can even daydream about things that are nothing to do with writing, have thoughts just to please myself. The time I have inside is all my own, I don’t have to juggle conflicting demands and make sacrifices and feel guilty stealing one little hour to myself. The time I spend in there doesn’t take away from the children, or my job, or David, or even the housework. I could spend the whole day writing in my room and emerge less than an hour after going upstairs, enough of the evening left to do some ironing and talk to David about music lessons for the girls.

I wonder … this trick I’ve stumbled on: could anyone do it? Do we all have this capacity, a secret room hidden away inside us, just waiting to be unlocked? Writing is the key for me, but could it be something else for someone else? Wishing is part of it, I’m sure, but also hard work and a particular kind of concentration.

Eight

And pride goeth before a fall. Ouch.

I haven’t been back into my room for three weeks: not for lack of wishing, not for lack of trying.

It was hard, sometimes, settling down to write out here when I wanted to be writing in there, but when I did (because I knew I’d never get anywhere if I didn’t) I kept breaking my concentration because I thought (hoped) I’d heard the clock strike. Well, that was the first week.

Finally I managed to stop hoping, to stop expecting anything and just write. I got quite a bit done—I’m well into the novel now and can see my way ahead.

This has made me rethink my theory.

Maybe it’s nothing to do with me. Maybe that room actually exists in some other universe, and our house just happens to be built on a border-line, and I just happened to be going down the stairs on a few of the occasions when the door between two worlds manifested itself, and it could just as easily have been David, or a visitor looking for the loo, who went through …

Or maybe it was a gift from God, or a passing good fairy, who kindly granted my wish until I got so unbearably smug about “my” room, at which point He, She, or It took it back.

Oh, please, if you’re out there—whoever You are—please please please give me another chance.

Nine

Halfway through the novel and I’ve hit an intractable hump. Where do I go from here? Maybe I should have stuck with the first novel, which at least had a proper sort of plot. I should have outlined first, the way they tell you in books. I was seduced by the ease of those two short stories into thinking it would just kind of work itself out as I went along.

Are the characters the problem? Maybe she’s too much like me and he’s too much unlike anybody I’ve ever met. Or it’s the situation. Meant to be difficult, it’s become impossible. There’s no obvious solution, maybe no unobvious one, either, no way out.

But there must be a way out, if there was a way in. Just not an obvious one. Something unexpected happens, something that changes the way she looks at her life. A door suddenly opens. A clock strikes when there is no clock—

Thank you.

Ten

Not just weeks, as for me outside, but months passed in there, the turning of the seasons. It was spring before, but when I went in two nights ago I found a dark, winter landscape outside the window. It was early morning. As I sat at my table and struggled to write myself back into my stalled novel the blackness outside began to lighten. The sun came up. There was snow everywhere; looking down I saw what had to be deer tracks in the snow. And as I went on gazing, my eyes roaming, dazzled, across the white expanse, feeling awed by its immense purity, I glimpsed a splash of red. It moved. As I continued to stare I made out a solitary human figure, well bundled against the weather (the red was a scarf), trudging through the snow.

My heart raced and I felt quite giddy. I wasn’t alone! As I watched, it became clear that the figure was coming toward me—hardly surprising, since mine was the only building anywhere in sight. I debated what to do, considering the wisdom of caution—in other words, should I escape back to my own world before I was seen—but was won over by curiosity and the inability to believe that I could be in any real danger in what was my own dream. I opened the window and, when he was close enough to hear, called out a greeting.

He replied, but I couldn’t understand a word he said. It was clear that he knew no more of English than I knew of his strange language. He mimed climbing up: would I let him in? He looked so cold, poor thing, and I was cold enough shivering by the open window, so I nodded and beckoned him to come up.

He climbed up the rough stone very nimbly while I thought disjointedly about Rapunzel and other princesses in towers without doors. I felt very strange when he came in. I felt shy. The whole atmosphere of the room was different with someone else in it. I think he felt shy of me, too. He avoided my eye but kept up a stream of incomprehensible talk while he divested himself of backpack and heavier outer garments. He could have been talking about the weather, explaining he was a king’s son, or telling me filthy stories for all I knew. I think he said his name was Jack, or Zak, or Jacques, but that’s only if he understood what I was asking him.

Jack—I might as well call him that—was a nice-looking, if rather grubby and stubbled, individual, a few years older than me and a bit shorter. He had shortish, fairish, gray hair and what there was of his beard was nearly white. Blue eyes, long nose, decided chin—quite a pleasant, humorous, intelligent face. He reminded me more than a little of Josh, that long-vanished Canadian, which maybe helps explains why I—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked, and mimed drinking. His face brightened and he nodded, and dug into his rucksack and brought out food: russet apples, a small, round loaf of brown bread, a chunk of hard yellow cheese, nutty and buttery tasting. Eating together we relaxed. I liked his company (the way he looked at me; the warmth of his eyes; that physical and psychic whiff of Josh, making me feel much younger than I am) and could tell he liked mine, although our attempts to communicate anything more profound or abstract than “this cheese is delicious” were doomed to failure. I have no ear for languages: I’ll never forget that time I asked a man in a bar in Scotland if he spoke English, under the misapprehension that the language he’d been regaling me with for the past ten minutes was either Gaelic or Norwegian! I got through French at school only because there was so much less emphasis on conversation than on reading and writing. Looking at words, reading them, I can make some sort of sense. The things I hear, though, slip away. I’m struggling now to recall the words Jack told me for “apple,” “bread,” and “book.”

After eating, the warmth of the room made him drowsy; he began to yawn and it was obvious he was having a struggle to keep his eyes open. I gestured him toward the chaise longue, mimed sleep, then pointed to the door and made him understand I would leave him to it. This won from him a burst of speech, but as I hadn’t a clue as to whether he was asking me about toilet facilities or simply thanking me, I could only shrug, smile, and wave bye-bye.

The door was there again last night. As soon as I came in Jack rushed to meet me, wide-eyed and talking a blue streak, desperately trying to explain something to me. All I could make out was that he’d nearly given up hope of ever seeing me again and had been about to leave.

I’d been gone only a day in my world, but that was so much longer in his. He drew me to the window and showed me that the snow was melting. He pointed to the remains of a deer carcass and I understood he’d been living off it—and my tea, made with melted snow—after exhausting the supplies in his rucksack. He’d waited as long as he could.

But why? I didn’t understand why he had waited for me until, our eyes meeting, he reached out to touch my face.

He loved me.

We made love.

Just writing those words, I feel myself swept away again. I can’t justify it. I’m happily married (and how suspicious I’ve always been of people who use that defensive phrase!) and he was a stranger.

My stranger. My fantasy. I guess that’s the only explanation there is. Anything is possible, and everything permissible, in a dream, and the life I lead in that room is a dream.

We spent a whole long day making love. In some ways it was the most natural thing to do—what is there, when you can’t communicate in words? There are gestures, there is touch; looks and smiles, caresses, the language of the body.

He wanted me to go out the window and away with him. It was obvious my door did not exist for him, which is just as well, since I could hardly have taken him back here, into my real life! I know he won’t be there when I return, which is

Eleven

I must not go back.

So much for my smug, self-serving belief that I could do what I wanted in my own private world without affecting anyone else.

David came upstairs last night, looking a little green around the gills, wanting to talk. Instant guilt attack. If I hadn’t still been writing it, I would have imagined he’d just read in my journal about Jack.

So I went down with him and we talked. It was a talk about feelings, a vague but impassioned something’s wrong/what’s wrong discussion of a kind unusual in our relationship. We had one just before we got married, I remember, and a couple when I was pregnant and paranoid, but in general we’ve both had a practical, if uninquiring, attitude toward our relationship, as to life in general; a belief in not stirring up trouble. We don’t argue very often but when we do it tends to be about something specific, not the “you don’t talk to me/I feel we’re drifting apart/what’s happening to us” blather of last night.

And the pig of it was, I couldn’t shrug off his vague fears any more than I could make them concrete with the truth.

“There isn’t someone else, is there, Chris? You’re not seeing someone else?”

His name is Jack, and he’s not real—I made him up. “When would I have time? No, there isn’t anyone else.”

“I didn’t think so. But if it isn’t someone, it’s something.”

I know he found it painfully difficult to express. He’s always been supportive of my writing—for all the good it’s ever done him! —and he doesn’t want to start being obstructive now, even though he’s started to feel that it is taking me away from him, away from him and the girls.

It’s true; I had to admit his fears were well-founded. Between my job, his job, looking after the children, doing basic housework and other chores, my writing, and—this is the part he still doesn’t know about—my secret fantasy world, there’s nothing left over for him, for us—nothing special, that is. We eat together, sleep together, go places as a family, and that’s about it. I don’t spend any more time away from him, physically, than I have in the past three years, but mentally I do. And mentally makes the difference. There aren’t enough hours in the day and never have been, but back when we first got together (both of us with full-time jobs and ongoing, if unsatisfactory, relationships with significant others) we used to focus a lot of energy on making the few hours we did have together something special.

“There aren’t enough hours in the day,” David said last night. “I know that. We have to work, and Rachel and Phoebe need our time and attention, and there’re always other things to be done, but we need time together, just the two of us. I’m not asking you to give up writing—I’d never do that, I know how much it means to you—but something has to change. Even when we are together I don’t feel you’re really with me. Your mind’s somewhere else. It bothers me.”

I hadn’t meant for it to happen and I didn’t want it to be true, but it was. I agreed that I would make an effort to change—we both would. We’d get a sitter and go out together occasionally and, just as important, we would spend more evenings together the way we used to—sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, listening to music, talking, making love.

I won’t have to give up writing, but I’ll lose my precious “extra hour.”

I was a fool to think I could do whatever I wanted without consequences. Everything makes a difference; everything has its cost.

I must not go there again.

I feel as sad and despairing as if this meant giving up writing. Maybe it does. By luck or magic I found a way to make more time in which to write, and now I’ll have to do without.

But if I carry on like this I’ll destroy my marriage. If it was only my happiness at stake maybe I’d risk it, maybe I’d choose the unknown over present comfort. But there are the children to think of as well, their lives, their happiness. I’m not that selfish. I know, pace Charlotte Perkins Gilman and all the other feminist writer-heroines, that writing—especially my writing—is simply not that important. People’s lives are what’s important, my family’s happiness, not my own selfish gratification.

Besides—I have to keep reminding myself—it’s not writing I’m giving up, just the sneaky, supernatural way I’ve been doing it lately. I will finish my novel.

Only not tonight. My hour is up, and I haven’t done a thing. I’ll have to give up this journal, too. Cut back to the basics. We’ll survive.

Twelve

Twice I heard the clock strike; twice I ignored it, as I’d promised myself I would, but the third time—

It was nearly four months since I’d heard it, and I’d thought I never would again. This might be my last chance.

Oh, David, I never meant to betray you, or leave you, and I still don’t. Maybe, if you read these pages, and can bring yourself to believe them, you’ll understand why, if not how, I have gone.

I got up when I heard the clock strike. It was a half-conscious impulse, a powerful desire, unreasoning, that drew me. I hesitated when I saw the door at the turn of the stair, hesitated and thought of you. What would happen if I called you? Would the door vanish, or would you be able to enter with me?

I wish now that I’d tried, had given you the chance to see, but I didn’t, and it’s too late for second-guessing. I did what I did.

As soon as I stepped into the room I was seized, attacked, by overwhelming pain. I staggered forward, doubled over, struggling to cope with whatever was happening to me, and then the pain passed. I could breathe again, but I was weak and covered in sweat. And there was something familiar about the pain. I looked down and realized I was pregnant.

The pain wracked me again. This time, the shock and terror were nearly as overwhelming as the physical labor. I was having a baby!

The contractions were very close together and horribly intense, with scarcely any space to rest in between. I didn’t really have the time or energy to worry about the fact that I was all alone and wonder how I’d cope—I just had to get on with it. It never occurred to me to try to leave the room; what I was going through so consumed everything that there was no chance of thinking coherently. All my energies were devoted to getting through the next surge of pain, and then the next, and then in pushing the baby out. I managed to get my clothes off, and located some towels. I suppose it was all over rather quickly, although it didn’t feel like it.

Then everything happened much too fast, and there was a baby slipping between my legs as I struggled to grasp and lift the slippery, bloody little creature. We rested for a while on the floor and she—yes, she; another girl, of course—looked up at me with her dark blue eyes and gave a peeping, mewling cry more like a newborn kitten than a human child. She was so much smaller than Rachel had been, tinier even than Phoebe, but she was just as solid, just as real, and the protective, wondering love I felt welling up in me for her was just as strong as it had been for my other two.

Oh, my baby!

Those splotches are tears. Well, I’m postpartum, I can’t be expected to— I can’t help it, I—

But looking at me now, looking at my breasts, you’d never guess that a few minutes ago they were swollen at least two bra-sizes bigger. You’d never know from looking at me that I just gave birth. There’s no trace left of the sweat and blood or any of the other fluids—I don’t even smell of anything much, as if I’d done nothing more strenuous today than walk up and down the stairs.

We lay there together a while, first on the floor where she’d been born, then up onto the chaise longue. All of a sudden I felt hungry, but what I wanted even more than something to eat was to have a good wash, and to wash her, and get some fresh clothes for both of us. Also, I was worrying about the umbilicus, having nothing to cut it. I had a vague notion that something awful could happen if you left it too long, although I couldn’t for the life of me remember what. We couldn’t just stay there in post-natal coma like that forever. I guess I knew it was a risk: nothing and no one from that world could go out my door with me; I’d never even been able to take out a notebook. But I’d taken ideas, stories, out, and she was as much a part of me as my stories—she was even still attached to me.

I thought it might work, but it didn’t. As soon as I stepped through the door she was gone, and I was alone and intact in this world again.

That’s why I screamed, and lied so unintelligibly when you called up to me.

Then I ran straight back here, to my desk, to my notebook, to try to write my way back inside to my baby.

She needs me; she can’t live without me, and I can’t let her die.

Newborns can go several days without food (I keep reminding myself of these comforting facts), but how quickly will several days pass in there while I’m out here? I won’t leave my desk, I won’t sleep, until I hear the clock strike to let me back in.

You do understand why, don’t you, David?

It’s not that I value her life more than your happiness, or Phoebe’s, or Rachel’s, only—only it is her life we’re talking about, her actual life weighed against mere comfort. She needs me in the way the rest of you don’t. The three of you can survive without me—she can’t.

But maybe you can both have me; maybe we can all survive. Time works so differently there. It might be, as I hope, that I can go back there, climb out the window and scale the rough stone wall of my tower with my baby strapped to my front, and carry her across that beautiful, wild emptiness to another house or a village or a castle—Jack came from somewhere, so there must be other people, and habitations, there—find her a foster home and wet-nurse, and then come back. I just want to save her life; I don’t have to raise her myself.

If I can do all that in the same sort of no-time in which she was conceived, then I’ll be back here before bedtime. You’ll never have to read this, never know what I’ve been through, and I’ll pretend—and eventually convince myself—that it all took place inside my head.

But if you don’t find me when you come upstairs looking for me, and you read this, I want you to know the truth.

The clock!

Remember, I love you all.

Where the Stones Grow

He saw the stone move. Smoothly as a door falling shut, it swung slightly around and settled back into the place where it had stood for centuries.

They’ll kill anyone who sees them.

Terrified, Paul backed away, ready to run, when he saw something that didn’t belong in that high, empty field which smelled of the sea. Lying half-in, half-out of the triangle formed by the three tall stones called the Sisters was Paul’s father, his face bloody and his body permanently stilled.

*

When he was twenty-six, his company offered to send Paul Staunton to England for a special training course, the offer a token of better things to come. In a panic, Paul refused, much too vehemently. His only reason—that his father had died violently in England eighteen years before—was not considered a reason at all. Before the end of the year, Paul had been transferred away from the main office in Houston to the branch in San Antonio.

He knew he should be unhappy, but, oddly enough, the move suited him. He was still being paid well for work he enjoyed, and he found the climate and pace of life in San Antonio more congenial than that of Houston. He decided to buy a house and settle down.

The house he chose was about forty years old, built of native white limestone and set in a bucolic neighborhood on the west side of the city. It was a simple rectangle, long and low to the ground, like a railway car. The roof was flat and the gutters and window frames peeled green paint. The four rooms offered him no more space than the average mobile home, but it was enough for him.

A yard of impressive size surrounded the house with thick green grass shaded by mimosas, pecans, a magnolia, and two massive, spreading fig trees. A chain-link fence defined the boundaries of the property, although one section at the back was torn and sagging and would have to be repaired. There were neighboring houses on either side, also set in large yards, but beyond the fence at the back of the house was a wild mass of bushes and high weeds, ten or more undeveloped acres separating his house from a state highway.

Paul Staunton moved into his house on a day in June, a few days shy of the nineteenth anniversary of his father’s death. The problems and sheer physical labor involved in moving had kept him from brooding about the past until something unexpected happened. As he was unrolling a new rug to cover the ugly checkerboard linoleum in the living room, something spilled softly out: less than a handful of gray grit, the pieces too small even to be called pebbles. Just rock-shards.

Paul broke into a sweat and let go of the rug as if it were contaminated. He was breathing quickly and shallowly as he stared at the debris.

His reaction was absurd, all out of proportion. He forced himself to take hold of the rug again and finish unrolling it. Then—he could not make himself pick them up—he took the carpet sweeper and rolled it over the rug, back and forth, until all the hard gray crumbs were gone.

It was time for a break. Paul got himself a beer from the refrigerator and a folding chair from the kitchen and went out to sit in the back yard. He stationed himself beneath one of the mimosa trees and stared out at the lush green profusion. He wouldn’t even mind mowing it, he thought as he drank the beer. It was his property, the first he’d ever owned. Soon the figs would be ripe. He’d never had a fig before, except inside a cookie.

When the beer was all gone, and he was calmer, he let himself think about his father.

*

Paul’s father, Edward Staunton, had always been lured by the thought of England. It was a place of magic and history, the land his ancestors had come from. From childhood he had dreamed of going there, but it was not until he was twenty-seven, with a wife and an eight-year-old son, that a trip to England had been possible.

Paul had a few dim memories of London, of the smell of the streets, and riding on top of a bus, and drinking sweet, milky tea—but most of these earlier memories had been obliterated by the horror that followed.

It began in a seaside village in Devon. It was a picturesque little place, but famous for nothing. Paul never knew why they had gone there.

They arrived in the late afternoon and walked through cobbled streets, dappled with slanting sun rays. The smell of the sea was strong on the wind, and the cry of gulls carried even into the center of town. One street had looked like a mountain to Paul, a straight drop down to the gray, shining ocean, with neatly kept stone cottages staggered on both sides. At the sight of it, Paul’s mother had laughed and gasped and exclaimed that she didn’t dare, not in her shoes, but the three of them had held hands and, calling out warnings to each other like intrepid mountaineers, the Stauntons had, at last, descended.

At the bottom was a narrow pebble beach, and steep, pale cliffs rose up on either side of the town, curving around like protecting wings.

“It’s magnificent,” said Charlotte Staunton, looking from the cliffs to the gray-and-white movement of the water, and then back up at the town.

Paul bent down to pick up a pebble. It was smooth and dark brown, more like a piece of wood or a nut than a stone. Then another: smaller, nearly round, milky. And then a flat black one that looked like a drop of ink. He put them in his pocket and continued to search hunched over, his eyes on the ground.

He heard his father say, “I wonder if there’s another way up?” And then another voice, a stranger’s, responded, “Oh, aye, there is. There is the Sisters’ Way.”

Paul looked up in surprise and saw an elderly man with a stick and a pipe and a little black dog who stood on the beach with them as if he’d grown there, and regarded the three Americans with a mild, benevolent interest.

“The Sisters’ Way?” said Paul’s father.

The old man gestured with his knobby walking stick toward the cliffs to their right. “I was headed that way myself,” he said. “Would you care to walk along with me? It’s an easier path than the High Street.”

“I think we’d like that,” said Staunton. “Thank you. But who are the Sisters?”

“You’ll see them soon enough,” said the man as they all began to walk together. “They’re at the top.”

At first sight, the cliffs had looked dauntingly steep. But as they drew closer they appeared accessible. Paul thought it would be fun to climb straight up, taking advantage of footholds and ledges he could now see, but that was not necessary. The old man led them to a narrow pathway which led gently up the cliffs in a circuitous way, turning and winding, so that it was not a difficult ascent at all. The way was not quite wide enough to walk two abreast, so the Stauntons fell into a single file after the old man, with the dog bringing up the rear.

“Now,” said their guide when they reached the top. “Here we are! And there stand the Sisters.”

They stood in a weedy, empty meadow just outside town—rooftops could be seen just beyond a stand of trees about a half a mile away. And the Sisters, to judge from the old man’s gesture, could be nothing more than some rough gray boulders.

“Standing stones,” said Edward Staunton in a tone of great interest. He walked toward the boulders and his wife and son followed.

They were massive pieces of gray granite, each one perhaps eight feet tall, rearing out of the porous soil in a roughly triangular formation. The elder Staunton walked among them, touching them, a reverent look on his face. “These must be incredibly old,” he said. He looked back at their guide and raised his voice slightly. “Why are they called the ‘Sisters’?”

The old man shrugged. “That’s what they be.”

“But what’s the story?” Staunton asked. “There must be some legend—a tradition—maybe a ritual the local people perform.”

“We’re good Christians here,” the old man said, sounding indignant. “No rituals here. We leave them stones alone!” As he spoke, the little dog trotted forward, seemingly headed for the stones, but a hand gesture from the man froze it, and it sat obediently at his side.

“But surely there’s a story about how they came to be here? Why is that path we came up named after them?”

“Ah, that,” said the man. “That is called the Sisters’ Way because on certain nights of the year the Sisters go down that path to bathe in the sea.”

Paul felt his stomach jump uneasily at those words, and he stepped back a little, not wanting to be too close to the stones. He had never heard of stones that could move by themselves, and he was fairly certain such a thing was not possible, but the idea still frightened him.

“They move!” exclaimed Staunton. He sounded pleased. “Have you ever seen them do it?”

“Oh, no. Not I, or any man alive. The Sisters don’t like to be spied on. They’ll kill anyone who sees them.”

“Mama,” said Paul, urgently. “Let’s go back. I’m hungry.”

She patted his shoulder absently. “Soon, dear.”

“I wonder if anyone has tried,” said Staunton. “I wonder where such a story comes from. When exactly are they supposed to travel?”

“Certain nights,” said the old man. He sounded uneasy.

“Sacred times? Like Allhallows maybe?”

The old man looked away toward the trees and the village and he said: “My wife will have my tea waiting for me. She worries if I’m late. I’ll just say good day to you, then.” He slapped his hip, the dog sprang up, and they walked away together, moving quickly.

“He believes it,” Staunton said. “It’s not just a story to him. I wonder what made him so nervous? Did he think the stones would take offense at his talking about them?”

“Maybe tonight is one of those nights,” his wife said thoughtfully. “Isn’t Midsummer Night supposed to be magical?”

“Let’s go,” said Paul again. He was afraid even to look at the stones. From the corner of his eye he could catch a glimpse of them, and it seemed to him that they were leaning toward his parents threateningly, listening.

“Paul’s got a good idea,” his mother said cheerfully. “I could do with something to eat myself. Shall we go?”

The Stauntons found lodging for the night in a green-shuttered cottage with a Bed and Breakfast sign hanging over the gate. It was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Winkle, a weathered-looking couple, who raised cats and rose bushes and treated their visitors like old friends. After the light had faded from the sky, the Stauntons sat with the Winkles in their cozy parlor and talked. Paul was given a jigsaw puzzle to work, and he sat with it in a corner, listening to the adults and hoping he would not be noticed and sent to bed.

“One thing I like about this country is the way the old legends live on,” Staunton said. “We met an old man this afternoon on the beach, and he led us up a path called the Sisters’ Way, and showed us the stones at the top. But I couldn’t get much out of him about why the stones should be called the Sisters—I got the idea that he was afraid of them.”

“Many are,” said Mr. Winkle equably. “Better safe than sorry.”

“What’s the story about those stones? Do you know it?”

“When I was a girl,” Mrs. Winkle offered, “people said that they were three sisters who long ago had been turned to stone for sea-bathing on the Sabbath. And so wicked were they that, instead of repenting their sin, they continue to climb down the cliff to bathe whenever they get the chance.”

Mr. Winkle shook his head. “That’s just the sort of tale you might expect from a minister’s daughter,” he said. “Bathing on the Sabbath indeed! That’s not the story at all. I don’t know all the details of it—different folks say it different ways—but there were once three girls who made the mistake of staying overnight in that field, long before there was a town here. And when morning came; the girls had turned to stone.

“But even as stones they had the power to move at certain times of the year, and so they did. They wore away a path down the cliff by going to the sea and trying to wash away the stone that covered them. But even though the beach now is littered with little bits of the stone that the sea has worn away, it will take them till doomsday to be rid of it all.” Mr. Winkle picked up his pipe and began to clean it.

Staunton leaned forward in his chair. “But why should spending the night in that field cause them to turn to stone?”

“Didn’t I say? Oh, well, the name of that place is the place where the stones grow. And that’s what it is. Those girls just picked the wrong time and the wrong place to rest, and when the stones came up from the ground the girls were covered by them.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Staunton said. There are standing stones all over England—I’ve read a lot about them. And I’ve never heard a story like that. People don’t just turn to stone for no reason.”

“Of course not, Mr. Staunton. I didn’t say it was for no reason. It was the place they were in, and the time. I don’t say that sort of thing—people turning into stones—happens in this day, but I don’t say it doesn’t. People avoid that place where the stones grow, even though it lies so close upon the town. The cows don’t graze there, and no one would build there.”

“You mean there’s some sort of a curse on it?”

“No, Mr. Staunton. No more than an apple orchard or an oyster bed is cursed. It’s just a place where stones grow.”

“But stones don’t grow.”

“Edward,” murmured his wife warningly.

But Mr. Winkle did not seem to be offended by Staunton’s bluntness. He smiled. “You’re a city man, aren’t you, Mr. Staunton? You know, I heard a tale once about a little boy in London who believed the greengrocer made vegetables out of a greenish paste and baked them, just the way his mother made biscuits. He’d never seen them growing—he’d never seen anything growing, except flowers in window boxes, and grass in the parks—and grass and flowers aren’t good to eat, so how should he know?

“But the countryman knows that everything that lives grows, following its own rhythm, whether it is a tree, a stone, a beast, or a man.”

“But a stone’s not alive. It’s not like a plant or an animal.” Staunton cast about for an effective argument. “You could prove it for yourself. Take a rock, from that field or anywhere else, and put it on your windowsill and watch it for ten years, and it wouldn’t grow a bit!”

“You could try that same experiment with a potato, Mr. Staunton,” Mr. Winkle responded. “And would you then tell me that a potato, because it didn’t grow in ten years on my windowsill, never grew and never grows? There’s a place and a time for everything. To everything there is a season,” he said, reaching over to pat his wife’s hand. “As my wife’s late father was fond of reminding us.”

*

As a child, Paul Staunton had been convinced that the stones had killed his father. He had been afraid when his mother had sent him out into the chilly, dark morning to find his father and bring him back to have breakfast, and when he had seen the stone, still moving, he had known. Had known, and been afraid that the stones would pursue him, to punish him for his knowledge, the old man’s warning echoing in his mind:they’ll kill anyone who sees them.

But as he had grown older, Paul had sought other, more rational, explanations for his father’s death. An accident. A mugging. An escaped lunatic. A coven of witches, surprised at their rites. An unknown enemy who had trailed his father for years. But nothing, to Paul, carried the conviction of his first answer. That the stones themselves had killed his father, horribly and unnaturally moving, crushing his father when he stood in their way.

It had grown nearly dark as he brooded, and the mosquitoes were beginning to bite. He still had work to do inside. He stood up and folded the chair, carrying it in one hand, and walked toward the door. As he reached it, his glance fell on the window ledge beside him. On it were three light-colored pebbles.

He stopped breathing for a moment. He remembered the pebbles he had picked up on that beach in England, and how they had come back to haunt him more than a week later, back at home in the United States, when they fell out of the pocket where he had put them so carelessly. Nasty reminders of his father’s death, then, and he had stared at them, trembling violently, afraid to pick them up. Finally he had called his mother, and she had gotten rid of them for him somehow. Or perhaps she had kept them—Paul had never asked.

But that had nothing to do with these stones. He scooped them off the ledge with one hand, half-turned, and flung them away as far as he could. He thought they went over the sagging back fence, but he could not see where, amid the shadows and the weeds, they fell.

*

He had done a lot in two days, and Paul Staunton was pleased with himself. All his possessions were inside and in their place, the house was clean, the telephone had been installed, and he had fixed the broken latch on the bathroom window. Some things remained to be done—he needed a dining-room table, he didn’t like the wallpaper in the bathroom, and the back yard would have to be mowed very soon—but all in all he thought he had a right to be proud of what he had done. There was still some light left in the day, which made it worthwhile to relax outside and enjoy the cooler evening air.

He took a chair out, thinking about the need for some lawn furniture, and put it in the same spot where he had sat before, beneath the gentle mimosa. But this time, before sitting down, he began to walk around the yard, pacing off his property and luxuriating in the feeling of being a landowner.

Something pale, glimmering in the twilight, caught his eye, and Paul stood still, frowning. It was entirely the wrong color for anything that should be on the other side of the fence, amid that tumbled blur of greens and browns. He began to walk toward the back fence, trying to make out what it was, but was able only to catch maddeningly incomplete glimpses. Probably just trash, paper blown in from the road, he thought, but still … He didn’t trust his weight to the sagging portion of the fence, but climbed another section. He paused at the top, not entirely willing to climb over, and strained his eyes for whatever it was and, seeing it at last, nearly fell off the fence.

He caught himself in time to make it a jump, rather than an undignified tumble, but at the end of it he was on the other side of the fence and his heart was pounding wildly.

Standing stones. Three rocks in a roughly triangular formation.

He wished he had not seen them. He wanted to be back in his own yard. But it was too late for that. And now he wanted to be sure of what he had seen. He pressed on through the high weeds and thick plants, burrs catching on his jeans, his socks, and his T-shirt.

There they were.

His throat was tight and his muscles unwilling, but Paul made himself approach and walk around them. Yes, there were three standing stones, but beyond the formation, and the idea of them, there was no real resemblance to the rocks in England. These stones were no more than four feet high, and less than two across. Unlike the standing stones of the Old World, these had not been shaped and set in their places—they were just masses of native white limestone jutting out of the thin soil. San Antonio lies on the Edwards Plateau, a big slab of limestone laid down as ocean sediment during the Cretaceous, covered now with seldom more than a few inches of soil. There was nothing unusual about these stones, and they had nothing to do with the legends of growing, walking stones in another country.

Paul knew that. But, as he turned away from the stones and made his way back through the underbrush to his own yard, one question nagged him, a problem he could not answer to his own satisfaction, and that was: why didn’t I see them before?

Although he had not been over the fence before, he had often enough walked around the yard—even before buying the house—and once had climbed the fence and gazed out at the land on the other side.

Why hadn’t he seen the stones then? They were visible from the fence, so why hadn’t he seen them more than a week earlier? He should have seen them. If they were there.

But they must have been there. They couldn’t have popped up out of the ground overnight; and why should anyone transport stones to such an unlikely place? They must have been there. So why hadn’t he seen them before?

The place where the stones grow, he thought.

Going into the house, he locked the back door behind him.

*

The next night was Midsummer Eve, the anniversary of his father’s death, and Paul did not want to spend it alone.

He had drinks with a pretty young woman named Alice Croy after work—she had been working as a temporary secretary in his office—and then took her out to dinner, and then for more drinks, and then, after a minor altercation about efficiency, saving gas, and who was not too drunk to drive, she followed him in her own car to his house where they had a mutually satisfying, if not terribly meaningful, encounter.

Paul was drifting off to sleep when he realized that Alice had gotten up and was moving about the room.

He looked at the clock: it was almost two.

“What’re you doing?” he asked drowsily.

“You don’t have to get up.” She patted his shoulder kindly, as if he were a dog or a very old man.

He sat up and saw that she was dressed except for her shoes. “What are you doing?” he repeated.

She sighed. “Look, don’t take this wrong, okay? I like you. I think what we had was really great, and I hope we can get together again. But I just don’t feel comfortable in a strange bed. I don’t know you well enough to—it would be awkward in the morning for both of us. So I’m just going on home.”

“So that’s why you brought your own car.”

“Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Your leaving disturbs me.”

She made a face.

Paul sighed and rubbed his eyes. It would be pointless to argue with her. And, he realized, he didn’t like her very much—on any other night he might have been relieved to see her go.

“All right,” he said. “If you change your mind, you know where I live.”

She kissed him lightly. “I’ll find my way out. You go back to sleep, now.”

But he was wide awake, and he didn’t think he would sleep again that night. He was safe in his own bed, in his own house, surely. If his father had been content to stay inside, instead of going out alone, in the gray, predawn light, to look at three stones in a field, he might be alive now.

It’s over, thought Paul. Whatever happened, happened long ago, and to my father, not me. (But he had seen the stone move.)

He sat up and turned on the light before that old childhood nightmare could appear before him: the towering rocks lumbering across the grassy field to crush his father. He wished he knew someone in San Antonio well enough to call at this hour. Someone to visit. Another presence to keep away the nightmares. Since there was no one, Paul knew that he would settle for lots of Jack Daniel’s over ice, with Bach on the stereo—supreme products of civilization to keep the ghosts away.

But he didn’t expect it to work.

In the living room, sipping his drink, the uncurtained glass of the windows disturbed him. He couldn’t see out, but the light in the room cast his reflection onto the glass, so that he was continually being startled by his own movements. He settled that by turning out the lights. There was a full moon, and he could see well enough by the light that it cast, and the faint glow from the stereo console. The windows were tightly shut and the air-conditioning unit was laboring steadily: the cool, laundered air and the steady hum shut out the night even more effectively than the Brandenburg Concertos.

Not for the first time, he thought of seeing a psychiatrist. In the morning he would get the name of a good one. Tough on a young boy to lose his father, he thought, killing his third drink. So much worse for the boy who finds his father’s dead body in mysterious circumstances. But one had to move beyond that. There was so much more to life than the details of an early trauma.

As he rose and crossed the room for another drink (silly to have left the bottle all the way over there, he thought), a motion from the yard outside caught his eye, and he slowly turned his head to look.

It wasn’t just his reflection that time. There had been something moving in the far corner of the yard, near the broken-down fence. But now that he looked for it, he could see nothing. Unless, perhaps, was that something there in the shadows near one of the fig trees? Something about four feet high, pale-colored, and now very still?

Paul had a sudden urge, which he killed almost at once, to take a flashlight and go outside, to climb the fence and make sure those three rocks were still there.They want me to come out , he thought—and stifled that thought, too.

He realized he was sweating. The air conditioner didn’t seem to be doing much good. He poured himself another drink and pulled his chair around to face the window. Then he sat there in the dark, sipping his whiskey and staring out into the night. He didn’t bother to replace the record when the stereo clicked itself off, and he didn’t get up for another drink when his glass was empty. He waited and watched for nearly an hour, and he saw nothing in the dark yard move. Still he waited, thinking,They have their own time, and it isn’t ours. They grow at their own pace, in their own place, like everything else alive.

Something was happening, he knew. He would soon see the stones move, just as his father had. But he wouldn’t make his father’s mistake and get in their way. He wouldn’t let himself be killed.

Then, at last—he had no idea of the time now—the white mass in the shadows rippled, and the stone moved, emerging onto the moonlit grass. Another stone was behind it, and another. Three white rocks moving across the grass.

They were flowing. The solid white rock rippled and lost its solid contours and re-formed again in another place, slightly closer to the house. Flowing—not like water, like rock.

Paul thought of molten rock and of lava flows. But molten rock did not start and stop like that, and it did not keep its original form intact, forming and re-forming like that. He tried to comprehend what he was seeing. He knew he was no longer drunk. How could a rock move? Under great heat or intense pressure, perhaps. What were rocks? Inorganic material, but made of atoms like everything else. And atoms could change, could be changed—forms could change—

But the simple fact was that rocks did not move. Not by themselves. They did not wear paths down cliffs to the sea. They did not give birth. They did not grow. They did not commit murder. They did not seek revenge.

Everyone knew this, he thought, as he watched the rocks move in his back yard. No one had ever seen a rock move.

Because they kill anyone who sees them.

They had killed his father, and now they had come to kill him.

Paul sprang up from his chair, overturning it, thinking of escape. Then he remembered. Hewas safe. Safe inside his own home. His hand came down on the windowsill and he stroked it. Solid walls between him and those things out there: walls built of sturdy, comforting stone.

Staring down at his hand on the white rock ledge, a half-smile of relief still on his lips, he saw it change. The stone beneath his hand rippled and crawled. It felt to his fingertips like warm putty. It was living. It flowed up to embrace his hand, to engulf it, and then solidified. He screamed and tried to pull his hand free. He felt no physical pain, but his hand was buried firmly in the solid rock, and he could not move it.

He looked around in terror and saw that the walls were now molten and throbbing. They began to flow together. A stream of living rock surged across the window-glass. Dimly, he heard the glass shatter. The walls were merging, streaming across floor and ceiling, greedily filling all the empty space. The living, liquid rock lapped about his ankles, closing about him, absorbing him, turning him to stone.

White Lady’s Grave

Ithought, when I moved to Scotland, that I was leaving romance behind, but here I am, in it over my head.

Men have called me beautiful, called me princess, wooed me, sometimes left other women, even their wives, for me. Usually in the end I found it was not me they loved but a fantasy-figure, something from their own imaginations. Their love was a private world I couldn’t enter. But I kept hoping, kept trying to get in, to make them see me, to make the happy-ever-after dream come true. All through my teens and twenties I fell in and out of love, recovered, went on to the next man, bruised but still believing. In my thirties my enthusiasm soured. I began to question the truth of this story which had been my life.

Then I met Angus, a stocky, red-headed Scotsman, and although he wasn’t my physical type, he won me over with his gentleness, his warmth, his sense of humor, and his practical attitude toward life. I didn’t have to pretend with him; I didn’t feel I was risking his disappointment every time I opened my mouth to say what I really thought.

Angus wasn’t a dreamer, he was a doer. He had a proposal which appealed to me: we would run a fish farm in Scotland, perhaps doing a bit of bed-and-breakfast on the side, in the season. It would be a wholesome, outdoor, rural life, particularly good for children.

I liked the idea of having children, and I longed to get out of London, which had become murky with memory and the failure of desire. By going away with Angus I thought I could escape my own history and the doomed inevitability of repeating it.

Before, when I’d gone away with a man, whether for a weekend or a life together, there had always been the sense that I was being swept away, that I was only acceding to a force greater than myself. But when I married Angus, it was an act of will.

I willed myself to be happy, and I was. We both were. Our new life together was different and satisfying, and even though, after three years, there was no sign of a child and I was nearly forty, I was determined we would be happy ever after.

So I felt no intimations of danger when I noticed the stranger in the bar of our local hotel that August evening, even though he was looking at me. I thought marriage, contentment, and age all protected me from romance. There were lines on my face, gray in my hair, and my body had thickened with the passage of years. So I looked back at the stranger, feeling quite safe, and accepted his offer of a drink. Angus was just the other side of the room, playing billiards. I was friendly in the way you can be when you expect everyone to know you’re married.

He was handsome: gray eyes in a lean, clean-shaven face; fair hair pulled back into a ponytail; a long, strong-looking body. He had the sort of self-confidence that expects, and gets, a warm welcome wherever it goes, and he must have been at least ten years younger than me. I was flattered by his attention, no longer the young woman who would have taken it as her due.

I can’t remember the first thing he said to me, how we got started, but before very long he was telling me a story. There was a lilt to his voice, the trace of an accent which made me think he might have grown up speaking Gaelic, and it was as much a pleasure to listen as to look at him.

“Long ago,” he said, “and far away, in the land of the ever-young, a great prince by the name of Midhir fell in love with a woman so beautiful, so fair to look upon, that she was known always as The Fair Woman. But when he took her back to his palace to be his wife there was another woman there who was jealous and turned The Fair Woman into a butterfly and summoned up a magical wind which blew her about the land for seven times seven years, never allowing her a moment’s rest. It blew her finally out of the land of the ever-young, into the world of mortal men, and then across the sea, and then at last into the garden of a house where a woman sat in company, eating and drinking beneath the trees. The butterfly was blown into the woman’s cup and the woman saw this but was unable to stop herself from swallowing it with her drink. Some months later this woman, whose name was Rona, gave birth to a daughter and named her Elaine. And Elaine grew up to be as fair as The Fair Woman, yet never knowing her true origins—except as she might glimpse them in dreams—and with no idea that her husband, Midhir, loved and searched for her still.”

The man stopped speaking and watched me. I was confused and upset and didn’t like to show it. Anyone could have told him—although I hadn’t—that my name was Elaine, but only Angus, in this company, knew my mother’s name. And not even Angus knew my mother’s story—one of the embarrassments of my childhood—about swallowing a butterfly in a glass of beer and then imagining, when she felt my first movements in her womb that same day, that it was the butterfly trapped inside her. I looked into my wine, smiling vaguely. “Nice story. Did you make it up?”

“Of course not. It’s true.” His eyes met mine and I felt a warm, intimate tingle accompanying the certainty that we really did know one another, were already lovers on some other level, in some other time and place… .Uh-oh. I knew whatthat meant, although I hadn’t felt it in years. That unexpected, unwilled response made me nervous, and I was gracelessly abrupt.

“I’m married.”

“You’re married here. In the land of the ever-young you were married to me.”

“Ah, but that was in another country, and, besides, The Fair Woman is dead.”

“Not dead. In that country no one ever dies; everyone is young and strong, without blemish, sin, or guilt. Fair Woman, will you come with me there to reign beside me as my queen?”

If he was crazy, it was a most attractive madness. But if this was his usual pickup line, surely he could see I was too old for fairy tales. I wondered what he’d do if I said yes. Take me up to his room? Row me out to his yacht, at anchor in the harbor? A little devil inside urged me to accept, just to see what excuse he’d come up with for not being able to take me to his magical country this instant. But I knew too well how affairs got started, and how they always ended. Flirtation with this man was too risky. I knew I wouldn’t be tempted if I wasn’t seriously attracted. I couldn’t even think up a teasing refusal, just shook my head and repeated, “I’m married.”

“Would your husband give you to me?”

I nearly choked on my wine. “We’re not that sort of people!”

“If he sold you, would you leave him?”

“He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Women aren’t bought and sold here—I don’t know what it’s like in your country.”

“My country is your country. There is no buying or selling there, no thine or mine. Please, won’t you come with me there?” I felt such yearning for him as he spoke—for his fantasy or for his body was something I couldn’t distinguish—that I could only cope by walking away.

“Sorry,” I said, brusquely, getting up. “I’m flattered, of course, but you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

I couldn’t get Midhir or his story out of my head. I remembered my mother’s story of how she became aware that she was pregnant with me after swallowing a butterfly, and I wondered if she’d read the same book Midhir had plundered for his chatup line. I went to our little local library the next day and told Maire Mackenzie the story that the stranger had told me.

“ ‘The Wooing of Etain,’ ” the librarian said. “It’s an old Irish story.”

“I’d like to read it.”

I expected her to fill out a card—most books I’d expressed interest in had to be requested from other libraries—but she went straight to the shelves. “Here’s a version for children, and it’s quoted in a couple of the local guidebooks.”

“Local? You said it was Irish.”

“So were the Dalriadan kings. We share a common culture, and we’re close enough for there to have been lots of sea-crossings in the old days. When Deirdre had to get away, it was to the west coast of Scotland that she came. Do you know how Sliabh Gaoil got its name?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“Of course you do; your house is in its shadow.Sliabh is the Gaelic for mountain. ‘Sliabh Gaoil’ means ‘the lovers’ mountain,’ and the lovers who are remembered in that name might well have been Etain and Midhir. Ah.” She pulled a shabby green volume from the collection of books about the area. “Etain and Midhir are connected, by local tradition, with a chambered cairn in the Achaglachgach Forest.”

My stomach constricted with surprise. Angus and I lived in the Achaglachgach Forest. “Is that the cairn called the White Lady’s Grave?”

Maire wrinkled her nose. “Who calls it that?”

“One of our neighbors. She’s lived on the edge of that forest forever. Angus and I noticed there was a chambered cairn marked on the map, and wondered if we’d be able to find it, and she said there was a stone sticking out the side of it that the locals called the door, and supposedly if you rapped on it after moonrise on a night of the full moon the King of the Fairies would open and give you your heart’s desire. Anyway, Angus and I walked up there one afternoon. It’s quite an easy walk. But except for the standing stone there’s nothing much to see. If I hadn’t known what it was I would have thought it was just a hillock.”

“You wouldn’t have recognized it as an entrance to Fairyland?”

“Is it? Gosh, imagine having it so close!”

“Oh, it’s not unique. They all are, all the old tumuli. That’s why the fairies were called thesidh , or the people of the mounds—the mounds themselves aresidh . That term isn’t as common here as in Ireland, but your cairn is called, Sidh Ban Finn. Is there something wrong?”

Her calling it “your cairn” had made me shiver, but I shrugged it off. “Goose on my grave. What does ‘shee baan finn’ mean?”

“Well, it doesn’t mean ‘white lady.’ It’s thesidh of The Fair Woman.”

Midhir, according to the children’s book, is the King of the Fairies. After losing his wife, he finds her dwelling, reborn as a mortal woman, wife of the High King Eochy. She refuses to go away with the stranger unless her husband gives her to him. Midhir challenges Eochy to a game of chess and, losing, performs a number of magical tasks for the king until, finally, Midhir wins a game, and asks as his reward a kiss from Etain. Although unwilling, Eochy can see no honorable way out and so agrees. As soon as Midhir has his arms around Etain the two rise into the air and become a pair of swans flying away.

The children’s story ended there, but one of the guidebooks gave more of it, complete with variant endings.

Eochy now searched everywhere for his wife, just as Midhir once had done, and eventually learned from a druid that she was being held in Midhir’s royal palace, which appeared to human eyes as the Sidh Ban Finn. Eochy took his men and they began to dig it up, but whatever they dug up one day would be filled in again the next, so they made no progress. Yet the battle took its toll upon Midhir, too, and after nine years he appeared and offered to give up Etain. He then sent his wife, with fifty handmaidens, back to the king, magically making them all look exactly alike. In one version, Eochy was able to recognize his wife because she gave him a sign; in another, he mistakenly chose his own daughter, and made her pregnant before he learned the truth.

It was all more complicated than the simple love story the stranger had told me. It was not exactly a huge shock to discover that the jealous woman at the fairy court who cast the first spell was actually Midhir’s first wife.

*

Now I knew more about the story, but nothing about the stranger, or why he’d told it to me. Could it be that he’d thought I’d recognize it? It wasn’t impossible that someone might have told him where I lived, recommending us for B&B, and a glance at the map would have shown how close we were to the Sidh Ban Finn. Tourists always expected locals to know everything about the area, not realizing we had other things to do than read guidebooks and explore ancient monuments. Maybe he’d expected me to correct him, and was waiting for me to say, “But I’m Elaine, not Etain,” so he could put out his hand saying, “And I’m Mather, not Midhir; Peter Mather, from Donegal.”

It could be that he wasn’t even attracted to me at all, that he was just one of those attractive young men who flirts, as a matter of course, with anything female. That thought gave me a terrible, hollow sensation, and I knew I must not see him again.

When Angus next suggested going out for a drink I had too much to do in the house, or there was something on television I particularly wanted to see. He stayed home with me the first two times, but on the third night he went out alone, and came home looking both puzzled and pleased with himself. He told me the story:

A stranger had challenged him to a game of pool, winner to declare the stakes. Angus, when he won, tried to laugh it off, saying he never played for money.

“Nor I,” said the stranger. “But ask me for something, anything I can give you. Surely there must be some task you want done?”

“He wouldn’t be put off,” Angus told me. “When I tried, you’d have thought I was insulting him. We were that close to a fight. So I said there was something I could use a hand with, if he really meant it—our garage needs a roof. Well, you know we could wait half the year before Duncan gets around to helping me with it, whereas this Mither, or whatever his name is, will be here tomorrow. So what’s the harm? It might turn out he’ll let me pay him something in the end, or I could find some other jobs that want doing and pay him for those. Could be he’s really looking for work.”

“Could be he’s looking for something else,” I said.

“What do you mean? He seemed honest to me.”

Seeming honest was the con man’s stock in trade, of course. Away from the city, how quickly we’d forgotten. But a man who presented himself as a prince from another world was not someone to be trusted. I said nothing of my own emotions, but now I told Angus the story Midhir had told me.

“So you’re saying it was all a ploy on his part to get another look at my wife? It would serve him right if you stayed in the house all day and never showed your face … or, better yet, went away to Glasgow shopping.”

The little, internal lurch of disappointment I felt at the thought of doing that told me how much I wanted to see Midhir again. It was a warning I disregarded. “No, I’m not saying that. Why would he tell me that story? He couldn’t expect me to believe it.”

Angus shrugged. “He’s Irish. The gift of the blarney, and there’s something fey about him … maybe he believes it’s true. He’s young… .”

“At least ten years younger than me, maybe more. That’s my point. Why chatme up?”

My husband put an arm around me. “You were the most beautiful woman in the bar that night, as you are every night. Ten years from now you’ll still be inspiring young poets like him to flights of fancy. And I hope you’ll still be mine.”

“Of course.” I thought I could will it to be true.

The first glance from Midhir’s gray eyes when I opened the door to him next morning pierced me with sweet pain and I began to smile. My hands and feet felt very far away. I was full of bubbles, lighter than air. Angus came through and took Midhir out to show him what wanted doing to the garage and I said, “I’ll make the tea,” and grinned and grinned like an idiot in the empty kitchen.

I felt wonderful. I realized that before I met Midhir, I had scarcely been alive, just surviving. All day, I kept singing to myself as I started one task and then abandoned it for another, unable to concentrate, unable to care, not worried about a thing. Life was grand. All day I scarcely saw him, but was aware of him, the way you’re aware of a warm fire in the corner of a room, or the sun in the sky. He was there, the most important thing in my world.

I managed to cook a meal—not one of my better efforts—and served it in the evening, and as the wine flowed, so did my feelings, overflowing into the looks I could not stop exchanging with him. I wanted to touch him but could not, not with Angus there between us. At first his mere presence was enough, but as the evening wore on I began to feel restless, wanting more.

After we’d eaten, Midhir challenged my husband to a game of chess.

“I suppose the stakes are the same as before?” asked Angus. “Winner to name the forfeit?”

“If you agree,” said Midhir.

“Oh, aye. There’s lots of odd jobs that want doing around here. I’d be happy to pay to have them done.”

“Some things can’t be bought or sold, they can only be won or lost.”

“As you wish,” said Angus, and went to get his chess set.

I said nothing while he was gone, and Midhir gazed at the tabletop and not at me. We were in suspense. The air was heavy with anticipation. As if we were listening to a story, there was nothing we could do to hurry it along or change the eventual outcome.

Rather to my surprise—although I knew he had played competitively when younger—Angus won the game.

“Name the stake,” said Midhir.

Angus frowned in thought. I wondered if I should remind him that we’d been meaning to put a new ceiling in the kitchen, or suggest repainting the entire house. I wanted a job that would bring Midhir back here day after day—and surely the young man wanted the same. But then Angus said that the spare room’s light fitting needed replacing.

“I’ll do it now,” said the young man.

I gave a cry of disappointment, and when they both looked at me I had to fumble for a reason. “You can’t—not now. You shouldn’t fool around with electricity; not when you’ve both been drinking.”

“For goodness’ sake, woman, it’s only a light fitting,” said Angus. “I’m not asking him to rewire the house.”

He was done in a quarter of an hour. I had the brandy bottle and three glasses out by then.

“Another game?” said Angus.

“Stakes to be decided as before.”

“Aye.”

I drank two glasses of brandy and then heard Midhir say, “Checkmate.” And suddenly suspected that in spite of my husband’s skill at chess Midhir could have won the first game as easily as this one, if he’d wanted to. Looking at him, I could see Angus thinking the same thing. The room was very quiet as we waited to hear the forfeit.

“I want your wife in my arms and a kiss from her lips. This is all I ask.”

“That’s not fair! I mean, you can’t ask me for something that isn’t mine to give.”

“Then I ask you to give her permission to give herself to me.”

I felt a fluttering deep inside, as if it were the butterfly my mother had swallowed. I didn’t dare look at Midhir, afraid my desire for him would be too blatant.

“Elaine doesn’t need my permission. She’s not my property; she’s a free woman. Ask me for something else.”

“There’s nothing else I want.”

“Then it’s Elaine you should have challenged, not me.”

Both men were watching me. I felt a childish fury at Angus for making this so difficult, yet knowing I would have been even more furious had he dared to treat me as his property. And much greater than any anger, discomfort, or embarrassment was the powerful longing I felt to give Midhir the kiss he wanted, to be held in his arms, to be his, however briefly.

I went to him and he put his arms around me. As we kissed, I became aware of a sound like a great beating of wings around us, and I felt myself begin to rise.

And then I was standing on the floor of the sitting room, looking at Midhir, who was backing away from me. He looked confused; for a moment I thought he was going to stumble, but he recovered himself and sketched a brief, courtly bow to Angus.

“Thank you for your hospitality. I must go now.”

“I’ll show you out,” said Angus. I saw by the careful way he held himself and didn’t look at me that he was hurt but wouldn’t make an issue of it. Least said, soonest mended. That was one of his sensible mottoes, and his dislike of emotional postmortems had been very attractive to me after involvements with men who’d insisted on analyzing every disagreement or hurt feeling throughout our affairs.Yes , I thought,you’re hurt now but you’ll soon get over it; we’ll both recover and our marriage will go on as before. After all, it was only a kiss.

When Angus came back we began to clear away the dishes and the empty bottles and he said, “We had a lot to drink.”

“Too much,” I agreed. Then, impulsively, “Angus, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t,” he said swiftly. “It’s all right.”

I was on the point of reassuring him but couldn’t, as I understood that I had already left him. I had ended our marriage when I walked into Midhir’s arms.

But as quickly as that insight came it left me. Common sense bustled up importantly. What nonsense. Of course our marriage wasn’t over; of course I hadn’t left Angus. Here we were in our home, about to do the washing-up together, like any other night. Brandy on top of wine and sexual intoxication had made me silly. A kiss was just a kiss, not a binding promise, not an irrevocable step, not the destruction of a marriage, not unless you wanted it to be.

But I did want it to be.

Common sense lay down and died. Love had me in its grip. I’d tried to pretend I didn’t believe in it, that it was just an illusion, that peace and contentment and all sorts of other things were more important, but I’d only managed to stave it off for a few years: this desire, this disease I had in me.

Angus was a good man, and he had been good to me. I didn’t wish him any sorrow. But even if Midhir was mad or a liar, he was the one I wanted, he was the man I’d already gone after in my heart.

I left Angus while he was washing the dishes. He thought I was going to the bathroom, but I went out of the house by the front door, saying nothing, taking nothing with me, not even my handbag or a cardigan against the chill. I didn’t say goodbye or leave a note because I knew this was madness, what I was doing, and if Midhir wasn’t nearby, waiting for me, I would have to go back. Then I could say I’d just been out looking at the moon. I could go on being the wife of Angus and try to forget I’d ever wanted anything else.

I wonder what Etain really wanted, which man she really loved? Perhaps neither. In the story she’s simply dutiful, giving her loyalty to the one who owns her, simply an object, like Helen of Troy, for men to fight over. But what about the real woman, if there ever was one? What about me?

The moon was full and the night clear, so I had no trouble seeing my way. As I reached the bottom of our drive I saw a man waiting on the old stone bridge where the forestry track leading into the hills splits off from the paved road, and my heart and stomach clenched in a way more like fear than joy. I ran to him anyway, as if I had no choice.

We kissed, and I shivered with passion and fear in his arms.

“I thought you’d forgotten me,” he said. “When the magic didn’t work, I thought I’d lost you forever, that you’d been blown too far out of our world ever to return.”

I understood what he meant, because I’d felt it, too. When we’d kissed, it should have happened then: the roof should have opened, and we should have flown away together then, like in the story. But that kind of magic didn’t work in this world.

“Your magic did work,” I said. “Look, here I am.”

“You’ll live with me forever,” he said. “We’ll never grow old. Come.”

“Where are we going?” I looked up and down the dark, empty, tree-lined road. “Where’s your car?”

“We’re going to my palace. Come, it’s not very far.” Holding my hand warmly and tightly in his he led me up the forestry track, deeper into the forest on the side of Sliabh Gaoil, the lovers’ hill.

What did I think, as I went with him?

I thought maybe he’d parked his car out of sight of the house, a little way into the forest. I thought maybe he was taking me to some isolated spot where we could make love—I was eager enough, abandoned enough, to have done it with him right away, in the wet grass, anywhere. I thought maybe he was a fairy prince whose palace looked to ordinary mortal eyes like nothing but a grassy hillock, and when we reached the Sidh Ban Finn it would be transformed—that with my hand in his I would be able to walk through a newly opened door into another world of unimaginable splendor.

I thought that no matter what happened at least I would be with him, and that would be magic enough.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Before long we left the road. I remembered a short, stiffish climb from my daytime visit to the mound with Angus; at night, the bracken, brambles, and uneven ground were all far more treacherous, as threatening and mindless as a bad dream. I clung to Midhir, who more than half-carried me over the roughest ground.

Then we stopped. We were on a hillside, in a treeless space where the bracken grew as high as my head. No lights showed in any direction, although I knew we must be less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my own house. I felt my orientation shift until I had no idea where we were, no notion how one bit of this wilderness fit with any other. I looked at the man beside me and knew him even less than I knew this moonlit territory. For a moment I recognized my own insanity in allowing him to take me here, and then I embraced the madness. This was what I wanted, this crazy love, this stranger. I shivered and leaned against him.

“You see it,” he said softly.

I frowned into the darkness, wanting to please him. “What … ?”

“Mysidh . The entrance to my world.”

A particular massive darkness detached itself from the general gloom, and I realized it was a standing stone. “This is the Sidh Ban Finn.”

“You can see!” He sounded so joyful I didn’t have the heart to confess I had only guessed. “Oh, my darling, I thought perhaps you’d been away so long, and come so far, I might never get you back. Magic hardly ever works in this dreadful world.”

“I never believed in magic before I met you.”

“Come, let’s not linger out here, while the gates to my country are open.”

I let him lead me forward, his arm around my waist. “Tell me where we’re going … describe it to me. I can’t see very much in the dark.”

“It won’t be dark for long, my love—surely you see the light ahead?”

Did I see a light at the end of a dark tunnel, or was it only imagination, fueled by the desperate need to see something? I decided it didn’t matter. The will to believe would be enough.

I went with my love into the darkness, eyes fixed on the dim light I’d willed into existence. We went into the side of the mound.That I didn’t imagine: there was an opening, an entrance of some kind that had not been there when I’d seen it in daylight with Angus. A door opened for us, and we went through.

For a brief moment I knew I was in another country. I could feel warmer air moving against my face, a spring breeze, scented with apple blossom; and above me an open, starry sky—or were those torches?

I paused to look up and I stumbled—or he did—and his hand slipped away from my waist, and suddenly I was in pitch darkness and alone. Everything changed in an instant. The air was still, close, stale and damp, and smelled strongly of earth. There was not even the hint of a light anywhere, and my lover had gone.

“Midhir—where are you?”

My own voice came back to me, loud and flat, words spoken too loudly in a small enclosure, and as I stretched out my arms to reach for him my fingers touched cold, damp stone.

Where was he? Where was I? Why couldn’t I see? Where was the moon?

Panic threatened and I struggled for control, exploring my surroundings by touch. It didn’t take long. Stone walls perhaps six feet apart on either side, extending maybe ten or twelve in length; a stone ceiling a few inches above my head. I was inside a rectangular chambered cairn, inside the Sidh Ban Finn.

There had been a way in, so there must be a way out. But no matter how I pressed, pulled, and prodded at the stone slabs, I couldn’t find it.

And where was Midhir, who had been beside me until a moment ago?

He had gone into that other country—close at hand, yet closed to me. He must still be beside me, pleading with me to open my eyes and see, casting his useless magical spells.

It was so dark that it made no difference whether my eyes were open or shut, so I shut them and tried to convince myself that Midhir was standing beside me, that I could feel his lips on mine, and that when I opened my eyes I would see him smiling at me, his handsome face illuminated by the thousand fairy-lights decorating his palace. I had believed enough to come this far; I must be able to push myself further. I concentrated on Midhir and opened my eyes.

Nothing. Blackness, stale air, the approach of a lonely death. The will to believe was not enough. I could not believe in Fairyland, not even to save my own life.

To Midhir this was a fairy palace and the entrance to another world. To me it is a grave. It was always my grave, and now I am in it.

Soul Song

All that summer I listened to Craithe’s last symphony. I’m not a great fan of classical music, and especially not the modern, atonal stuff, but Craithe’s final work was an exception, and I had a soft spot for it that was purely personal. The CD had been a present from an ex-lover who was very knowledgeable about music (unlike me), and the symphony had been playing on his car radio the first night I went home with him; in some way, I felt, the achingly sweet swell of the third movement was a factor in deciding me to spend the night.

But our love affair had ended, leaving me with a few regrets, with memories good and bad, and with Craithe’s last symphony, to which I listened in the long, lonely evenings with a masochistic pleasure.

Because I liked his last symphony so much, I tried his earlier works, too, but I couldn’t like them: they seemed cold, monotonous, inhuman. I could hardly believe they’d been written by the same person. But, as I would readily admit, I knew nothing about music. That I should have set out to make a film about the Scottish composer Edward Craithe might seem unlikely, but the truth is that we don’t always choose our subjects—sometimes they choose us.

After a stint as a researcher with the BBC I’d written a reasonably successful short series about the depiction of drug abuse and drug culture in art and literature down the centuries, and I was trying to figure out what came next. I’d pitched a couple of ideas but hadn’t managed to rouse the enthusiasm of anyone with money.

And then I got the letter from Maggie Price about Flora Abernethy.

Maggie is a social worker in Edinburgh who helped with my research into post-Trainspottingdrug culture. We became friendly and kept in touch via e-mail. She was always sending me no-hoper ideas she thought would make brilliant TV, and so far my lack of enthusiasm had not put her off.

Her latest suggestion was for a program about a composer called Flora Abernethy, who supposedly had never been properly valued because she was a woman (Maggie didn’t realize that feminist rediscoveries were way past their sell-by date), and because she’d been mad at one time, but who might actually have been the real composer of Craithe’s last symphony.

Edward Craithe had been Flora Abernethy’s lover. The original score, from 1940 or so, was in her hand, and no drafts or notes for it had ever been found among Craithe’s papers. And of course, as even I knew, it was very different from the style in which he had previously been working. The big mystery about Craithe, and the only fact which I knew about his life, was what had happened to him in 1940. He had disappeared then, and no trace of him had ever been found. Maggie suggested that Craithe’s last symphony had actually been a collaboration between him and Flora Abernethy, but she referred me to an article published inThe Feminist Review in 1984 which argued that it was Flora Abernethy’s work alone, written after her abandonment by Craithe, and that it was the refusal by the establishment to accept this and take her seriously which had led both to her mental breakdown and to the effective end of her career.

“Of course, there’s no way of proving authorship, but at least the issue could be raised. She’s a lovely lady, very articulate, I’m sure she’d be great on TV. Her connection with Craithe could be the hook for a fascinating program.”

For once, I agreed with Maggie. I’d been looking for my next project, and now I’d found it. Music, history, a mystery, the hint of scandal: had Craithe been given credit for his girlfriend’s work? Maybe she knew the truth behind his disappearance. From what Maggie said, the old lady was ready to talk; the time was ripe to solve the mystery of Edward Craithe.

*

Maggie thought there was no way of proving authorship, but I believed otherwise. I’d heard of a computer program which could analyze a piece of music and generate more in the same style, and if computer programs could be used to authenticate works believed to be by Shakespeare and other word-mongers, how much more easily would one deal with the more mathematical structures of music!

The London Library listed two biographies of Craithe, one from 1952, the other from 1976. I reserved them both. It seemed strange to me that there had been no new biography in twenty years. Weren’t there others, like me, tempted to solve the mystery of Craithe’s disappearance? Or had it been solved? How to go from egocentric (“What a brilliant idea I’ve had!”) to paranoid (“Everyone else in the world has known for years.”) in five minutes. I got on my bike and went straight to the library before anyone else could steal my books.

The 1976 biography, by Mark R. Thomas, had a section of photographs, as well as footnotes. I looked at the pictures first. Craithe, in a studio shot from 1936, looked smooth and oiled, handsome as a matinée idol. Flora Abernethy had dreamy eyes but a determined jaw. I began to skim-read, with the 1952 biography, by A. D. Wallace, close at hand for the occasional contrast and comparison.

Edward Craithe had been born shortly before the first world war into a middle-class Edinburgh family. They were not especially musical, but there was a piano, and music lessons, for all the children, and when Edward showed an interest in composition it had been encouraged, and a tutor provided. By the age of twenty-three he was teaching music at a private school in the city and his first symphony had been performed, to encouraging reviews. He announced his engagement to an eighteen-year-old girl of good family, and then, scandalously, broke off the engagement a few months later, having fallen in love with another woman. This, of course, was Flora Abernethy, an “older woman” (she was twenty-five) with no living relations, who played the violin in a chamber group, and supported herself by giving music lessons. Although they traveled together unchaperoned, and may have lived together, Flora always kept her own rented room, and they did not marry. Wallace hinted that a prior marriage had made it impossible for Flora legally to marry Edward, but Thomas had interviewed Flora Abernethy and quoted her “philosophical and moral objections” to marriage.

According to the earlier biography, Craithe had been lured into joining a strange cult by the gullible Flora, who was under the influence of its leader. According to Thomas there was no cult, only a Taoist monk called Hsiu Tang whom Flora and Edward had separately approached for tuition in traditional Chinese music. Along with musical instruction he had taught them his own esoteric branch of Taoism which was based on the ancient Chinese belief that everything was created out of music, and that it was possible to learn to hear this divine music through a specialized form of meditation. The details now could only be guessed at and supposed. Hsiu Tang had, like Craithe, vanished around 1940.

Both biographies ended with speculation on what had happened to Craithe. They were in agreement that after being called up he had deliberately deserted, under pressure from Flora, who was pregnant. Wallace believed that, after a period of hiding out, perhaps in Wales where Flora had suffered a miscarriage, Craithe had repented of his cowardice and gone to London to enlist under a false name. He had then become one of the many casualties of the war, dead in some foreign field, buried under an assumed name. Thomas went along as far as the flight to Wales and the miscarriage, but then, as Flora descended into madness, he believed that Craithe had left (perhaps unaware of how ill Flora had become, assuming she would follow later) and gone by boat to Ireland. There he had stayed in a cottage on the west coast, living like a hermit and continuing to compose music, for several years until his death, while still a young man, from what might have been TB. Much hand-written sheet music had apparently been found in the cottage after his death, and although most of it had been destroyed, the author claimed to be in possession of a few remaining scraps in which he had recognized Craithe’s distinctive style.

More for the computer to analyze, I thought happily. I was always happier when I found a way of using the computer. I don’t know how I’d live without it.

*

Back at home, I trawled the Internet in search of connections, posting requests here and there. If there was anyone writing a biography or otherwise researching Craithe, I wanted to know about it.

I arranged a meeting with my TV people and came away with seed money—well, with a contract and the promise of seed money. The zeitgeist was with me: Scottish composers were “in,” and if I could, as I’d hinted, solve the mystery of Craithe’s disappearance—big time. If not, well, I could still have an effective, artistic little biography to appeal to a smaller audience.

I tracked down the biographer, Mark Thomas, and took him out to lunch. He agreed to give me copies of the music that had been found in the cottage in Ireland, although he warned me that they were only scraps, not enough to prove anything.

“They might be enough for the computer,” I said. “They can extrapolate from very little, and make comparisons with the body of work.”

He scowled. “I can do that, too. I could continue what there is on certain lines … but that’s not to say that what I came up with would be what Craithe wrote. I think you have the wrong idea about how music works: yes, it may be mathematical, but that’s not to say it is utterly predictable. Set a problem within certain limits, take any five musicians and no two of them would reach the same conclusion.”

“I don’t know anything about music,” I said. “But I do know computers, and there are programs which can write music.”

He snorted. “Depends what you call music.”

“That’s not really the point. It’s analysis, not composition, I’m interested in. Computers are great for detective work. What made you decide the music you found was Craithe’s? There must have been some basic principles… .”

“To be perfectly honest, I was following a hunch, operating on instinct as much as anything. There’s no proof.” He looked straight into my eyes, and I suddenly twigged that he’d made the whole thing up to sell his biography.

“Wasn’t there any music found in the cottage?”

“Yes, of course! You don’t think I made that up? Look, I don’t have proof, these thingscan’t be proved, whatever you may think, but using my knowledge of musicology and of Craithe I made some perfectly legitimate speculations… . Of course the music was there! But most of it was burnt by the time I got my hands on it. There were really only scraps left.”

“Could I see them?”

“I’ve brought you photocopies. You can use them however you like.”

“Thank you. There’s something you might not have thought of doing, but I’d like to get it analyzed not only in comparison with Craithe’s other works, but also to compare his last symphony with Flora Abernethy’s own compositions.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “You’re not intending to argue—not seriously—that loony feminist’s theory?”

“Why not? The only manuscript is in her hand, and you must admit that it is completely unlike his earlier works.”

“It’s also wholly unlike anythingshe ever wrote,” he said definitely. “There’s absolutely no connection between any of her known works and Craithe’s final opus. So if the lack of connection between the last symphony and his earlier work is meant to be proof that he couldn’t have written it—why doesn’t it matter in her case? I’ll tell you why: the woman who wrote that article had no notion. She was simply casting about, rather desperately, in search of some new victim-heroine to prove her thesis that women’s work is always stolen by men. She had absolutely no evidence. And for all the mad things Flora Abernethy said, she never claimed that Craithe’s work was hers.”

“You did ask her?”

He looked at me without replying. I felt I was trespassing, but I didn’t let it stop me. “I did think it strange that although you interviewed her you didn’t give her explanation of what happened to him. Surely she had some idea?”

“She was quite mad. It would not have been kind, nor served any purpose, to have published her rambling, mystical notions. As far as she was concerned, Edward Craithe simply vanished. He ‘left this plane,’ I believe was how she put it. I doubt she’ll be able to tell you anything useful. If you have any idea of putting her on television … well, I hope you’ll think very hard about it.”

“I don’t intend to exploit her,” I said, annoyed. “Maggie—her social worker—doesn’t think she’s crazy.”

He shrugged. “Even if she’s completely sane now she’s unlikely to be able to remember the truth of what happened when she was mad. I suspect that she simply doesn’t know what happened to Craithe, whether he told her where he was going, expecting her to follow, or if he simply abandoned her, unable to cope with her grief and her madness any more than he could cope with the war.”

I wondered what Flora Abernethy had told this man but I didn’t press him; I preferred to let her speak for herself.

*

Flora Abernethy lived in a basement flat on a rundown street near the center of Edinburgh. She was a frail-looking, white-haired woman who spoke clearly but moved very slowly. The dimly lit front room was bone-chillingly cold, although it was only October; she switched on an electric heater for my comfort. Even had Maggie not warned me I would have recognized by this how she lived, pinching and scrimping and doing without, putting on another ancient woolly rather than add to her electricity bill. I wished I’d brought more than a box of biscuits, but Maggie had insisted that Miss Abernethy would be mortally insulted by a food basket. “Too much like charity. She’d be mortified.” If my program got made, then later there would be money she’d be able to accept: fees for her time and help, fees for the use of her music.

When we were settled, finally, with our cups of tea and the box of biscuits open on a table between us, I asked if she minded my tape recording our interview.

“I don’t mind at all, dear. In fact, I prefer it. This way there can be no confusion about what I’ve said. Because you’re bound to question it. But I don’t mind that, as long as you hear it. It won’t hurt me if people think I’m mad. What matters to me is that the truth should be told.”

“Yes … what truth is that?”

“About Edward Craithe. What happened to him. Isn’t that what you’ve come to ask?”

My heart lurched. I had meant to lead up to this more gently, but… . “You know what happened to him?”

“Of course I do. I told the other one, the one who was writing a book, but he never put in what I said. He thought I was mad, you see, and of course I was, driven mad with grief, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t true. I know what happened. I know what I did.

“I’ve always been able to hear the music in people. It was a gift I was born with, although as I grew up I realized that other people couldn’t hear what I could, and that it would be better for me if I didn’t talk about it. One day, after I was grown, I attended a lecture on non-Western musical traditions, and the lecturer mentioned in passing the ancient Chinese belief that all of creation was molded according to the music performed inside it. And suddenly I understood: this was how I perceived the world. After that I was wild to learn whatever I could about Chinese music and religion.

“I didn’t get much further until I came across Mr. Tang. He could hear the music in people, too, and so we recognized each other. Unlike me, he came from a culture, a tradition, which accepted his gift, and made sense of it. He agreed to teach me what he knew.

“One day when I was going to visit Mr. Tang I met Edward coming out. We knew each other already, for we belonged to the same musical world. At first I was wild with excitement, imagining that he had the gift too, but I soon learned I was wrong. He had approached Mr. Tang as an interested outsider. He did not ‘hear’ people as I did, yet he was drawn to the idea of a universal music, of music as the shaping principal of all creation… . I think really it was the religious impulse in him which was nearly strangled by his dour, Free Church upbringing, and that he was looking for God in music as the only alternative he could imagine to worship. It might have remained an intellectual interest for him, he might have drifted away as easily as he had drifted into the orbit of Mr. Tang—but he fell in love with me, and began learning to listen.”

“I thought you said you were born with the ability?”

“Och, aye, it was a gift I had; that’s not saying it can’t be learned as well. I wouldn’t have known how to teach something that came so naturally to me, but Mr. Tang taught it as a form of meditation: gradually the student would learn to focus his attention to hear the universal music. Edward began to catch snatches of it here and there, he was learning. What kept him at it, he often told me, was the desire he had to hear my song.” She smiled sadly. “But the war came, and everything changed.

“Edward was called up. Mr. Tang disappeared. Everything was confusion and flight. And then I found that I was pregnant. And I … I lost my reason.

“I should have been glad of Edward’s child—we had hoped for a child someday. But somehow, with the war … I became convinced that I would lose Edward, and that without him I could not survive. I felt I must keep him with me at any cost. And so, on his last day with me before he was to be shipped out, I asked him to sit and meditate with me. I listened to the song of his soul—which of course I had heard many times before—with the closest attention I had ever paid. My senses were sharpened by fear. I knew I had to hear him exactly as he was—I did not dare make any mistakes—because this time I was going to write down what I heard.

“I did that. And as I made the final notation, and raised my eyes to look at him across the room—he was gone. Physically, bodily gone. The only thing left of him was the music I had just copied down which still, to my ears, hung as a faint echo in the air.

“At first I was elated. I had captured my dear Edward in music and now nothing could harm him, nothing, not the war, not death, or any person, could take him away from me. I only gradually realized that by saving Edward in this form I had lost him physically. I had translated him out of his human body into the pure music of his soul and I had no way of getting him back.

“Of course I tried playing the music. And when that had no tangible result I told myself, well, that was because I had only one instrument, and he would require a symphony. I couldn’t command an orchestra to play at my whim, of course, so that would have to wait. In the meantime, I tried to find Mr. Tang. If he couldn’t call Edward back, I hoped he would allow me to join my love, by translating me. You see, there was no one else I knew of in the world with the ability to hear my music and write it down. Possibly Edward might have learned to do it, or if Mr. Tang had taught someone else… . I had the address of a pupil of his, in Wales, but when I made my way out there, he too was gone, called up. His family took pity on me, an abandoned pregnant woman, and let me stay with them. I was delivered of a dead child at seven months and spent the rest of the war in a mental institution.

“After the war, when my translation—Craithe’s last symphony, they called it—was performed and still Edward did not return … then I was forced to recognize the full enormity of what I had done. By writing down his music I had destroyed his life, killed him just as thoroughly as if I had fired a bullet into his heart.

“If Edward had died in the war his music would have joined with the universe, his particular song would not be fixed but would disperse and be re-formed, like the atoms of his physical body, into new life. What I did gave him one type of immortality, by freezing him into one single symphony, as he was at twenty-eight, but it denied him the chance of rebirth, of the eternal round of life that everyone else has. Well, one must learn to live with one’s mistakes. I survived a suicide attempt and many years of lonely madness. I must go on to the end, however it comes to me, knowing I cannot make amends for my terrible mistake.”

*

She looked sad and tired and very old as she fell silent. Full of sympathy, I said, “But Edward Craithe is immortal, because of the final symphony. The only immortality anyone can hope for is to be remembered, and for their work to still be known. That’s what I believe, anyway.”

“And so you believe me?”

Listening to her story, I’d suspended my disbelief. Now, put on the spot, I dithered. “Well, I—I’ve never heard anything like that before. It’s an interesting idea. You know they say that we, that all living things are composed of information, and that theoretically it should be possible to transcribe all that information and store it in a computer. That would be a sort of immortality, because if it could be stored and retrieved later … but I’d never heard it suggested that if you did transcribe all the information of a life into a computer that you’d betransferring the life from one form to another; I’d always assumed it would be a duplication, that the person would go on living in his or her body even after all the essential information was stored on a computer … maybe it’s a paradox? Nobody can be in two places at once?”

She was looking much perkier, almost alarmingly bright. “Souls in computers! Yes … I saw something on the television about that, but do you know, I never made the connection? But we are all information, and music is another form of information which can be stored and reproduced… . Do you know much about computers, my dear? Do you have access to one?”

“Yes, I do.” I was taken aback by her informed interest, and ashamed of myself for assuming that because she was old she was also ignorant of modern ideas. “In fact, I’d thought of using one to research this film. I had hoped to get some samples of your own compositions and compare them with Craithe’s earlier works, and with the final symphony—” I stopped in embarrassment, but I needn’t have worried. She didn’t care what I believed about who had written the final symphony; she was pursuing her own train of thought.

“There are computers—sorry, programs—which can write music, yes? Could it, if you entered the final symphony, continue it?”

“But it’s finished already. It’s a complete work.”

“Yes, that was my mistake. I finished Edward by finishing the symphony instead of leaving it open. He wasn’t dead, that shouldn’t have been his ending, he should have gone on living. And if he had, his life’s music would have taken a different form, to a different conclusion. Could it, this computer program, could it change the course of the music?”

“Well, yes.” I had the uneasy feeling that I was encouraging her in her madness, but what else could I do? “I don’t see why not, if you fed in a few simple rules, whatever knowledge a human composer would have to have, and then you let it follow those rules. I mean, I don’t know anything about music, but I should think it would be like structuring a program to create anything.”

“Please …” She leaned forward in her chair, her little bird-claw hands clutching at the arms, her bright eyes full of hope and fixed on me. “Would you let me try it?”

“Well … yes. Why not?”

*

I’d realized by then that even if my film did get made I wasn’t going to be able to have Flora on screen, revealing her madness to the world. I may have already suspected my project was on the skids, but I had started something I had to see through.

Maggie had offered me an open-ended invitation to stay with her while I was in Edinburgh, and I’d thought I might as well spend a week or two up north doing some research, so I’d brought along my laptop and the as yet untried musical software. I took it with me when I called on Flora Abernethy at her flat the following day.

Flora was a quick study. Despite her age and the fact that she’d never had any hands-on experience with a computer before, she adapted very quickly. I had imagined that I would be the operator, doing things at her suggestion, but her knowledge of music was something I could not match; it was less frustrating for both of us if she worked directly on the computer. She took to mouse and screen as to another musical instrument. Observing her as she entered Craithe’s last symphony—commanding the on-screen virtual orchestra to play it—I recognized that she was a woman of genius, and I was gripped by a feeling of profound sorrow for the waste of what should have been a rich, creative life.

“Now,” she said, raising her hands above the mouse pad. “Now, the music is in the machine. Edward, as he was, in 1940, is in there, like a phonograph of his soul.” She turned to look at me, standing behind her. “Now, I want to let the music out of the fixed form, the symphony, I trapped it in, and let him live again. How can you help me?”

In the games—if that’s the right word—of artificial life I knew about, there were a few established rules which determined when the units could move, and in which direction, when they could reproduce, and so on. Flora was working with music, but she didn’t want to create a song or a symphony—she wanted something open-ended, for the music of Craithe’s last symphony to grow, like the living being she believed it was. I told her she needed different software—or I needed to modify the program we had to allow her individual notes the chance to evolve, to emerge in some system that formed naturally according to the rules of life, rather than being imposed by the rules of musical composition.

“How long would this take?”

“I should be able to do it tonight.”

“And bring it back to me tomorrow?”

I promised I would, and then I went back to Maggie’s flat and spent the evening modifying the music program so it would do what Flora wanted. It took very little time to set it up the next morning at Flora’s place: once the notes had been fed in we just let it run, the music playing softly, strangely from the speakers as the visual form of the notes ran in shifting patterns on the screen. From time to time I thought I recognized snatches of Craithe’s final symphony, but just as often the sounds which emerged were not music at all.

*

While that went on, I was able to continue my interview with Flora. I had no idea how or if I would ever use the material, since the film I’d envisioned seemed unlikely ever to be made, but I was still going through the motions. And besides, I was curious about her.

So she told me about her sad, lonely childhood: her father was killed in the Great War, and she’d lost her mother and baby sister to the influenza not long after that. She’d been taken in and raised by her only relation, a spinster aunt, who had always been kind to her. This aunt had died when Flora was seventeen, leaving her alone in the world. But she’d won a music scholarship and had a small inheritance which kept her going. Music was always the constant in her life and she had, of necessity, lived for it. She had won an award for composition while a student, and she had sold a few songs. Her alliance with Edward had brought her more recognition, giving her an entrée into more exalted musical circles. Before the war, she had been commissioned to write a chamber piece which had been performed and broadcast.

I was thrilled by these revelations, and pleased that Edward had helped rather than hindered her career. “I’d love to hear some of your work,” I said.

She shook her head dismissively. “I don’t have it anymore.”

“You lost it? All of it?”

“You must remember what my life was … during and after the war. From pillar to post. Locked up, out of control. No home of my own. It’s not as if I decided to destroy my music, or to save it. I simply … lost track. I have no idea what happened to it, to any of it… . And, really, it’s not important.”

“But it is! It was your work, and it was good enough to be performed—” I had a sudden inspiration. “The BBC archives? They might have a recording.”

She shrugged. “They might. I can’t help you there. I can’t even remember the date. I think it was some time in 1938.”

“What about after the war, after you were better. Did you go back to writing music?”

“Never. I gave it up. Renounced it, after what I’d done to Edward. It seemed too much like playing God.”

“And this doesn’t?” I gestured at my laptop, at the little speakers from which the almost-not-quite music continued to issue.

“Oh, no.” She smiled. “That couldn’t be more different. I copied Edward into the machine so he could be free again. I’m not trying to impose my will and end his life or shape it; that’s no more playing God than it was when Edward and I made love knowing that a new life might result. Knowing that itmight , mind, not knowing that it would or, if it did, what sort of life it might be.”

No way was this woman insane. “What do you think will happen now that you’ve put Edward’s music into the program?”

She began to shake her head. “I don’t know. This might—” And then she froze. I saw tears in her eyes. She turned eagerly toward the computer.

The music had changed. It was real music now, not simply the random sequence of sounds we had been getting, and it was something new. It was very much like Craithe’s final symphony; it was similar to it, familiar, yet it was not the same.

“Edward,” said Flora. “Oh, itis Edward, itis . Oh, thank God—I didn’t destroy you!”

She was talking to the music. Not insane? My heart sank. She went on talking to it, and I was writhing in embarrassment. “Oh, my darling, have you forgiven me? Truly, never? You were never sorry. Oh, my love! You know what I want you to do?” I couldn’t go on listening. Awkwardly, I said, “I’ll let you, um… . I’ll go and make us some lunch.”

I’d brought a bag of groceries in the previous day, knowing she could not object to a shared lunch. I’d bought some ready-made meals but also some fresh vegetables and other things; I decided to keep myself out of the way by making soup, even though I’d lost my appetite.

I was mentally waving everything goodbye. Not just the idea of solving the mystery of Edward Craithe’s disappearance, but the idea of a film at all. I couldn’t exploit a poor old madwoman. Goodbye money, goodbye work, and goodbye computer as well. Because there was no way she could afford to buy one for herself, and now that she believed her darling, long-lost Edward was resident in the software, I couldn’t be so cruel as to deprive Flora of her only comfort in life. Maybe she wouldn’t want it; maybe it would be enough for her to have said goodbye to him properly and believe that he was now an immortal piece of music forever evolving in the depths of cyberspace … but I wasn’t banking on it. If I’d just been reunited with my long-lost lover after years and years of missing him I’d certainly want to stay with him forever and ever amen.

*

Before I got too heavily invested in the soup, I thought I’d better ask Flora if there was anything she didn’t like or couldn’t eat. I took a few deep, meant-to-be-calming breaths and went back into the sitting room.

The first thing I noticed was that the music had changed. It was no longer anything at all like Craithe’s last symphony. It was completely different in style, tone, everything. I was sure I had never heard it before, and yet there was also something faintly, teasingly familiar about it. I loved it at once. It was beautiful, strong, emotional—“What is it?” I asked, and only then did I realize that I was alone in the room.

Flora had probably gone to the loo; I sat down to wait, entranced by the music.

I must have sat there for twenty minutes or more, rapt in the music, before it changed to something I found less compelling and at about the same time Flora’s continued absence started to worry me. I went to check on her—but she wasn’t in the loo, or in her tiny nun-like bedroom, or in the kitchen. Back in the sitting room again I went over to look at the computer screen. I think on some level I already knew where she was.

Now, instead of the musical notation which went with the sound, there were words I could read on the screen, words which were meant for me. As I read them the music from the speakers changed again, this time to something which not simply seemed but actually was very familiar. It was a song everybody knows; it was “Auld Lang Syne.” And blinking at me from the screen, in time to the music, was my final message from Flora:

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Until we meet again.

Food Man

Dinner was the real problem.

Mornings, it was easy to rush out of the house without eating; when it wasn’t, when her mother made an issue of it, she’d eat an orange or half a grapefruit. At lunchtime she was either at school or out so there was no one to pressure her eating anything she didn’t want. But dinner was a problem. She had to sit there, surrounded by her family, and eat whatever her mother had prepared, and no matter how she pushed it around her plate it was obvious how little she was eating. She experimented with dropping bits on the floor and secreting other bits in her sleeves or in her pockets, but it wasn’t easy, her mother’s eyes were so sharp, and she’d rather eat than suffer a big embarrassing scene.

Her brother, the creep, provided the solution. He was always looking at her, staring at her, mimicking her, teasing, and while she didn’t like it at any time, at mealtimes it was truly unbearable. She honestly could not bear to put a bite in her mouth with him staring at her in that disgusting way. Her parents warned him to leave her alone, and shifted their places so they weren’t directly facing each other, but still it wasn’t enough. He said she was paranoid. She knew that even paranoids have enemies. Even if he wasn’t staring at her right now, he had stared before, and the prospect that he might stare again clogged her throat with fear. How could she be expected to eat under such circumstances? How could anyone? If she could have dinner on a tray in her room alone, she would be fine.

Her mother, relieved by the prospect of solving two family problems at once, agreed to this suggestion. “But only for as long as you eat. If I don’t see a clean plate coming out of your room you’ll have to come back and sit with the rest of us.”

It was easy to send clean plates out of her room. After she’d eaten what she could stomach she simply shoved the rest of the food under her bed. Suspecting that the sound of a toilet flushing immediately after a meal would arouse her mother’s suspicions, she planned to get rid of the food in the morning. Only by morning she’d forgotten, and by the time she remembered it was dinnertime again.

It went on like that. Of course the food began to smell, rotting away down there under her bed, but no one else was allowed into her bedroom, and she knew the smell didn’t carry beyond her closed door. It was kind of disgusting, when she was lying in bed, because then there was no avoiding it, the odor simply rose up, pushed its way through the mattress and forced itself upon her. Yet even that had its good side; she thought of it as her penance for being so fat, and was grateful for the bad smell because it made her even more adamantly opposed to the whole idea of food. How could other people bear the constant, living stink of it? The cooking, the eating, the excreting, the rotting?

When she could no longer bear the enforced, nightly intimacy with the food she refused to eat, she decided it was time to get rid of it. Before looking at it, she decided she’d better arm herself with some heavy-duty cleaning tools, paper towels, rubber gloves, maybe even a small shovel. But when she opened the door of her room to go out, there was her mother, looking as if she’d been waiting awhile.

“Where are you going?”

“What is this, a police state?” Hastily, afraid the smell would get out, she pulled her door shut behind her. “I want a glass of water.”

“From the bathroom?”

“No, I thought I’d go down to the kitchen and get a glass. Why, aren’t I allowed to go to the bathroom?”

“Of course you are. I was just worried— Oh, darling, you’re so thin!”

“Thin is good.”

“Within limits. But you’re too thin, and you’re getting thinner. It’s not healthy. If you really are eating—”

“Of course I’m eating. You’ve seen my plates. I thought they’d be clean enough even for you.”

“If you’ve been flushing your good dinners down the toilet—”

“Oh, Mother, honestly! Of course I haven’t! Is that why you’re lurking around up here? Trying to catch me in the act?” She realized, with considerable irritation at herself, that she could’ve been flushing her dinner neatly and odorlessly away for a couple of weeks before arousing suspicion, but that it had now become impossible.

“Or throwing up after you eat—”

“Oh, yuck, you’ll make me sick if you talk about it! Yuck! I hate vomiting; I’m not some weirdo who likes to do it! Really!”

“I’m sorry. But I’m worried about you. If you can eat regular meals and still lose weight there must be something wrong. I think you should see a doctor.”

She sighed wearily. “All right. If it will make you happy, I’ll see a doctor.”

She was just beginning to feel good about her body again. She didn’t care what the doctor said, and when he insisted she look at herself in a full-length mirror, wearing only her underwear—something she had not dared to do for months—she was not grossed-out. The pendulous breasts, the thunder-thighs, all the fat, all the jiggling flesh, had gone, leaving someone lean, clean, and pristine. She felt proud of herself. The way the doctor looked at her was just right, too: with a certain distance, with respect. Not a trace of that horrible, furtive greed she’d seen in the eyes of her brother’s friends just six months ago. The look of lust mixed with disgust which men had started giving her after her body had swelled into womanhood was something she hoped she’d never see again.

“How long since you had a period?” the doctor wanted to know.

“About four months.” She was pleased about that, too. You weren’t supposed to be able to turn the clock back and reject the nasty parts of growing up, but she had done it. She was in control of herself.

In reality, of course, the control was in the hands of others. As a minor, she was totally dominated by adults, chief among them her parents. After the doctor’s diagnosis that she was deliberately starving herself, she was forced to return to the dinner table.

Resentful and humiliated, she pushed food around on her plate and refused to eat it. Threats of punishment only strengthened her resolve.

“That’s right,” she snarled. “Make me a prisoner. Let everybody know. Keep me locked up, away from my friends, with no phone and no fun—that’s really going to make me psychologically healthy. That’s really going to make me eat!”

Bribes were more successful, but her parents either weren’t willing or could not afford to come up with a decent bribe at every single mealtime, and she simply laughed to scorn the notion that she’d let someone else control every bit of food that passed her lips for an entire week just for a pair of shoes or the use of the car on Saturday. She didn’t need new clothes, CDs, the car, or anything her parents could give her, and she wanted them to know it.

Now that the battle zone was marked out and war had been openly declared, food was a constant, oppressive preoccupation. She was reminded of food by everything she saw, by everything around her. Hunger, which had once been the pleasurably sharp edge that told her she was achieving something, was now a constant, miserable state. She no longer even controlled the amounts she ate; she ate even less than she wanted because she couldn’t bear to let her mother feel that she was winning, that anything she put in her mouth was a concession to her. She couldn’t back down now, she couldn’t even appear to be backing down. If she did, she would never recover; her whole life would be lived out meekly under her mother’s heavy thumb.

Lying in bed one night, trying to get her mind away from food, she realized that the smell which permeated her mattress and pillow and all her bedclothes had changed. A subtle change, yet distinctive. What had been a foul stench was now … not so foul. There was somethinginteresting about it. She sniffed a little harder, savoring it. It was still far from being something you could describe as agood smell—it was a nasty smell, not something she’d want anyone else to suspect she could like, and yet there was something about it which made her want more. It was both deeply unpleasant and curiously exciting. She couldn’t explain even to herself why the bad smell had become so pleasurable to her. It made her think of sex, which sounded so awful when it was described. No matter how they tried to make it glamorous in the movies, the act itself was clearly awkward and nasty. And yet it was obvious that the participants found that embarrassing, awkward nastiness deeply wonderful and were desperate for a chance to do it again. It was one of the great mysteries of life.

She wondered what the food under her bed looked like now. All the different foods, cooked and uncooked, pushed together into one great mass, breaking down, rotting, flowing together… . Had it undergone a change into something rich and strange? Or would the sight of it make her puke? She had decided she was never going to clean under her bed—her refusal, although unknown by her mother, was another blow against her—but now, all of a sudden, she wished she could see it.

There was a movement under her bed.

Was it her imagination? She held very still, even holding her breath, and it came again, stronger and more certain. This time she felt as well as heard it. The bed was rocked by something moving underneath. Whatever was moving under there was coming out.

Although she’d turned out her lamp before going to bed, her room was not totally dark; it never was. The curtains were unlined and let in light from the street, so there was always a pale, yellowish glow. By this dim, constant light she saw the man who emerged from under her bed.

Her heart beat harder at the sight of him, but she was not frightened. There might not be light enough to read by, but there was enough to show her this man was no ordinary serial killer, burglar, or rapist from off the street. For one thing, he wore no clothes. For another, he was clearly not a normal human being. The smell of him was indescribable. It was the smell of rotting food; it was the smell of her own bed. And, she did not forget, she had wished to see what her food had become.

He made no menacing or seductive or self-willed motions but simply stood there, showing himself to her. When she had looked her fill she invited him into her bed, and he gave himself to her just as she wanted.

What took place in her bed thereafter was indescribable. She could not herself remember it very clearly the next day—certainly not the details of who did what to whom with what when and where. What she would never forget was the intense, sensory experience of it all: his smell, that dreadful stench with its subtle, enticing undercurrent, that addictive, arousing odor which he exuded in great gusts with every motion, and which, ultimately, seemed to wrap around her and absorb her like the great cloak of sleep; the exciting pressure of his body on hers, intimate and demanding and satisfying in a way she could never have imagined; and her own orgasms, more powerful than anything she’d previously experienced on her own.

She understood about sex now. To an outsider it looked ridiculous or even horrible, but it wasn’t for looking at, and certainly not by outsiders—it was for feeling. It was about nothing but feeling, feeling things you’d never felt before, having feelings you couldn’t have by yourself, being felt. It was wonderful.

In the morning she woke to daylight, alone in her deliciously smelly bed, and she felt transformed. She suspected she had not, in the technical sense, lost her virginity; far from losing anything, she had gained something. She felt different; she felt expanded and enriched; she felt powerful; she felt hungry. She went downstairs and, ignoring as usual her mother’s pitiful breakfast offering, went to the counter and put two slices of bread in the toaster.

Wisely, her mother did not comment. Her brother did, when she sat down at the table with two slices of toast thickly spread with peanut butter.

“What’s this, your new diet?”

“Shut up, pig-face,” she said calmly, and, yes, her mother let her get away with that, too. Oh, she was untouchable today; she had her secret, a new source of power.

At lunchtime the apple she’d intended to eat wasn’t enough, and she consumed the cheese sandwich her mother had made for her, and the carrot sticks, a bag of potato chips, and a pot of strawberry yogurt. Sex, she realized, took a lot of energy, burned a lot of calories. She had to replace them, and she had to build herself up. Now that she had a reason for wanting to be fit and strong she recognized how weak she had become by not eating. She wouldn’t have to worry about getting fat, not for a long time, not as long as the nightly exercise continued.

It did continue, and grew more strenuous as her strength, her curiosity, her imagination, all her appetites increased. She no longer feared getting fat; on the contrary, she was eager to gain weight. She wanted to be stronger, and she needed more weight for muscle. More flesh was not to be sneered at, now that she knew how flesh could be caressed and aroused. She ate the meals that were prepared for her, and more. She no longer had to be obsessive about controlling her intake of food because it was no longer the one area of her life she felt she had some control over. Now she controlled the creature under her bed, and their passionate nights together were the secret which made the daytime rule of parents, teachers, and rules, bearable.

Her nights were much more important than her days, and during the night she was in complete control. Or so she thought, until the night her creature did something she didn’t like.

It was no big deal, really; he just happened to trap her in an uncomfortable position when he got on top of her, and he didn’t immediately respond to her attempts to get him to move. It was something anyone might have done, inadvertently, unaware of her feelings—but he was not “anyone” and he’d never been less than totally aware of her every sensation and slightest desire. Either he’d been aware that he was hurting her because he’d intended it, or he’d been unaware because he was no longer so much hers as he’d been in the beginning, because he was becoming someone else. She wasn’t sure which prospect she found the more frightening.

The rot had started in their relationship, and although each incremental change was tiny—hardly noticeable to someone less sensitive than she—they soon demolished her notion of being in control.

She was not in control. She had no power. She lived for her nights with him; she needed him. But what if he didn’t need her? What if one night he no longer wanted her?

It could happen. He’d started to criticize, his fingers pinching the excess flesh which had grown back, with her greed, on her stomach and thighs, and she could tell by the gingerly way he handled her newly expanded breasts and ass that he didn’t like the way they jiggled. When he broke off a kiss too quickly she knew it was because he didn’t like the garlic or the onions on her breath. The unspoken threat was always there: one night he might not kiss her at all. One night he might just stay under the bed.

She didn’t think she could bear that. Having known sex, she was now just like all those people she’d found so incomprehensible in books and movies: she had to keep on having it. And she knew no other partner would satisfy her. She’d been spoiled by her food man for anyone else.

She began to diet. But it was different this time. Once not eating had been pleasurable and easy; now it was impossibly difficult. She no longer liked being hungry; it made her feel weak and cranky, not powerful at all, not at all the way she’d used to feel. This time she wasn’t starving to please herself and spite the world, but to please someone else. She went on doing it only because she decided she preferred sex to food; she could give up one if allowed to keep the other. And by promising herself sex, rewarding herself with explicit, graphic, sensual memories every time she said no to something to eat, she managed to continue starving herself back to desirability.

This suffering wouldn’t be forever. Once she’d reached her—or his—ideal weight, she hoped to maintain it with sufficient exercise and ordinary meals.

But the sex that she was starving herself for was no longer all that great. She was so hungry it was hard to concentrate. His smell kept reminding her of food instead of the sex they were engaged in. Except when she was on the very brink of orgasm, she just couldn’t seem to stop thinking about food.

And as time went on, and she still wasn’t quite thin enough to please him, not quite thin enough to stop her killing diet, she began to wonder why she was doing it. What was so great about sex, anyway? She could give herself an orgasm any time she wanted, all by herself. Maybe they weren’t so intense, maybe they were over quicker, but so what? When they were over she used to fall asleep contented, like someone with a full stomach, instead of lying awake, sated in one sense but just beginning to remember how hungry she still was for food. As for arousal—what was so great about arousal? It was too much like hunger. It was fine in retrospect, when it had been satisfied, but while it was going on it was just like hunger, an endless need, going on and painfully on.

She didn’t know how much longer she could bear it. And then, one night, she went from not knowing to not being able. When her lover climbed into bed with her, swinging one leg across her, holding her down as he so often did now, keeping her in her place, the smell of him made her feel quite giddy with desire, and her mouth filled with saliva.

As his soft, warm, odorous face descended to hers she bit into it, and it was just like a dinner roll freshly baked. She even, as her teeth sank into his nose, tasted the salty tang of butter.

He did not cry out—he never had made a sound in all the nights she had known him—nor did he try to escape or fight back as she bit and tore away a great chunk of his face and greedily chewed and swallowed it. She felt a tension in him, a general stiffening, and then, as, unable to resist, she took a second bite, she recognized what he was feeling. It was sexual excitement. It was desire. He wanted to be eaten. This was what he had wanted from the very first night, when he had pressed himself, first his face and then all the other parts of his body in turn, against her mouth—only she had misunderstood. But this was what he was for.

She ate him.

It was the best ever, better by far than their first night together, which had seemed to her at that time so wonderful. That had been only sex. This was food and sex together, life and death.

When she had finished she felt enormous. Sprawling on the bed, she took up the whole of it and her arms and legs dangled off the sides. She was sure she must be at least twice her usual size. And the curious thing was that although she felt satisfied, she did not feel at all full. She was still hungry.

Well, maybe hungry wasn’t exactly the right word. Of course she wasn’t hungry. But she still had space for something more. She still wanted something more.

The springs groaned as she sat up, and her feet hit the floor much sooner than she’d expected. She was bigger than usual; not only fatter, but taller, too. She had to duck to get through her own bedroom door.

She stood for a moment in the hall, enjoying her enormous new size and the sense of power it gave her. This, not starving herself and not having secret sex, was true power. Food and eating and strength and size. She knew she wanted to eat something more, maybe a lot of something more before the night was over. There was a smell in the air which had her moist and salivating with desire. She licked her lips and looked around, her fingers flexing, but there wasn’t much of interest in the hallway. A framed studio portrait of the family hung above the only piece of furniture, a small table with a wobbly leg. On the table was a telephone, a pad of yellow Post-it notes, and a gnawed wooden pencil. The taste of the pencil was as immediately familiar to her as the salty tang of her own dandruff and sloughed skin cells beneath a nibbled fingernail, and did about as much to satisfy her hunger. The shiny, dark chocolate colored telephone wasn’t as easy to eat as the pencil had been, but she persevered, and had crunched her way through more than half of it before the unpleasant lack of taste, and the discomfort of eating shards of plastic, really registered. She finished it anyway—it was all fuel—and then sniffed the air.

From the bedrooms where her brother and her parents slept drifted the rich, strong, disturbing smells of sex and food. Aroused and ravenous, she followed the scent of her next meal.

Manskin, Womanskin

He said, “I think we’d be more comfortable in the bedroom, don’t you?” and I said, “Where’s the loo?”

It was our first time alone together in his house and we both knew what we were there for. We’d met at a friend’s party and had gone out together seven times in three weeks. Although we were still on our best behavior, and I was aware that I still knew very little about him, the urge to get closer was strong, very strong. A lot is made of the loss of virginity as a great moment of decision, as a trauma, even, but the loss of mine had been easy and inevitable, and my first boyfriend and I had been together for nearly eight years. Making up my mind to go to bed with my second boyfriend had been much more difficult, and now I felt that I had taken too long and been overcautious. I’d been so determined not to make a mistake, to be certain that this relationship would last—and in the end we’d broken up after less than two years. This time, although I still wanted it to be the last first-time, this man my final one-and-only, I’d decided to take a chance and be a little braver about the unknown.

After three weeks of increasing warmth and interest the time was right. I was nervous, but willing. I’d meant to conquer my nervousness by staying close to him, so close that clothed kisses on the sofa would progress without any major break to the naked intimacies in his bed. But when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. So off I went and didn’t realize until the door was closed with me inside the little room that the light switch was on the wall outside. But I didn’t need light for what I had to do, and if I had, the moonlight sifting dreamily through frosted glass would have been enough.

I wondered, as I sat on the pot, if Fred was as nervous as I was. It seemed unlikely. He was thirty-nine, ten years older than me, and he’d never been married. Although he hadn’t itemized his girlfriends for me, I gathered there had been quite a few. He didn’t seem to have much luck with sustaining relationships, a fact about which he seemed rueful and a bit bewildered. It was obvious to me that he just hadn’t met the right woman. Was I the right woman? I thought of the sense of intimacy and understanding between us already, despite the fact that we’d known each other only three weeks. Was it a false understanding? Sexual attraction was like moonlight, casting a glamour on things that would look terribly ordinary in daylight, like that garment, whatever it was, hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. The moonlight made it look like a cast-off human skin, if humans could cast off their skins.

I remembered a movie I wished I’d never seen, about a psycho who murdered women for their skins, and I jumped up. I felt a little sick. Yet there was nothing grisly or horrible about the thing. When I touched it, it was so cool and fine between my fingertips that it might have been spun from the moonlight itself.

It came down from the hook into my hands as if I wanted it, and the sensation of all that impossibly light mass tumbling into my arms made me dizzy with desire. I just had to put it on.

It was the weirdest sort of garment I’d ever encountered, a full body suit with hands and feet and head. It seemed all of a piece, yet as soon as I looked for an opening it was open in my hands, inviting me out of my clumsy, constricting clothes and inside it. There was no zip or other form of fastening, yet when I pressed the edges of the skin together they bonded fast. It seemed that a light veil had fallen over my face, I could feel something lighter than the finest silk against my skin, yet there was no obstruction. I could breath as freely as ever, open and shut my eyes, even open my mouth and put out my tongue. I thought my vision was slightly affected, as if veiled, yet that may have been the moonlight.

I ran my hands over my naked/not naked body, finding it both familiar and strange. I had changed, the skin had changed me, but I was still myself. For the first time in my life I knew, absolutely, that I was beautiful, and, for the first time since childhood, felt completely at home in my body. No longer nervous, I went out to meet my lover.

He was waiting for me in the bedroom, in the moonlight which streamed through net curtains, as naked as I was. His unexpected handsomeness took my breath away. His body was more impressive than his clothes revealed, and the shadows chiseled what I’d first thought were the fairly ordinary—though very nice—features of his round face into more pleasing, classical proportions. I should have felt utterly intimidated by the sight of this stranger, but instead I was engulfed by a wave of lust that carried all my qualms and hesitancies out to sea, and washed me onto the bed, into his arms.

*

The first time I tried to make bread it was awful. I felt clumsy and irritable, did everything wrong, and in the end I threw the batch out. After that, it was fine. In fact, baking bread is one of my favorite things to do. But my first experience with it sums up my attitude toward first times in bed with someone new: it’ll be awful, but worth it in the long run. Since there’s no way of avoiding the first time, you might as well just be as relaxed as you can about it, get through it, perform the mental equivalent of throwing it out uneaten, and take your reward from the pleasures to come.

Things I’d heard from my friends made me believe it was true for everyone—certainly for all women—butthat first time, in the skin, was totally different. Our bodies seemed to recognize each other, our bodiesadored each other, and it was impossible to put a hand or a foot or anything else wrong. All, all was mutual delight.

It was the skin, of course, but while I was in it, I thought it was me. A me wonderfully, gloriously changed, but still me.

I fell asleep in the skin. In the morning, I’d forgotten I had it on, but in the bathroom, just as I was about to step into the shower, the skin suddenly fell away from me, running down my body and dropping smooth as water to puddle at my feet.

I picked it up and examined it in the dull and murky daylight. It was a silvery no-color, like a snake’s shed skin, but without brittleness. Fine, supple, and strong, it had no weight, almost no mass. I crushed it into the palm of my hand, closed my fingers on it until it was invisible and felt like nothing at all. I could carry it in my purse or pocket, keep it with me always, I thought—then I hung it back on the door where I’d found it.

In the kitchen, amid the smells of coffee and charred toast, Fred looked ordinary again, ordinary and a little shy, and I knew that must be how I looked, too. He didn’t seem to mind, though. He seemed to like looking at me, and he didn’t avoid my eye, rather he caught it, and smiled.

An accidental bump led to a fervent clutch and a kiss and very soon, clutching and groping at each other, we made our way back down the hall to the bedroom. He seemed different in daylight, the whole thing was different, clumsier and sweatier, no less urgent yet somehow scarier, a new first-time. And then he paused and drew back a little. “Shall we … uh, do you want to … ?”

“Of course.” I rolled away from him just enough to reach the box of condoms on the table, but when I looked back I could see that wasn’t what he meant. “No?”

“Oh, yes, that too, but I meant—like last night. In the skins.”

It shocked me to hear him say it. How could I have thought it was my secret when it was his house I’d found it in? Yet, since it had fallen off, the memory of the womanskin had moved into the part of my mind where dreams and sexual fantasies lived, and to have Fred refer to it gave me the creepiest feeling, as if he’d somehow got inside my head.

He misinterpreted the look on my face. “Of course we don’t have to, if you didn’t like it. I thought it was rather special, that’s all …”

“Yes, yes, I did too,” belatedly I twigged. “Youwere wearing one, too!”

“Yes, of course.”

“Fred, what are they?” I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on an elbow, and he mirrored me.

“I don’t know. A manskin and a womanskin, just what they seem to be. No, honestly, I don’t know any more than you do.”

“You must. Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know. I found them in the garden.”

“In your garden?” I looked at the bedroom window, still curtained in net, at the greenish blur beyond. I hadn’t seen his garden yet, but I was familiar enough with the pocket handkerchief gardens of this neighborhood of London to imagine the narrow, fenced-in rectangle of grass bounded on at least two sides by flower beds or shrubberies, all most unmagical. “You found them in your garden? How? When? Tell me, Fred!”

“Well, did you think I’d bought them in a shop?” He grinned at me. “The garden’s nothing special; I’ll show you later. There’s a little shed down at the bottom, and a compost heap; the skins were lying on the grass in between. It was about a month ago—well, it must have been exactly a month ago because the moon was full, like it was last night. It was about a week before we met—you see, I haven’t had them very long. I was feeling a little lonely and a little restless and I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed, although it was late enough. It wasn’t raining and I could see the moon shining away when I went to draw the curtains, so I thought I’d go out into the garden for a breath of air. That was when I saw something shining like moonlight on the grass. It looked like—you know, quicksilver? That’s what I thought of, quicksilver flowing in the shape of a person. Like a shadow on the grass, but light instead of dark, almost like a concentrated essence of light, shining up from the dark grass. I went over to it and bent down to touch it, and it was as I was hanging it up that it fell apart into two, and I realized I was holding—well, you know.”

“So you just kept them?”

“What would you have done?”

“Did you try them on?”

“Just the manskin,” he said swiftly, so swiftly that the qualification made me wonder. “Once I had it on I knew that it was no good by itself, that they were meant to be a couple, were for a couple.”

“So a few days later you asked me out.”

“I would have asked you out anyway. It might have taken me a little longer, that’s all. The skin gave me an extra—it gave me courage.”

“And then yesterday you left the womanskin hanging on the back of the bathroom door hoping—what? That I’d just see it and happen to try it on?”

He nodded.

“What if I hadn’t?”

“But you did.” He smiled his sweet, shy smile. “Shall we put them on again?”

I wasn’t feeling the slightest bit sexy, the mood had gone to something else entirely, and I wanted to go on exploring it, exploring him by talking, but I was so moved by his strange story, and by him, that I did what he said, got up and went to the bathroom and slipped into the womanskin. I knew as soon as I returned that he was wearing his—there was nothing to see, but I sensed it, like an aura. As soon as the two skins came into contact they began making love. Of course it was we who did all those things, our two bodies fitting together as if we’d been lovers for years, and of course we experienced the arousal, the growing excitement, the climax, and yet all the while there was some small part of me which remained remote, aware that Fred and I were two strangers, separated by the skins, and that all the passion they generated had nothing really to do with us.

At first, in the beginning days and weeks of our deepening relationship, I didn’t like to say anything about it. Sex in the skins was so reliably wonderful that it seemed sheer perversity to ask to try it without them. And besides, I thought naked sex was bound to happen naturally before long—we’d just get carried away and do it without thinking of the skins.

But it didn’t. If we were caught in the throes of passion on the couch in the middle of watching the late-night movie, we had to pause for contraception, and given a pause, the skins would insert themselves. I could have protested, of course, made a joking or a serious request to leave them out of it. But I guess I wanted it to come from Fred. I was afraid of finding out that the skins meant more to him than I did.

Every night Fred would slip into his skin at bedtime, the way that I might have inserted my diaphragm, just in case. But there was no “just in case” about it, because once he’d put the manskin on, I seemed to feel a yearning from the womanskin which would have been cruel to ignore. I couldn’t just be myself when Fred had on the manskin; I had to be her.

They were no good on their own, the skins. It was as Fred had told me, they were a couple, made for a couple. One morning I had the notion of wearing the womanskin out into the world, of going to work in it and seeing how other people would react. But I couldn’t do it. The skin which clasped me so close whenever I was alone with Fred simply refused to stay on; it would not be worn under clothes or without sexual intent.

I don’t mean to imply that the skins dominated our lives. The skins were only for sex, and when we weren’t wearing them, or about to, even the memory of them seemed to slip away, at least from me. There’s always more to life than sex, even in the most passionate relationship. Fred and I began to spend all our spare time together. Although I still, cautiously, continued to pay rent on my single room, and left my out-of-season clothes hanging in the wardrobe there, I was effectively living with him. I met his friends and he met mine, we cooked for each other and went shopping together, joked and argued and shared a life. It should have been perfect—the sex could not have been better—yet I felt there was something missing. I wanted a greater closeness. Fred didn’t know what I meant. How could we be closer? We did everything together and the sex, every night, was great. I thought maybe we should talk more about ourselves. Fred didn’t, but he did his best to oblige, answering my questions about his past, or what he felt about something, even when I could tell he found them annoying or unimportant or intrusive.

I couldn’t explain what was wrong, what was missing, but something was. After a while I became obsessed with the notion that the skins were coming between us, and that the intimacy I craved would be ours only if we made love without them.

Of course, I should have said something about how I was feeling, but our love was still too new: I didn’t want him to think I was dissatisfied, or to make him unhappy. So, in time-honored female fashion, I resorted to trickery.

We were on our way to the cinema, a route which took us right past the house where I rented a room, when I suddenly expressed a need for a particular sweater I’d left there. Obligingly he went along with me, and as soon as we were together behind the closed door of my room I faked an overwhelming passion to get us onto my single bed. But even before all our clothes were off he’d revealed that, alongside the emergency condom I already knew he carried in his wallet, he also carried both the skins.

“They fold down to nothing at all, you must have noticed,” he said. “I don’t always carry them with me, but this morning I just thought I’d see if they’d fit … lucky chance, huh?”

I burst into tears and confessed. He was astonished. Why hadn’t I said?

Now, too late, I tried to make light of my desire. I hadn’t asked because I hadn’t wanted to make it seem important. It wasn’t important. Our relationship, most particularly the sexual side of it, was wonderful. Only, now and then I wondered if we might not be even closer if we made love without the skins. Hadn’t he ever wondered about that, about how it would feel?

He said he had not. He said he couldn’t imagine being any closer to anyone than he already was to me. He said that sex with me, in the skins, was the best he’d ever known and, that being so, why should he want anything different? But now that he knew what I wanted …

Now that he knew what I wanted, we had to do it there and then, the skins folded back into his wallet. Was it their presence, like uninvited ghosts, which made what followed so unsatisfactory? Or was it my guilt at having tried to deceive him? How could I complain we weren’t close enough when I kept my own feelings hidden? It was a pretty wretched coupling, all told. I’d seldom felt less like having sex, and it was easy to imagine the pressures on Fred struggling to satisfy me unaided. No wonder that we ended up farther apart, more alone than ever. No wonder it was such a relief to put the skins on again later that night and feel ourselves drawn back together. In my imagination the skins had been coming between us, blocking a more perfect understanding, but now I could see it was the skins which saved us from our differences. Without the skins we were only ordinary. With them we were special.

We soon took great sex for granted, as our right. We were spoiled by the skins which made sex instant and easy and completely detached from the rest of life. It still made me uneasy because it was so unnatural. We were in the unlikely situation of being in a sexual relationship in which the sexual part was completely unaffected by the relationship.

The sex was magic, but the sex belonged to the skins. It didn’t matter if we’d just been arguing about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom; or whether someone who voted Conservative could be, in any sense of the word, agood person; it didn’t matter if he was tired or I had a hangover—whatever our moods, whatever our differences, if we put on the skins we were instantly ready for love. The skins took us into another world, their world, where only one thing mattered. Tiredness, anger, irritation, menstrual cramps either vanished or stopped mattering for a little while. Yet it was the same if I was feeling particularly loving toward Fred for some reason, or if I was already aroused by some fantasy I’d been having—none of it mattered, nothing made any difference, positive or negative, in the realm of the skins. Fred and I were involved in a sexual relationship, but it was not our own.

Our relationship did not influence the sex, but the sex definitely influenced our relationship. It’s hard to share several hours of physical bliss with someone and not feel, at the very least,warm toward them the next day. Kitchen and bathroom foibles, odd and even disgusting personal habits are easily forgiven in the afterglow, differences forgotten because unimportant. I don’t know what sort of lovers we would have been without the skins; neither of us was eager to find out, unwilling to spoil what we did have. And yet there were times when I was with Fred when I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt on my own. I put it down to hormones.

I still don’t know why I put on the manskin one night. Opportunity, I suppose, and curiosity. I had never examined it; I don’t think I’d ever even touched it except when Fred was wearing it. We’d just been getting ready for bed when the telephone rang and he went out of the room to answer it, leaving his skin lying on the bed.

Wondering how different it was to mine, I picked it up, and, because I was naked already, put it on.

I didn’t expect it to fit. My skin fit me, as his fit him, as if they’d been specially tailored to our proportions, and Fred was nearly six inches taller than I was, with broader shoulders and longer arms. Yet the manskin settled onto my nakedness like my own skin. Looking down at myself, I thought there’d been some mix-up: his skin couldn’t possibly fit me so tightly and comfortably. This must be a woman’s skin.

But I knew it wasn’t mine. Fred had been wearing this skin; it was unmistakably his. Something of his essence still clung to it the way that a smell, perfume, or body odor will cling to much-worn, unwashed clothes. This wasn’t a smell, though; it was emotion, it was personality, it was cast of mind, a sort of echo of Fred himself, which I recognized as surely as I recognized his voice on an answering machine, his arms around me in a dark room.

It was almost like being Fred, knowing what he knew, feeling what he felt. It was intimacy beyond anything I’d ever experienced, a way of knowing what I’d only struggled to imagine, before, and the knowledge overwhelmed me with love.

Fred came back into the room and I tossed him my skin. “Put it on,” I said. “Quickly!”

I don’t think he understood what I had done until he had put it on. I saw the astonishment on his face, the melting into love, in the minute or so before we came together to make love.

It was the best ever. In the past I’d sometimes felt more like a passenger than a participant, aware that it could be someone else, anyone else, inside without making any difference to what was happening between manskin and womanskin. Great sex, yet somehow anonymous.

This could not have been less anonymous. I was engulfed by Fred himself, by the sensual, sensory memories of the man. I was inhis skin, and yet I was myself, making love to him, the man I felt with every part of me, inmy skin. Words can’t explain or do it justice. I’m not even sure I can really remember it now, not the way it really was, but one thing is certain: it was the high point of our love affair.

The problem with heights is that once you’ve reached the highest there is nowhere to go but down. The next few nights afterward we made love the old way: Fred in the manskin, I in the womanskin, until I began to grow restless and want something more.

When I suggested we swap skins, Fred was adamantly opposed. I didn’t quite believe his opposition—it had been so wonderful, how could he not want it again? I teased and pressed and pestered for a reason.

“It’s not right, that’s why. It’s not natural.”

“Oh, and the skins are?”

“Of course they are!” He glared at me. “I can understand curiosity, once, but you should be satisfied now. Aren’t you satisfied with being a woman?”

“But it’s not about being a woman! I’m still a woman, with the skin or without it—whichever skin I wear. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“If it doesn’t make any difference, why do you want to wear the manskin?”

“It’s not about being a man or a woman, it’s about being you. Well,feeling you, knowing you better than— Knowing you from the inside. That’s what it’s like; that’s why I liked it. Not because it was aman skin—really, I couldn’t tell any difference between them—but because it was yours. Didn’t you like being in my skin?”

“It’s not your skin, it’s just something I let you wear. And no, I didn’t like it particularly. I don’t like feeling like a woman. I’m a man.”

I was suddenly frightened, aware that I was on dangerous ground. All at once the skins were his and I was—who was I, what was I, to him?

“Of course you’re a man. It’s because youare a man, and I’m not, and it’s because I love you, that I want to know you in every way there is. I want to get closer to you, I don’t want to take anything away from you—”

“Then you shouldn’t try. Loving me isn’t wanting tobe me; it isn’t wanting to turn me into a woman. If you really loved me you’d want to be evenmore of a woman, to make me feel more of a man. That’s what the skins are all about.”

“I’m sorry.” It was hard for me to accept the truth, that what had been for me a high point of intimacy and understanding had been no such thing for him. Instead of feeling closer to me in my skin he had simply felt, unhappily, like a woman. Any woman, I guess, with me as any man. I gave up trying to explain it to him. If he didn’t want to be inside my skin I wasn’t going to try to force him.

After that we made love less often. His aversion to wearing the womanskin created an ambivalence in me, an insecurity. Was the woman he had encountered traces of in the skin so unlovable? Who did he imagine that I was? We made love a few times without the skins in pursuit of our old closeness but it was never satisfactory. We tried very hard for a time and then we gave up trying.

We were drifting apart. The term implies a gradualness, and it was certainly not abrupt, yet it happened very quickly once it began. Both of us became busy with things that kept us out of the house and out of each other’s way. I went back to my room more often, and even spent the night there, especially if I was going out with friends after work or if he said he would be out late.

Yet it wasn’t easy, giving up on Fred. I’d always liked being part of a couple, and I’d never entered a relationship without intending it to last forever. And I missed him. Memories of the early days of our romance haunted me, memories of intimacy, wordless feelings I would never have again.

Neither of us said anything about what was happening, reluctant to bring it to a formal, final close. We spent two or three nights a week together, and although I had been gradually, unobtrusively shifting my things back to my own room, I still had my own key to his house.

One evening which we had planned to spend together I happened to get there first. I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen, and then went down the hall to the bathroom.

The skins, both of them, were hanging from the hooks on the back of the door. It gave me quite a start to see them, for Fred had long been in the habit of folding his carefully away after use. When it wasn’t in his wallet he kept it in a small, round, leather stud-box on the bedroom dresser. I had tended to leave the womanskin hung on the back of the door where I’d first found it, but after feeling his disapproval of “picking up after me” a few times, I’d found a Chinese red silk purse and used that faithfully. I was sure that I’d folded it away after the last time; certainly the skins had not been hanging in the bathroom when I left on Sunday night.

Then I noticed that they were moving. It was only the faintest of gentle waving motions, as if they stirred in a breeze, but there was no breeze in the closed room, and if there had been, it would have impelled the skins to move both in the same direction not, as I could plainly see, in gentle flutterings toward each other.

What I saw, and I knew it, was pure yearning. They longed for each other all the time, but only by human intervention could they come together. We could live without them, but they needed us.

I lifted them down from their hooks, took them into the bedroom, and lay them flat on the bed, one on top of the other. I watched for a little while but there was no visible movement—maybe, for them, no movement was necessary now they were so close. Then, feeling embarrassed by my own curiosity, I left the room, turning out the light when I went.

Fred and I had dinner in—a take-away from the local Indian restaurant—and then watched a production ofDon Giovanni on television. Opera is not really my sort of thing; and he had offered to tape it and watch it by himself later, but I was getting the prickly sensation that Fred had decided it was time at last for our serious talk, and I was grateful for anything that would postpone it. Our relationship was nearly over, but I was determined it should last long enough for us to make love once more.

When we went into the bedroom together he looked startled at the sight of the skins on the bed.

“Oh, maybe not,” he said. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea tonight—I’ve been meaning to talk to you—”

“Later. Don’t say anything now. We’ll put on the skins—we could be any man, any woman—we can talk tomorrow.”

Hastily I stripped off my clothes, knowing that once I was in the skin he wouldn’t argue with me, he would feel the yearning, too, and the compulsion to satisfy it.

Then I was in the skin and—it wasn’t mine anymore. All at once I was suffocatingly close to, intimate with, a complete stranger. It was like waking up in the middle of a rape, and the worst part about it was the hot, heavy desire all around. I felt it as if it was mine, and it was directed at Fred—but I knew it belonged to somebody else. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. Somehow I managed to peel the thing off me, and then I stood naked, trembling, staring outraged at my lover.

“You’ve had someone else here—you’ve been making love with someone else!”

“I was going to tell you—I tried—”

“You were going to tell me! And that makes it all right?”

“Oh—please. Don’t go all—as if I’d broken your heart. You know perfectly well that things were already all but finished between us.” His calm, weary, rational tone made me aware that I was playing a role lifted from a soap opera, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

“All but, yes. All but. But not completely finished. It would have been nice if you could at least have waited, instead of ending it like this, humiliating me, and—and why did you have to bring her here? Why did you have to use the skins?”

He stopped looking defensive.

“You know why,” he said quietly. “You know perfectly well why. The same reason you dragged me in here and tore off all your clothes ten minutes ago. Nothing to do with love for me. Nothing much to do with you, either.”

Anger and hurt rushed out of me like air from a pricked balloon, leaving me limp. I began to put my clothes back on. “I wasn’t the first, was I.”

He sighed and shook his head. “But it felt like the first time with you, it really did. That’s all I meant. I didn’t want you thinking it was routine, or old hat, or— Because it really was special with you, like the very first time.”

“Did you really find them in your garden?”

“Different garden. Down in Suffolk. Years ago—the night I lost my virginity. Some fifty-odd women ago.”

I was all dressed now. I looked at my watch, saw that the underground would still be running. I could go home. “Well—good luck. I hope you’re happy. Maybe she’ll be the one.”

He smiled a little, mocking my conventional expectations. “That’s not what it’s about. I don’t needone .”

Turning Thirty

Iwalked into the pub off the Gray’s Inn Road and saw him slouching at the bar, and it was as if no time had passed.

The pub was one where we’d often met, and which I’d not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn’t nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I’d hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.

With the end of our affair we’d ceased to see each other. It wasn’t something that had to be arranged: we had never moved in the same circles, and our one mutual acquaintance had moved to America soon after she’d introduced us. About two years after the last goodbye I had seen Nick in Holborn underground station: I was on the down escalator and he was ascending; I don’t think he saw me. The sight of him sent me into such a spin that I actually forgot where I was going.

Now at the sight, so familiar five years ago but not since, of my one and only adulterous lover, I came unanchored in time. I felt a little jolt, as if I’d seen a ghost, and then I shivered as that old sado-masochistic cocktail of lust and anger and loneliness began to spread throughout my system, and I went up to him with a sort of casual, sort of wicked grin, the way I used to, as if we’d planned this meeting and I was pretending we hadn’t.

He was exactly the same. Those might have been the same pair of jeans, the same denim jacket, the same Doc Martens he’d been wearing the evening I first put my hand on his thigh under the table in the Café Pacifico. It was maybe not quite the same haircut, but definitely the same wire-framed glasses, the same blue eyes, and the same slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he grinned the same loopy grin.

Which he did, hugely, at the sight of me, and I realized he was honestly pleased to see me. He’d never been one to disguise his feelings, unlike every other man I’d ever been with.

“You look wonderful,” he said.

“You look like a refugee from the seventies. Still. And I’ll bet they’re not even Levi’s—Marks and Sparks’ own brand, am I right?”

“I was never a slave to designer labels, and, as you can see, success hasn’t changed me.”

“You’re successful?”

“Meet my backer.” He introduced me to the man he’d been drinking with; despite my hopeful first impression, he wasn’t alone. I was about to make my excuses, but the man in the suit beat me to it: cordial smile and nods all around, and he was off. Nick ordered me a whiskey and dry ginger and I didn’t stop him, although I didn’t like the mixture. It was what I’d always drunk with him, and that he still remembered pleased me.

We gave each other cautious, curious looks.

“Well,” he said.

“Your backer?”

“I’m making a film. Didn’t you know? There was a piece about me in theFace. In April.”

“I must have missed that issue.”

“I did a film for Channel Four. Part of the four-minute film series.Ratphobia. Did you see it?”

“No. Sorry. I didn’t know. TheTV Times is another one of those must-reads that I just don’t… . You should have sent me a card.”

“I would have. But you told me once a long time ago never to darken your door again and that included your office mail.”

I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true, and he sounded hurt. I was always saying things to hurt and then feeling abashed by my success. An awkward silence fell, for about twenty-three seconds, and then my drink arrived.

“Cheers.”

“Confusion to your enemies.”

I would have to stay at least until I’d finished my drink, and all at once that seemed too long. We had nothing to say to each other; we never had. Back in the days when we were seeing each other, if we weren’t making love we were either flirting or fighting; there was nothing else for us, no comfortable middle ground, none of the common interests on which friendships, or marriages, are built. He hadn’t the least understanding of, or interest in, my work, and as for his, well, at the time when I knew him his film-making aspirations had progressed no further than production work on a couple of pop videos. He spent a lot of time talking himself up to various people who might help his career, and when he talked to me, too often the same well-practiced, self-aggrandizing phrases came rolling out. I hated it. Not only because I mistrusted people who tried to impress me, but because I felt he wasn’t talking to me at those times, but performing for an imaginary audience. So I would not admire; I refused to be impressed. And I did my best (in a phrase of my grandmother’s) to cut him down to size.

Sometimes I didn’t even have to try. How could the names he dropped impress me if I’d never heard them before? I know he found my ignorance of famous film directors and musical megastars difficult to credit. But although he was only four years younger than me, we belonged to different generations, culturally speaking. I’d stopped paying attention to pop music in about 1978, whereas Nick still bought singles and read things like theFace andNME.

“You still working in the same place?” he asked suddenly.

“And still doing the same thing.” I wondered if he remembered what it was.

“That’s good,” he said. “I guess you’re happy?”

“Well, I need the money. It’s easier working than finding a backer.”

“You’re not kidding! But really, it’s a great project. I’ve got a script by—d’you remember that book that came out a few years ago, the one everyone was talking about—”

I gulped at my drink and felt an unexpected pleasure at the warm, bubbly kick of it.

Then Nick was excusing himself, ordering another round before he left and before I could stop him. It occurred to me that I could slip away while he was in the loo. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I didn’t particularly want to go somewhere else and drink alone. The first drink had mellowed me, but I wanted more.

As I put my empty glass on the bar I looked up and saw Nick walking toward me, a sight from the past I never thought I’d see again. Maybe because we were both married and always met in the center of London, well away from both our homes, my most common image of Nick is of suddenly picking out his figure against a background of strangers in some public place, coming toward me along the Tottenham Court Road, weaving among the tables in a large restaurant, or between the other drinkers in this very pub.

He had one of those long, awkward bodies you often see on adolescents. Even now, past thirty, he looked as if he hadn’t quite grown into it. Totally unathletic, of course, with a stooping, hip-slung stance. Watching this once so familiar body come toward me, I was seized with lust.

Lust is, for me, a particularly intense variety of memory. I can’t imagine feeling it for a stranger. For someone I’ve just met I might feel interest or attraction, but not lust—no more lust than love. Nick was the first man for whom I ever felt lust without loving, and even with him it was hardly lust at first sight. I thought him attractive in a kind of young, funky, non-threatening way. My reasons for contemplating sex with him had more to do with my feelings for my husband than for Nick. I was furiously angry with Peter, desperate to right the balance of our dying marriage by taking a lover. When Nick made it obvious he was attracted to me I felt a resurgence of a female power which Peter had all but destroyed in me.

What started out of curiosity, anger, loneliness, and revenge became something else after the first kiss. Sex, when we got to it, was explosive, quite unlike anything I’d expected, or experienced, before. It was wonderful and terrible. I’d never had orgasms so violent. Afterward, I hated him for making me feel so intensely, hated him because I wanted him so fiercely and specifically.

Now I began to remember, in a pornographic, filmic rush. Positions we had used in our fierce and frantic couplings those few times we had the opportunity—on the floor, against the wall, in the bath, as well as in the beds. Even more powerful, because I’d always been left wanting more, were memories of our more public embraces, on the street, under bridges or in doorways, when we had no time, or nowhere to go, yet were desperate with desire.

It was just then, in my unusually vulnerable state, that the music began. It came from the jukebox: a plaintive love song first popular about twelve years ago. The summer I fell in love with Peter that song was to be heard on every radio, at every party, from every jukebox in the land. It was no longer in the charts, of course, hadn’t been for a long time, but it had remained popular enough for unlucky coincidence to strike, years later: it was the song Nick had chosen as a background to his seduction of me, in this pub, five years ago. He couldn’t have failed to notice the effect it had on me, and as I never told him that I associated it with falling in love with someone else, it became from that night “our song.”

And there it was again. No wonder I forgot what year it was. I realized Nick hadn’t gone to the loo at all—he’d been remembering old times and he wanted to see if “our song” had lasted the years. I hated him and loved him for it. I could no more fight the effects of that song than I could have resisted a massive shot of muscle relaxant. Already weakened by whiskey and lust I hadn’t a prayer against the power of a sentimental song.

He saw me slumping and put his arm around me. I burst into tears.

“I’ve missed you too,” he said.

When I stopped shaking he walked me over to the table in the corner farthest from the bar where, in the old days, we’d often spent hours drinking and driving each other crazy. He had seemed determined either to undress me or to get inside my clothes with me, and I had fought him off like a reluctant virgin, my occasional delicious lapses into surrender always broken by the fear of public indecency.

It was like old times. He was just as I’d remembered—I was just as I’d remembered, roused to a pitch of desire I’d nearly forgotten. It was as if we had spent only weeks apart, not years, just as in those days the weeks apart had felt like years.

“Don’t.”

“But you like it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it, just don’t.”

“But why?”

“Someone might see.”

“So?”

I struggled without success to trap his hands. “I’m no exhibitionist. Anyway, you’re the movie buff. Didn’t you seeThe Accused ?”

He gave a soundless laugh. “This isn’t that kind of bar.”

“And I’m not that kind of girl. Can we talk?”

“We’ll only end up fighting.”

“I need another drink; so do you.”

He looked at our empty glasses and sighed. When he got up to go to the bar I followed.

We drank; we flirted; we fought. And all of a sudden the barman was calling time. That couldn’t be right. But the clock on the wall said it was, and I looked around and realized we were the only customers left.

We walked all the way down to Holborn tube station, hand in hand, like innocent lovers. The hour and the darkness gave us that freedom. Just before we reached the station he pulled me into a recessed doorway, one which had been overlooked by the homeless sleeping in others. As he kissed me, he slipped his cold hands into my layers of clothing, seeking flesh. I felt a reckless pleasure and did nothing as he eventually managed to bare one breast. I’d barely had time to feel the cold before his hot mouth left mine and closed around the nipple.

Then the heady sensation stopped. “You’re driving me crazy,” he said, low-voiced. “This is no good. I want to make love with you. Come back with me.”

“To Kent? Your wife won’t mind?”

“I’m on expenses. We can get a hotel room. I said I might have to stay overnight… . In fact, I do; I’ve missed the last train.”

All our lovemaking had been in dark corners or in cheap hotels. We’d only spent the whole night together twice. I’d planned and chosen nights Peter was away, but Nick had had to call home, once from a pay phone in a station, once from the hotel room. I remembered how much I had hated those phone calls, which I’d tried not to hear. Did he say, “I love you,” before he said goodbye? Afterward, when he’d said it to me, I’d hit him. That had been the next to last time we’d seen each other.

All those old feelings were still there, as volatile and immediate as the touch of his lips. I wanted sex with him, violent and annihilating, but I couldn’t deal with the emotions of before and after.

“I can’t,” I said abruptly, pushing him off, fixing my clothes. “I haven’t missed my train and I’m not going to.” I began walking toward the station.

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly. Although we’d both been married, both, therefore, equally guilty, I’d reserved the role of the innocent. Of course, the husband I betrayed had already betrayed me, but I didn’t tell Nick that. From his readiness to shoulder all the guilt I guessed that I was not the first woman his wife might have cause to hate. This, of course, added to the anger I felt at him and at faithless men everywhere.

“If you knew how much I’ve missed you—how much you still mean to me—can I see you again?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Has it?”

He looked very sad. “I guess not.”

I had a ticket, he didn’t, so I pushed through the turnstile and left him without looking back.

In my mind, though, I never stopped looking back. I had plenty of time to think, for it’s a long journey from Holborn to South Harrow, with a long, cold wait on the platform at Acton Town making it even longer at that time of night. Yet with all the time I had to think, I really didn’t think at all. I was moving on automatic pilot, going through motions learned a long time ago, while in my head, playing again and again like some cheap, sentimental, incredibly powerful song, was the memory of Nick: the rasp of his whiskers on my face, the light in his eyes, his voice whispering in my ear, his face.

Tears came to my eyes and then dried up. Older recollections—highly-charged sexual moments—mingled with the memories of a few hours before. Things he’d said to me, things we’d done. Even more powerfully: all the things we hadn’t done.

I was fairly drunk. Feeling no pain, as they say—except in my heart. As I walked up the hill from South Harrow station I cursed myself for not having gone with him, for not having seized a precious few hours of joy. Why did I always worry about what came next, why was I so desperate never to be caught out, always to behave correctly? What was the big deal about faithfulness and propriety, and getting home before dawn? It had never made me happy.

All too soon I was standing on the doorstep, trying to dig out my key from the clutter in the bottom of my handbag. I couldn’t find it, but that didn’t mean a choice between dumping everything out onto he ground or ringing the bell—long ago, and without telling Peter, I had hidden a spare as insurance. The brick was still loose and the key was still there. It was a bit stiff turning in the lock, but it let me in.

The house was dark and silent. He hadn’t even left a light on for me. I felt annoyed and yet relieved that I wouldn’t have to hide my guilt and lie. With luck, I wouldn’t wake him. I switched on the light in the corridor and opened the bedroom door and then I stared in horror feeling everything, my own sense of identity, swirling madly.

The bedroom furniture had changed. The bed was in a different position. And in the bed, sleeping beside Peter, was a woman. Peter’s wife.

Not me—I wasn’t Peter’s wife any longer. I wasn’t anything to Peter. Not since our divorce had become final, more than two years ago. And for two years before that we had ceased to live as man and wife.

I stared and stared as if seeing a ghost, but the only ghost in that house was me, the ghost of myself as I had been five years ago, when I was turning thirty. Meeting Nick tonight had brought that troubled young woman back to life, made her more real than the woman I thought I was now, thirty-five and single, living in a shared flat in Kilburn, with a room and a life of her own. What sort of life was it that could vanish so completely after a brief meeting with an old lover?

The ghost I had become stared and stared, unable to move, unable to think of how I could explain my presence when they woke, as they would at any moment, and found me here, more than four years out of my rightful place.

Haunts

John Hutchinson was a haunted man. Not bad—I’ll never believe that—and not mad, as others think, but haunted. Driven to what he did by a ghost. You can’t blame him for what he did; I honestly believe that. Of course, he didn’t believe in ghosts. But in the end belief doesn’t matter a damn. Things happen that make no human sense. Trying to make sense of them could drive you mad—or worse.

I probably knew John Hutchinson as well as anybody. He was one of my best friends in high school—Hutch, John Wayne Barlow, Greg Hainey, and me. We called ourselves the Big Four, sometimes the Famous Four. In some ways, it was an unlikely alliance. Greg and Hutch were budding scientists, engineers-in-training, devoted to rationality, practical and smart, whereas John Wayne and I loved the arts, the psychological, and the weird. Really, we should have hated each other, and maybe at a bigger school we would have. But we were all misfits growing up in a small town in Texas. To everybody else, we were geeks and losers. We didn’t have any other friends. So we tended to kind of get lumped together—bookworms, hopelessly unfashionable, no good at sports—and learned to like each other.

For three years we hung out together, wasted time, and helped each other at school, both socially and academically. It was Greg who kept me from flunking out of Algebra, it was John Wayne who turned him on to Mervyn Peake and Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Gorey, it was Hutch who got me to take an interest in science, it was me who helped him with his English essays, and tried to teach him there had to be more to life than the strictly rational.

We used to go on ghost-hunts. Mostly, I guess, they were an excuse to huddle together in a graveyard or an abandoned house at night and try to scare each other, but we were serious about it as well. Greg and Hutch were complete unbelievers, rationalists who bemoaned the fuzzy-minded attitude which allowed me and John Wayne to reckon that there just might be “something” there. John Wayne and I wanted to see a ghost, for real, to experience what we’d read about so often. Greg and Hutch wanted to prove that there are no such things as ghosts, to force me and John Wayne to admit that they were right and we were wrong.

Well, we never saw a ghost. And since Hutch disallowed self-reported “creepy feelings” as evidence, there were never even any close calls, although we did have a couple of really weird sessions with my mother’s old Ouija board. We ended our brief career as psychic investigators with our established belief-systems unshaken: Greg and Hutch were still rationalists, John Wayne and I still hoping.

After graduation we went our separate ways—Hutch to the West, John Wayne to the East, Greg and me to the University of Texas in Austin. We kept in touch, and got together at Christmas when we could escape from our families.

I might as well admit right here that I used to have a crush on Hutch. But I kept my feelings to myself, and I’m sure he never knew. My self-esteem was low. I was a skinny, flat-chested girl with glasses and a bad home-perm, and I felt that the survival of the Big Four was dependent on my sexuality being kept as hidden as John Wayne’s. Like him, I pretended to be “one of the guys” to survive. I had a lot of fantasies about Hutch one day waking up to my presence, reallyseeing me for the first time—but I couldn’t do anything to try to make it happen. If Imade him see me differently, what if he didn’t like what he saw? It wasn’t just that I couldn’t face rejection. If I declared myself, the balance of power would shift. The Big Four would crumble. I couldn’t risk destroying it for all of us.

Then we went away to college. Although we stayed in touch, the oldraison d’etre for the alliance had gone. Life at the University was totally different from a small-town high school. I found new friends, intellectual soul-mates, and also lovers. I let my hair grow long, put on a few pounds in strategic places, borrowed my roommate’s clothes, gained confidence. I felt that I was completely changed.

That first Christmas when I saw Hutch again—saw the new assurance in his skinny, slouching stance, saw the way he filled out his Gap T-shirt and chinos—I felt a fluttering in the pit of my stomach and realized that here was one thing which hadn’t changed: I still wanted him. In fact, I wanted him more than ever—and now there was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn’t want me.

So, after Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson had gone to bed, and Greg and John Wayne had staggered off home to their parents’, I stayed on. Hutch got out another six-pack and we settled down on the flowered chintz sofa in the enclosed back porch for more personal conversation.

By way of checking that the path was clear, I asked if he had a girlfriend at college.

He grinned, and told me of his conquests. There were nearly a dozen already; he was averaging one a week. A different girl each weekend. He didn’t like to repeat himself, because if you asked a girl out two weeks running, she’d start making assumptions and talking about arelationship , for God’s sake!

“The problem with girls,” he told me, as if I weren’t one, “is they’re hard-wired for monogamy, which guys aren’t. Girls screw around, sure they do. But if they screw the same guy regularly, then after a certain point, which I reckon is about a month, it’s like some switch in their brain gets tripped, and they get flooded with these chemicals, you know, serotonin and that, and suddenly they’re‘in love’ .” He did the fingers-for-quote-marks thing in the air with his hands as he spoke those dire words in a tone dripping with irony.

The attraction—why not be honest and call itlust ?—which I’d been feeling for him, died inside me.

“The problem is,” he went on, after pausing to chug some beer, “a month is about the time when the average guy stops feeling so horny for her and starts to get kind of bored. His genetic imperative is to move on to fresh pastures, try to knock somebody else up. Even if, you know, you’re not intending to knock anybody up, ever—well, that old urge is still there, genetically encoded.”

“So in other words,” I interrupted him, trying to make my own voice just as ironic as his, “the answer to my question is, no, you don’t have a girlfriend.”

He grinned at me. “I couldn’t be that cruel, Becky! Breaking their little hearts … no, but it’s hard. When I find somebody really hot, you know, and think it would be great to get together with her again—well, I just have to resist the urge, and go out to look for somebody new. I always make it perfectly clear that what I want is sex, not a relationship.”

“What about love?” I demanded. “Don’t you ever think about that?”

He shook his head. “Love’s a con. It doesn’t exist. There’s body heat, there’s hormones, there’s the genetic imperative—and there’s social myths about romantic love. That’s all it is. It’s not real, just because people believe in it.”

I was reminded of all the conversations we’d had in high school, when Hutch and Greg would put forth the rational, materialistic argument, and John Wayne and I would try (and fail) to shoot it full of holes with alternatives from the arts, from books, from philosophy, fromfeeling. I suddenly wished I wasn’t alone with Hutch. John Wayne had told me—had he confessed the same to Hutch or Greg?—that he was in love with his roommate. But I didn’t want to use John Wayne’s private feelings as ammunition, and I had no great love of my own to argue from. I’d never been any good at arguing, anyway, not like the boys, who would say anything to score a point. Occasionally, when John Wayne and I were flailing too badly, one of them would switch sides to argue our position, to make it a fairer fight. I knew Hutch could wipe the floor with me, and I’d never be able to believe in love again… .

“Gosh, it’s late,” I said looking at my watch. “I’d better go home.”

*

The years went by. John Wayne did post-graduate work in set design, then moved to New York, where he seemed to be always on the fringes of the theatrical and/or art world, barely surviving, but happy. I worked for a free-sheet in Austin, and then got offered the chance to start up an arts and entertainment paper in Galveston. Hutch had a job with one of the big oil companies based in Houston; I think he had something to do with designing drilling equipment. Greg was the most successful of us all. The little software business he’d started up in college took off in a big way, and by the time we were in our mid-twenties, Greg was a millionaire. He settled in Austin in a big, beautiful house, married a doctor named Linda, and became a leading light on the charity fund-raising circuit. Despite all the demands on his time, he kept in touch with his old friends.

I’m not sure I would have stayed in touch with Hutch but for Greg. Although I’d thought of myself as being the very heart of the group when we were in high school, now he was the one who forwarded my replies to his e-mails to Hutch, and vice-versa. It was only his efforts which kept alive the ghost of the Big Four.

Even though Houston and Galveston are very close together, I never saw Hutch from one year to the next except at Christmas, when our visits to our parents overlapped, or up in Austin at one of Greg’s parties. He threw great parties, especially at Halloween. Even in Austin, a city where Halloween is taken seriously, Greg’s Halloween parties were the stuff of legend.

I was surprised, and flattered, when Greg invited me to Austin one weekend in April, to discuss plans for that year’s Halloween party. He said he wanted to pick my brain; he desperately needed my help to create a unique and unusual experience.

He sent the same invitation to Hutch and John Wayne. He even paid for John Wayne’s plane ticket.

So there we were, suddenly, the Famous Four reconstituted, with the addition of Greg’s wife, Linda. We stood in their living room, grinning uneasily at each other.

“You should have brought Luke,” Greg said. “I hope I made it clear Luke would be welcome?”

He had. I nodded and explained, “I didn’t want him overwhelmed with our shared nostalgia.”

“Who’s Luke?” John Wayne asked. “There was no ‘Luke’ mentioned in your Christmas card!”

I could feel Hutch staring at me, and I hoped I wasn’t blushing. “We’re not actually living together yet,” I said carefully.

Greg rolled his eyes at my coyness. “Luke is her fiancé,” he announced. “At least, she toldme they were engaged.”

“Tick-tick-tick,” said Hutch.

“I think you’ll find that men have biological clocks, too,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed.

“Not in the Hutchinson theory of life and love,” Greg said, grinning. “ There, women have but a short shelf-life, while men are the eternal hunter-gatherers.”

Hutch shrugged. “It works for me,” he said.

John Wayne looked him up and down. “It might work now, but what about when your visible assets start to go?” He struck a pose. “Madame Fortuna predicts: a lonely old age.”

“Oh, I’ll probably get married eventually,” he said. “Becky’s right—”

I nearly dropped my drink as he nodded this acknowledgement to me.

“—men can afford to leave it till later, but we’ve got the same urge to procreate. And I don’t actually want to be a bachelor forever. Studies show that married men are happier and live longer than singles. I figure when I’m in my late thirties I’ll start shopping around for a wife… .”

Linda snorted. “God, Hutch, you make it soundso romantic! How could any woman resist you?”

“I don’t know, but many have,” he told her, grinning.

“Luckily he’s not too picky,” said Greg, putting his arm around her. “When the time comes, he’ll just head for the Generic Wife aisle at Wal-Mart—”

“Target, surely,” I objected, giving it the French pronunciation.

“Come on, let’s move to the dining room,” Linda interrupted.

Hutch had been barely nineteen when he’d formulated his theory about men, women, and love. But it seemed that nothing which had happened to him during the next eight years had made him change his mind. I knew from Greg that Hutch no longer picked up and discarded women with the rapidity of his college years. Probably, he didn’t find it so easy off-campus. More recently, he’d gone for longer-term, yet easily broken, liaisons with married women.

Behind me, as we walked through to the dining room, I heard John Wayne quizzing Hutch. “So you’re just going out to shop for a good little wifey when the time is right? I know you like to be Mr. Unemotional, but get real. What about that crazy little thing called love?”

“He doesn’t believe in it,” I said, taking the seat that Linda motioned me to.

“Belief has got nothing to do with it, believe me! Is that true?” When Hutch nodded, John Wayne said thoughtfully, “Boy, you are really ripe for a fall! I just hope I’m around to see it when you fall head over heels for … whoever.”

He was looking, very thoughtfully, at me, as he spoke. I didn’t know why, but I could feel myself blushing. I dreaded Hutch’s rejoinder, his devastating deconstruction of the fraud of romantic love… .

Greg rescued us all from that. “Let’s talk about this Halloween party,” he said firmly.

“Sure, that’s what we’re here for,” John Wayne said. “I’m sure once we four put our heads together, we’ll come up with some great ideas. What do you want?”

“I want a haunted house,” Greg said.

“Not thewhole house,” Linda objected quickly.

Greg shrugged and shook his head. “No, Linda’s right. I can only give you the west wing to work on.”

“This house?” I asked.

“No, we’ve got a new house under construction on a lot overlooking Lake Travis. Figure it should be ready for a Halloween house-warming. And I’d like to do something really special with it—with the west wing, anyway.”

“Creepy gothic decor?” John Wayne suggested.

Greg nodded. “Yeah, that’s part of it—I was hoping I could leave that part of it to you and Becky. Hire artists or decorators, buy whatever you need—I want it to be scary, but subtle. Disturbing, but not so severely that nobody could stay there. And I want Hutch to provide the ghost.”

“Thank you,” Hutch said, bowing his head gravely. “However, honored though I am to be proposed as a sacrificial victim, I should warn you that, if murdered, I will not return to haunt you or your house!”

“Hutch, this is your old pal Gregory talking to you. We both know that ghostly phenomena are not caused by the spirits of the dead.”

“Right, right. So what kind of a con-trick do you want from me?”

“Not a con-trick. An experiment.” His eyes were bright, his round face glowing like a jack-o-lantern. He paused as a waiter came in to deliver the first course.

“A couple of guys in England did some research into the effects of low-frequency sound waves on human physiology. The results were reported in several places—I can’t believe none of you guys read about it!”

“Well, we didn’t, so you’d better tell us,” I said, tasting the bright green soup. Leek, creamy and delicious.

“They found that if you set up a standing wave of about nineteen cycles per second, a person in it is going to start feeling more and more uncomfortable: shivery, oppressed, frightened, just completely creeped-out.”

“And in that state, they’re very suggestible, maybe they start imagining ghosts,” I guessed.

“The human eyeball has a resonant frequency of eighteen cycles per second,” Greg explained. “Infrasound just above that frequency will cause sympathetic vibrations in the eyeball—”

“And you’d start seeing weird things,” said Linda. She shuddered.

Greg was already positively vibrating with excitement as he gazed intently at Hutch. “Could you repeat the experiment for me? I mean, set up a standing wave which would make the west wing seem to be haunted?”

“If you’re paying for it.” A slow, wide grin cracked Hutch’s usually solemn face. “God, I’d love to try something like that!”

“I thought you would!” Greg rubbed his hands together. “I’ll put you in touch with the architect and Bud, my contractor, so you can all work together. I’ll tell Bud to give you whatever you need. This takes priority. If we have to change the layout of the house, so be it.”

“Just as long as the ghost can’t get out of the west wing,” Linda said. “I don’t want the infrasound affecting anybody anywhere else in the house. There could be health implications.”

“It’ll be a completely localized phenomenon,” Greg assured her. He looked at Hutch. “Bear that in mind—and that there has to be an off-switch, so the west wing doesn’t have to be hauntedall the time.”

We all got caught up in the excitement of planning. It felt almost like old times. Although, of course, there were differences. Greg was paying for it all. It was real work for John Wayne, but Hutch, who said he couldn’t afford to be caught moonlighting, would design and build the machine for producing the sound in his spare time, for expenses only. As for me, well, I was really just an onlooker, although both Greg and John Wayne were good about asking for my input. I couldn’t contribute anything to what Hutch had to do, and he said flatly that there was no point in trying to explain anything to a liberal arts major, I would just have to wait and see.

This I got to do, finally, in September, when I flew up to Austin for a private view. There was no way I was going to wait for the formal unveiling on Halloween like some ordinary, gullible member of the public!

Luke went with me; he wanted to see the house. It was impressive, since Greg had plenty of money and was willing to let the architect have his way rather than insisting on imposing his own (frankly, rather primitive) notions of style, but I was really only interested in the west wing, and seeing the results of Hutch’s experiment. So we left Luke wandering around quite happily while Hutch led Greg and me to the site of his experiment.

I was shivering as I stepped through the last door (the gallant gentlemen let me go first), but whether I was already responding to the atmosphere or just anticipating, I have no idea. The room was big, like all the others in the house, but seemed to have been built on a different scale. It was long and narrow, more like a hallway than a room, and although it was perfectly spacious and airy (the ceiling was very high) and there was plenty of light, there was something oppressive about it. I’m not usually claustrophobic, but I started getting a prickly, trapped feeling, as if I’d wandered into a closet by mistake. There were no windows. I must spend half my life in windowless rooms without giving it a thought, but for some reason, it bothered me here. Although I knew perfectly well I hadn’t gone down any steps or ramps, I started thinking that this room was underground. The real problem was that the air-conditioning and ventilation system weren’t working properly. The temperature had dropped—I was actually shivering with cold—but the place was so airless that no matter how much I gulped I couldn’t get the oxygen I needed.

I was just about two beats away from a full-blown panic attack when I turned to my friends. Hutch was standing and gazing at nothing with a small, proud smile on his lips, and Greg’s bright eyes were darting everywhere. The freckled skin of his bare arms had sprouted goosebumps, but what parted his lips and made him breathe faster was anticipation, not anxiety.

Of course. We weremeant to feel like this. As soon as I’d realized that it was Hutch’s standing wave which was making my pulse race, I stopped being afraid. There was nothing to fear. I still felt uncomfortable, but now that I knew why, I could deal with it.

Greg and Hutch had moved further into the room, and I went after them. I thought I heard someone come through the door right behind me, and I turned, expecting to see Luke.

He wasn’t there, butsomeone had just slipped past me—from the corner of my eye I caught sight of a slim, gray figure speeding past.

“There, look!” cried Hutch, and I whirled around, saw him pointing at the wall, saw … I blinked, narrowed my eyes, struggled to make sense of it … a woman, in a long, gray, hooded coat, backed up against the wall. I had the sense that she was frightened, cornered, with nowhere to run … and then she was gone.

We all sighed simultaneously.

“So this is the haunted west wing?” Luke entered, and we all looked to see his reaction. He shivered. “Creepy. Really oppressive. That’s not just your standing wave, Hutch; it’s the lighting, the shape of the space …” He prowled up and down, checking it out. Finally he stopped and looked at us. His eyebrows raised. We were all staring at him so strangely, I guess. I went over and slipped my arm around his waist, feeling better for the contact immediately.

He gave me a squeeze and looked at Hutch. “Is it just this creepy feeling, or is anything else supposed to happen?”

“It might,” said Hutch. “Visual disturbances. Tell us if you see anything weird, huh?”

Luke nodded. We all waited in silence for a bit. I looked at the door, because that was where I’d been looking when I’d first seen something, but Hutch and Greg were both staring at the wall where the figure had disappeared. I could feel Luke’s tension in his arm around me, and he kept jerking his head around.

“See anything?” Hutch asked him after the third sudden movement.

“No—yes—maybe, I don’t know. Just out of the corner of my eye, a sort of gray shape, blurred, like something moving. But when I turn my head, it’s gone.”

“Somethingor someone?”

Luke shrugged. “No idea. Just a blurry, moving shape. Could’ve been an animal, I guess.”

For some reason his comment really spooked me—I think it was the image it conjured of the gray woman metamorphosing into a beast.She had seemed to me frightened, not frightening, but the idea of a shape-shifting monster was terrifying.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Fine with me,” said Luke, walking me toward the door.

“I’m going to stick around for a while longer,” said Hutch. “Just to see what happens. How about it, Greg?”

I expected Greg to agree; I’d thought the haunted west wing was going to be his new toy. But he was looking oddly pale. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so, man. I’ve got kind of a headache… . I got to get out of here for a while. And I really don’t think you should stay too long.”

Hutch shrugged. “I just want to check something out. I’ll meet y’all out front in about fifteen minutes.”

What a relief it was to leave that empty room. I began to feel better immediately.

“My headache’s gone already,” said Greg, sounding surprised, as we stepped outside the front door. He sighed happily, inhaling the scent of sunbaked earth and cedar. “Whew, I feel like I just came back from some dungeon in the middle ages!” Then he looked at me. “You don’t think Hutch will do himself any harm?”

“Thereare health implications,” I said cautiously. Since Hutch wouldn’t tell me, I’d looked into the literature about infrasound research myself. “But no, I really don’t. And I’m sure it’ll be safe enough for your party guests. Nobody’s going to be in there for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“Only Hutch. And don’t forget, this isn’t his first time.”

I nodded. “But it’s not likely to do him any lasting harm. I’m sure there are factory floors which are worse.”

Greg took us on a tour of his property. We even went down the rough hillside path—“there’ll be steps the next time you come”—to the lake and a wooden dock. We were away for more than twenty minutes, but when we returned to the house there was still no sign of Hutch.

“I guess I’d better go get him,” said Greg.

My heart gave a flutter. “Let’s all go.”

He gave me a look, then dead-panned, “Of course. Whatwas I thinking? In the movies, they always get into trouble when they split up. Oh, my God, we should never have left him alone … ”

“Don’t look be-hiiiiind you.” It was Hutch, of course, grinning sardonically. “Some friendsI’ve got—leaving poor little me all alone in the infamous haunted west wing.”

“Since you’re the one who haunted it—”

“Oh, great, so now I discover my so-called friends think I’m a ghost?” His hand shot out and gripped my arm. I think the movement was meant as a punch line, but as his fingers, icy cold against my sun-warmed flesh, dug into me, I lost it, and screamed.

The men—even Luke—looked at me as if I was insane.

Hutch yanked his hand away as if I’d burned him.

“Sweetie, Sweetie, it’s OK,” said Luke—a little belatedly, I thought, but better late than never.

I hugged Luke to hide my blushes. I felt like a complete idiot. I began to babble. “Sorry—sorry—I just—I don’t know, Hutch, you startled me! Aftershock, I guess. I mean, even knowing what it was, the whole thing was just so creepy! Really got my adrenaline going. Sorry, Hutch.”

“That’s OK. You were supposed to be scared. It’s good—means I succeeded.” Hutch twitched his shoulders. “I won’t say I was scared myself, because I wasn’t, but my body sure thought I ought to be. It wanted me out of there! If I wasn’t shivering, I was sweating like a pig. Thank the lord I’ve still got a clean shirt in my case in the car!”

“So, did the ghost come back after we’d left?” Greg wanted to know. “Did he have anything to say for himself?”

“He?”

“The ghost,” Greg explained.

I looked at him in surprise.

“What did you see?” Hutch was frowning.

Greg shrugged. “A gray figure … in a long cloak, with a hood, so I couldn’t see his face. I thought he was like a monk.”

“I saw a woman,” I said.

“So did I,” said Hutch. There was something in the way he said it, looking at me, that made me tingle.

I shrugged irritably. “But it’s not like there was anything there to see—there’s not a ghost. We didn’t see anything, really—it’s about perception, not vision. Our eyeballs vibrated, and our brains were just trying to make some kind of shape out of that blurriness.”

Hutch shook his head slowly. “It has to be more complicated than that. In so-called haunted houses people see the same ghosts again and again.”

“Because of tradition,” Greg put in. “People see what they expect to see.”

“And you expected to see a monk?” Hutch said skeptically. “Doubtless one of the world-famous Lake Travis brotherhood.”

“Sure, the Indians wiped them out, burned the monastery to the ground, in ought eight,” Greg said. “I always build my houses on sites of historical and religious significance, didn’t you know that?”

“There isn’t any tradition here, yet,” I pointed out. “We didn’t know what to expect. So our minds were free to make their own connections. For Greg, obviously, gray ghosts have got to be monks… .”

“Whereas for you and Hutch, it’s the sexier option of a dead woman,” Luke said.

I made a disgusted face at him. “Dead women aresexy ?”

“Hey, not tome . But according to Edgar Allan Poe and everybody else who follows that route …”

“I don’t think somebody who saw an animal ghost should talk about sexy.”

Hutch ignored us. “I’d like to interview more people about their experience in the west wing,” he told Greg. “See if some kind of consensus starts to emerge. Maybe at the party.”

“Yeah, OK,” said Greg. “But try not to get too heavy. Remember, they’re my guests, not your experimental subjects.”

“Well, hey. I wouldn’t have to bother anybody at the party if I could run an experiment beforehand. If I could bring some people out here, you know, and then ask them to describe their experience … ”

“Mi casa es su casa,” Greg agreed. “I’ll get another set of keys cut for you. There’ll be decorators and such-like coming and going for the next few weeks—that won’t bother you? Good.”

“You don’t mind if I camp out here for a night or two? I’d really like to find out what happens on repeat visits; you know, does the whole thing cycle through again? Do you get habituated to it, more or less sensitive? All sorts of questions.”

Greg nodded, looking admiring, looking, maybe, a bit envious. “I might join you,” he said. It was as if he’d forgotten this was his house—his ghost. But this was how it had been in high school, when Hutch always had the best ideas—or, at least, the ability to convince us they were his.

Later, at the airport, Hutch asked me if I could sketch a portrait of the ghostly woman I’d thought I’d seen.

“Oh, I don’t know, Hutch—it was only a glimpse—I’m really not sure. Maybe, if I see her again—”

“We don’t know that you’ll see the same apparition twice. I need some hard evidence. God knows, most people are completely incapable of describing what they’ve seen in any kind of detail … I don’t want to rely on what people think they remember.You have a talent, Beck. You can draw. Your portraits are really good.” He turned to Luke. “My mom framed the portrait Becky did of me in high school. She’s still got it on the living room wall, says it’s more like me than any photograph!”

I felt myself blushing, both pleased and embarrassed. I’d given up any serious attempts at drawing while in college. The art teachers there did not admire my work. It lacked flair and individuality. I could copy— but computers could do that sort of thingso much better.

I bought pencils and a pad of paper in the airport shop, and while Hutch, Greg, and Luke drank coffee at the next table, I struggled to produce an image of the woman I’d imagined I’d seen. Her figure—coat open over a loose dress—and posture, cowering fearfully against the wall, were what I remembered best about her, and were the easiest to capture. It was her face that was difficult. I did the best I could to sketch the features I thought I remembered while not making them too individual. Generic pretty young woman backed up against the wall by (unseen) threat… .

Hutch grinned broadly. “That’s her! That’s what I saw!”

“You know, I think I saw her too,” Luke drawled. “On the cover of a book in the newsstand over there where Becky bought her paper.”

Luke’s sarcasm didn’t register on Hutch. “May I keep it?” he asked.

I nodded. Of course, what else, I had drawn it for him … but I suddenly wished I hadn’t.

The Halloween party was supposed to be the main event, but for me it turned into something less than a sideshow.

Things hadn’t been going well between me and Luke, and for some stupid reason we ended up sniping at each other nearly the whole of the drive from Galveston to Austin. At the party I spent about ten minutes talking to John Wayne, who was in a snit because Hutch didn’t appreciate what he’d done to the west wing—he just flat didn’t like it, if you please, because itdistracted the visitors from what John Wayne called “Hutch’s special effects.”

I went down to the west wing to see for myself, but there was such a long line of people waiting to get in that I gave up. I meant to go back later, but that never happened. I never even saw Hutch that night. Instead, I found Luke, and the tension which had been building between us suddenly exploded. We left the party to have our fight in private, and we thoroughly demolished the relationship. By the time Halloween had given way to All Saint’s Day, our engagement was off, and we never wanted to see each other again. I made him drop me off at the bus station because I couldn’t bear another four hours of his company on the drive home.

*

I e-mailed Greg and Linda to apologize for walking out on their party and to explain about the break-up. I sent a similar note, only more groveling, to Hutch. Knowing how proud and possessive he was of “his” haunting, I figured he’d be furious that I’d disappeared.

Greg’s reply was practically instantaneous, concerned about my emotional state, offering me the lake house as a retreat if I wanted to get away from Galveston for a while. From Hutch, nothing. After a week, I e-mailed him again, this time quizzing him about the results of his “experiment.”

I’d chosen the right topic. He couldn’t resist a reply.

I’m going to write it all up and submit it as an article somewhere. Till I manage that, here’s a quick breakdown of my findings: roughly 60 percent thought they saw some sort of human figure; another 10 percent saw “something moving” which they thought might have been an animal or a person; 5 percent thought they just glimpsed something but couldn’t say anything positive about it at all, another 5 percent “heard” or “sensed” something they couldn’t see; and 20 percent experienced no ghostly or inexplicable manifestations at all.

Of the (most interesting) 60 percent, slightly more than half described the figure as female, usually as wearing a “long gown,” but otherwise their descriptions varied widely. Of those who saw a male figure, nearly half described the figure as a monk or a priest! (The long gown again?)

Guess I’ll have to try to make sense of the data, draw some kind of conclusion. Might be good to have your input on that; how would you feel about collaborating?

Nobody else saw our woman.

*

Our woman.The phrase sent a thrill through me. I was warmed by it, and felt closer to Hutch than I had in years. And he wanted to collaborate! I replied right away, letting him know I was eager and willing to help.

But I didn’t hear from him again for a couple of weeks. It was early December when he phoned and asked if I could come and meet him in Houston.

He didn’t sound like himself. There was something in his voice I’d never heard before. “What’s up?”

“I’ve found our ghost,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

I met him in Houston, the next day. It was the middle of the week and should have been a working day for both of us, but there we were, playing truant. He’d given me explicit directions for how to find a restaurant called The Black-Eyed Pea, where he would be waiting for me.

I couldn’t figure it out. The scenario I imagined centered around old newspaper clippings, maybe the story of a murder in Travis County, maybe the discovery of a young woman’s body in the lake. I surely wasn’t expecting Hutch to greet me, when I joined him in his booth beside a window, by pointing out at a high-rise bank building across the street and saying, “She works there. She’ll be coming out of the building for her lunch break in about …”—he checked his watch—“thirty-five minutes. You should get a good view of her then.”

I looked at him. He didn’t look well. I could tell he wasn’t sleeping, or eating right, and he was drinking too much coffee. “Who are you talking about?” I asked, although I already knew.

He waited for the waitress to take my order, and then he told me. “Her name is Melanie Caron. She’s twenty-six, single, works for First City National over there and lives by herself in a townhouse in a little subdivision off the Gulf Freeway. Not a rental; I think her parents bought it for her—there’s money in the background, I think.” He paused, seeming to lose track of what he was saying, and ran a hand over his face.

“But why?”

“Oh, the car she drives, the townhouse—”

“No, I don’t mean the money! I mean, why her, why are you so … interested?”

“Wait’ll you see her.”

“No. I don’t remember what I saw. Not well enough to be sure.”

He slammed his hand down on the table, making the silverware judder. “Don’t say that! You drew her picture!”

“It’s adrawing. I’m not a camera.”

“I know it’s her,” he said quietly. “The second I saw her—sitting at a table just over there,” he canted his head. “As soon as I set eyes on her it was like littlethings just crawling all over me … the creepiest sensation. Iknew it was her.” He raised his haunted eyes to mine. “I don’t know why. I don’t know what it means. But I saw her ghost. It has to mean something.”

“Why? Why does it have to mean anything?” This washis line when I’d tried, in my clumsy way, to argue for the existence of God, an afterlife, or even the significance of coincidence.

“Don’t be an asshole, Becky,” he said irritably.

“Don’tyou. You want to know what it means? OK, I’ll tell you: you don’t want to know. It’s a warning.”

He became more alert. “You really think so? I need to tell her?”

“No.You need to keep the hell away from her.” The way he looked when I said that told me everything. My heart sank. “You’ve told her?”

“Not about the ghost, no, not about seeing her—butyou could. Maybe she’d believe you.”

“And she wouldn’t believe you, because why?” He didn’t answer; he didn’t have to. “Because you came on to her, and she didn’t want to know. And instead of letting it drop, you’ve been following her around, spying on her… .” I turned to gaze out the window at the bank where this unknown woman worked. I felt a horrible, cold dread filling me up from my feet to my head. “Oh, lordy. You’re stalking her.”

“Becky, come on!” He gazed at me, anguished. “I thought you’d understand! It’s not like that. If you’d help me …”

I prayed that I could.

“Look, Hutch,” I said gently. “Think about the ghost. Think about how she looked. I don’t just mean her face, I mean her, whaddayacallit—her affect.”

He frowned at me. I spelled it out. “She wasterrified. Somebody was after her. Maybe you?”

“I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“So how’s she supposed to know that? Telepathy?”

Just then the waitress arrived with the food I no longer wanted to eat.

“Would you like to order now, sir?” she asked him, but Hutch shook his head. “Just some more coffee, please.”

He turned his attention back to me as soon as the waitress had gone. “You could tell her the truth. You could just recognize her and go up to her, tell her about the ghost. I bet she’d believe you. Why shouldn’t she? And I bet she’s heard of Greg. If he invites her to a party she’d probably be thrilled.”

“What if she’s not? What if she doesn’t believe me? What if—”

He held up his hand to stop me. “Quit borrowing trouble. We can deal with any problems when—”

“No.”

He blinked at me in disbelief. “You won’t help me?”

I was trembling, but determined. “I’m trying to, believe me. This is insane, Hutch. Look at what you’re doing—try to look at it from her point of view—”

“But she doesn’t know about the ghost!”

“What difference does that make?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Becky, it’s the whole point! I’m not trying towoo this woman—I’m not in love with her; she’s a mystery I’m trying to solve!”

I swallowed hard. “The mystery is all in your head.”

“And yours,” he shot back. “You saw her too—don’t you care why?”

Before I could begin to answer, he froze. His head came up like a hunting dog’s and he stared through the window. “Here she comes.”

I followed his gaze across the street. But he must have sensed her before she appeared because all I could see was a couple of gray-suited men just emerging from the building. Behind them, a second later, a slim blonde woman in a salmon-pink suit came pushing through the heavy glass doors.

“See? It’s her.”

“She’s not wearing a gray hooded coat—”

“Look at her face.”

I tried, but from that distance she was just a generic pretty young businesswoman. I’d already made up my mind how to play it, though, so I said, definitely, “That’s not who I saw.”

“What! You’re lying!”

“I am not. That’s not who I saw.”

“Wait. Maybe she’ll come in here for her lunch, and you can see her close up.”

For a minute it did seem that was her plan. She crossed at the light and seemed headed straight for the restaurant. But as she came nearer, she looked nervous. I saw her eyes flickering across the cars in the parking lot, and over the big window where we sat, watching.

I think she caught a glimpse of Hutch, and that decided her. Because instead of approaching the entrance she turned abruptly and walked past.

I spent the next half-hour doing my best to argue him out of his obsession, then pointing out how dangerous it was. But he was no more convinced by my attempts at putting forward the rational viewpoint than he’d ever been by my emotion. Even the irony of our reversed positions was, I think, lost on him.

Well, you know the rest of the story. Nothing, not my refusal to help, nor my attempts to make him see reason could stop what was to come.

Hutch became ever more obsessed with Melanie Caron. When charm, reason, and persistence all failed, he finally just went after her, to take her by force. His gun wasn’t loaded—after all, he didn’t want to hurt her, only to make her go with him—but she didn’t know that. He didn’t know she had her own gun, that she’d started carrying it with her always, against the threat he posed… . But, of course, he didn’t think he was a threat. Even after she’d shot him, as she believed in self-defense, even as he was dying, did he understand what he had become?

Yet wasn’t he still the same Hutch I’d known and loved?

Everyone else seems to think he’d changed, become a monster, monstrously pursuing the object of his desire.

Even Greg, even his parents, seem to have written him off, sadly, as mad.

Yet if he was mad, it was with the same madness which had always driven him: that of the single-minded scientist, the engineer in pursuit of a practical solution to some material problem. He wasn’t “in love” with Melanie Caron in the sick, obsessive way of stalkers; he just wanted to know what shemeant.

And so did I.

After his death, seeing the image of Melanie Caron on TV and in the papers, I became convinced that shewas “our ghost.” I felt awful because I could never tell Hutch I’d been wrong, could never apologize … I’d completely screwed up the real chance I’d had of helping him.

I felt horribly guilty. Of course, I’d thought I was doing the best, by warning him away from her—and Ihad been right about the danger. But I should have known he wouldn’t listen to me. He couldn’t walk away from an unsolved problem; it just wasn’t in him. I should have known that, and tried to avert this horror in some other way. Maybe, if I’d done what he’d asked, and approached Melanie myself, I could have talked her around, reached some peaceful accommodation. Would it have hurt her to spend a little time with him, with us? To help us solve the mystery of her haunting?

The mystery remained, and, after all, it wasour mystery. Solving it felt like one last thing I could do for Hutch.

Although my intuition that the ghost had been a warning to stay away from Melanie Caron turned out to be horribly right, that didn’t solve the mystery. The logic was circular, like a time paradox: the ghost we saw was a clip from the future, when Melanie had cowered in fear from her stalker—but that future could never have come into being if Hutch hadn’t first seen her cowering in fear… . I couldn’t accept the idea of a totally predetermined universe, that our fates were scripts written before our births, so that brought me back to Hutch’s original question. Why her?

I took my time and thought carefully about how to approach her. I couldn’t afford to blow what might be my only chance.

I decided to approach her as a journalist, and told her I was researching a story on the subject of stalkers. She wasn’t a Galveston resident, so had no idea how unlikely a topic that was for the weeklyShore Times. And although she told me she didn’t want more publicity, when I swore I wouldn’t use anything she didn’t approve, and said I just needed some “insider detail” to help me understand the experience of being stalked, she agreed to meet me, suggesting a Starbucks near her office. People do like to tell their stories.

I made the most of our first meeting. I’ve never worked harder to make somebody like me. Never felt so desperate for acceptance. But it worked. I racked up a lot of miles on my old car, pretending urgent business in Houston so that I could take her up on her invitation to “call, if you happen to be in town.” To keep her talking to me about Hutch, I told her that although my editor had spiked “our” story, I was considering writing a book about stalking.

I sucked up to her shamelessly—and it all paid off, finally, when she invited me out to her house for dinner. She knew I would have a long drive back to Galveston, and one of the things we had in common was a liking for good wine with our dinner, so she invited me to stay the night.

I had been afraid that she might have sold her house and moved, unable to bear to go on living in the place where she had killed someone, but no, she was still there, in the house where Hutch had died.

“Why not?” she asked me, shrugging. She liked it there. Why should she let “that bastard” drive her out? Since “that business” she’d had an alarm system installed. She felt as safe here as she could feel anywhere.

“So you don’t feel the house is haunted?” I held my breath waiting for her answer, hoping… . Maybe, despite his determined materialism, Hutch’s spirit was still hanging around.

But she shook her head firmly. “I’m sure it’s not. I had this psychic, she’s supposed to be really, really good, come to check it out, and she said there was no evil here, nothing but good vibrations, lots of love.”

I felt my heart turn over. Poor Hutch… .

“But I did get the kitchen completely redone, just to be on the safe side, and I had a Feng Sui expert advise me about the energy flow… .”

“Thekitchen ?” That was where we were sitting now, with glasses of wine and bowls of olives, nuts and taco-chips set out. I gaped at her. “Why the kitchen?”

She stared at me, obviously suspecting my journalistic credentials. It must have been publicized, or maybe she’d told me when I wasn’t listening. “Because this is where I shot him, of course! He actually died in the laundry room, just there”—she pointed across at a louvered shutter, painted sunflower yellow, which screened off the narrow back hallway from the rest of the room—“but there’s not much to redesign in there. It’s not like I ever spend much time in there, anyway, not like I do in the kitchen. But I did everything I could. I had the carpeting taken up, of course, put down Mexican tiles instead, and had the walls repainted blue, a very harmonious color, instead of white like they were before, because white’s the color of the dead in China, after all, and …”

I got up. “Do you mind if I look?” I was already walking away from her as I spoke. I didn’t want her to see the tears which had sprung to my eyes at the thought of poor Hutch dying all alone in that cramped space while his killer sprinted out the front door to safety.

It was a tiny little room, all right, tightly packed with a big washing machine and even bigger dryer; cupboards overhead held the usual sorts of cleaning stuffs. I tried with all my might to get some sense of Hutch, some lingering trace of his personality, in that little room, but there was nothing. Maybe the Feng Shui had got rid of his hungry ghost… . Or, more likely, what Hutch had always believed was true, and there was nothing left of us after death; ghosts were just vibrations aided by imagination and the hope that springs eternal… .

I got myself under control and returned to the kitchen, where Melanie was starting to get our dinner together.

The evening dragged on. I’d never realized how exhausting it could be to be constantly “on,” always on my guard, like a spy, having to pretend to like someone I would rather have hated. Not that I did hate her, actually, because I understood too well that, in similar circumstances, under siege in my own home, I would have done my best to kill my stalker. What difference would it have made to me to be told that he was somebody else’s beloved friend? At least I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in her. I did, genuinely, want to know everything there was to know about her. Somewhere in that mass of personal detail must be the answer to what had happened to Hutch. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I was determined to find it.

Yet somehow, the more I knew about her, the less I understood. Melanie was becoming deeply familiar to me, almost a part of myself. Not like the friends we make by choice, but like the playmates forced on children by proximity or family. I thought she was like the boring cousin, a year younger than me, I’d had to play with whenever my mother or my aunt wanted a day off. I knew every detail of her life, knew her room and her toys almost as well as my own, and yet I knew nothing at all about her. When, halfway through college, she dropped out and became a Moonie, I couldn’t say I’d seen it coming, but neither could I be genuinely shocked, because, after all, why shouldn’t she? I had no idea who she was inside.

Was Hutch as mystified as me, or would being in Melanie’s presence have given him what he needed, answered all his questions? As she chatted on, I tuned out, my thoughts drifting back to Hutch, the pain of his loss, the endless regrets… .

“Becky, what’s wrong?”

She reached across the table to touch my hand and I jerked away, spattering fresh tomato sauce all down my shirt.

We both cried out in dismay.

“Oh, gosh,” Melanie said, jumping up as I began to dab at myself with my napkin. “No, don’t do that! You’ll set the stain—the best thing is to take it off right away and put it under cold, running water. Take if off, take it off now.”

I looked up at her and she blushed. She turned away. “I’ll go get you something else to put on, of course,” she said in a strained voice. “Put it straight into the sink, put the cold water hard on it, you hear?” She kept her back to me as she spoke, and hurried out of the room.

By the time she got back I had remembered: there are no coincidences in this life. Every action is meaningful. Suddenly it made sense to me: I had been thinking about Hutch. This might be a way of getting closer to him, of finding out more… .

“Could I wash this? Really wash it in the machine, I mean?”

“Uh, if you want … sure. There’s a couple of towels in it now, they’ll be OK with it—” She held out her hand but I kept a grip on my dripping shirt.

“I can do it. Just tell me where the soap is.”

“Oh, well … if you look in the cupboard just above the machine—are you sure? OK, then, put it on half-load.”

I performed the simple actions slowly, like a ritual. The little room was like a chapel, high ceilinged, bare, stone floor… . My naked arms goose-pimpled. I’d been over-warm in the kitchen, but it was freezing out here.

“Are you OK?” I’d taken too long, and she’d come to check on me.

“Sure, I’m fine.” I managed a smile, took the T-shirt she offered, followed her back to the table.

About twenty minutes later, as we were still sitting there, sipping wine, I felt it: a sort of low rumble like an approaching storm, and the fine hairs on my arms prickled with electricity. There was a high-pitched whine like a plane taking off.

“Oh, thatmachine ,” Melanie said crossly. “You can’t hear yourselfthink .”

As she got up and walked toward the laundry room door—which I’d left open—I followed her. I wanted to get back into the little room, sure that he would be there, invoked by the nearly palpable noise.

But I didn’t get in, because of course Melanie wasn’t going in, she’d only gone to close the door, and I was behind her. When she stopped, I ran smack into her.

We were there on the threshold between the two rooms, possibly on the very spot where he’d been shot. I felt a presence, unmistakable, absolutely electric, as we collided. She gasped, and then gave a sort of helpless little moan and turned around—a tight little turn, more a rotation, which kept her pressed against me, only now it was her breasts I felt, soft and firm against mine.

An absolute imperative brought our lips together. I’d never been attracted to a woman before in this way, but I didn’t question it. I couldn’t. It was the most natural and necessary thing in the world to kiss her. And as I did, I knew that this was what Hutch had wanted. And now it was what I wanted. In this feeling between us was all that was left of him.

If he’d been alive, Hutch would have been horrified, I’ll bet, by my ignorance in thinking that an ordinary domestic washing machine could produce infrasound waves powerful and concentrated enough to haunt a room. But he’d never shared the specifications of his ghost-machine with me, so why shouldn’t I think it?

I still thought it as, still kissing her, I pushed Melanie through the doorway, against the vibrating machine, and moved slowly down her body, kissing her through her clothes and then beneath them. I think I imagined that I was doing this for Hutch, or that he was working through me… .

But he’d been just as ignorant, just as foolish, in imagining that he could solve the mystery that was Melanie by pursuing her, and forcing himself on her.

I know otherwise now.

She’s still a mystery to me, although I know her better, inside and out, than I’ve ever known anyone before. And she knows me, even about my connection to Hutch. I’ve told her everything. And yet the mystery remains, which I think we’ll forever try, and probably fail, to solve. It’s called love.

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The Vampire Tapestry

Barry Malzberg

Shiva and Other Stories

Paul Park

Soldiers of Paradise

Rudy Rucker

The Secret of Life

Howard Waldrop

Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

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