Sitting up high in the back of the bus, resting his forehead against the cold window, Heath gazed out at the misty landscape and tried to make sense of what he saw. Although he had grown up in this country, it had become alien to him.

There had been rainstorms the night before, and now the late afternoon sunlight filtered through drooping, perspiring greenery and glistened on the boggy ground and the swollen streams. That seemed normal, and yet here and there he also glimpsed a landscape in agony—stands of blighted, shattered trees and the blackened ruins of farm buildings; the swollen carcasses of dead animals; piles of what might have been bodies, or just discarded clothing; burnt-out cars abandoned at roadsides, even something that looked like the wreckage of an airplane scattered over a hillside—all evidence that he traveled through a war zone. But the war was over, or so somebody, or almost everybody, insisted, and, anyway, the war, Heath's war, had been a localized conflict on the other side of the world. How could it have reached this far into his peaceful homeland?

He thought then about the conversation he had had with the stranger beside him, who got off at the last stop save one. I'm looking for work, the stranger told him, have been for months now, but there's nothing a man can make his living from—life's tough these days, on account of the war. At first Heath thought he meant that the cost of sustaining a war abroad had crippled the domestic economy, but as he put together other, overheard snatches of talk with the details of the ruined landscape before him, he found himself forced to another conclusion. During his long years of captivity, he decided, when he had known nothing of the world outside, the war must have mutated and spread like a disease until no part of the globe was free of it. Like a monstrous incurable inescapable plague, it had become a reality for everybody, but nobody wanted, nobody dared to talk about it. Thus he found himself wondering, Who are we fighting now? Who is the enemy? Who are we?

Still, somebody had told him: “Your war's over, soldier, you're going home,” and, yes, here he was, going home.

He originally dreamed of going home on the train, of arriving for the first time at the railroad station that had loomed so large in his boyhood fantasies of escape. He had spent what seemed in memory an inordinate amount of time hanging around the platform, gazing yearningly down the tracks, envying the grown-ups who had the money and the freedom to buy tickets to go somewhere else, and promising himself that some day he, too, would climb aboard and be gone.

The train no longer went through his town, however, nor anywhere near it. Not for many years had there been an operative line so far out, not for many, many years—and when Heath, shocked, had tried to argue with the woman in the travel agency, she clattered the keys of her computer keyboard and came up with a date that stopped his mouth: the last trains had come through during the year he started high school, they had been long gone even by the time he left to enlist—how could he have forgotten? He had left town on a bus, because there were no longer any trains.

And now he returned by bus. He disliked it. The bus smelled of other people, of unwashed clothes impregnated with sweat and cigarette smoke, of sickening food, tuna fish sandwiches and bananas and apples and potato chips, and coffee turned sour on breath. Bags rustled, people chomped their food noisily and talked, the air conditioner struggled weakly to cope with their exhalations and body heat. Some previous occupant of Heath's hard, lumpy seat had slashed it, and someone else had mended the rents with strips of rough cloth-backed tape. The bus was a bad fit, almost as bad a fit as the uniform they had given him to wear. Any clothes at all felt wrong, for in the hole his only coverings had been darkness and filth, but the uniform was an abomination, poking, pinching, itching in a dozen places. His captors, the enemy, had worn uniforms, and though he tried, though he knew his uniform was not the same, he sensed no essential difference. He felt as though sewn into the skin of one of the enemy.

But who were the enemy? Not the people he fought when his war began, not the people who captured him. They were all dead. “Your war's over, soldier, you're going home,” his rescuers said, when they pulled him out of the hole, when they finally made him understand. That could only mean that before one war ended another had begun. He assumed it was somewhere else, far away, and no concern of his, because he was going home.

Home. He tried to remember where that was, exactly, and what it meant.

Precisely how long he had been away he did not know. He had asked, and received a reply, but numbers, dates, precise information floated around his head like a cloud of gnats, as impossible to grasp as the incomprehensible names of the countries the enemy controlled. He felt as if he had been away forever, “forever and a day,” words from an old song Cara had liked to sing. How did it go?

I'll love you though you stay away, forever and a day.

She had told him on the day he left, though she was furious with him for leaving, that she would wait.

He knew she meant it, but he knew also that nobody could wait forever. Not really. He had written to her anyway from the hospital, because the people who rescued him—our side, he kept reminding himself—told him, practically ordered him, to get in touch with his family, and though they were not blood-kin and had never married, Cara was the closest thing to family he had left, the only family he really wanted. My war's over, he had written to her, I'm coming home.

He sent the letter to her father's house, praying the old man still lived and would pass it on to her, wherever she might be, and his prayers were answered. Cara, amazingly, still lived there, in the town where they had both grown up. She had not forgotten. I love you, she wrote, again, as in her very first letter to him. Come back to me as soon as you can.

As soon as I can, he thought, and slept slumped in his seat high in the back of the bus, on his way home.

The bus braked with a noisy exhalation, startling Heath awake. He looked out at the dull concrete and glass box of a small-town bus station, old and dirty. He stared, frowning, at the faded board bearing the name of the town, trying to trace the distant chord the name struck within him. His gaze moved to peeling advertisements for goods he could not imagine that anybody sold, services surely nobody provided. He sat, unmoved and unmoving until the bus driver sang out the name of the stop. Then he stood as though jerked erect by a hook wedged between his ribs and caught in his heart, and pain shot up his left leg, the legacy of a kneecap smashed long ago by a bored, smiling guard. He limped slowly down the aisle and made his way carefully down the steps. He stood for a long time beside the bus, regarding the station's sagging eaves, as the full import sank in. This was Cara's town. This had been his town. This was home. He was home.

"There's a pay-phone inside if you want a taxi,” the bus driver called down to him, and Heath nodded agreeably, but though he knew he must be a sorry sight with his curved spine and awkward gait, he wanted to walk. If he meant to feel truly at home in this place again, he must start to reclaim it, and the only way he could think to do that was the same way he had done it as a kid, on the ground, mapping it out for himself.

Things had changed; he saw that right away. Although he knew to expect it, the sight of the abandoned, sagging railroad station made his eyes sting. He picked his way over the rusted rails and found himself skirting the commercial center, once bright and bustling, now almost as decrepit in appearance as the station building. The few cars parked along the street had seen better days, and at least half of the storefront properties stood empty, their dusty windows displaying for sale or lease signs if they displayed anything at all. The little Mom & Pop grocery store was posted with warnings about security measures; the drugstore he remembered, the bakery, the card and gift shop, had been displaced by a locked-up tattoo parlor, a charity thrift shop, and a gutted shell of fire-blackened cinder blocks. Grass grew through cracks in the pocked and crumbling pavement underfoot. He glimpsed human figures, close by or far away, he could not be quite sure. Some seemed vaguely familiar, but none looked directly at him or spoke as he hobbled past. This did not surprise or offend him. His imprisonment, those eternities spent alone in a concrete box, had aged him. He had lost flesh and teeth, and what remained of his hair had turned white. His skin was ashen from so long without sunlight or decent food. He wondered if even Cara would know him.

Nevertheless, walking on as quickly as his injured leg allowed, he took hope from the fact that life went on in this town, wounded as it obviously had been. Heath saw no bomb craters, no corpses in the street, no uniformed men clutching guns, looking for an excuse to shoot. His past—not the recent past, not the slow, painful tedium of physiotherapy, not his confinement in the hole, and not the time before the hole when he had been a young soldier, alternately terrified and bored out of his skull, but that time when he and the world had both been young, when he first loved Cara—fell over him like a comforting blanket.

Cara, he believed, held the key to his life, his survival. Memories of her had kept him alive, kept him from losing his mind in the hole. Squatting on rough concrete in total darkness, he would touch his face, stroke his own body, until his fingers became hers, and he could feel the hard floor beneath him soften into the bed in Cara's light-filled bedroom. Then he would look up into her beautiful face, and, finally, as he saw the pure and utter love shining from her eyes, he had been able, truly, to love her back.

After a time, either long or short, he could not say exactly, of moving through curiously empty streets, he found himself standing before Cara's house in the part of town once called ‘new': a section of handsome brick boxes built in neatly tended rows when a new factory had opened. The factory soon closed, however, early victim of the wartime economy, some of the houses had never been sold, and the neighborhood, once desirable, had quickly gone downhill; the house next door was an abandoned wreck. But Cara's father, a proud and careful homeowner even in times of tight money, insisted on mowing the grass once a week, planting flowers and shrubs, keeping the gutters cleared and the trim of the house painted a cheerful yellow. Now, when Heath saw the peeling paint, the sagging gutters and flowerbeds full of weeds, he knew the old man must be dead.

He stood before the house where Cara had lived—where he knew she still lived—his heart racing, his mouth very dry. They had been virgins in those days and, without a car or a place of their own, lacked privacy in which to consummate their love. They walked everywhere together, holding hands, leaning close as they talked—and talked, and talked. They shared everything in words, all the secrets of their hearts, even a few tentative sexual fantasies. They hugged and kissed often, but beyond that, nothing—except once.

Once, and once only, they found themselves alone together in Cara's house, her father having driven her mother to the city to see a specialist at a hospital there; they were to have dinner before returning, so were certain to be out until very late.

Without a word about intention, in silent accord, Heath and Cara walked home from school that day and let themselves in, went straight to her sunny bedroom, undressed, lay down on her big, soft bed and then—

Somehow, despite their best hopes and efforts, despite their love, it all went wrong.

He was clumsy, she was frightened, they were both embarrassed and shy with each other, and, finally, virgins still, they clung together, whispering hopeful promises, It'll be okay, next time, another time ... not realizing they had missed their one and only chance.

Heath shuddered, ashamed of his ignorant, innocent younger self, wishing he had been bolder. He would never have forced himself on her, of course, but with a little more experience, he might have aroused her, relaxed her enough to make intercourse possible. Only later had he learned from other soldiers in his unit, and from magazines and videos, of the things women supposedly liked, tricks to make them “hot and horny."

He stood before Cara's house, aware of the heat in his cheeks and a crawling in his belly, and he almost turned away. What right did he have to presume? He belonged to the past, whereas she had gone on and grown up. She must have found another, bolder lover by now. Unlike him, she would not still be a virgin.

Then he reminded himself: Come back to me, she had written. He had not imagined that, she really wrote those words, and whatever else might be true, she remembered, she still wanted him.

He walked slowly around the house, into the backyard where he had met her so many times, to the tree where, in the orange light of a long-ago afternoon, he had carefully carved heath loves cara into the wood while she sat in the grass at his feet and told him, “Forever. Put forever."

The tree still stood there, apparently thriving, and in the overgrown grass beneath it sat a young woman, and she was still Cara. The years had not changed her as they had changed him. She still wore her long fair hair in a braid draped over her shoulder. He wondered how he must look to her, and he touched his face, recalling the ashen, shrunken features of the old man who stared back at him from a mirror in a hospital bathroom.

But something flared in her eyes at the sight of him, and with a swift, sweet smile she jumped up and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Heath! Finally! I've been waiting for days, wondering when you'd get here!"

Her weight knocked him back—she must have outweighed him by twenty pounds—and he might have fallen except that she held him so tightly.

"I—I've missed you,” he murmured, a little breathless, but that was wrong, he immediately thought, I shouldn't have said that. How could he miss her when he was always aware of her presence, keeping him alive?

She let go of him and stepped back with an odd little laugh, and he guessed she sensed the falseness in his words. He felt ashamed, fearful that he had hurt her, especially as she would not meet his gaze. “I'm sorry—"

"Oh, stop! Since when do we need platitudes between us?” Finally her eyes rested on his face. She looked him slowly up and down, and bit her lip. “You look—oh, dear—you haven't been well, poor darling."

He nodded, not knowing what to say. In the hole, there had been no need for words. She had come to him when he needed her, and there was never any strangeness or misunderstanding.

She took hold of his hand. “Come inside. Are you hungry? I made cookies and lemonade. It looks to me like you need feeding up."

His answering smile felt stiff on his face, but he walked up to the house with her, hand in hand as in the past. He sat at the kitchen table and waited as she got a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator and a covered plate of oatmeal cookies from the pantry. He remembered that she had made lemonade and oatmeal cookies on the day he went away; they had sat here at the same table, she too sad to eat or drink, he too excited.

Although he felt no hungrier now than then, he bit into a cookie, watching while she did the same. His first impression of her had been wrong; she had changed. She had been a girl when he left, and now she was a woman, with a ripe, full figure, and very fine lines around her eyes.

He said, “Your father,” and then stopped, not knowing how to go on.

"Oh, he's not too bad today,” she said brightly. “I'll take you in to see him in a little while."

"You mean he's—what's wrong with him?"

She frowned as if he should have known and said shortly, “Daddy had a stroke. Not a major one, thank God, but now he can't get around so much by himself. I do the best I can, but I don't—I can't—” Tears started to gather on her eyelashes.

"No, no, of course not. Cara, I'm sure you're doing your best."

She blinked away the tears, but the frown remained. “You thought he was dead."

"When I saw the flower-beds all overgrown, and the paintwork peeling—"

She cut him off with an anguished look. “I haven't got time to do all that, too! I cook and clean and look after him—that's a full-time job! I wanted to hire a nurse, but the expense—and besides—"

"Hey, hey, hey!” He caught and held her hands in both of his. “I'm not criticizing you, Cara! I think you're the most wonderful...” He faltered again, lost for words. Had this been one of his dreams, by this time she would have been on his lap, stopping his mouth with her kisses, unbuttoning his shirt with her small, deft fingers, but he was not in the hole now, he was sitting in Cara's kitchen, and she was gazing at him, hurt and hungry for his praise.

"Wonderful woman,” he finished rather weakly, dropping her hands to pick up another cookie, which he quickly stuffed into his mouth. “Mmm!"

She smiled rather sadly and a small sigh escaped her. “I guess ... I guess you missed my cookies?"

He nodded, eager to please, swallowed, and an idea struck him. “Look, I could do the chores—yard work, repairs, sort of thing your dad used to do..."

She nodded cautiously. “That would be wonderful, Heath. If you can spare the time, I mean. While you're here.” She looked down at the table, pushed a crumb around with one fingertip and went on hesitantly, “I don't know what you want to do, or how long you can stay—"

At last he managed to say the right thing: “Forever. Forever, Cara.” She looked into his eyes, and her face broke into the most beautiful smile he had ever seen on a human face.

"I do love you, Heath. I always have."

"I know. I've always loved you, too. I always will. Forever."

They said no more. The better part of a minute passed. Then, still without speaking, without even touching, they both rose from the table and went to her bedroom.

The room was as he remembered it, only not so bright. The filmy curtains were closed, and the late sunlight filtered through them, thin and strange. The same prints of paintings by Monet and Cezanne hung on the yellow walls, however, and the same china figurines shared space with what seemed to be the same books and recordings on the shelves. He recognized the flowered bedspread and fluffy white rug. He saw nothing indicative of new interests acquired during the years of their separation, and he wondered if she had really been here all that time, like the sleeping princess in the fairytale, awaiting the reviving kiss of her prince. Or had she returned only recently to look after her father? Had she left her real life somewhere else, merely fitted herself back into the bedroom of her childhood, too busy, or too depressed, to bother to redecorate, putting off the major step of moving in all her stuff because to do so would be to admit that this was her real life now?

He did not ask; he dared not risk this moment of intimacy.

Cara pulled back the bedspread, and they undressed clumsily, scarcely looking at each other. Horribly aware of his wasted, scarred flesh, pallid, shrivelled, and aged from years of semi-starvation spent crouching in the dark, he was grateful for the maidenly reserve that kept her eyes downcast as she fumbled with her clothes. When she turned away to pile them neatly onto a chair, he crawled beneath the sheet. Moments later, she slipped in beside him, and as they moved closer together he smelled the clean fresh citrus tang of her shampoo, a powdery, perfumed waft of deodorant, and the more subtle, personal scent of herself beneath. He put his arms around her. She shivered at his touch and then lay still, waiting.

He waited, too.

He thought of how she had come to him countless times in the hole, of how he would squat and stare and see nothing in that utter blackness until, after a time, he caught glimmers of light, and a faint hint of motion. Then he would hear her voice humming a sad, wordless tune, and the sadness of it would bring hot tears to his eyes. She would murmur his name, tell him that she loved him, tell him what she had done that day, all the simple, ordinary things: how she had gone on her bicycle to the store and then worked in the garden with her father, the music she heard on the radio while preparing supper, what book she read at bedtime.

Gradually, as he listened to her familiar phrases, the darkness would lessen until finally he saw her, just her outline and a hint of her face. When he opened his arms, she would melt into them, kiss him passionately and explore his body with her hands and mouth while he gasped and shuddered with pleasure. To his wondering amazement, the girl who came to him in the hole was not the shy virgin he remembered, but a lover every bit as practiced, skilled, and uninhibited as the stars of the pornographic videos he had watched with the other guys before his capture. She could do anything, and would do everything he had ever dared to imagine. She knew just what would please him, what would excite and sustain him, and thousands of times she had brought him release.

And when she left, he would touch his face in the darkness, just to make sure he was still there.

Now, as he lay in Cara's soft bed, in the dim light, aware of her real, solid body pressed so close against his, he longed for her to make the first move, as she had always done in his fantasies. He was too fearful of spoiling the moment with his clumsiness and ignorance to touch her first. He was still a virgin, just as when they had said goodbye, but then he had been young, strong, responsive to the desires of the girl he loved. Now, he was old and weak as well as inexperienced, and he did not know the woman beside him.

He heard her sigh, felt her shift a little beside him, and he stopped breathing in the intensity of his hope that it was about to begin at last, for real, that the love that had kept him alive in the hole would bring him back to life. He would be reborn at her hands; it was the only way.

Nothing happened. He did not feel her hands on him, he felt nothing, only, as he began to breathe again, he thought he heard her whisper, faintly, “Kiss me."

He turned his head and saw her waiting for his kiss. He pressed his lips to hers for the first time since the day he had left her at the bus station. He kissed a stranger's mouth. He tried to ignore that chill warning and kept his lips on hers, as he felt her hands begin to move on his back. Now, surely, she would give herself to him.

Her hands remained lightly pressing on his back, however, holding him in a chaste embrace, never straying below his waist, showing no inclination to go exploring. He continued kissing her until his lips grew numb, and then he drew back. For the first time since they had left the kitchen they looked into each other's eyes, and he saw there bewilderment and sadness, her feelings reflecting his own.

The love he had come looking for existed only in a dream. He closed his eyes.

Cara would not let him give up, however. Just as, once, his memory of her had kept him alive, now the real woman refused to let the dream die. She demanded, “Heath, talk to me!"

Talk was the furthest thing from his desire.

"Please, tell me what you want!"

He could not; it was impossible; what he wanted was for her to know without being told, and if he so much as said so, everything would be spoiled.

Finally, she began to cry. “You don't love me any more."

"Oh, Cara, of course I do!” He hugged her close. “Please don't cry. I love you. I wish I could show you how much."

She stilled in his arms. “You—you mean it?"

"Yes. Loving you was all that got me through the war."

"Really?” She hesitated, then lifted her head to look him in the eye. “I don't mind, I'd understand, if you'd found another girlfriend, or even—even if you went to, you know—” she faltered, barely whispered the word: “prostitutes."

He shook his head. “Never, Cara. There's never been anybody but you. Never."

Understanding lit her face. “There's never been anybody but you for me, either. So we're both virgins—that's why—oh, Heath, it's like before! We just need time, that's all! Time to learn how to please each other. And we have plenty of time."

When he agreed, she hugged him, then abruptly pulled herself free of his embrace, rolled away from him, out of bed, and began dressing.

"I have to check on Dad and get his dinner,” she explained. “We'll have to wait until bedtime—think you can manage to wait? Luckily, we go to bed early in this house.” She flashed him a smile he could not recall seeing from her before, sexy and mischievous, and he felt a stirring of arousal. Maybe it would be all right.

He got up and dressed himself, determined to help. He followed Cara downstairs to the kitchen, assisted her chiefly by being present as she prepared a tray, and followed her back upstairs.

Cara's father sat in an upholstered hair and gazed through the curtain of his bedroom window. He looked frail and tired and impossibly older than he could actually be. A faint sour smell hung in the room. He only glanced at Cara as she set the tray on a table beside his chair. Then he noticed Heath standing behind her in the doorway, and started violently.

"Daddy, it's Heath,” Cara said. “You remember Heath."

"Heath,” said the old man, slurring the word almost beyond recognition. One side of his mouth barely moved; one side of his face seemed unsynchronized with the other. “Heath's dead."

"No, Daddy. Heath was taken prisoner of war. Now he's back."

"That's not Heath."

"Yes, it is, Daddy. They did terrible things to him in the prison camp, but it is Heath, I promise you."

"No, no..."

"I'm upsetting him,” Heath said, backing out of the room.

"Give him time,” said Cara.

We all need time, Heath thought. He went downstairs and stepped outside. Twilight was already settling; he listened for insect song, bird calls, then for sounds of neighbors, distant traffic, anything, but all was weirdly silent. He imagined the evening holding its breath as it waited to see what he intended to do.

Then, as he came around the corner facing the street, something small and dark like a dog or a very dirty child yelped and darted away quickly, too fast for him to get a good look at it, disappearing into a gap among the wild shrubbery. Heath stared after it, breathing hard, waiting for his heart's beating to return to normal. When he had recovered, he walked back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, always stopping well short of the shrubbery. He glimpsed, as though from a distance, as though through air turned hazy with impossible distance, a few indistinct human figures stirring in the neighborhood. They took no notice of him; wraithlike, silent, those who evidently had jobs were returning from them, others evidently were leaving home for a night out. Heath recalled the closed factory, the empty shops. He could not imagine what sort of jobs there might be, or where, exactly, in this small town, one went for a night out.

When he re-entered the house, he found Cara putting dinner on the table. They sat opposite each other and ate without talking until Heath finally asked, “What happened here?"

"What do you mean?"

"Everything. The town. What happened to everything, where did everybody go?"

Cara stared at him blankly. At last she said, “I'm still here."

Now he stared. “You mean you never left? But why did you stay?"

"What else was there for me to do? I told you I'd wait. I never thought the war could go on for so long."

"No,” he muttered, feeling cold, “neither did I. Nobody did."

"We were going to love each other forever,” Cara said, her voice growing sharp, “and be together always. But then the war came, and you wanted to go be a soldier."

"I didn't want to. I had to. It was my duty."

She shook her head. “It was your excuse. You wanted to get away from this town so much, you couldn't think of anything but getting out, and you left me behind."

"I said I'd come back for you, and now I have."

She set her fork on her plate. “Yes. You have. I'm sorry if I sounded a little bitter just then. It hasn't been easy for me, but I know what you've been through must have been so much worse. But it's going to be all right now that we're together."

Even so, though he felt another stirring of passion that night as he watched her undress, it quickly faded and died. He told himself the problem was too much light. Cara's bedroom was never truly dark, owing to a hall-light she left turned on for her father's sake, and to the streetlights that sent their sickly yellowish glow through the filmy curtains and cast unnerving shadows on the wall. He suspected, however, Cara's dull passivity was the real cause of his impotence. She seemed both slow and skittish, reluctant to touch him, and when at last he tried to direct her, the result was even worse. He could not enjoy what he could only think of as masturbation by proxy.

Still, with fingertips and lips, he managed to bring her to orgasm. She shuddered and cried out softly and then lay very still in his embrace. He listened as her breathing slowed; he fancied he heard the slowing beat of her heart as well.

Finally, she said, “Heath, that was beautiful."

He could think of nothing to say except, “I'm glad you liked it.” After a moment he added, “It was beautiful."

"But what about you?” She touched him hopefully. He felt nothing, not the least tremor of arousal.

"Never mind me."

"Heath, I want to make you happy."

"I know, and you do,” he told her, “you do make me happy,” and hated himself for lying.

They said no more, only held each other, drifting into sleep. He awoke in the unmoving depth of the night and looked for the little painted Swiss clock that Cara always kept on her bedside table. Its glowing dial faced away from him; he picked up the clock and turned it and held it to his ear. It was silent, inert. He returned it to the bedside table and lay staring at the pattern of shadow on the bedroom wall, listening to nothing, thinking about the sleeping woman at his side, with her head cradled in the hollow of his shoulder.

Then he found himself thinking about the other Cara, the one he had known in the hole. How had her imagined touch aroused him so incredibly, when the real woman, using her mouth and hands as he taught her, could not? What was wrong with him? He lay awake almost until dawn, worrying and wondering.

On the second day, he walked around the house, noting jobs that needed doing. Then, without telling Cara or even thinking to tell her, he set off for a long walk around the town and did not return until late afternoon. He found her in the kitchen, preparing her father's dinner tray.

"Where have you been?” she demanded.

"I went searching for old landmarks,” he told her. “I didn't find many. In fact, at one point I started wondering if I'd ever actually lived in this place before."

"That's ridiculous. Of course you did."

"Cara, more than half the houses I passed looked like nobody lives in them. Many were uninhabitable. There's a house at the end of this street with only half its roof. Its ceiling's caved in, too. I could see, through the dirty windows, the shadow of rafters cast on an inside wall. Other houses I saw had charred walls, broken, sagging roof beams, empty windows, missing doors. And everything overgrown, vines, fallen limbs of trees.” He hesitated, groped for words. “Disappearing into wilderness. Here and there I passed a lot covered in rubble, as if the house that'd been there just burst apart under the impact of an immense fist. Further on, the same fist must've ploughed through the cemetery. I think some graves are broken open there—I couldn't bring myself to look too closely. And feral, starving cats, prowling everywhere, skittering away when I looked at them. Cara, what happened here?"

He saw emotions flowing across her face like a speeded-up history of grief: flat denial gave way to fury at his lies, then she reluctantly conceded that some of it might be so, yet haggling over the details, then sinking into abject misery, before, finally, achieving a sad acceptance of the truth.

"Terrible things,” she said softly. “While the war was going on over there—your war—awful things happened here, too. But that's all past now."

"What happened?"

"There's no point talking about it.” Her voice grew stronger. “It's wrong to brood on what we can't change—it's harmful. It only makes things worse. You should just remember the good things. That's what I do. And look what happened! You came back. And now we can have the rest of our lives together."

"But, Cara—"

"Heath!"

And so he let it pass.

That night, their second together, she kissed him determinedly, almost savagely, and ground herself against him, forcing him to respond. It was what he had thought he wanted from her, this passionate attack, and finally it did arouse him. He managed to sustain an erection long enough to enter her and move himself to a mechanical climax.

She clung to him afterward, refused to let him move off her while, within her, he went soft and shrank and crept away, it occurred to him, as though in disgrace. He supported himself on his elbows and lowered his head to blow a cool stream of air into the hollow between her sweat-slicked breasts. She murmured with pleasure. It was, he thought, the single honest moment of the evening. When she spoke, Heath cringed at the sheer inane repetition of avowals of love even as he found himself helpless to respond otherwise. He could think of nothing meaningful to say, and as Cara, with excruciating forced brightness, began to speak of their wonderful, shared future, he reflected bleakly that though now neither of them was, technically, a virgin, nothing fundamental had changed. He suspected that, for all her hopeful, loving words, Cara found him no more satisfactory a lover than he found her.

Lying next to her, half-listening as she spoke of destinies entwined, lives inextricably bound together by love, he felt shamed by his estrangement from this girl whom he had loved in solitude for so long.

When she paused, waiting for his answer to some question he had not heard, he said, painfully, the words bruising his throat and bringing tears to his eyes, “Cara, this doesn't—none of this seems real. I feel like—I feel like a ghost in my own life."

After a long moment's consideration, she asked, “How does a ghost feel?"

After another long moment, he answered, “Ghosts move among the living and believe that they, too, are still living. But they're not."

"Heath, you're not dead. You're alive.” She squeezed his hand, and though he was aware of the pressure, he knew he did not feel her touch the way he should, the way he would have in the past.

"People don't have to be dead to be ghosts.” He tried to explain a truth he only dimly sensed. “Maybe they only have to be out of step with their surroundings. It's very confusing..."

"Oh, Heath.” She sighed. “You think too much. Can't you just accept things as they are?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't. What things? How are they? This war—"

"The war's over."

"Is it?"

"Of course! Would you be here, would we be here like this if it wasn't?"

"Maybe—why not? I don't think it's really over. And maybe it's not just me. Maybe we're all ghosts."

"We're not any of us ghosts. We're two people who love each other. Why is that so hard for you to accept? We have a future to build for ourselves. It may be hard work, but it's worth it to both of us, isn't it?"

Puttering around this house, he wanted to say, and taking care of the yard can never be a full-time occupation for me, but he did not say it, as he did not say many other things.

It fell to Cara to say things.

By late the next afternoon it occurred to him that she had spent much of their third day together not exactly complaining but certainly bringing to his notice things she did not like: his failure to notice what needed to be done, his silence, his lack of appreciation, his air of bewilderment. When, however, he stood up for himself she became indignant: it was because she loved him that she told him when he did something wrong; if she cared less, she would not bother; when two people loved each other, communication was the most important thing—he must agree!

After that, he could not tell her how her ceaseless talk sawed across his nerves. Adding to his discomfort was her father's fearful fury: at dinnertime, the old man clumsily knocked away the tray, scattering bread and beans on the carpet. Then, as Cara knelt to clean up the mess he screeched at her, somehow conveying the accusation that the two of them were paying a trick on him. Heath retreated, unable to blame the old man for his mistrust, only too aware of himself playing a part, pretending to be somebody who no longer existed. He went outside and stood under the tree carved with heath loves cara forever.

That night, because she felt it important that they talk about their lovemaking, he described several scenes he recalled from X-rated films, presenting them as his own fantasies. He got her to act out one scenario, and she proved gratifyingly eager to do as instructed. At least, he knew he ought to have found it gratifying, but, as before, every word he spoke and every act she performed at his command served only to deal his libido another bruising blow. He felt like some dirty-minded puppeteer and knew that if she ever again did exactly anything he suggested, ostensibly of her own accord, he would be too aware of his own impatient, flat, whispering voice to enjoy it.

I ask for too much, he thought. In the hole, with his life stripped down to mere survival, physical wants were basic: the feel of sunlight on his skin, clean water, enough food to fill his belly, the chance to stand upright and walk around. Now he took all those things for granted, and this beautiful, loving woman could not satisfy him. Nor could he shake the feeling that, whatever she might say, he disappointed her as much as she disappointed him.

After Cara fell asleep, he rolled away from her and out of bed and padded quietly down the hall to the bathroom. He meant only to relieve himself without disturbing anyone, and he could see well enough by the hall light. He let the door fall quietly shut behind him, and darkness enclosed him—not total, but the nearest thing to complete darkness he had known since the hole.

For a moment it threw him back to an earlier time; the last few days became no more than a particularly vivid, extended dream. Then, as his eyes adjusted he saw a thin line of light marking out the bottom of the door, and he breathed again in this world. Although naked, his skin was clean, still smelling of the soap and deodorant he had used earlier in the day, and he was in Cara's house, and darkness not forced on him held no terrors, only a promise. He sank to the softly carpeted floor, and waited as he had waited before, and she did not disappoint him. When he opened his arms, she came into them as ready and eager, hungry and passionate, as she had ever been before, her lips and tongue going everywhere her fingers explored, and with a groan of pleasure, a cry of relief he could not stifle, he fell back...

The light was everywhere, dazzling, almost as shattering as Cara's shriek.

Was it disgust that made her scream, or jealousy? What had she seen, exactly, when she opened the bathroom door?

She would not say. For once, though he implored her, she refused to speak. It was a natural urge, he told her, you were asleep, I was alone, it wasn't like I cheated on you, I've never loved, never even really lusted after, anyone but you. Please, can't we talk about this?

Pale, rigid, she stood with her face averted, as though she could no longer bear the sight of him, and told him to take a shower and get dressed. When he emerged from the bathroom, she had his bag packed. Dawn was just breaking when she all but pushed him out the front door.

He stumbled along the strange, familiar street. In all the town, it seemed, he alone stirred. Too early to be going to work, he supposed. Then he stopped, disoriented, wondering if he had come the wrong way. Near the end of the street, at the edge of a driveway, a bird stood with its ashy back turned toward him, like some sort of vulture but impossibly large, bigger than anything he had ever seen outside a zoo. It pecked and worried at something that looked like a big, lumpy bag of garbage.

Heath gave a little cry of astonishment and turned away from the horror. Not real, he thought, not real. Nothing here is very real except...

In turning, he found himself facing in the direction he had just come. He could still see Cara's house though it appeared to rest on the rim of a jumbled horizon. He closed his eyes and dropped his suitcase and his hands balled into fists as the wrongness of everything assaulted him. It's not fair. He took a step, and another. After all I've been through, she can't just throw me out like this, reject me because I had one brief moment of pleasure away from her. He kept his head down, ignoring everything around him, concentrating on walking, on getting back to Cara. She wanted to talk; very well, he would make her listen. And then, he hoped, they could start again, and love each other, more honestly this time.

It was early morning by now, and though Cara's street was still weirdly quiet, he sensed human activity going on somewhere, though he could not tell if it was near by or far away. A door opened and closed, an automobile engine wheezed asthmatically. He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw people behind him, moving purposefully, going about their unimaginable business, ignoring or perhaps simply oblivious to the creature feasting at the end of the street.

Just as when he had first arrived, Heath headed for the backyard rather than formally present himself at the front door. As soon as he came around the side of the house he heard Cara's voice, and knew she was there under their tree, talking to someone. He heard her speak his name, but not angrily; she sounded calm and normal. She seemed to be running through her plans for the day. He could not imagine to whom she spoke. She had introduced him to no one nor mentioned any friends.

He stopped short, staring, trying to make out who that was beside her. Not another woman, but a man—a young man.

"Maybe a picnic down by the river ... maybe we could even go for a swim, what do you say to that, Heath?"

He froze, certain she must have seen him, but her entire attention focused on the young man who leaned against the tree and smiled down at her, a terribly familiar young man, though Heath had not seen that face in the mirror for a long time.

"Then we'll come back, and I'll make you something nice for dinner, one of your favorites.” She laughed and tossed her head girlishly, as if the silent, ghostly young man beside her had said something. “Just because—because I love you, Heath, you know that! Forever."

He crept away, though he had an idea she would not have bothered to look in his direction no matter how much noise he made. He knew there was nothing he could say to her that would make her take him back. There was no point in trying. She was happier, her life much simpler, with the young man she had first fallen in love with. She did not need him.

Avoiding the end of the street where he had seen the strange bird, Heath made his roundabout way to the bus station on foot through the decaying neighborhoods of the town that would never be his home, this time not stopping or staring, this time unsurprised by the wasteland. Of course, there were junked cars and ruined houses on every street, as well as piles of uncollected refuse; and all this would attract scavengers and carrion-eaters. The morning advanced, and he was no longer alone: others, people he glimpsed from the corner of the eye, far away across the street, walked to work or somewhere else, continuing lives he could not imagine. Cars went by, some of them black and shiny with tinted windows rolled up tight, others old, rattling, aggressively noisy.

At the barred grille of the ticket counter he passed through the largest bill in his wallet in exchange for a printed strip of paper that would allow him to board the next bus. He had no idea where it would take him, or what he would do when he got there, but that seemed not to matter.

There were only half a dozen other people on board, each sitting separately, all half-turned away from him and from one another as they munched doughnuts or sipped coffee from paper cups. Heath settled into a window seat near the back. He glanced across a debris-littered lot at the railroad station platform, at the crowd patiently waiting there, and wondered why he had not taken the train instead of the bus. He had always loved the train as a boy. When the bus began to move again he stared blankly out at the world, wondering if it would always seem as strange to him. He shifted uneasily in his uncomfortable clothes, on the uncomfortable seat, and then his fingers strayed to his face. Yes. He was still there.

Copyright © 2007 Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley

AN ALTERNATIVE CANON

The Times recently published an essay by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (20 October 2007), on what he perceives as the disaster of multiculturalism. The essay, extracted from his book The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (Continuum), provoked an almighty backlash, not least because of Sacks’ defence of the idea of a literary canon, and his claim that “the existence of a canon is essential to a culture.” No doubt thousands of Eng. Lit. graduates, sufficiently enlightened to reject the notion that a set of texts written by a bunch of dead white males was the proper basis for a nation's shared values, were among those to criticise Sacks’ essay.

Any group of people who share a set of cultural values can be called a community, and so it is with those who share a passion for particular types of fiction. Think of the horror community, for example. Does such a community really exist, and if so what are its shared values and beliefs? To paraphrase Sacks, what constitutes our “public vocabulary of narratives and discourse"? To anyone who's been to a genre convention, the answer to the first question is obviously yes. Fans and writers of horror and fantasy regularly congregate to share their ideas and debate the contribution of particular works to the genre. In order to do so, there must exist a set of shared assumptions about horror, though I guess that these assumptions are largely implicit and ill-defined. This is a good thing. Why? Because most attempts to define horror—or any genre—invariably end up with a prescriptive set of rules which, though they make a text easily recognisable as belonging/not belonging, also serve to demarcate the genre to the extent that, when confronted with a genre-blending work like Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), they become unstable and irrational.

Readers of horror fiction recognise its slippery nature, its resistance to easy definition. This being the case, then the values and beliefs that underpin the genre are, necessarily, constantly shifting and always open to negotiation. How then can we share a set of cultural values? Maybe the notion of a horror canon, a set of texts generally recognised within the community as embodying what the genre is about, can help in identifying the tenets of an autonomous horror culture. Most fans of the genre would probably have little trouble coming up with a canon of horror works. The core texts would presumably include Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination and a selection of works by writers like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson.

Expanding on this core list isn't difficult, but there's a danger that it becomes predicated not on beliefs and ideas, but on the genre's material signifiers—the supernatural, vampires, zombies, ghosts, werewolves and the rest. Many of us get hung up on these things but they are not essential to horror. Douglas Winter put it succinctly in the introduction to his collection of author interviews, Faces of Fear (1990), when he wrote that the best horror fiction poses the intrinsic question of “whether the reality we perceive is indeed real, or whether it may slip away to reveal even darker landscapes.” Instead of thinking about horror in terms of its creatures, we should consider the genre in terms of what it can be and what it can do. And, to quote Winter again, one of the things that horror can do is expand “our assumptions about where we live to include the dark and frightening regions within ourselves, as well as those hidden beneath the familiar relationships to which we look for support."

It's difficult to think of a better statement of guiding principles for the genre. If we take the idea of a fiction that shines a light beneath the surface of our everyday lives, which confronts and interrogates the nature of our humdrum daydreams and imaginings to reveal the varying shades of darkness in which our realities are rooted, then we can start to consider an alternative canon. Instead of a culture largely circumscribed by the supernatural and the gross out, we can think in terms of a genre in which these devices are at the service of a questioning, always curious, attitude. It can be stroppy and confrontational, as in Clive Barker's Books of Blood, or work in a more allusive manner, like Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now. It can embrace ordinary domestic fears like the terrors of parenthood beautifully sketched in Nicholas Royle's ‘Hide and Seek’ and Glen Hirshberg's ‘The Two Sams', or it can use the apparatus of horror to illustrate the lunacies of corporate capitalism, as Thomas Ligotti does in My Work is Not Yet Done.

But these are, after all, writers already known to a significant portion of horror readers. I hesitate to say the ‘majority’ because I suspect that some of these, in particular the last three mentioned, while familiar to most in what I think of as the horror community, do not register at all with the majority of readers of what is marketed as horror fiction. By which I mean readers who unwittingly collude with those publishers whose risk-aversion leads them to market only the kind of horror fiction which accords with a prescriptive definition of the genre. On the other hand, you have publishers like Transworld, whose Corgi imprint marketed Scott Smith's recent novel The Ruins as a thriller, despite its being, as Pete Tennant observed in Black Static #1, “a horror story in the tradition of Hodgson, Blackwood et al.” And a damn fine one at that, but one which will miss out on a significant part of its potential readership because of a lack of bottle on the part of its publisher.

An alternative horror canon that exemplifies Winter's notion of expanding our assumptions, of digging beneath the familiar, shouldn't be worried about sliding over the border into other territories. The boundary between horror and SF has always been blurred, and has become increasingly so with Crime—check out John Connolly's The Unquiet (2007) and his earlier Charlie Parker novels. There are any number of writers operating on the fringes whose works have been more or less accepted by the horror community. But what about those who inhabit the literary mainstream? I'm thinking of writers like Cormac McCarthy, who in No Country for Old Men (2005) created an antagonist possessed of an implacably deterministic will which cannot be reasoned with. Evil—a word that will suffice for what Chigurh represents—has rarely been so starkly portrayed in mainstream horror. McCarthy has created an even more terrifying vision of pervasive evil in his gothic western, Blood Meridian (1985), in the form of Judge Holden, a character whose desire to dominate the wills of others makes him seem, even to the men under his command, something other than human.

I propose this alternative canon not to try and get us all to agree on what horror is, but to provoke further discussion and debate, to prompt readers into looking beyond the barriers to see what else is out there, to explore unfamiliar territories where horror might be lurking. I leave you with a tentative list of works that reveal dark and uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the realities in which we live.

As well as the two Cormac McCarthy novels already mentioned, check out The Road (2006); Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001) and The Unknown Terrorist (2006); Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987); William Gay's Twilight (2006); James Ellroy's LA Quartet (1987-92) and American Tabloid (1995); J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes (2000); Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991) and The Body Artist (2001); Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (2002); Michael Collins’ The Meat Eaters (stories) (1992); Theodore Roszak's Flicker (1991).

Copyright © 2007 Mike O'Driscoll

The serpent in the sea was nothing compared to the serpent in the hearts of men. The serpent in the sea may or may not find you, Esther Lane said, may or may not be there at all. But the corruption in a man's heart, the malicious weakness that disguises itself as passion and autonomy, then drowns itself and all around it in liquor and violence and failure—that is inescapable. Its effects can be lessened, its power can be curbed, but it can never be banished entirely. Put the men in chains and pour their liquor out on the ground, she continued, and they will still find a way to do you harm. The serpent in their hearts will not be defeated. Better to take your chances with the monster offshore.

Julia Brooks listened attentively. The others, though steadfast in their commitment, were long used to Esther's grand pronouncements and greeted them placidly, nodding in agreement but clearly waiting for the old woman's rhetoric to run its course. But to Julia, the youngest among them, Esther's words flowed like the tide into Sandy Bay, and as they all sat—in three cases, stood—crammed liked netted mackerel into Rachel and Stephen Perkins’ parlor, the temperate July night turned sweltering in such close quarters, she waited eagerly for Esther to continue.

Instead, there was the sound of an elderly throat clearing, and Julia turned with the rest of them to see Hannah Jumper look up from her knitting. “Don't say that, Esther. The whole point is to pour the liquor out. Ain't that why we're here?"

Esther looked momentarily annoyed, but quickly composed herself and said, “Of course, Hannah. I do get carried away sometimes. Of course we remain united in our purpose. Don't we, everyone?"

They all voiced their agreement. Tonight, only the leaders gathered for one last coordinated review of their plan. But come tomorrow, fully sixty of the women of Rockport, Massachusetts, would bring moral and economic sense back to the community. The half-hearted attempts of the town's agents to regulate liquor sales had been a miserable failure, and it was now up to the women who bore the worst of the burden, and the handful of men who understood what was at stake, to deal themselves with this public nuisance. No more men lying about in drunken indolence when the winter storms and summer doldrums kept the fishing boats docked; no more backbreaking grocery bills whose main item was rum. No more bruises to hide, Julia thought. No more knowing the back of your husband's hand better than his heart.

They had been meeting for weeks, in secret. And while Esther's eloquence kept them inspired, Hannah kept them going. She was not well-spoken, and seventy-five years old in the bargain. But it was she who had called the first meeting, she who had kept record as the conspirators discovered, and chalked with white X's that would not be seen by those not looking for them, every spot in Rockport where liquor would be found. It was Hannah who had invoked their Revolutionary ancestors, the twenty women who had banded together some eighty years back and raided Colonel Foster's supply store in Gloucester after their men marched off to Bunker Hill promising to bring back liberty but leaving their fishing boats idle and their families improvident and shivering. And it was Hannah who convinced them that hatchets were the only sufficient instrument for dispatching, if not the men who defied decency and the law, at least the wretched barrels of rum.

Mary Hale, at thirty-seven the next youngest after Julia, had objected. “Is there not too great a risk of injury? We don't want anyone to get hurt, do we?"

"Desperate cases need desperate remedies,” replied Hannah, and continued with her knitting.

Now, on the eve of their action, the old woman sat calmly, the motion of her needles and yarn so smooth and continuous it scarcely seemed motion at all. Although she sat to the side, against the wall, the room seemed centered around her.

"But why all this talk of sea serpents?” asked Stephen Perkins, leaning forward from his perch on the edge of the room's only sofa. “Haven't we enough to do without digging up all that nonsense?"

"I agree,” said Mary Knowlton. Her husband had enjoyed great success transporting stone south to Boston, prosperity that set her apart from the fishermen's wives and daughters who filled the room; some were surprised that she had joined enthusiastically in their conspiracy. But when Mrs Knowlton was Mary Clarkson she had been a schoolteacher, and Julia, one of her students, still remembered the impromptu temperance lectures with which the young teacher would punctuate even a math lesson. “Do we want to be laughed at again? To the rest of the world we might as well have been Indians chasing spirits in the woods, and the nineteenth century might as well never have arrived. What we're doing is too important—"

"I was scarcely speaking publicly for the Boston papers,” said Esther. “I merely invoked the serpent as a figure to dramatize my point. We're gathered here, after all, because of the depravity of men—"

"We're gathered here because of rum,” Hannah said without looking up from her work. “Rum is real. So's our hatchets. Let's stick to them."

"Please, friends,” said Mary Hale, “Hannah, Esther—we're all here for the same reason. Let us not divide ourselves from ourselves.” She stood and brushed straight the skirt of her grey dress. There were some of the younger matrons in town who had left their Puritan ancestors firmly behind. Betsey Andrews, the current schoolteacher, periodically took the steamboat down to Boston to inspect the latest fashions, while Judy MacQuestion was rumored to own at least one hat imported from Paris. Mary was not among their number: the neatness of her clothing was matched only by its plainness. “Mrs Knowlton is right. The task before us is too important. Esther, we all admire your eloquence, and are grateful for it. Who of us could have framed the issues so compellingly? How many will there be on the streets tomorrow because of your persuasion?” Esther smiled and nodded her head every so slightly.

"And if Esther's silver tongue has put people in the streets, it is Hannah's courage and strength that has put us all in this room. Please don't worry, Hannah. We know what needs to be done, and we shall do it."

Hannah did not reply. They all knew by now that, in a group at least, Hannah would speak only to prod forward or to object; her silence testified that the disagreement was settled. Mary sat and smoothed her skirts again.

"Well, then,” said Mr Perkins. “Are we concluded, then?"

They agreed that, barring unforeseen circumstances, this would be their last meeting; the plan was set and would be implemented tomorrow.

As they adjourned, James Babson, who had kept silent throughout, offered to escort Julia home. As an agent of the Granite Company, Mr Babson had access to all manner of tools and an income not dependent on the vagaries of the ocean; both made him an invaluable ally. He was also corpulent and ill-kept, and the breath that whistled through two missing teeth was foul. Julia had had to accustom herself to such attentions in the two years since her husband's ship had returned to port with its flag at half staff, and she had no real reason to consider Mr Babson's offer as anything other than honorable.

Still. “Many's the time, ma'am, when I saw your late husband, God rest him, with his hand so reverently on your arm as you walked home of an evening. I would be honored to assume that duty—even if only momentarily, this evening,” he added hastily.

Julia instinctively leaned away from him, then steadied herself, sighed, and was about to agree when Hannah stepped in. “Walk home with me, child. I reckon I could use the company."

Hannah had no more need of company, Julia believed, than did Squam Lighthouse. But she quickly accepted the old woman's offer and left Mr Babson standing in the middle of the parlor, Esther heading casually but directly toward him, already talking.

The night felt almost chilly after the warmth of the overcrowded parlor, and Julia pulled her shawl close about her shoulders. Inside, Hannah's had filled the room; outside, her great height remained—Julia came barely to the old woman's shoulder—but, free of the press of walls and bodies, Hannah seemed reduced, distant. It was like walking with a scarecrow, Julia thought, although a most strong and determined one.

As they made their way down High Street, Julia, still full of the meeting and the righteousness of their cause, reiterated much of the evening's discussion. Hannah remained silent, her heavy shoes clopping on the cobblestones. When they reached the Inner Harbor, rather than turning right to continue to their respective homes, Hannah stopped, facing the water. Julia followed the old woman's gaze into the harbor. The fishing boats rested at their moorings, looking like charcoal drawings beneath the dim light of the half moon. They had not been out to sea for over a month. On one of the larger boats, at the outer edge of the harbor, several figures moved around the deck. Julia could not make them out individually, but she heard rough laughter, the shattering of glass, a bellowing voice: “She was mine, damn ya! Who said you could get under her skirts afore me?” More laughter, and the sawing of a fiddle. Although she knew it was impossible at such a distance, she could almost swear she smelled their liquor across the salt and the brine.

Julia shuddered. “After tomorrow perhaps we'll have less of that."

Hannah stared out past the boats and the profanity. Julia looked up at her. For a moment, the old woman's face was obliterated by the darkness, and she looked like her bonnet and her dress and nothing else. “They should stay on the boats,” Hannah said. “They should stay on the ocean. They can't harm the ocean."

"Maybe the serpent will get them,” Julia said, and then instantly remembered Hannah's harsh dismissal of Esther at the meeting. “Oh, I know, Hannah, it's just nonsense, forgive me."

Hannah said nothing in response. Then she turned sharply away and said, “Long past time we were home, child."

They proceeded down Mt. Pleasant Street, past Hannah's house. Julia tried to get Hannah to stop and let her make the remaining short walk on her own, but the old woman refused. As they turned down Long Cove Lane, Hannah asked, somewhat to Julia's surprise, if the chamomile she had sent to Julia's Aunt Martha had helped with her digestive difficulties. The women of Rockport paid Hannah to mend their dresses, but far more valuable, and free in the bargain, was the harvest of Hannah's herb garden. Horseradish for a sore throat, catnip to sleep, pennyroyal for a chill, pipsissewa leaves for the heart.

Julia replied that her aunt was much better and expressed her admiration for Hannah's skills. “I wish I could cultivate herbs as well as you. I tried planting some rosemary last season and it just didn't take."

"Put rosemary close to the high-water mark. It gets its strength from the sea."

At Julia's doorstep, Hannah bade the young woman good night. “Rest well, child. You'll need all your wits about you tomorrow.” Julia promised that she would and watched the old woman retrace her path down the street and disappear around the corner.

Later, with the lamps an hour dark and sleep nowhere close, Julia stood before her open bedroom window. The moon was gone, and the land and the ocean and the horizon were a dark unbroken carpet over the world. But she heard the ocean, and felt it in the breeze that chilled her through her nightclothes, and smelled it. If she opened her mouth, she knew she could taste it.

There was nothing to see, but much to remember. Two years ago next month.

She had heard the stories; everyone had. The summer of 1817, fourteen years before her own birth. Hundreds down in Gloucester, most more reliable than not, had seen it. From Ten Pound Island to Western Harbor they had shielded their children and grabbed their telescopes, or set out in their boats. The reports were almost all the same: fifty to one hundred feet long, thick as a barrel, dark on top, lighter on what of its belly could be seen when it raised itself from the water. A head the size of a horse's. Some claimed it was segmented; others noted its vertical undulations. It could turn on a dime and raced away when approached. Several had tried to kill it, of course, even as one newspaper suggested they should be grateful to it for driving herring into the harbor.

The Linnaean Society of New England had formed a committee—Harvard men, of course—to investigate, but, being too busy living inside their own heads to come and see for themselves, the committee members had sent a list of questions to the Justice of the Peace with a request for him to interview the witnesses and send them the results.

Things might have held steady at that point, or even faded away, but a couple of months later the Colbeys found a humpbacked snake, over a yard long, on the ground near Loblolly Cove. They killed and examined it, and they remembered one or two people claimed to have seen two serpents in the harbor. Could this be offspring? The Linnaeans got hold of it, dissected it, gave it a Latin name, and declared that, well, yes, it might be kin to the creature in the harbor. But then another Harvard man came along and proved that it was just a deformed black snake.

The next summer there were more sightings in the harbor, and things looked as if they were getting heated up again. But when the creature came up to Squam Bar, near the lighthouse, and a Boston captain chased it down in a whaleboat, only to discover that he had harpooned a horse mackerel, most of Cape Ann was ready to forget anything ever happened. The following year, dozens more saw the same thing just off the shore down at Nahant, but by then the Linnaeans had given up, the Boston captain had disappeared, and people were making fun of the gullible Yankees all the way down to Charleston.

They were all just stories Julia had grown up with, and she didn't regard them as anything more, or less. And then she saw it herself.

Her husband Joshua had been out with the boats, and she had not been sorry to see him go. The summer doldrums had lasted longer than usual, giving him more time to drink, and curse the fish because they weren't there, and her because she was. It could have been worse. Abigail Hancock's husband used her so badly that both the town constables had intervened, and Mr Hancock, after he sobered up, left abruptly for a rumored family in the Maine woods. But the memories of the young man of promise and passion she had married, against the sullen wreck who stared emptily out at the waves as he swigged his rum, were almost as bad as the bruises she managed most of the time to hide.

Almost. A hundred fifty-seven dollars for nine months’ work was no life for anyone; she understood, felt his entrapment. But he had no right to take it out on her. He had no right to do that.

She had been out on the rocks at Bearskin Neck in the early morning, looking out into Sandy Harbor. She had emptied the liquor as soon as he left and no longer cared how angry he would be when he returned. It was a clear morning and the sun was warm on her face, but the water still looked hard and grey.

She blinked, and felt as if she had just missed something. She looked intently out into the bay, and seconds later it rose up in front of her.

Immediately, she knew what it was. All the stories she had always heard, with all of their divergent details, now merged and came to life not fifty yards in front of her. It was black, and it undulated vertically through the water, and it did indeed seem about as big around as a barrel, and its head did in fact look about the size of a horse's. Its front end was several feet out of the water, and the sound of its churning and splashing was louder than the tide lapping against the rocks beneath her feet. The serpent splashed and glistened in the sun, and she reached out as if to touch it.

In an unbroken motion, it turned and plunged toward shore. Before she could even consider backing away, it was directly in front of her. It raised itself up from the water, its head level with her own. Its liquid grey eyes regarded her calmly. There was a hissing sound, but not that of a snake; rather of wind blowing through an enclosed space, or her husband's breath beside her when he slept without drinking.

Her heart felt as if it would hammer through her chest, but she was not frightened. At that moment she had no problems; there was nothing in her life but this wonder. She kept her arm outstretched, leaned forward.

And as quickly as it had come to her, it left. By the time she lowered her arm, it was gone. The water seemed scarcely disturbed. She turned away and went back through town to her home.

Two days later came the news that her husband was lost. She wept properly at his funeral and gave his clothes away.

She had never told anyone, ever, what she had seen, not even when it had been sighted a week later out from Loblolly Cove, and later that same month further south near Hull. It was not so much that she feared ridicule as that she wanted to keep the event for herself. She had given everything to her family and her husband while they lived, but that moment at Bearskin Cove, that splash of water and shining strange skin, was hers alone. Let the learned men have their theories, and let the foolish men try to hunt it like a whale. For her, the creature was not a disruption of the natural order; it was a reassurance, a guarantee of possibility.

And she so needed that guarantee. When her grandmother had died, she and Joshua had claimed the old woman's house. (Grandmother had loathed him, thought him beneath her only granddaughter; Joshua swore she had lasted as long as she did solely to keep him out of her home.) Modest as it was, it did for them, and certainly it had for Julia by herself. There was, of course, no pension for a dead fisherman, but there was still a bit left of the small inheritance she had from her parents, and it went farther without Joshua working his way through it a bottle at a time.

But it would not last forever. Sooner or later, Julia knew she would have to choose among gloomy options: join the relatives in Boston whom she barely knew but who had grand visions of her becoming a governess on Beacon Hill; strike off on her own and seek work in the inland factories; or cast her lot with the likes of Mr Babson. These were not choices; these were sentences for the crime of being a widow.

Now, as she leaned out her open window into the dark, she breathed deeply of the ocean and thought about a new and wonderful possibility: a town without rum. A community of responsible and sober men who cared for their families. Surely in such a place, there would be true choices. She and Hannah and the rest would make it happen. Julia closed the window, buried herself under the bedclothes, and dreamed of swimming with the serpent, giving it sweet herbs from Hannah's garden.

By nine the next morning, Dock Square was more or less awake. The boats languished in the harbor waiting for July to pass and the winds to return, and the men who were about were already in the taverns. The shopkeepers had their doors open for business and what breeze might come off the harbor. But business almost always came from the women, and as Julia waited in front of Deacon Burns’ shop, there were none anywhere in sight. Here were two men playing checkers in front of Johnson's Hall hotel; there was a cluster of neighboring merchants discussing the merits of Fillmore's audacious embrace of the Know-Nothings. An isolated scholar took his leisure near the checker players and perused the latest collection of Mr Emerson's essays.

But where were the women? Julia smiled graciously at the merchants and restrained herself from wringing her hands. Where were they?

Then she saw a figure approaching from School Street, and two more down Broadway. Margaret Thurston, two of the Choate sisters. Then a group turned off High Street, Mary Knowlton among them, and more down Broadway, and when Julia looked up Mt. Pleasant she saw Hannah marching across the cobblestones, her hands hidden beneath the folds of her shawl.

As Julia moved to join the women, there was a commotion down past Jim Brown's shop. She turned and saw what looked like a small battalion moving in her direction, men as well as women. The women marched silently toward Dock Square, but Julia heard the cries of the men: “Watch out! They're coming for the rum! The women are going for the rum shops! Think they'll do it? Never in hell! Oh, yes they will, too! Ha! Let's go! Better hurry, boys!"

They're coming for the rum? How could these men know? She and the others had gone to such lengths to keep the plan secret. But as Julia saw more women treading resolutely toward the square, marching silently past the shouting men, she had a sudden sense of her own naiveté, and of the scope of what was about to happen. Of course others had found out. Not everyone. But enough. How could they not know what the problem was? How could they not see the ruinous effects of the rum in the idle men, in the drawn and haggard faces of the women? She moved quickly to join the others.

By now there must have been two hundred women on the square. Everyone from the meetings, of course, but plenty of others as well. The younger men stood to the harbor side and jeered. At least one woman, whom Julia did not recognize, complained loudly at being caught up in this lawless mob and swore to head straight for the constable's office. A few men were now gathered with the women: Stephen Perkins, Newell Burnham, James Babson—the latter of whom, to Julia's consternation, found her in the crowd, smiled, and tipped his hat. Joe Griffin, who worked for Perkins, waved an American flag.

Julia had expected Hannah to take command, but it was Esther Lane who separated from the crowd and planted herself to speak. Now the men as well as the women fell silent. The sun beat down on their heads as the gulls screamed over the harbor. Julia rearranged her shawl, and prepared for a lengthy discourse.

Esther started to speak, stopped, removed a hand from her shawl to wipe a tear from her eye. Julia marveled at the intensity of the old woman's face: for once, Esther Lane seemed to be yielding to what she felt, rather than to the sound of her own voice. “We know why we are here,” she said, her voice quavering but loud enough for all to hear. “We are here to take back our town and our families and our lives.” She paused, removed her other hand from beneath her shawl, and held aloft a hatchet. “Not one bottle left!"

In unison, every woman present produced a hatchet from beneath her shawl and raised it high. Every family in Rockport had one, or more—the common land was now mostly sold off to private hands, but most of the fishermen still cut their own wood as best they could from the ever-thinning landscape. To see them all at once, in the hands of these women, took Julia's breath away. As Joe Griffin waved his flag, Sally Norwood raised the banner she had promised to make: a cotton rectangle she held aloft bore a hatchet in black paint.

Julia held her own weapon over her head. She thought of Joshua and gripped the hatchet tighter. “Not one bottle left!"

With that, Hannah stepped forward beside Esther and shouted, “Let's get to work!"

The young men who had been so noisy before gaped as the women fell into formation, four abreast, and began their march down the street. Julia tensed when she saw the town's two constables, who had but recently arrived, but they looked on with the other men, and did no more to stop the women than they had done to enforce the liquor laws.

As they passed by Deacon Burns’ shop, he stood in the doorway, his face twisted with rage. He looked like Joshua used to after a session with the rum, and Julia's step almost faltered. “Shame!” Burns shouted. “Where are your husbands? Are they men? Shame! There's nothing here for you! Go home!"

There was a sudden movement from the marching column, and Betsey Andrews darted toward Burns. Julia was shocked to see that the schoolteacher's latest fashion was a skirt that came just below her knee, exposing light yellow bloomers that ruffled down to her shoes. But the lack of a full skirt left her free to maneuver past Burns while holding a hatchet in each hand. She waved to the women, and as most of the column continued down the street, several broke ranks, shoved the deacon aside, and charged into his shop.

Julia followed them in, and they began rolling barrels out into the street, one after the other: rum, brandy, ale, beer. As Burns screamed and cursed in a manner not befitting a leader of the church, the women took their hatchets and went to work. The young men who had followed them from the Square were now cheering: “That's it, girls! Have at it! Damn, look at Burns! Better pour some on the Deacon, ladies—he needs cooling off, by God! Serves him right! Hurrah for the hatchet gang!"

Julia tried to weigh in with her own weapon, but there were too many women ahead of her. The aroma of the spilled liquor was overpowering, and she tried in vain to wipe off the rum that had splashed on her dress. She was mortified by the crude encouragement of the young men and unsettled by the gleam in the eyes of the women as they swung their hatchets down, again and again and again, on Deacon Burns’ stock. Their hands were growing bloody, but they did not even seem to notice.

When she heard a voice from inside the shop announce, “That's the last one,” Julia moved to rejoin the column. The gang now moved as with a mind of its own: several women would peel off to attack a shop or tavern, then rejoin the column as it wound through the streets. They took care of the Stage Coach Inn, the Laf-a-Lot cottage, Johnson Hall. When they got to Jim Brown's shop, they found him sitting atop a barrel, swearing, daring them to take his livelihood from him. They swept him onto his own front steps, smashed the barrel, and slopped over the foaming ale to get inside. Brown had hidden many bottles, and they found them all.

"Damn you!” Brown cried. “Whores! Devils! What are you trying to do? What do you want? Is this going to makes things better? Will this make the winds blow? Are your hatchets going to fill our ships? Give your men work? I'll be restocked in a month! We all will!"

They brushed past him and moved on to John Hooper's basement, reportedly the largest holdings in town. Julia stepped over a man she recognized as one of Stephen Perkins’ crewmen as he lay beneath Brown's steps and tried to catch the dripping ale in his mouth. Mary Hale, her plain dress drenched with alcohol, evidently thought the man injured. She paused and tried to help him up, but he shoved her away.

And so it went for the rest of the morning. They ceased around noon, lining up to drink from the town pump, and then they resumed their work. They had marked many places with their subtle white X's, and they dispatched them all. As they moved through the town, the young men following them were joined by children, by dogs. The stench of liquor in the streets was suffocating, made worse by the boiling sun. The women's dresses were soaked through. With each stop, their eyes grew brighter, their hatchets cut deeper. Their laughter was punctuated by screams that might have been of anger or of joy. Some sang hymns that sounded here and now as rough as the sailors’ chanteys.

Julia had never been so weary in her life. Her dress was ruined; her shoes squished from the spilled liquor. She had marched with the others from the square to Bearskin Neck and back, the fear she had felt at the beginning of the violence turning to exhilaration, and then back to fear as the violence continued, and then finally to numbness. The certainty of their cause, the care of their planning, her ache for a better life for them all—none of that had prepared her for the reality of smashed barrels and broken glass, the curses of the men, the jeers of the boys, the consuming ferocity that possessed the women. The unshielded, naked emotion on both sides. One of the merchants had actually wept as they smashed his bottles of brandy on the cobblestones. She had never before seen a man weep.

And still the women were on the hunt, and still the men did not try to stop them. Not really. She had heard one man shout to anyone who would listen that they should go down to the armory and come back and teach these women a lesson, but another man cuffed him on the head and called him a damned scoundrel. The women moved at will through the town. “Not a bottle left!"

Julia found herself staggering away from the hatchet gang down Long Cove Lane, her head spinning from the heat and the fumes, her hands bloody from her turns at the barrels. She had been unsure at first, and then she had thought about Joshua and the times she had tried and failed to fight back, and then her hatchet sank as deep as anyone's. Now she was in front of Hannah's house. Her head was so heavy. Her hands were trembling. It was so hot. Perhaps it would be cooler by the inner harbor. She walked around the house and through the back yard, past the herb garden, to the water's edge.

The sun was still relentless, but the wind had picked up, and the water was choppy. Julia shook her head as if to stir the air some more. She let her shawl drop from her shoulders. She did not know what had become of her hatchet. Behind her she could still hear the occasional sound of breaking glass, distant shouting. She stepped out onto the rocks. She wanted to be closer to the water.

Which churned, and bubbled, and produced the serpent. No sighting, no warning. The enormous head rose in front of her. The same grey eyes; the same hissing sound. And why not, on this mad day? Julia reached out to the serpent, as she had before. She leaned closer, and her soaked shoes on the slick rocks betrayed her.

The water was shockingly cold, and almost immediately her head struck one of the submerged rocks. Everything went away for an instant, and then she rose out of the water, and above it. The serpent's skin was like nothing she had ever felt before. She adhered to it without effort; she did not have to try to hold on.

As the serpent moved with her out into the harbor, she wondered dimly where she might be going, but a destination truthfully did not seem all that important. The stench of the liquor had been replaced with something equally strong, but it was the smell of the sea and not the weakness of men or the violence of women. To her still-spinning head, that was a great comfort. Esther's words came to her from what seemed like some other world: The serpent in their hearts will not be defeated. Better to take your chances with the monster offshore.

They raced through the harbor, plunging beneath the surface for seconds at the time, then rising, then plunging down again. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Once the serpent paused on the surface and she could see the shore behind her. A figure appeared. A blotch on the horizon, but Julia dimly registered the outlines of a dress, a bonnet. Hannah? Was it over? Had they won? The serpent plunged again, but this time it stayed down. Julia held her breath and closed her eyes against the salt water.

When they surfaced, Julia opened her eyes. She was still facing the shore, but now it was different. The shore was yards and yards away, and yet she saw with perfect clarity as if looking through a telescope whose lens encompassed the whole world. Hannah stood motionless at the water's edge while behind her the houses, the shops, the cobblestones, all melted away, leaving no trace, leaving only a field of white, an appalling empty whiteness before which Hannah stood frozen like a carving before a piece of blank paper.

The serpent dove again. Julia closed her eyes and prepared to drown.

But when the serpent brought her to the surface she still breathed, and when she opened her eyes Hannah was still there on the shore, and the buildings had returned. Some of them. There was Hannah's house, and others. But now the telescope lens had become a stereopticon, and she could see past the houses on the shore to buildings she had never seen before, and bizarrely-shaped carriages that moved by themselves, without horses, and men and women dressed in bright colors, with some of the women dressed like men and some in nothing but what appeared to be undergarments. Before it all stood Hannah, still, and Julia heard a voice that was Hannah's, and was something else altogether. Our victory will outlive us! It will outlive this century, and the next!

The serpent was gone. Julia had never been particularly adept in the water, but she floated comfortably, without difficulty. She would not have noticed if fifty serpents had appeared. She did not know what she saw, but she knew that within this impossible scene was a cleanliness, a tolerance, a prosperity beyond anything she could ever have hoped, and at the same time a danger, an inexplicable poison that frightened her to the bone. There were options after all. It made no sense at all, and it made perfect sense.

Julia shut her eyes against the salt and the sun and the knowledge, good and bad, which overwhelmed her. She felt a hundred miles from shore and wondered if Joshua lay somewhere beneath her. She thought how pleasant it would be to remain floating there, like a leaf, like a hatchet, away from women and men.

When she opened her eyes again, the strange buildings and machines and people were gone, and so was Hannah, and her town as she knew it spilled down to the water's edge. She felt a gentle pressure on her back grow more insistent. She tried to keep floating, but soon her heels dragged the bottom, and she was returned to the shore.

Julia looked back to the water. The serpent was gone. So she turned and made her way over the rocks and across the yard and went back to the options that awaited, to the triumph and the wreckage of her town.

Copyright © 2007 F. Brett Cox

MEAN STREETS: A MEET AND GREET WITH MICK SCULLY

Mick Scully's work will be familiar to readers of our sister publication Crimewave and has appeared in a number of prestigious anthologies. June saw the release of Little Moscow (Tindal Street Press paperback, 269pp, 7.99 pounds), a collection of his best short work.

While it's where his reputation currently resides, Birmingham based Scully doesn't think of himself as primarily a short story writer. “I have written a couple of novels, but they have not been taken up by publishers. I have continued to write short stories alongside these, and although I enjoy the restrictions—and in some cases the freedoms—of the form—because there are so many links between my stories, I feel there are some elements of the novel about them when put together. Similar themes, the same characters and locations."

It's this interconnectedness that informs Little Moscow, with the main character in one story reappearing as a subsidiary in another, and nearly every story trailing back to the watering hole of the title, a Birmingham pub favoured by the underworld which Scully describes as “a composite of a couple I go in,” with even Marlene Dietrich popping in for a visit in the story ‘Performance'. And at times the stories turn back on themselves in the manner of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction ‘Abstract', the second story in the collection, opens with immigrant Hamid stumbling upon a dead body hanging from a lamp post, which as far as starters for ten goes is a real jaw dropper, but we have to wait until the story ‘Electric Pink’ before we discover how the body got there in the first place and to fully grasp the ending to ‘Abstract’ itself, while only with the final story, ‘A Tree for Andy Warhol', do we learn of the body's eventual fate.

While many writers make a big deal about the perils of being pigeonholed, Scully is far from dismissive of genre categories. “I think they have important significance, to both the reader and the writer. If you are writing genre fiction, you are working your text through the prism of the conventions of the genre and—while you can certainly deviate from them in various ways—I find that exhilarating. Also once you have ‘come out’ to yourself as a crime writer you can focus on the big issues of good and evil, the human condition without feeling pompous. You are crawling in among the underbelly of society sniffing out what you can find—nice work when you get it."

Nice work or not, and I'll allow a degree of irony in that remark, it's a task that Scully seems to relish and is especially good at, giving his criminals very human traits, strengths and weaknesses, so they appear as fully formed individuals, rather than formulaic hoodlums courtesy of Bad Guys R Us.

Office, the protagonist of the title story, is a small time conman who got greedy and tried to double cross the big boys. Out of gaol after a long stretch for a crime he didn't commit, Office returns to the Little Moscow seeking a confrontation, some kind of closure and, although Scully leaves the ending open, you just know that things are going to end badly for him. The story's strength lies in the sense of place, the seediness of the Little Moscow as vivid on the page as the sweat stains festering in the armpits of barman Fat Alex, while you never doubt the character of Office, his blend of self-pity and bravado hitting just the right note, giving the narrative an edge. ‘Tattoo City', one of the few stories in which the line between plot driven and character driven action teeters towards the former, sees an ex-soldier opening a tattoo parlour and refusing to pay protection money, thinking that his army mates will keep him safe. It's an engaging, combative story of hard men in conflict, testosterone fuelled and firing on all cylinders, with a rich vein of scabrous humour running through the text. In ‘Restoration’ a young man turns up at the Little Moscow asking questions about a now deceased member of the pub's clientele, the story taking off in a direction that delves into themes of madness and obsession in a manner worthy of Poe, with the revelation of what the young man has in his duffel bag just the icing on a substantial cake.

While his work falls squarely within the margins of the Crime genre, it is not detective fiction. Instead there is an almost mainstream sensibility about many of Scully's stories, with an emphasis not on the solving of cases as such, but rather on the circumstances that give rise to these events.

"I find it infinitely more interesting,” Scully explains. “The variety of elements that lead a personality to criminal activity—and the large variety of criminal activity there now is—is fascinating. There are many reasons why a person may end up a criminal. They may be part of a criminal family, and in the story ‘The Causes of Crime’ I have looked at the difficulties of trying to break away from such a situation. Some people have a dark area in their character that they either can or can't keep under control, such as Matt Fuller in ‘Prague Blonde'. I have tried to look at the way poverty and the immigrant experience can contribute."

In ‘Abstract', immigrant Hamid sees the body hanging from a lamp post not as an atrocity but as an opportunity. He steals the dead man's clothes, moves into his flat, takes on his identity, and finds within himself the will to commit murder rather than allow this treasure trove to slip from his grasp, but as ever with Scully things are not as they seem and a sacrifice of an entirely different nature is demanded of Hamid, the story asking us what the good life is worth, what compromises are we prepared to make to get and retain it, to walk not a mile in another man's shoes, but to go barefoot. ‘Ash’ is the tale of a young boy, who cannot face going into care when his father is to be sent to prison, and so embraces criminality in a series of desperate acts, but the story is told with sensitivity and compassion, so that the reader cannot help but sympathise with the child even as he becomes monstrous, takes steps that will prove irrevocable. The aforementioned story ‘The Causes of Crime', its title an ironic comment on Blair's sound bite politics, is set against the backdrop of Longbridge's closure and crippling unemployment, with a proud man tempted by the possibility of easy money when he finds himself unable to provide for his family. Bertrand Russell once said that if politics was ever to be a science then it would be necessary to discover the precise point of starvation at which a man prefers a bag of grain to the vote. Scully seems to be asking how many mortgage payments it's necessary to miss before honesty becomes negotiable, and while we may not condone Gary Lanahan's actions, condemning them doesn't come easy either. In a final, savage twist of fortune the one who suffers the most is an innocent.

Eschewing the more familiar ethnic groups, such as the yakuza and so called Russian mafia, Scully is drawn to Chinese criminal factions.

"There is a large and thriving Chinatown in Birmingham and some Chinese are very active in the criminal underground of the city. They have links mainly to property in the centre of the city, and various gambling activities, particularly casinos. While Triads in the old sense of that word probably aren't active in the city there are certainly formal groupings that operate as closed communities. Some of the mythology I have tried to create around them comes from my training as an acupuncturist."

'Night of the Great Wind', which originally appeared in Crimewave, has the traitor Jimmy Slim fleeing the vengeance of Hsinshu, Emperor of the Seventh Dragon, and seeking refuge in a tower block apartment where an elderly woman lies on her death bed attended by her sister, the wife of a criminal fence. The worlds of orient and occident collide, two criminal traditions intertwined, the story exploring themes of honour and loyalty. The Chinese contingent aspire to higher ideals perhaps, while the westerners seem more pragmatic and self serving in comparison, but both parties share the common goal of survival and a will to prosper come what may. ‘Bonebinder and the Dogs’ is a sequel of sorts, with Hsinshu's trusted lieutenant easing his master's way into the profitable world of illegal dog fights and gambling, to achieve which he must deal with some rather unsavoury westerners. The story hits hard and the reader is left confused, unable to decide between the brutality of the one group and the emotionless amorality and aloof disdain of the other.

'Primitive Stain’ has a police officer implicated in the series of murders he is investigating, having slept with one of the prostitute victims, and happy to settle for one of her other johns as the killer, though the actual truth is far stranger. The plot here is somewhat more complicated than most, delving into the murky waters of the sex trade, with the viewpoint shifting between Detective Dowd and the never named Sewer Boy, his story told in italics and with a detached and distant narrative voice, cleverly blurring the boundaries between innocence and guilt. There's a similar twin narrative strands device used in ‘Looking for Starkweather'. One strand in present time gives us a police officer looking at crime scene videotapes and the other fills in the back story of a young girl who becomes fascinated by killer Charlie Starkweather, the two strands moving tangentially to a collision that, if it occurs at all, happens beyond the story's end, with a moral that may only be evident to the reader—an absorption with the monstrous leads one to become a monster.

It's a conclusion Scully himself refutes, at least for the majority of us. “I don't think most people want to be monsters, even for a night. We are fascinated by them because we know they are among us, they might pounce and then what would we do? They are in so many ways the same as us, they might even be us, but we don't actively want to be them, we just want to understand a bit more so we can protect ourselves."

There are monsters in Little Moscow, but they are in the minority. Mostly what we get are fallible, suffering human beings and all that entails. Marlene Dietrich aside there's no glamour either, not the airbrushed criminality of the various CSI franchises or bestselling thrillers. Instead Scully invites us into a world populated by prostitutes and petty crooks, gangsters and fences, people who are, in the main, just trying to get by in a hard place where things are seldom black and white, and desperate measures may be called for.

So step inside the Little Moscow, ask Fat Alex for a pint of your favourite tipple and sit back while Mick Scully tells you some of what he's learned in stories that come with their own reek of criminal authenticity and are told with an enviable skill. The heroes are off doing whatever it is that heroes do, and you can read about them tomorrow. For now let's find out what the bad guys have to say for themselves.

ANTHOLOGIES: ANCIENT & MODERN

Two recent anthologies, The Black Book of Horror (Mortbury Press paperback, 298pp, 10 pounds) and Read by Dawn Volume 2 (Bloody Books paperback, 240pp, 9.99 pounds), represent slightly different approaches to the art of Horror.

In his introduction editor Charles Black reminisces about the heyday of the anthology, recalling the macabre delights of the various Pan and Fontana series, and tagging The Black Book of Horror as a tribute to those volumes, ‘right down to the blood soaked quotations on the back cover'. While you can't judge a book by its cover, you can tell something about how it wishes to be perceived. On that score Black Book stands squarely in the great literary tradition of supernatural and horror fiction, with red on black text and the cover image of a sartorially elegant gentleman seated in a leather backed chair and staring intently at the large volume in his hands, against a backdrop of shelves lined with similar tomes.

Edited by Adele Hartley, Read by Dawn Volume 2 has a more modern provenance, having first sprung to life as an offshoot of Dead by Dawn, Scotland's International Horror Film Festival, of which Hartley is the director. This too is conveyed by the packaging, with a clean white cover on which there are some fracture lines, the suggestion of a knife and a few splashes of red, making the reader think of a porcelain sink in which blood has been spilt or a Mondrian abstract left out in the rain until the colours run.

Black Book gives us eighteen stories, most by writers whose names will be known to anyone familiar with the independent press, guys who have paid their dues (and yes, the complete absence of female contributors is a curious omission), who've honed their craft and know how to tell a story, who are aware of the history and traditions of the field in which they are working. The characters may be a bit more forthright and psychologically aware in certain areas, such as sexuality, and the gore may be laid on a bit thicker than in the past, but all the same what we get are stories the likes of Lovecraft and Poe, James and Benson would not have turned their noses up at and, even if new ground is seldom broken, in terms of entertainment most of these tales more than reward reading.

'Regina vs. Zoskia’ is a typical Mark Samuels story, the account of a protracted court case, one which is never intended to be resolved, only to drain the vital energies of the lawyer involved, a subtle and Kafkaesque tale with sinister undertones, made all the more so by Samuels’ calm, restrained prose style in which words often seem to be used as a straitjacket to keep in check the madness that is always bubbling away just beneath the surface of the text. David Sutton's ‘Only In Your Dreams’ hedges its bets, allowing the reader to decide if the jelly man is simply the daughter's nightmare given a name and flesh or perhaps the outward manifestation of the tensions that are simmering in the family unit, Sutton excellent in suggesting the dichotomy of the passive wife/mother and the bullying husband/father, and how these roles impinge on a child's awareness. ‘Size Matters’ by John Llewellyn Probert is a nasty little schlocker about a man hell bent on penis enlargement surgery with a vicious sting in the tail and descriptive passages guaranteed to make the strongest wince.

Not everything works, with some stories retreads of stuff we've all seen before. ‘Spare Rib: A Romance’ by John Kenneth Dunham is the most obvious offender, a riff on The Monkey's Paw which offers irony in lieu of originality. ‘Cords’ by Roger B. Pile is another familiar tale, that of a young couple who fall through the cracks into another reality where they learn something of life's harshness, well written and holding the interest but with nothing to challenge the reader's expectations. The usually reliable Paul Finch tells us about ‘The Wolf at Jessie's Door', in which an ex-cop tries to rekindle an old romance by reporting the activities of a monster dog on the slum estate where he now lives, only this is much more than a mere dog, the story building beautifully, with some excellent characterisation and awareness of police esprit de corps, a sure sense of mounting menace and effective ambiguity as to the nature of the beast, only to then falter with an abrupt and left field ending. ‘Shalt Thou Know My Name?’ by Daniel McGachey is that old chestnut of the scholar who unleashes an ancient curse and finds himself the victim, but entertaining all the same, with some nice touches of macabre detail. There's a similar whiff of something nasty in academia in ‘To Summon a Flesh Eating Demon’ by Black himself, though the plot doesn't quite ring true (I had a hard time believing that the villain of the piece would be quite so blasé about sacrificing a female student) and it's too straight faced at times for its own good, might have worked better as out and out comedy.

But this is a collection in which even the less satisfying stories have something to recommend them, while the best are fine indeed. ‘Power’ by Steve Goodwin is one of the highlights, the tale of a Brit in Poland who falls in with a gang of Satanic skinheads. The story is beautifully written, with the evil Marek and his philosophy of power and nullity a compelling creation, a Nietzsche wannabe with a streak of Crowley thrown in to flavour, while a strong sense of place grounds the story in reality even as the supernatural elements coalesce, their precise nature left chillingly unsaid. ‘Subtle Invasion’ by David Conyers starts with a wasp sting and develops into a bleak, end of the world scenario, one that offers a re-evaluation of man's place in the great scheme of things every bit as disquieting as anything found in the oeuvre of Lovecraft. The feeling of hopelessness that pervades the story is almost palpable as its hero loses everything that he has, all whom he holds dear. David A. Riley's ‘Lock-In’ has echoes of King's The Mist but offers enough in the way of original touches to more than pass muster, with several pensioners getting stuck in a pub when a Satanist opens a rift between realities. The characters are engaging and the plot holds the attention, as they test the barriers that hem them in and fight to find a way back to whatever passes for normality

Read by Dawn Volume 2 contains twenty six stories, and given the lower page count the average story is much shorter than in Black Book, with the longest a mere eighteen pages compared to thirty nine in the latter, and the shortest weighing in at just one line, which would put most flash fiction to shame (in fairness, it is a very good line). Only two of the contributing authors are familiar to me, though this time around some women did make the cut, and while every story in Black Book had a supernatural or alien element, with Read by Dawn the balance seems to have swung in favour of purely human evil.

If I had to find a common denominator here, and I'll admit that my perspective could be skewed thanks to the prominence of the Madeleine McCann case in the media landscape, it would be that something like just under half of these stories involve children, though whether we should be afraid for the little ones or afraid of them is open to debate.

Henry, the seventeen year old protagonist of ‘Baby Steps’ by Scott Stainton Miller, is obsessed with sex like any healthy teenager, but there's a sinister backdrop to his preoccupation. A girl has gone missing in the town where he lives, and his family are keeping something hidden in the basement, in this tale of youth seduced and embracing corruption, where everything is suggestion and nothing can be pinned down until the final revelation. Ken Goldman's ‘Rite of Passage', a savage indictment of urban squalor and lifestyles, details a long chain of cause and effect that sees a teen gang causing a motorway pile up and, although the final twist becomes evident long before the end, the sense of inevitability about what is happening actually enhances the effect for the reader, like being a witness to an RTA and wanting to scream out a warning but finding your tongue paralysed, having to watch in helpless horror as events unfold. In ‘Childhood’ by Morag Edward, young Ben believes in fairies, and when he finds crucifixes in the lodger's room thinks that the old man has been killing them, a revelation that tips the boy over the edge into insanity, the story cleverly delineating the delusions of childhood and, in the idea of the crucified Jesus as a fairy pinned to a dissecting board, offering an unforgettable central conceit, one that challenges our ideas on the nature of faith. Brian Richmond's ‘Like Snow’ has ghosts appearing all over town but harmless, this scenario simply counterpoint to a marital break-up, the story told from the viewpoint of the young boy who misses his father, the narrative movingly written and shot through with poignancy, all the pain of loss. More standard fare comes in the form of ‘Gristle’ by Stephen Roy, which has a paedophile procurer fall victim to a shape shifting monster that takes the form of a little boy, a sting in the tail piece where all the pleasure for the reader comes from seeing a nasty character get his comeuppance at the hands of something even more monstrous. One of the best stories in the book and with a last line that chills to the bone, ‘A Candle for the Birthday Boy’ by Christopher Hawkins sells the reader a dummy before dropping its final bombshell, as a man whose attitude has driven his ruthless mistress away finds that she has seeded a terrible revenge. It's a story in which the moral high ground shifts, as we first sympathise with the absent mistress, but then come to realise that, in the modern parlance, this woman really did have issues and the ones who are going to get hurt are the innocent.

There are some weak stories, but they are the exception rather than the rule. ‘Sharp Things’ by Joshua Reynolds details an encounter in an underground train between an assassin and a mutant of some sort, a man whose body is filled with metal which he can use as a weapon, the story a bloody and violent curtain raiser for the collection, but too insubstantial to satisfy, seeming simply an episode in some bigger story. Similarly ‘The Skin and Bone Music Box’ by Andy P. Jones is little more than a vignette, a bittersweet recognition of poverty and what it can do to people. Promiscuity is punished in ‘Urbane’ by Frazer Lee, as nymphomaniac Jennifer falls foul of flesh eating monsters in an orgy of death that brings to mind the film Society, though if you're not into conservative values there is little to recommend it beyond the vivid descriptions of mutilation and death. A man is infested by a wormlike parasite in ‘Guts’ by Gavin Inglis and cuts himself open to get rid of it, the story effectively horrific in its description of the infestation and self-surgery but also somewhat pointless, the title inviting unflattering comparisons with Palahniuk's story of the same name.

Back to the good stuff. The protagonist of Joe L. Murr's ‘Hostage Situation’ is a psychotic killer who finds himself stuck in the queue when robbers raid his bank, and you know how hard it is to keep control in those sort of situations, the story a grim little tale of human nature held in check and then not, with plenty of bloodshed along the way and a bitter coda in which it's suggested the difference between a hero and a monster is only one of degree. ‘Fat Hansel’ by David Turnbull gives us the real story behind what happened in that witch's cottage, with Hansel grown to adulthood and the possessor of strange appetites, which he wants his sister to share, the story a sinister outing that harks back to the true nature of fairy tales. Family values are affirmed in F.R. Jameson's ‘Adultery', with a couple who meet in a motel for a little extra-curricular sex terrorised by the sounds of torture from the next room, and agonising over whether they dare call the police as it would result in their infidelity becoming public knowledge, the story using a stock horror scenario to ask some awkward questions of the characters and reader both. The protagonist of Patricia Russo's ‘Sally’ latches on to somebody in a coffee shop and forces them to listen to a strange story, the mood growing weirder with every paragraph as the tone of voice changes and her obsession emerges, making this one of the most effective and unsettling stories in the collection.

Keith's ‘Fingers’ are taken over by an alien intelligence in Jamie Killen's story, and he has to fight to save himself from becoming inhuman, but this is only the start of the problem. The story is told with a lightness of touch that undercuts the sinister nature of what is taking place, but the mood grows ever bleaker as it progresses, with Keith realising that his body is turning against him. In ‘The Proposal’ by Charles Colyott a man with the power to resurrect the dead does so for the woman he loves over and over again, even though he knows she will never return his feelings, the story one in which the protagonist is at first manipulative but ultimately pitiable, with his unique ability become the rack on which his emotions are tortured. ‘The Night Animals’ by Scott Stainton Miller, to me reads like a sequel of sorts to Morag Edward's ‘Childhood', but that could be nothing more than the character having the same name and a roughly similar family background. Problems in Ben's marriage are given a keener edge by his mother's illness, but there are suggestions her condition is not due to a stroke at all, and Ben learns the terrible truth about his family's heritage as all the chickens come home to roost and ghosts of the past emerge in a subtle, disturbing tale of evil that feeds on our fears of mental illness and old age, promising that there are far worse things.

YOUNG GUNS: HORROR'S GENERATION X

The short story is in decline the pundits tell us, regardless of which it remains the point of entry into the world of publication for many writers, the place where they learn their craft and grow, and when they first see their name on the spine of a book, that book is often a collection of short stories.

World Wide Web and Other Lovecraftian Upgrades (Humdrumming paperback, 163pp, 7.99 pounds) is Gary Fry's second collection and a third is now available from PS Publishing. It is, as the title implies, a series of stories inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, pastiches, homages and parodies etc. There's a sense about the book of a writer who has found his own voice and is bidding fond farewell to the influences of his formative years, and in this Fry echoes his mentor Ramsey Campbell, who also published a collection of work inspired by Lovecraft at the start of his career.

As well as being the longest, the title novella is the most substantial of what's on offer, the place where Fry gets to stretch himself and show off his ability. ‘World Wide Web’ is the story of Adam, a young boy who relocates to a cottage in an isolated seaside community when his parents split up. While his mum, a former film star and fading beauty, drinks herself to death Adam ventures out and meets Howard Philip, a writer of weird tales, who gives the boy a sample of his work. Adam is resistant at first, but then finds himself gripped by the tale and wondering if there is any truth to it, grounding for the story in local legends. He finds strange roots rising up out of the earth and down on the seashore locates a hidden cave on the walls of which are monstrous drawings. And there seems to be a connection to his media mogul father too, with echoes of the outré in the corporate logo of his company. All of which is by way of setting the scene for the novella's resolution, in which Adam's fears are given form in a total collapse of the world order.

This is a bravura performance and worth the price of admission alone. Fry seeds the story with signs and portents, hints of the numinous, but at the same time leaves the reader room to manoeuvre, to ask just how reliable our narrator is. Adam's character is drawn with an enviable skill, his sense of alienation, from both a familiar environment and those he loves, coming over well, and also the feeling that he has been betrayed, badly let down by the adults in the story, with scenes in which the boy tries to connect with both his mother and father among the most telling. There is a clever overlapping of effects here, various ideas and plot strands bouncing off of each other, highlighting the opposition between fiction and reality, Adam's inner torment and the external landscape of his world, with Fry particularly good at capturing the isolation of the coastal community and using it to reinforce his protagonist's outsider status. It is revealing that the story's resolution reflects the boy's personal phobia, is simply his fear writ large, and also ties in to his father's media empire, inviting a Freudian interpretation of what transpires.

The remaining six tales wear their Lovecraftian roots a bit more obviously, and are more hit and miss, though none is without its rewards. The academic protagonist of ‘Unnaturally Selected’ is facing disgrace at the hands of a rival who has discovered a way to mutate human flesh. The academic is convincingly portrayed, a man caught up in concerns that would leave most of us disinterested, and the atmosphere of menace, with hints of some great horror creeping into the world, is palpable when he goes to visit his rival. The ending however was predictable and the extra twist Fry gives the narrative, with the white powder of transformation released as a social equaliser, doesn't convince. I suspect, rather than society overturned, all that would happen is we would see one set of bullies replaced by another or, alternatively, those in power monopolising the powder. In ‘Servant of the Order’ an unsuspecting bookseller agrees to provide a client with a copy of the Necronomicon with dire consequences, the story a tongue in cheek pastiche with a wealth of ‘in’ jokes. The ‘hero’ of ‘In the World’ is pitched into a reality where things have changed in many subtle ways; he's having an affair with his work colleague, is a harder boss and Princess Diana is still alive, the prompt for all this an interest in a ‘cursed’ house. There are some fine effects here, but ultimately it's stuff we've seen done before. ‘Out of Body, Out of Mind’ has another academic, this time going off to live in an isolated cottage where he can write a paper, but finding his reality falling apart. A longer story than the others, there is a strong atmosphere to this piece with excellent build up to the shocking denouement, and the novel suggestion that James Myreside's plight is in some ways self-inflicted, a consequence of his inability to connect with others. Finally, in ‘Bodying Forth’ a cleaner discovers an academic's notes and reads the tale of transformation they tell. Again there is a sense of the overly familiar to this story, with Fry bringing nothing new to the table except smidgens of jargon and a slight shift of perspective. Overall though, whatever the bumps in the road, this is a fine collection from a writer whose star seems to be on the rise and worth a few hours of anyone's time.

Michael Boatman staked his claim to fame as an actor (his best known role is as Carter in Spin City) before adding another string to his bow with the publication of God Laughs When You Die (Dybbuk Press paperback, 147pp, $12.75), and 2008 should see his first novel hit print. Boatman's work seems informed by a splatter punk sensibility, with gore laid on thick and an unforgiving savagery that brings to mind not only the early fiction of a writer he admires, Joe R. Lansdale, but also the black comedy of such cinematic delights as Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead. Psychology is thin on the ground, as Boatman's characters are too busy running for their lives or screaming as they die horribly to spend much time reflecting on what is happening to them. God Laughs When You Die is a RSVP card for those who thought Richard Laymon was a big softie. It's also a rather nice thing in its own right, with a cover ‘adapted’ from Hieronymus Bosch and a fine selection of interior illustrations that capture the mood of these ‘mean little stories from the wrong side of the tracks.'

While nearly everything here has something horrific about it, it would be incorrect to say that all of these tales are horror stories. Boatman casts his net wider, taking in television, comics, SF and fantasy, placing the whole gamut of the modern media landscape and entertainment industry on his rack, and stretching it until new forms emerge. Take ‘The Tarantula Memoirs’ for example, a superhero story that brings to mind Martin's Wild Cards series, but casts a sardonic and world weary eye over the old stereotypes, as an ailing mystery man is given the opportunity to die in combat, fighting against an evil nemesis, and along the way the story asks questions about how such vigilantes would really fit into our society and what is evil anyway. ‘Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers’ poses these questions more directly, getting right in the reader's face and rubbing his nose in the reality of vigilantism. Two super powered beings take on a drug dealer and his gang, showing no restraint at all, with bodies pulled apart and blood spraying everywhere, as if Boatman's intent is to challenge the ingenuity of some film company's sfx department. The scene is set, a question is asked, the answer is refused and mayhem ensues, and that's all there is to it as far as plot goes, though we do get the suggestion that this incident is part of a bigger picture. It's in our own response that the shit really hits the fan. Initially we are repulsed by the criminals and look forward to seeing them get their comeuppance, but the response is so over the top, so heavy handed, that we are again repelled, perhaps even come to sympathise with the criminals, fighting a battle they can't hope to win and being slaughtered indiscriminately.

Alien invasion is another recurring theme, with ‘Dormant’ the shortest tale in the book at only three pages and also the weakest. The protagonist is infected with an alien parasite, one that explodes out of the body if treatment is not forthcoming in time, and the man cannot afford treatment. The story is well written and there's a gory scene in which a parasite does ‘explode', but it has no real raison d'etre, is simply shock for shock's sake, as if somebody had filmed John Hurt's death scene in Alien and decided to not bother with the rest of the movie. The aliens in ‘The Last American President’ are much more substantial, creatures who have turned our world into their personal playpen. The story is told from the viewpoint of a certain politician, who records their antics in his self serving memoirs, Boatman pulling out all the stops with a rich vein of invention and satire, while underlying the narrative is righteous anger at what we had done to our world before ever the aliens arrived and the hypocrisy of our leaders. In the mould breaking ‘The Ugly Truth’ Boatman presents a story that's part high fantasy, part martial arts spectacle, part romance, part gorefest and all fun. A stable hand wins the heart of the princess when he saves her from a monstrous zombie, something beyond all the royal champions regardless of their bone crunching prowess. So far, so fairy story, but in this instance there's a considerable amount of take no prisoners style mayhem to be got through before we reach the happy ever after, as if Tarantino had remade The Princess Bride.

'Folds’ is set in the world of daytime TV reality shows, as an assistant producer comes to suspect that there is something not right about the incredibly fat boy who appears on the show. He makes a horrific discovery about the child's abilities, one that brings to mind an old episode of The Twilight Zone, but Boatman has grounded his story in the present day media world, satirising its worst excesses and asking who really are the monsters here, the fat boy, who has an agenda of his own, or the millions watching who do so simply to feel good about themselves. Generally though, the horror stories in this collection are the most conventional, as with ‘The Drop', in which a jealous husband plans to kill his rival in a boating ‘accident’ and vice versa, but both their plans are cast awry by the intervention of a third party, the story well written but not really going anywhere, with the outré element too intrusive and arbitrary to succeed. ‘Katchina’ similarly addresses old tropes, with a wife discovering that her husband is a serial killer when his victims return. More interesting is ‘The Long Lost Life of Rufus Bleak’ in which a black preacher is brought back from the dead to serve an otherworldly power, reflecting on his past and questioning his reason to be, realising that he has become every bit as monstrous as the Klansmen who murdered him.

God Laughs When You Die is an impressive collection. While some stories may seem lacking in substance and the level of violence could deter readers, there is no doubting Boatman's prose skills, his flair for a telling line or metaphor, the anger that informs his work and willingness to push at boundaries.

James Cooper is the exception that proves the rule, having first seen publication with a novel. His debut collection, You Are The Fly (Humdrumming paperback, 179pp, 8.99 pounds), contains sixteen stories, four co-written with Andrew Jury. It comes with the subtitle Tales of Redemption & Distress, but madness and metamorphosis might be more appropriate terms. In tone he reminds me of Poe, has the same obsessive quality and attention to minutiae, with the ghost of Roderick Usher breathing down the reader's neck as we turn the pages.

Opening story ‘The Other Son’ is a fine example of what Cooper does best, with echoes of Poe's Valdemar in the son of the title who suffers from a rare mental condition, believing that he is a corpse. The story of his deterioration and eventual death is told through the eyes of his brother (who is also the ‘other’ son—Cooper is nothing if not ambiguous), each event minutely detailed, with a subtext that hints at abuse in the family unit. It's a story that takes an impossible situation and makes it believable through the simple trick of regarding what happens as mundane, everyday, so that we cannot help but be moved by the characters’ plight, however far outside our own experience it falls. In title story ‘You Are the Fly’ Jud finds distraction from his unhappy relationship with Shelley in studying a housefly, but this displacement activity develops into an obsession that further alienates his lover. Cooper piles on the details, each step of Jud's descent carefully mapped out, closing with an image of transformation every bit as shocking and macabre as that in Cronenberg's The Fly.

Insects play a pivotal role in several of these stories, as with ‘Shortly Comes the Harvest', whose protagonist tries to save a friend wracked by grief, his feelings of loss manifesting in culinary excess, the consumption of insects and rats. Reading this story it's impossible to say when exactly the line is crossed, at what point an eccentricity blossoms into madness; we can only join with the narrator in wondering what could have been done differently. ‘A Frailty of Moths’ takes a surreal, Kafkaesque slant, as a man stands in a queue, no revelation as to why, then gets ushered off to a rich man's abode, an insect collector whose guests are transformed into moths. It's a strange story and doesn't quite fit with the rest of this collection, one which holds the interest but doesn't deliver on the expectations raised by the scenario, with the sense of an elusive something going on in the background, always tantalisingly out of reach.

The desperation of the grief stricken husband trying to resurrect his wife in ‘Hollow Heart’ comes over well, but at the end all we have is an unnecessary reprise on the themes of The Monkey's Paw and Pet Sematary. King's back catalogue is touched on in several of these stories, as with ‘In Fetu’ which reprises a core concept of The Dark Half, that of twins with one foetus absorbed by the other, but Cooper gives it an interesting twist and produces something sharper and more poignant than the King novel, detailing the mother's abnormal response to this situation. In ‘All He Wrote', co-written with Jury, the whole King canon of the writer as protagonist is reprised with a famous author who cannibalises the life of his greatest fan for his masterwork, only for the fan to exact a terrible revenge, the story questioning our criteria for greatness and how writers use what is given them.

Of the other collaborations with Jury ‘And So Departs’ is the best. It opens with a man discovering a body hanging from a tree in his garden, cleverly switching direction over and over again, so that by the end the reader is not exactly clear who is dead and who is alive, and with the worm of guilt consuming the central character.

For my money the best story in the book, ‘The Constant Eye’ is told from the viewpoint of a man looking back on a period in his childhood, when he ended up befriending Mattie, the school's designated victim, only to discover that the boy has a terrible gift, something even more frightening than the bullies who prey on him. Again comparisons with King are apposite, especially Carrie and The Body, but Cooper owns the material. Insightful about the world of children and the mentality of the bully, beautifully written and convincingly characterised, this is a compelling and moving story of power and responsibility, the revenge of the pariah.

The narrator of ‘The Skin I'm In’ is a self-harmer who lives with his mother, who herself has mental problems in that she is on occasion taken over by another personality, the tension between the two a sure recipe for disaster, though the real appeal of the story lies in the matter of fact and thoroughly credible depiction of the characters. It's a high note with which to end a collection by a young writer with a gift for portraying off the wall mental states, making us believe in them and care for the people involved regardless of the damage they inflict on others and, more often, themselves.

With a host of short stories and two novellas under his belt, Gary McMahon has more publication credits than any of these writers, and that's reflected in Dirty Prayers (Gary Friar Press paperback, 287pp, 7.99 pounds), which contains twenty five stories. Harlan Ellison is an obvious influence, with echoes of Deathbird Stories in the religious imagery that recurs, and the various Psalms that appear as interludes between each grouping of stories. McMahon lacks Ellison's élan, but there's the same feeling of anger barely held in check, of raw emotion about to explode on the page. More than any of these writers, even Boatman, McMahon writes from the gut, with each story a body blow to the reader. However fantastic, his fictions are rooted in the material and emotional squalor of our everyday world, tales of the displaced and dispossessed, fuelled by rage and disgust at the lack of common humanity that breeds these conditions.

Opener ‘Do Not Be Alarmed’ sets the tone with Brent, a man who feels the world around him is going to hell in a hand basket, this social malaise given voice by the alarms that constantly disturb his nights, like the hunting cry of some beast off in the urban jungle. When his wife inexplicably goes missing Brent abandons his life to search for her, following the alarms wherever they lead until he learns the terrible truth of what has become of the woman he loves. It is a story without pity, in which the modern world swallows up the innocent and betrays the rest, with the constant wail of the alarms as background music in a dystopia of our own making, one that has now assumed an identity and energy of its own.

'The Bungalow People’ is a sad, bitter story, with an elderly couple left alone to die by their family and society, clinging on to the hope that somebody actually cares, but of course all in vain, McMahon's words an indictment of a world which allows such indifference. ‘The Dead Kid’ has a man haunted by a corpse, that of a boy murdered by his former partner, who has now moved on to somebody else, as if it is their love which is left dead on the front lawn, the outward manifestation of feelings turned sour, of all the things lost to time and circumstance. ‘The Man in the Chimney’ is a figment of the imagination of a lonely woman who begins to obsess about what he may be doing while she is out of the house, this obsession coming to both dominate and give her life meaning. McMahon's assured prose and measured pacing elevate the story above the absurdity inherent in the situation to deliver something that is sinister and yet, in its coming full circle ending, strangely comforting.

Abusive fathers, cheating husbands and lovers are characters who appear over and over again in McMahon's fiction, as if he is trying to grapple with masculine roles in the noughties against a backdrop of outmoded machismo. Clay, the protagonist of ‘A Grown Woman', cannot control his temper and all of his past relationships have ended badly. He is finally brought to heel by an archetypal female who cannot be tamed, his masculinity completely undermined, but also with the sense that his suffering is deserved, something he has brought on himself by refusing to confront his own failings. In another story the hero becomes ‘Incommunicado', bereft of his ability to communicate with other people, who only hear swearing and obscenity from his lips. He is a man disenfranchised from his own life through being inarticulate, the concept a powerful metaphor for our inability to converse meaningfully with each other. In ‘My Name Is’ a young girl is picked up by men in cars, who take her home and she forces them to admit that they abused her as a child. Though none of them are the actual offender they all find catharsis through confession, as if culpability and guilt are inevitable by-products of the male condition.

The protagonist of ‘Borrowed Times’ is a ghost in his own life, incapable of achieving anything, only having borrowed all the things he thought constituted his happiness, with McMahon's use of the second person reinforcing this sense of ineffectuality, that the protagonist is only a spectator, incapable of affecting events. There's a similar feel to ‘My Burglar', the story of a professional thief who believes that by breaking into people's homes he somehow manages to experience their lives, but when he is interrupted in his work feels that he himself has been robbed.

'Pray Dirty', which opens the third section, is the story most reminiscent of Deathbird Stories and one of the finest in the collection. The tenants of a rundown housing estate summon a god to settle scores with their grasping landlord, the story told from the viewpoint of an outsider and the details externalised more than in most of the other stories, but with a concern for the downtrodden at its core, along with the realisation that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. In the short ‘To Invocate His Aid’ a grief stricken father employs a black magician to raise the spirit of his dead daughter with mixed results, the action as gruesome as the end result is gratifying. ‘Like A Stone', the tale of a man returning to the town of his childhood and confronting the sins of his past, I praised highly on its original appearance in the anthology Bernie Herrmann's Manic Sextet (for details refer to ttapress.com). It's a story that tackles timeless themes of guilt and loss, one of the most keenly felt and moving pieces in the book.

In ‘Raise Your Hands’ the world turns against a man, inflicting violence on him for no reason, though there is the suggestion that actually this is what he desires, payback for some past, never specified transgression. Finally in ‘Face the Strange', a story inspired by the work of Arthur Machen, a man haunted by the memory of his girlfriend returns to the place where she died and is granted a vision of nature that helps him come to terms with his loss. It is a beautifully written and evocative story, the fitting end for one of the year's best collections of short fiction, a book that provides conclusive proof the short story is in good hands.

What is it about the short form that appeals to you?

Gary Fry

To paraphrase Nietzsche, I regard short stories as I do a cold bath—quick in, quick out. The immediacy of such a shock to the system is what short stories do best. Which is not to say that the finest short fiction provides only shocks. No, sir. It can be delicate and insidious, as well as brutal. Whatever the case, the common denominator is that condensation of effect: every word matters. Its language is at least as important as the events it depicts. Good short story writers are good writers; the form demands an unforgiving level of literary skill. Long may they continue to be published and read!

Michael Boatman

My favourite stories draw you in quickly, get you to care about the lead character and then mess him up bad. Real bad. They place the protagonist on the razor's edge of an extraordinarily difficult situation, one far beyond his ability to deal with, and then force him to deal with it; deal with it or die, maybe lose a limb or be forever transformed. I love anthologies. A great horror anthology should come at you from a dozen different directions, fast and violent like a gang rape in a prison shower. Maybe there's a slim chance of escape but probably not. Unlike involuntary sodomy, however, the reader should come away bruised, dented ... and ready for more.

James Cooper

The best short stories are reflections, of someone, somewhere, reaching out. It's like that shocking glimpse you catch of yourself as you walk past a mirror, when what you're expecting to see doesn't always present itself. For a moment the space that your body seems to occupy is unfocused, as though your reflected world has been twisted beyond its natural state, and you discover something in the blurred image that's almost impossible to define. This is why the short story is so important to me both as a writer and a reader. Because somewhere in there I always see reflected back at me the best and worst of who I am.

Gary McMahon

I think the short form appeals to me most because it's the perfect literary venue to examine a moment, a feeling, an emotion—something brief and fleeting and unforgettable. A good short story is a sort of concentrated snapshot from the life of a character, and in skilled hands so much can be said and revealed and suggested in a few thousand well chosen words. Scars that last a lifetime can be made in not much time at all.

Five Favourite Horror Stories

Gary Fry

'Just Behind You’ by Ramsey Campbell x ‘The Cast’ by Nicholas Royle x ‘Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad’ by M.R. James x ‘Man From The South’ by Roald Dahl x ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood

Michael Boatman

'Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy’ by David J. Schow x ‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’ by Joe R. Lansdale x ‘Gramma’ by Stephen King x ‘The Pit’ by Joe R. Lansdale x ‘Danger Word’ by Tananarive Due & Stephen Barnes

James Cooper

'The Mezzotint’ by M.R. James x ‘The Monkey's Paw’ by W.W. Jacobs x ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson x ‘The Crowd’ by Ray Bradbury x ‘Chiliad’ by Clive Barker

Gary McMahon

'The Dark Lands’ by Michael Marshall Smith x ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’ by Harlan Ellison x ‘It Only Comes Out At Night’ by Dennis Etchison x ‘The Scar’ by Ramsey Campbell x ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood

OLD DEVIL MOON by CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

(Serpent's Tail paperback, 296pp, 7.99 pounds)

In the introduction to his first collection of short stories in nearly five years, Christopher Fowler catalogues a miscellany of recent news stories that show how reality has far outstripped ‘dark’ fiction in its ability to deliver shocks to the system, while by way of afterword there's an interview in which he sets out his own thoughts on writing in general and crafting short stories in particular. Between these two book ends we get twenty two short stories which show that the master has lost none of his old magic, a collection that is as diverse as it is substantial, with quality the only common denominator.

Opening story ‘The Threads’ is one of several which deals with the English abroad, assuming the airs and graces of empire lost and inevitably coming a cropper. The villain of the story, the male half of an English couple in North Africa, steals a valuable carpet from a local dealer only to find himself on the receiving end of some particularly nasty just desserts. It's a satisfying twist in the tail piece, but the real strength of the story lies in the contrast between the disdain and aloof selfishness of the European and the native sense of community, with everyone looking out for each other. ‘Cupped Hands’ covers similar territory, its amoral Englishman leaving his native lover to her fate and falling in with a mercenary's plan to blackmail a town by withholding its water supply, but in this instance Fowler allows his protagonist a change of heart and he is able to redeem himself. One of the best stories in the book, ‘Identity Crisis’ concerns a man who exploits modern technology to take on the identity of others, finding himself stranded in a sinister Spanish town, as if Highsmith's Ripley had wandered into Tryon's Harvest Home. Beautifully told, its twists and turns a delight, deftly setting us up for the shock ending in which identity becomes even more problematic, with something very dark and menacing at the narrative's heart, this is quintessential Fowler.

Several stories come with a Victorian setting, as with ‘The Lady Downstairs', a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in which it's Mrs Hudson who solves a crime, simply through being more in tune with the lower classes than the Great Detective, the story tapping into the reader's natural joy in seeing a clever clogs brought low. There's something of melodrama about ‘Heredity', another slice of Victoriana, in which a plot by childless aristocrats to steal their maidservant's son is foiled. It's a feel good and unabashedly sentimental tale, and doesn't quite fit with the rest of this collection, except in the sense of demonstrating how wide Fowler's range is. Further proof of that, if needed, comes in the anarchic, knockabout comedy of a visit to ‘The Night Museum', which houses exhibits celebrating the exploits of some of the lesser known explorers of the Victorian age, the author's imagination in overdrive and tongue firmly in cheek as he throws up oddity after oddity, as if to ask the reader, “how much more of this are you prepared to swallow?"

The same mocking sense of humour, albeit in a more modern and media savvy vein, informs ‘That's Undertainment', a catalogue of films “intended to provide entertainment and pleasure", but which do “the exact opposite, to the point of horror". Fowler's satirical broadsides seldom miss their mark, and one can only regret that their intended targets will, almost certainly, never read this story. Hollywood itself is the setting for ‘The Uninvited', another highlight of the collection and reminiscent of Bradbury classic The Crowd, with a party going actor seeing the same, sinister group of people at each function, and a similar tragic aftermath on each occasion. The ending will be transparent to anyone who was alive during the 60s, but Fowler's build up is assured and the story is far more than its sting in the tail denouement.

There are some weak stories. ‘The Spider Kiss’ doesn't have much going for it other than the surprise ending, and this is a premise so out of left field even Fowler can't make it convincing. In ‘Forcibly Bewitched’ a magician attempts revenge on the woman who spurned his advances, only to have the tables turned on him in a particularly nasty manner. The story comes with a little too much freight for what is essentially nothing more than a comeuppance story, and seems unable to decide if it is seriously intended or comedic, albeit leaning heavily towards the latter.

Fowler isn't all about clever plotting and black comedy though. Some of his best stories show a rare sensitivity, an understanding of human failings and why we do the strangest things. In the brief but insightful ‘The Luxury of Harm’ a man is reunited with the idol of his schooldays at a horror convention, only to see how far he has departed from the once cherished aesthetic of rebellion. The story carries a powerful subtext, that for some to become ordinary is to become a victim. ‘Starless’ is another story about identity, with two very different men using the King's Cross bombs as the pretext to embark on new lives, the protagonist's sense of alienation in his own life conveyed with genuine empathy, so that what should be a terrible disaster to him instead becomes a window of opportunity. The short ‘Red Torch’ has a young boy gaining his first sexual experience with the usherette at his local cinema, only to find that the dark can hide many things, the boy's adolescent lust portrayed convincingly, and also the sense of betrayal, that reality all too seldom lives up to what's on the packet, and in this case falls further away than most. ‘All Packed’ finds Fowler in a quiet and reflective mood, with a moving account of a man dying of AIDS and letting go of his life.

There are seven more stories of varying merit in this collection, but let's end this review with consideration of one of the very best. ‘Invulnerable', almost certainly an allusion to M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, has a young women returning to the ruined corner shop which was the scene of a traumatic incident in her childhood. And as she remembers the past she also reflects on her fascination with superhero comics and the realisation that as role models they don't really work, even Bruce Willis sans vest has feet of clay, and the only realistic option is to bid goodbye to the past and become the hero of your own life. It's powerful stuff, the story one of both horror and redemption. It's Fowler, doing what he does best, telling the stories we need to hear.

THE WORDS OF THEIR ROARING by MATTHEW SMITH

(Abaddon Books paperback, 339pp, 6.99 pounds)

After a prologue in which a British deserter in WWI encounters German zombies, we skip forward to the present day when, thanks to British experiments in developing a zombie weapon, the country has been overrun by the living dead. Order has broken down, with central government's authority undermined and crime barons such as. Harry Flowers looking to fill the power vacuum. Gabe, one of Flowers’ lieutenants, is compromised and to save his own skin must turn against his master, but things go badly wrong for him. Years later Flowers has succeeded in his aim and rules London with an iron fist, commanding both the living and the dead, but the prize has been won at the cost of his own humanity. Gabe, who is now a zombie but an intelligent one, prepares for a final confrontation with his former employer.

The second volume in Abaddon's Tomes of the Dead series of novels, this book picks up on themes and ideas explored by George Romero in Land of the Dead, primarily that of the intelligent zombie. And, while hardly a radical departure from the zombie archetype, the book does have a lot of fun with the old tropes of this subgenre, offering a read that holds the attention and engages the imagination.

Smith knows how to tell a story. The characters are all well drawn, have a depth and motives for their actions which we can understand, if not always empathise with. Gabe, whose back story we are given in full, is the quintessential man of action with a conscience, treading the thin line between the expediency demanded by circumstance and outright amorality, though his relationship with Flowers’ daughter, the initial cause of antipathy between the two men, does have more about it of plot convenience than not. The spread of the zombie plague, the way in which the dead can so quickly overpower the living, is depicted in a way that engages the attention and seems entirely credible, and the same can be said for the rationale behind the various zombie societies that emerge in the wake of this disaster. The battle scenes are an especial strength, vivid and colourful, with plenty of bang for our buck and conflicts that could go either way. All things considered The Words of Their Roaring is well worth a few hours of any zombie aficionado's time.

SHARP TEETH by TOBY BARLOW

(William Heinemann hardback, 321pp, 12.99 pounds)

Set in Southern California, this novel masquerading as a prose poem concerns the rivalry between several packs of werewolves. Lark Tennant keeps his pack low profile, planning for the long term, but he is deposed by a rival pack that engages in criminal activity, acting as enforcers for a drug lord. Lark builds up another pack to challenge his rivals, but matters are complicated by the existence of yet a third pack, while the drug lord has his own agenda, as does a police detective who is being used by these parties. Another major strand involves Anthony, who works as a dogcatcher, and his love affair with the woman Lark sends to him as part of a plan to infiltrate the pound, and her willingness to do absolutely anything to protect the man she has come to care about so much.

First up, don't be put off by the prose poem tag. It is, as Barlow himself made clear in an interview, not much more than a matter of how the words are laid out on the page, an attempt to get away from the rectangular blocks of text that are our default setting, and on that score it does inject a note of novelty into the proceedings, bringing to mind earlier fictional templates, such as The Iliad and Icelandic Sagas. And there are moments where you get the kind of sharpening of effect that poetry seems best suited to, a condensation of emotions and thoughts, with the one bleeding into the other, phrases that sing off the page and delight the reader with their rightness, which is not to say Barlow's prose is slack or ineffective elsewhere. This is, make no bones about it, a beautifully crafted work of fiction, worth reading simply for the quality of the prose.

But of course there's more to it than that. The plot is marvellously complicated, with a wealth of back story my précis does not touch upon, and if some of this is a bit far fetched (such as a plan to wrest control of LA from the humans put forward by one of Lark's rivals) the overall pattern holds up well, the rivalry of LA street gangs echoed in the turf wars between the various packs, each of which is given its own distinctive rationale and modus operandi. The language is moving, vivid, capturing perfectly the feel of being an animal (mostly large dogs, not wolves, it needs to be said) and how that carefree existence might appeal to many humans, while complementing this is a nice vein of humour, with incidents in which the fearsome ‘werewolf’ finds himself reduced to the level of pampered house pet, or addicted to the lifestyle of a card sharp. Barlow doesn't spare the action either, with plenty of betrayals and turns of fortune, the whole culminating in a pitched battle between the rival factions and the few humans who have strayed into their territory, the story speckled with more than enough gore and grisly set pieces to satisfy the most jaded of horror aficionados. And at the centre of this remarkable book is a love affair, the unlikely relationship between dogcatcher Anthony and the never named woman come werewolf who has been sent to spy on him, two fractured people who need each other to be complete, the events between them described in moving detail, every subtle nuance of the emotional landscape captured on the page, making us care what happens to them and root for that happy ending.

Poetry or not, novel or not, this is an original and enthralling work of fiction, one that makes much genre fiction seem staid and painfully accepting of its limitations in comparison. Sharp Teeth is not just for dog lovers and werewolf boosters. It deserves to reach a wide readership.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Tennant

What's The Big Idea?

Once upon a time, in books, in cinema and on television, everything was fiction.

Crime, horror, SF, romance, comedy, adventure, social comment, you bought books and stuck them on shelves next to each other, or watched filmed stories that just happened to fall into different categories. A book or film with a wartime background presented as many ideas about life and love as, say, a comedy. When our leisure time increased, fiction subdivided into genres. Some of these were more outré than others, and were labelled cult, arthouse, slipstream, experimental, fringe. They were soon dumped by the big companies anxious to maximise profit, and were produced instead by small independents, which further reduced their following.

So, despite the fact that your local home entertainment store is divided into dozens of little pockets, it has just one category: the mainstream. This system is quickly being adopted in every other part of our lives.

I imagine most Black Static readers are on the side of the independent, the cult, the quirky, the fringe. But the magpie mainstream, ever on the search for other people's ideas with which to feather its nest, now steals wholesale from the fringe. So shows like Lost rework the kind of stories that only appeared in Fortean Times, comics steal from mythology and fairy tales, paperbacks recycle old pulps, films borrow from comics, and advertising people swipe everything—all of which leaves the fringe with an increasingly empty bag of tricks.

At which point, J.G. Ballard has noticed an interesting phenomenon; the mainstream itself has been forced to behave like a gigantic independent, because there is so much choice within it that the concept of the ‘faceless corporation’ is breaking down. The chicanery of Enron and a thousand movies featuring evil companies called the Tyrell Corporation or The Company is so familiar that the old model could no longer be trusted.

What happens next is intriguing. London's Brunswick Centre, for two generations a rundown gangland of crumbling flats and reeking takeaways in Bloomsbury, was given a facelift. The flats were restored and a dozen chains replaced the little shops. Outrage! cried people who had never ventured there. Save Our Street! Signatures were sought and petitions signed. To no avail; the corporations moved in. They bred better choice in a clean, safe environment, which in turn bred farmers’ markets and open days in all the area's previously sealed buildings. Although the whole place looks a little like the ‘perfect’ societies of Logan's Run and Gattaca, no one misses the betting shops and chicken huts. So, in microcosm, this is where the mainstream starts to improve on the independent.

A handful of small stores still exist nearby, though, and while rushing late to work I passed a bookshop. It was 9:25am, and the owner was pottering about with a coffee. I asked for a book and was told to bugger off until the shop ‘officially’ opened. The owner drank his coffee and finally opened half an hour late, by which time he'd lost a dozen sales. And I'm supposed to sign a petition for this?

Independents are nice when they sell cakes, but at the cinema they're usually nothing of the kind. In the UK we can't see a good selection of foreign films at all, because a ‘foreign film', to an independent, is a nice bourgeois French drama or a Chinese historical epic that will bring in white middle-class punters. But Europe makes mainstream films just like Hollywood—the difference is that you can't see them in Britain. So it's okay for Brice De Nice or Le Coeur Des Hommes or Crimen Ferpecto to please French and Spanish crowds, but they don't fit the ‘indie arthouse’ demographic they'd be forced into here.

So it is with art. As the grim roll-call of rich, bored and boring artists trot through the Sunday papers—whose turn is it this week, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst or Gilbert & George?—we are lured into thinking that this is choice. It's not, of course, because choice is finding a 19-year-old art student's web page and wanting to see more.

Which brings us, with a heavy heart, to books. A Simpsons episode once featured a bookstore called King ‘N’ Koontz, and it was as likely to have been an independent as a major chain, because the problem starts with the publishing house readers who keep in mind a strange idea of the ideal customer: a mum enjoying a well-earned respite after putting the kids to bed; a feisty teenager who falls in love with the printed page in a summer park—this is what a female friend of mine refers to, disparagingly, as Ladyscience, an emotional inexactitude that keeps rigorous, original, unformulaic books out of the stores, and the small press can sometimes be just as guilty as anyone else.

Luckily we have the net, an appropriate term for something that stops stuff from falling through and being lost forever. But why is it that the rare and wonderful books are mostly old? Tartarus Press is one of the few companies brave enough to publish modern literary experiments, although you need deep pockets to buy them. Small houses like PS and Telos are great but unrepresented in stores. Borders still stocks most of my mystery novels under ‘Horror’ because of a computer glitch their staff aren't qualified to rectify. And yet, I want to believe in the idea of the Indie Corporation, and there are reasons to be cheerful. Waterstones encourage their staff to share knowledge and form relationships with readers and writers. The Brunswick Centre is now a place to sit and read, rather than somewhere to run through fearfully. And Ballard encourages us to embrace the new corporate world, although he issues a health warning with the edict.

The losers here are still writers, because he who controls the media controls everything, and that means—at least in the West—the USA, which might explain why there's no adult horror or SF any more. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy films like, say, 30 Days Of Night, but the CGI and digital step-framing used to make them are now so commonplace that we need the back-to-basics originality one finds every day in the dark corners of YouTube. Music videos from bands like Justice and Beirut present more ideas and moods in two minutes than most films can deliver in two hours. The unspoken key word in this column is the idea. For, while the new corporate culture gives us choice, comfort and safety it removes anything as subversive and dangerous as a brain-hurting idea, and the currency of ideas are what we writers trade in.

Ideas appear to cost nothing. They don't, of course, but that doesn't stop producers from picking the brains of writers and giving nothing back. Go into almost any bar in London and you'll hear people discussing ideas for films, books, websites, art that they want to create—the British are, by nature, creators. But we happily surrender our best ideas because we have no outlets, and because we have no money. Magazines like this (and Strange Attractor, which I urge you to seek out) consist of nothing but ideas. Does that makes us the enemy of the new corporate world? No, it makes us friends because friends are always easier to rob. And our creative community is the constant repeat-victim of idea larceny from those with the outlets and the finance. Thinking this through, if we make friends with the new corporate culture instead of hating it so much, we might be able to make ourselves seen and heard. Revenge appeasement? Now that would be a good idea.

Copyright © 2007 Christopher Fowler

This was the part that Reynolds hated the most.

The deal was so close he could almost smell it. The fish was nibbling, practically had the worm between his nubby gums. Reynolds had wowed the mark with the double bay windows, the parquet flooring, the loft bedroom with skylight, and the view of the Appalachian Mountains stretching a blue hundred miles in the distance. Custom cabinets and a cherry stair railing hadn't hurt, either, and the deck was wide enough to field a baseball game. Surely that was enough to convince anybody that this twenty-acre piece of real estate and 7,200-square-foot floor plan was the steal of a lifetime, especially at the sacrificial price of four hundred grand.

But the mark wanted to see the basement. They always wanted to see the basement. It figured. Reynolds was stuck handling the only haunted house on the local market, and these idiot buyers didn't make the job any easier.

"The bulb's burned out in the basement, David,” Reynolds said. “Had the caretaker up here the other day, and said he'd get around to changing it. You'd think he'd carry one in his truck, you know? Good help is hard to find around these parts, David."

Maybe he shouldn't have said that last bit. This buyer was from Florida, and might think that poor work habits were an Appalachian trademark. Reynolds looked David in the eye and smiled. It was Reynolds’ plastic smile, the closer smile, the glib smarmy hypertoothiness that he'd learned in salesman school.

The man reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flashlight. “I used to be a builder,” David said. “You can tell a lot about how a house is put together by looking at the floor joists. A house needs a good foundation, especially when it's clinging to the side of a ridge."

Damn, Reynolds thought. “David, you're a man after my own heart. A real fixer-upper, I'll bet. Not that you'll need to do much work on this house."

Even though every corner is slightly out of square.

Reynolds thought about slapping David gently on the back to punctuate the statement, then decided against it. David seemed more like the firm-handshake, no-nonsense type. A tough sell. A man that was hard to sucker. The kind of man who wore a little tape measure on his belt.

Reynolds headed toward the door that led to the basement stairs. The chill crept over him as he palmed the door handle. He put an ear to the door, pretending to check the hinges when actually he was listening for the spook. Damned thing had cost him a commission three times already. He made a show of looking at his watch. “You said you had to meet your wife at the airport?"

"Yeah,” David said, studying the blown gypsum ceiling for cracks. “But there's plenty of time."

"Traffic can be a bear around here. You may have noticed that all the roads are twisty, and you're bound to get behind some flatlander tourist—no offense, mind you."

David stepped to the basement door. “I'll manage."

"David, this is a whole lot of house for the money, David,” Reynolds blurted. Had he said David's name twice? In realtor finishing school, he'd learned that you used the name of the potential buyer as much as possible. But maybe he was overdoing it. He was losing his concentration. Sweat pooled in the armpits of his shirt and stained his serge jacket. He lightly bit his lip to bring himself under control. The bite turned into a disguising smile.

David smiled back. The man was too patient, in Reynolds’ opinion. One of those forty-somethings who had already finished his life's work, his bank account probably set for the downhill run. Had a kid at Duke and one in an academy somewhere, a tennis-playing wife who probably came from old textile money. Reynolds saw no troubles in that tan, placid face, and a flare of jealousy rocketed across his heart.

But it wasn't David's fault that Reynolds dropped eighty grand in a sour time-share deal. No, not time-share. Interval ownership was the new gold-plated term for it. But by any name, Reynolds was in the hole and had a lot riding on this sale. Haunted house or not.

David switched on the flashlight. Reynolds turned the knob and let the basement door swing fully open. The hinges creaked like an old woman's bones.

"Going to need a little oil there,” David said, playing the light over the hinges.

"Y-yeah,” Reynolds stammered, as the cold crypt air wafted up from the basement and bathed his skin.

"You going first?"

"You're the guest."

"But you know the territory better."

"Yes, yes, of course, David."

Careful, Reynolds chided himself. He was oh-so-close to nailing this one down. All he had to do was smile and walk down the stairs, let David have his little look, rap on a few floor joists, kick the support beams, and they'd be back in the office in no time, running some numbers and working up papers. And Reynolds would be rid of this house forever. All he had to do was finish the tour.

He surreptitiously wiped the sweat from his brow and stepped past David into the murk. His feet found the steps and he laughed aloud, trying to hide his nervousness.

"What's so funny?” David said.

"I forgot to tell you, the basement's half-finished. The previous owner was converting it into a rec room. Talk about your amenities, David. Only a little bit of payout, and you can have the perfect little hideaway. From the wife and kids, know what I mean?"

"I like my wife and kids,” David said. “What about the previous owners?"

Damn, damn, damn. They always asked that question. Reynolds cleared his throat and continued down the roughed-in wooden stairs, following the flashlight's beam. The darkness swallowed the light ten feet ahead as hungrily as the crawl-space swallowed the sound of their footsteps.

"Well, David, the previous owners were—” This was the real no-no. The one thing he'd learned was that you didn't talk about people who had died in a house, especially a house you were trying to sell. Buyers were superstitious.

"—the previous owners were old, and this was a little too much house for them. They bought into a sweet condo deal on the coast.” Reynolds found lying distasteful. Sometimes lying was difficult for a salesman to avoid. But he preferred the more sophisticated methods of distraction, bait-and-switching, and blinding the customer with useless but eye-catching extravagances.

A nice window treatment kept them from noticing that the window was broken. A crystal chandelier hid stains caused by a leaky roof. A gilt-edged and wall-mounted mirror kept them so busy looking at themselves that they failed to see the odd shapes hovering in the alcove.

David shined the light into the belly of the house as they reached the smooth concrete floor at the bottom of the stairs. “Going to need a few strip lights down here."

"Great place for a pool table and a big-screen TV,” Reynolds said, looking around warily.

David studied the plain gray walls, the nails visible in the sheetrock. “Smells a little musty,” he said.

"Yeah, been closed up too long. You get a little air in here, it'll clear up in no time."

It's just a little decay. And that odor that never seemed to go away completely. Nothing unusual.

David sniffed again. “Sure there's no mice?"

Mice? Everybody had mice. But maybe David didn't tolerate mice. Some buyers were like that, even a man's man like David.

Everybody's got their own little quirks, don't they? You, for example. Acting like a big-shot wheeler-dealer, cool as a termite, like you could care less whether anybody ever takes this dump off your hands.

"Look how solid this construction is, Dave,” Reynolds said, sneaking a peek to see if David minded the shortened form of his name.

David pounded on the sheet rock partition wall and frowned. “Sounds hollow."

Reynolds licked his lips. The spook should be here by now.

"So, why are the owners selling?” David asked. He shined the light into Reynolds’ face, causing him to squint.

"Uh ... they wanted to move to a warmer climate. These Appalachian winters can be tough."

Oops. You need to sell them on the summers, when the air is fresh and the shade inviting and the cool creek bubbling beside the house is an asset, not an ice-coated hazard. Play up the investment angle, too.

"They move to Florida?” David asked, investigating the galvanized ductwork that ran beneath the flooring. Yellow insulation filled the gaps between the floor joists.

"Sure. Doesn't everybody?” Reynolds chuckled. He kept his eyes glued to the bouncing circle of the flashlight beam, though the thing he really wanted to see was probably hiding in the darkness, mere inches from the edge of light. His dread was nearly matched by his curiosity.

"You wouldn't be lying to me, would you, Reynolds?” The light exploded in his eyes again. “About somebody living here?"

He blinked rapidly. “I don't know what you're talking about, David. Now, we need to be getting back. Afraid I've got another appointment."

The light remained on his face. Reynolds could see nothing of the man behind the bright wash.

"Haven't you seen enough?” Reynolds said, a little bit of the hey-old-chum tone still working its way into his voice. He decided to give one last try at turning over this property. “You just can't find places like this anymore. More than a mile from the nearest house. You don't have to worry about the neighborhood brats bugging you."

"I like kids,” David said.

"Sure, David. And your kids will love it here. Plenty of room to play, hike, or just scream at the top of your lungs if you feel like it. You can scream for days and no one will notice."

"And why would somebody need to scream? Is this place occupied or something?"

David's words were eaten by the shadows. The stillness of the basement was broken only by Reynolds’ ragged heartbeat and breath.

"Occupied?” Reynolds said, not even having to pretend to sound startled. “This place isn't occupied."

"You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Reynolds?"

He wasn't lying. The house wasn't haunted. Rather, it was ... what was that phrase? Oh yes, multi-dimensionally possessed.

Still, beads of sweat erupted on the high bare plane of Reynolds’ forehead. The light mercifully fell away and raced across the smooth white-gray of the cement.

"David, David, David,” Reynolds tutted, recovering somewhat now that his face was hidden by the darkness again. “I'm not a high-pressure kind of guy. If you don't want the house, that's fine with me."

Well, not all that fine, because then I might have to drape a rope over the ductwork and twist a little noose and take myself a midnight swing.

Not many buyers existed for a palace like this. While the layout was great, the house was a little too angled. You stepped inside and you felt uneasy. The walls listened and the electrical sockets were tiny black eyes and every single nail and screw and chunk of spackle whispered and every board groaned, even when the wind was still.

Surely David had sensed it, too. That's why he'd asked the question. It's the kind of house you'd expect to be occupied.

"I'll have to put some deadwood braces between those joists,” David said. “They're starting to bow a little."

Reynolds smiled to himself. David had spoken possessively. The deal was all but sealed. If only she would stay away long enough to get David back up the stairs.

"Uh, David? Don't you have a plane to catch?"

"Huh?"

"Your wife. You said you were picking her up at the airport."

"Oh, yeah. Guess I've seen enough, anyhow.” David headed for the stairs.

Reynolds’ heart flipped for joy. He didn't even mind that David had left him in darkness. He hurried after David.

That's when it came out, built itself from the bricks and mortar of nightmare. Nailed itself together with the claw hammer of insanity. Staple-gunned its mockery of flesh into form.

It was her.

She looked him in the face, her eyes deeply bright and strange, her mouth curled into a smile. “You're real,” she whispered, no fear in her voice.

Reynolds drew in a sharp breath, then swallowed the scream that filled his lungs. The basement air tasted of fiberglass and tomb dust. David paused on the stairs, then whipped the light around.

"What was that?” David asked.

"Nothing,” Reynolds said. “Nothing but a bunch of nothing."

David thundered down the steps, splashed the light around in the corners of the room. “I know I saw it."

Reynolds adjusted the necktie that seemed to be choking him. “Listen, David my man, you've seen all there is to see."

"Except the breather."

"The breather?” Reynolds shrugged innocently. The last three prospective buyers had said nothing, only shivered and hurried up the stairs. None of them had returned Reynolds’ follow-up phone calls. But David seemed to be immune to the skin-crawling sensation caused by the basement's tangible tenant.

"I know there's a breather here,” David said, sounding like all the other pompous out-of-staters who thought money gave them the right to bully around mountain people.

"No breathers,” Reynolds said. “Breathers don't exist."

"Most of the summer houses in the Appalachian Mountains are supposed to be empty. I'll be damned if I'm going to own a house that has a restless spirit banging around. Where's the peace in that?"

The woman stepped into the flashlight's beam. Reynolds stumbled backward, bumping into the bottom step and nearly losing his balance.

"I see you,” she said, reaching out her hand as if to touch an expensive fabric. “I knew this place was haunted."

David splashed his beam of light on the breather. Her satisfied grin absorbed the light, sucked it into the netherwhere of her chest. The dim basement grew even darker, became the pit of a hell so bleak that even fire could not draw air. The only luminescence came from the strange glowing eyes of the human, floating like the lost moons of insane planets.

Reynolds fell to his knees, his only comfort the hard, cold concrete. He hated this next part. The only thing worse than losing a sale was watching a fellow ghost have his very foundations rocked. The prospects either went insane or found a religion that worked, but either way Reynolds remained stuck with this damned piece of overpriced unreal estate.

The woman flipped on the overhead lights and punched at her cellular phone, her breath as sharp as a winter wind in her excitement. “Meryl?” she said into the phone. “You know that house I just bought? It's haunted! Oh, this is just so terribly delightful."

David backed up the stairs slowly, disgust and horror etched on his face.

"Jackie's going to simply die with jealousy,” the breather prattled into her phone. “We'll get together for a seance soon, I promise. Right here in the basement, that's the cold spot. Of course, I'll have to redecorate first."

Reynolds drifted after David, who had already reached the top of the stairs. “David. It's not what you think. I can slash it to three-and-a-quarter, David. But the offer's not going to be on the table long."

David was pale, shocked, too recently dead to comprehend all the workings of the immaterial world.

"Excuse me, I ... I have a plane crash to catch,” David said, looking down at his hands as if expecting to see an owner's manual for his amorphous flesh. Then he shimmered and whisked across the room.

"Call me?” Reynolds said weakly, but David was already through the wall.

Reynolds succumbed to the sideways gravity and the interdimensional currents dragged him to the basement stairs. He sat on the hard wood, mingling with the dust that the breather had stirred with her industrious cleaning. Her words echoed off the concrete walls, frightening and shrill.

"And black velvet drapes,” she said into the phone. “No, there are no windows down here, but drapes are called for all the same. One can't have a seance room without black velvet drapes. I'll have some crates of candles shipped in for the occasion. Oh, this is going to be simply divine."

Reynolds rubbed at his weary eyes and looked up at the beam where he had draped the noose. The wood was slightly splintered from the friction caused by his body weight. Eighty grand in the hole hadn't been worth killing himself over. Not to get trapped in a hell like this one, where he had to close a final deal before being allowed to rest in peace.

"Oh, I'm certain he'll be back,” the woman said. “He had that look. You know, the one your second husband had? Yes, the ‘doomed puppy dog’ look.” Her laughter hurt Reynolds’ ears.

Reynolds stood and brushed the cobwebs from his sleeves. No use hanging around here. He'd be summoned back soon enough. In the meantime, self-pity wasn't going to get this house moved. He'd learned that in salesman school. The only way to unload property was to circulate, press the flesh, talk fast and smile faster.

Maybe the breather would take a vacation, fly down to Florida, go on a tour of America's haunted houses or something. A window of opportunity would open, another mark would want to be shown around. All Reynolds had to do was keep the old confidence, comb the hair over his bald spot, and act like a generous uncle who wanted to make someone's American dream come true, and maybe soon this house would be somebody else's problem.

She'd said he looked a doomed puppy dog. What an insult. The living had absolutely no sensitivity. Well, at least he didn't lurk in dark basements hoping to catch a glimpse of the other side.

Reynolds tried on a glib smile. His ‘closer face'. A good salesman didn't stay down for long. He whistled as he drifted through the wall and under the moonlight in search of buyers.

A sucker was born every minute, he reminded himself. And just as many suckers died.

Copyright © 2007 Scott Nicholson

Not for the first time he decides to go nameless. Moves to a city where they don't know him. Tells no one of his new whereabouts. Chooses a new name using identification documents he's paid a fortune for, then avoids using that expensive new name as much as possible.

"And your name?” they might ask at a bus stop or in the park.

"You can just call me Buddy,” he replies. Most do so without blinking an eye.

Then he spends months trying to erase both the new name and the old name from his consciousness.

The process is not particularly difficult for him. He doesn't open his mail—drops it into the trash without a glance. He fills out only those forms he cannot avoid, looking away when he scribbles a bit of graffiti that may or may not be his signature. He answers to “Buddy,” but for him “Buddy” is no more identifying than “Hey, you."

He deals with neither banks nor doctors. He isn't naive enough to think that he's achieved total anonymity—no doubt his persona has been digitized in a number of different ways. But he doesn't think much about it. He does not avoid photographs, but always makes sure he is part of a group, which as far as he is concerned is far more anonymous than never having been photographed at all. Similarly, he rejects the life of the hermit, and wraps himself in crowds. He tries to make himself as frequently seen as lampposts and trees.

You would expect such a man to avoid diaries as if they were forbidden tomes of black lore, but he keeps his religiously, using it to report concise, nonjudgmental observations, the only reporting suitable, he thinks, for an anonymous observer:

Two dogs were run over in the street today. A car avoided the first animal, then plowed into the second. At the same moment the car behind ran over the first dog. The men climbed from their cars and swore at each other. A nearby child was hysterical. No one went to the child, who cried for thirty-six minutes, fifteen seconds. Most would think such lengthy hysteria impossible, but an accurate watch cannot be denied. Eventually a female police officer came and led the child away.

The temperature was forty-five degrees at eight a.m., climbing to seventy-six degrees at noon. At 142 Lincoln Street a dark man in a white T-shirt and green pants sat on the front step and watched the sky. At intervals varying between fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-two seconds the man wiped tears from his eyes. He said nothing when the old woman in the blue dress split her grocery bag. A can of peas rolled under a parked white Oldsmobile. She did not see it and left it behind after she'd gathered the spilled groceries. At five p.m. the man stood up slowly and went inside. His shoulders and knees appeared to struggle with gravity. A man in a brown suit passed him going out the door, walking very fast.

There are eight green bottles and a dead cat in the alley across the street. A man enters the alley and counts them every day. He looks at the cat and tries to determine if it has been moved. A newspaper lies beside the cat but he does not reach down and cover the cat with it. He prefers to remain nameless.

The nameless man wanders down the street with a water bottle in his hand. At every third corner he stops and takes three swallows. At some point in the past he has fainted from dehydration and is determined to avoid such incidents in the future. He continues down the street until he finds a crowd to join. For the rest of the day he moves from crowd to crowd, holding the water bottle, drinking his swallows but trying not to be too obvious about it, trying not to be seen. Both unknown and unknowable, he is a part of the grand movement of the world, he thinks, and there are others who need the moisture far more than he.

At the end of the day the man strips off his shirt and stares at himself in the mirror. He drips what's left of the water over his head. It is a kind of baptism, he thinks, but will not pursue the idea. He imagines the remaining dust of the day dissolving from him, freeing him from this time and place.

In the morning the traffic noise begins early, at precisely five fifteen a.m. The man without a name dresses in clean gray slacks and a light blue shirt. He puts a newspaper he will not read under his arm and walks out onto the hot concrete. He strolls at a steady pace down the sidewalk with no destination in mind. The man from the day before is again sitting out on the front step crying, silently but unmistakably to those willing to notice. The man with no name walks past the crying man, pretending not to notice.

The man who will not be named slips into a mass of people on their way to work. Their movements and intentions toward movement make an intricate pattern of gravity and emotional force the nameless man has come to understand and predict. He moves with them as if within a migratory herd of long duration as they pound the pavements, casting off one member after another at bus stops and subway entrances. He is aware of the unhealing carcinoma under one dark man's ear, a young woman's blackened eye, the bleeding forearm of an elderly Jew where the skin has been scrubbed raw. The man without a name smells the stink of fear that leaks from pores swaddled in clothing bought with a great deal of money and very little taste. The nameless man tastes the horror in the mouths of those who cannot speak it, yet speaks none of it himself.

He walks and walks with no destination in mind, with no name and its burden of past association to stop him.

"Bob!” The voice breaks through the back of his head. “Bob, is that you?"

The man who has no name turns and looks at the woman who has stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, her hands thrown up to her face as if in joy or grief.

"I thought I'd never see you again!” she cries, and runs toward him, throws her arms around him. He flinches, but allows her to do what she feels she must do. The woman suddenly removes her arms and steps back. “What's wrong?” she asks.

The nameless man does not think in terms of right or wrong and so says nothing.

"You act like you don't even know me."

The man without a name recognizes the fatigue in the woman's eyes, which had been there every time he saw her. “Mary,” he says, knowing that isn't the name of her secret heart—it is only the name she shares with others—but she has never shared her secret name with him so Mary is all he can use.

"Bob, you've been gone for months—is that all you have to say to me?"

He looks at her, wondering what he can possibly say to her, thinking he'd have to be a genius in order to know the right thing to say. “I wouldn't want to hurt you,” he finally begins, telling her the truth. “Believe me, I would give anything not to hurt you. We could have been married—I know that's what you wanted. Maybe I wanted it, too. Maybe I still want it. We could be married and I believe we would have had a successful marriage by the usual standards. No huge betrayals, no precipitous decline in affection, certainly none of the arguing that continues at a low burn for years before finally erupting into something more than painful and possibly dangerous. We would have had children and I'm sure we would have raised those children well."

Somehow he thinks saying those things will in some small degree be comforting. But he has always been stupid in relationships, and he is being stupid now.

"Then why did you leave?” She is screaming at him. He doesn't think he's ever seen her screaming before. “You just threw it all away! There's something wrong with you!"

"I'm not going to say that you're incorrect about that.” He looks down, unable to look directly into those angry eyes. “But if we had married, whom would you have married? In our relatively short time together, how much did you really learn about me? How much would you have known after three years? Five years? How much do I even understand myself? I would try to be honest with you, but am I going to tell you things I think will make you dislike me?"

"So how is that different from any other relationship?"

"I don't think it is. I don't know. Is my ‘self’ anything more than a random accumulation of brain cells? These things that are me, are they anything more than accidental?"

"Bob..."

"You call me that name, but does it identify me any more precisely than any other? It's a label my parents gave me, and the government finds convenient, like a label on a file so that you can find it among all the other files. But you can put anything you want into that file, can't you? If I married you I would have been Bob with wife and kids and a house at a specific address in an all too specific neighborhood, working at any of a number of possible occupations, with benefits. I would have been well-adjusted. I would have been happy. But I'm not at all sure it would have been right."

She stares at him for a long time. When she leaves without saying anything more, he feels embarrassed, but relieved.

The nameless man returns to his hotel room and sits in an overstuffed chair the texture of battered skin. He has moved this chair to face the window so that he might have a fresh breeze on his face. He replays his conversation with Mary. He feels genuinely sorry that he has hurt her but he is anxious about something much more important right now: what if she tells others where to find him?

What if she finds some way to get in touch with his parents?

He has never seriously considered the possibility before. Once she asked to meet his parents and he told her he hadn't spoken to them in years. Which was perfectly true. When she asked him about what had happened he told her it was too painful for him to talk about, but that someday they would. The first part of that statement had been basically true but even then he'd known he wouldn't be around long enough for the second part. He's already made a few too many mistakes with her, giving her his real first name and inadvertently revealing the state where he had been born (and where his parents, as far as he knows, still live). Those two items shouldn't be enough to track down his history but who knew how many other slips he might have made? That's what happened when you got close to someone. Perhaps she had just enough information, and perhaps she was angry enough, to contact his parents.

He tries to imagine the resulting conversation, the trading of stories, the bonding of these people who cannot fathom his odd behavior. Contemplating it makes him ill. He thinks about them visiting one another, trading pictures, hiring professional assistance. He knows he will need to leave this place sooner than planned, but perhaps there is still a way to buy himself more time.

He grabs the disposable cell phone he acquired when he first moved into this city and dials her cell number.

"Yes?"

"Mary, this is ... Robert. Bob."

"I thought you were done with me.” She's been crying. She's resentful. He hears cars, street sounds. She's obviously outside. He thinks he can detect panting, footsteps. She's walking somewhere. He thinks he's in terrible jeopardy here.

"I'm so sorry,” he says to her, pleading. “Obviously I'm not a well-adjusted person. And you've been wonderful to me."

"I don't ... don't deserve this,” she says and a sob escapes. “Wait. Wait,” she says. “I'm crossing ... wait."

A loud car horn. A muffled impact. A rattle, a rattle, distorted voices. The phone goes dead.

He stares at his own phone, drops it onto the bed. Where was he? What was he thinking? He feels light-headed, nauseated. He leans over, stretches out on the bed. Certainly she's all right. A near-miss. She just dropped the phone.

Suddenly desperate for fresh air, he stumbles from the bed to the window, prying it open with trembling fingers. He sticks his head out into the air of the alley, clutching the sides of the frame, sure that he will fall.

The nameless man looks down and sees the creature feeding off the garbage pile below. Some sort of goat or dog—hard to tell, it is so emaciated, probably ill. Large patches of its coat have fallen out. Something odd about its head. A horn, so it is a goat. But only one. And that one distorted, broken, oozing narrow rivulets of pus. It turns its head around and smiles up at him with broken teeth, a piece of a rat wedged in its mouth.

A true unicorn, he thinks, not knowing why, but knowing it is so. That's what they really look like. And now he knows Mary must certainly be dead. A vagrant wanders past the unicorn, neither apparently noticing the other. Mary is dead and he is at last forgotten, for now he knows his parents are dead, too. Because he is seeing unicorns the way they really are, raw and unglamorized. At last unknown, he has descended into the worlds of myth, of things unnamed and misnamed, of things unseen and things misunderstood. The grand consolation prize, he thinks, for anonymity.

When the unknown man goes out that evening it is only after reconsidering the events of the day until a certain sanity has been achieved. The delusion he had experienced was the direct result of the shock of Mary's accident, or presumed accident. Presumed death. He could make some calls and find out for sure, but he knows he will not.

An author whose fantasy novels he has been reading for years is giving a signing at a bookstore nearby. The author is there in support of his recent autobiography, which the nameless man has read. He has his copy with him, tucked under his arm. He has a number of questions about the book, most having to do with its authenticity. He isn't sure if he will risk asking them.

A drunk wanders out of a bar onto the sidewalk in front of him. The scruffy fat man turns, his sneer all the more disturbing because it is on a bull's head sitting lop-sided on his shoulders.

Minotaur, the unknown man thinks, throwing up his arms in alarm. The book skids across the sidewalk and rests against the Minotaur's left foot.

The Minotaur stares at the book dumbly, as if it is a category of object he has never seen before. He bends awkwardly, the weight of the great head threatening to pull him over. He clutches the book between his two palms, fingers too short to be of much use—and pulls it up to eye level, where he sniffs it, then licks it. Finally he shoves it into his mouth, apparently tasting it as his eyes roll around and copious amounts of saliva drip onto the sidewalk.

The Minotaur stares at the nameless man again, slack lips drooping into an avalanching frown. With an explosion of wind and saliva the Minotaur spits the book back at him. It slams into the nameless man's chest, and he hugs himself so it won't get away from him again. He examines his catch: the pages and cover are damp, but readable. When he raises his head the Minotaur is gone.

As the nameless man continues to the bookstore he wipes the cover and pages against his shirt until satisfied he can do no more. The book appears to have swollen to twice its original thickness.

A few doors down from the bookstore he pauses in front of a shop specializing in exotic fish and supplies, where a giant aquarium fills the front window. Disobeying the posted sign he taps the glass in an attempt to attract some fish. Almost instantly a cluster of fetus-like creatures swarms out from behind flowering vegetation, propelled by large, powerful tails. They gather in front of him, staring with partially-formed eyes. Their chest cavities are filled by some sort of complex, inefficient breathing organ. Their mouths open and close in painful-looking spasms as they struggle for air. Mermaids, he thinks, poor, pitiful mermaids. Unable to witness this for long, the unknown man turns away from the colony and heads into the bookstore.

The nameless man is surprised to see that no long lines wait for the fantasy writer's signature. In fact, other than a large man who might be the writer's bodyguard (or younger lover?), and a few bookstore clerk-looking types, the nameless man is the only person in the store. Suddenly anxious to finish his business, he walks up to the small table and plants the bundle of rustling pages in front of the startled writer.

The writer opens the book gingerly and examines a few pages. “You know, I used to love reading in the bath,” he says, as if that explains everything. He looks up and displays a vaguely bored smile. “Do you just want a signature, or would you like it personalized?"

"How personal could it be? I just met you. You don't even know my name."

The large man steps forward, but an impatient gesture from the writer stops him. He takes a step or two back, but the nameless man can tell he is ready for trouble.

The fantasy writer laughs out loud. “Good point.” Then he stops, looking slightly awkward, as if he's left his script in his other jacket. “Do you even want a signature?"

"Actually, I don't care for signatures very much. I do have a question or two, if you don't mind."

"I'll answer what I can."

"This book...” The nameless man touches the sloppy bundle on the table. It makes a soft rattle. “It purports to be your autobiography. Yet it reads just like one of your novels. It has suspense, rising and falling action, complications appearing just at the right points in the narrative. Real life isn't all that neat."

"I suppose you would have preferred that I fill it with descriptions of television shows watched, fast foods eaten, frequent trips to the bathroom, and long naps after too much drink?"

"Not really. I just don't understand how I'm supposed to believe that any of this is true."

The fantasy writer looks at him, considering. Finally he sighs and says, “I suppose we each have to answer that for ourselves. Writers are there to give experience shape, and that includes their autobiographies. The moment you write something down, you're changing it."

"The moment you name it,” the nameless man says.

"Pardon me?"

"The moment you name something you change what it was, what it was becoming. It was a living, evolving thing, and then you killed it by naming it."

The fantasy writer laughs, then looks at his bodyguard. “Listen to this guy!” Then, turning around he says, “So maybe I shouldn't have put my name on this book. If I hadn't put my name on it, people might find it more believable?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. But at least they'd be reading it without preconceptions. It might have more of a chance to be ... magical."

"So, do you write?"

The unknown man feels unaccountably anxious, reluctant to reply. Then he says, “A little. A diary, of sorts."

The fantasy writer turns the warped book around and offers the unknown man a pen. “Then you sign it. Personalized, please.” He laughs. “Say, ‘To my good friend.’ It's a lie, but perfect strangers ask me to put that down all the time."

Without hesitation the nameless man takes the pen, writes ‘To my only friend,’ and signs the complete name he was given at birth.

The fantasy writer turns the book around and puzzles over the scribbled handwriting. “Hey, I can't even read this!” he says, but the unknown man is already going through the door.

Outside it has grown dark, and all over this part of town lights are going on, individually and in groups, with a peculiar kind of rhythm that fascinates the unknown man, who actually begins to smile until his own light explodes inside him, and he feels himself pitching forward, a skyscraper containing thousands of souls in the last throes of demolition.

When he wakes up there are people leaning over him: a woman, the bodyguard, a man in uniform (postman? policeman?), and the fantasy writer, who is scribbling madly in a small bright red notebook. The unknown man wonders if he is about to become a fictional character.

And floating above the heads of these people are the angels: tiny rat-like creatures with oily, burnt leather wings, long square teeth and loopy grins. Several are blind—all have something wrong with their eyes. Now and then they bump into each other, and then punish themselves with their long fingernails, which they scrape against their cheeks over and over making frayed patches of blood.

"Your name,” the officer says. “What's your name, sir?"

The nameless man speaks, saying his name over and over again. But he can tell by their faces they do not understand.

Copyright © 2007 Steve Rasnic Tem

CREEPY UNKNOWN

Bad places are a staple of genre horror. Essentially, there are two types. Places already known to be domains of evil, visited only for purposes of investigation or exorcism by fools or heroes (Legend Of Hell House, Ghostbusters), and places where the forces of darkness lurk unsuspected yet soon to be encountered by protagonists (The Amityville Horror, The Grudge). The first category tends to rely on broadly theatrical effects, while the second delivers suspense with audiences forewarned about a supernatural menace that characters have yet to confront. Based on a novel by Kei Oishi, Japanese chiller Apartment 1303 belongs to the latter group. A malevolent spirit haunts a hotel condo. Female residents commit suicide after disturbing events, and several girls exit via the 13th floor balcony. Wholly responsible for the strange death of her abusive mother, the resentful ghost is deficient in redeeming qualities, using her medusa hairdo and brooding expressions to drive the heroine crazy. Director Ataru Oikawa astutely preserves a novelistic approach to exposition here and so, because uncanny imagery and moody atmosphere are more vital to cinematic frights than witty dialogue or memorable characters, the movie plays out its generic narrative with a second-hand checklist of impressionistic scares. This is not a classic but it passes the time.

Never to be confused with Lloyd Kaufman's tasteless and wholly redundant Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead, or Eric Lavaine's execrably retro camp and hardly watchable farce Poltergay (a French disco fantasy sitcom with ‘Village People’ stereotypes, mingling Beetlejuice silliness with Ghost style romanticism), Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is now available on digitally re-mastered 25th anniversary edition. Despite the influence of producer Steven Spielberg on this classic movie, it retains many peculiar characteristics found in the director's other works. From the sweaty chills and savage humour of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, to the childhood problems and domestic strife underpinning his underrated Invaders From Mars remake, and various sociopolitical anxieties in the pilot episode for TV series Taken, all these disturbing themes indicate that Hooper is one of the few auteurs capable of working on a Spielbergian project without losing his own distinctive vision, most evident here during the weirdly surreal goings-on affecting the Freelings’ household. Hooper takes Spielberg's spooky plot—inspired by Richard Matheson's Twilight Zone episode Little Girl Lost, and transforms it into one of the most nightmarish and shockingly visceral confrontations with death (the bathroom mirror shows a rotting face, the suburban garden ejects broken coffins) that fantasy-horror cinema has ever seen.

Of course, horrible people are considerably worse than terrifying places. An outgrowth of splatter movies, the cycle of ‘torture porn’ popularised by Saw, Devil's Rejects, Wolf Creek, Captivity, and Eli Roth's Hostel continues with that director's uneven sequel Hostel: Part II, which fields more varied action/horror influences (from The Most Dangerous Game and John Woo's Hard Target, to Countess Bathory and Caligula) than its predecessor. Brazenly fulfilling the misogynistic trend as the focus of cruelty shifts from young males to primarily female victims, while evoking a unique theme park concept like a perversely twisted Westworld vacation, Roth spins a rather tatty web of episodic suspense and theatrically staged torments. It does have its moments, but there's nothing here to equal the searing intensity of Takashi Miike's period shocker Imprint from television series Masters Of Horror.

Approaching a comparable ambushed prey scenario, but with the paranoia of surveillance culture added to the story, Nimród Antal's Vacancy is about a married couple (Kate Beckinsale, Luke Wilson) that are stranded by car trouble at an isolated motel and then terrorised by anonymous killers. More like one of those utterly contrived TV movies than genuinely horrific cinema, this Hollywood siege thriller is efficiently produced, but has no appealing characters and so few genre surprises (snuff videos? Oh, yawn ... ) that its boilerplate conspiracy is actually spoiler proof. Romanian chiller Ils (Them) explored similar themes but with a much greater sense of risk to its heroine, and possessed a more visually imaginative style.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the ultimate Transylvanian gothic extravaganza of Bram Stoker's Dracula is now fifteen years old (the deluxe edition DVD features a worthwhile Coppola commentary track). Fondly remembered for introducing Sadie Frost (who steals the show as the enslaved Lucy), and for discovering Monica Bellucci (one of the Count's blood-lusty brides), this remarkable visual feast of sumptuous designs and dazzling effects, autonomous shadows and erotic nightmares, frames the timeless romance between Gary Oldman's shape-shifting night stalker and spirited Londoner, Mina (Winona Ryder), dominating a veritable hotbed of horrors, including the inevitable AIDS allegory. Indie video productions like Dracula's Dirty Daughter (cheesy softcore antics with eternal blood-fiend and soul-taker ‘Vamparina'), and Mike Watt's unashamedly cheap, frequently gory action-horror A Feast Of Flesh (small town mercenaries are provoked into attacking the undead hookers of a local brothel) are remarkably lurid compared to erotic vampire thriller The Last Sect, which features minimal bloodletting, artful lesbian action without nudity, and David Carradine as Van Helsing. Here, love-bite sexuality is bashful compared to The Hunger, home study-bound detective work unfolds like Sherlock Holmes on a lazy Sunday evening, and we get only limited kung fu slayings to liven up the relaxed pacing, so the immortal matriarch's scheme against humanity never seems like the world-shaking crisis it's alleged to be.

Set in an alternative New Zealand, Glenn Standring's Perfect Creature is like a steampunk Blade Runner meets Underworld, with an elite brotherhood of priestly vampires protecting ‘flu plagued humans in Dickensian squalor. In the quest for better antivirals, a renegade geneticist turns nasty in the slums, and attacks the cop (Saffron Burrows) investigating Whitechapel style murders. The retro scenario fascinates, the SF-horror timeline intrigues, and there's much to admire in the widescreen detailing but, unfortunately, this feels like a comicbook adaptation that requires development to avoid the hazard of narrative clichés galore. As the flipside of Blade, it could have been a nocturnal SF thriller worthy of a similar franchise. Instead this is just another slapdash cross-genre oddity composed of elements that clash, and throw sparks that illuminate structural faults (why should the ban on medical research hinder engineering innovations?), when they really needed to fit together smoothly and seamlessly.

Ahead of Robert Zemeckis’ blockbuster Beowulf, comes Sturla Gunnarsson's unpoetic Beowulf & Grendel, with its sketchy characters and borderline fantasy trappings (only a single wrathful sea hag). Here, the ferocious monster of Norse legend is just an orphaned hulking wild-man grown used to spree-kill rampages and cave troll cannibalism. Gerard Butler is the brooding hero, Sarah Polley makes a feisty witch of Selma, but Stellan Skarsgård looks merely haggard or morose as the village elder. Although the rugged Icelandic scenery is always breathtaking, nothing of sufficient import or particular interest to genre fans happens until the final fifteen minutes. On the traditional fantasy spectrum, colour this as a wormy Conan, not fabulous Tolkien.

Copyright © 2007 Tony Lee

Even the walls of the house could not entirely stifle it. As soon as one came in through the main door the first snatches were perceptible. It slid under the internal doors and haunted the corridors, like a climbing plant that clings to empty space. It was everywhere, lurking in the corners. Seven days had passed, and even the night was no longer silent.

It was in Faustine's bedroom, next door to the studio, that the presence made itself felt most tangibly. While still very small, Faustine had learned to lull herself to sleep to her father's comings and goings in the neighbouring room, the noise of footsteps, the creaking of floorboards and the turned-down radio spinning a protective cocoon around her. Sometimes, when she concentrated, she could even make out the gliding movement of the pencil's lead over the paper. Papa preferred to work at night.

On the evenings when the studio remained closed it was from the living room, directly beneath her bedroom, that the music came to her, with the laughter of friends that Papa invited to stay late into the night. Faustine had learned, naturally, to relegate the noises to the background—at least when she did not strain her ears, with supreme curiosity, to catch the idiot laughter of adults transformed by alcohol into a gang of dirty children. The noises kept her company while she let herself slip into sleep. Absolute silence distressed her.

For a week she woke up and went to sleep to the sound of the same overworked guitars on the other side of the wall. On the first morning, it had woken her up with a start. Papa had his rituals while he was drawing, but turning the music right down in the early hours had never been one of them. Faustine knew that from experience. She had hidden under the sheltering bedclothes to await the end of the song—which was renewed as soon as it was finished, in a perfect cycle. There was nothing astonishing in that: Papa liked to put certain songs on a loop in order to work. He too could be intimidated by silence.

Mama had come knocking at the studio door: four closely-spaced raps, louder than was necessary. When Papa had opened it to her, their voices had drowned in the sonic mush. Even music allied itself with adults when it was a matter of protecting excessively curious childish ears. The door had closed again without Faustine having been able to catch a treasonous word on the wing—and the music had followed its perfectly circular trajectory. Hours, then days, went by.

Faustine had quickly become accustomed to it. By the second day she had ceased to find it astonishing. It was entirely natural to wake up to the vibrations off the bass line, which she perceived before even catching the voices of Mama and William in the kitchen. It was her first impression as she opened her eyes. Had it not been for the glances of annoyance they exchanged over the kitchen table at meal times, she would have forgotten that there had ever been a time before Papa's absence and the music in the studio. Mama did not even listen to the radio at breakfast. In those early hours, the sound of her own voice became repugnant to her. She was eager to cut her sentences short with mouthfuls of coffee, and would rather keep silent unless she was forced to answer questions. The train of her thoughts was undoubtedly her most agreeable companion.

How could they understand it, those who—unlike Faustine—did not have the privilege of sharing a wall in common with the studio? She alone was close enough to hear it properly. It is easy to grow weary of a song, when one stops at the surface.

Papa no longer left his studio. He took all his meals there, and if he came out occasionally in search of provisions it was doubtless at a time when he knew that he would not bump into anyone. Faustine did not remember having heard him leave the room. Day and night, shuffling footsteps testified to his presence on the other side of the wall—unless she was confusing them with the echo of the drumbeat?

For a week, that muffled voice had been that of the house. The mosaic woven by the guitars lived in the walls, spreading itself out in the recesses like the filaments of a spider's web. The bass imprinted its dull vibrations there until it had impregnated them. When Faustine had pressed her ear to her bedroom's decorative wallpaper, it had seemed to her that she felt a pulsation, as if the surface were animated by a life of its own. Since then, a little of that energy had infected her in her turn. Even when she went out, she carried it within her. On the road to school, that was what guided her steps. More than once, Faustine had been surprised to find herself drumming on her school desk, recognising the familiar rhythm thereafter.

They ended up getting used to one another; it was a mere matter of time. And Mama ended up prowling around the studio door on occasion, in the evening, in the hope that Papa would let her come in. And William lifted his eyes to the heavens when he came home from college to find the silence still vanquished. He grumbled, thinking of all the times when Mama had shouted at him for not turning the radio down in his room. Go figure the justice of grown-ups.

Faustine did not despair of penetrating the secrets of what was still, on the first day, no more than a vague drone. By straining her ears, she discerned the outline of a structure in the apparent chaos. It was at night, most of all, when the house fell silent, that the sounds revealed themselves to her. She learned to separate out subtle intonations or, better still, successive layers, and whatever she once unmasked remained definitely acquired. She soaked up sounds to the point of nausea, as if her stomach, filled up by a chocolate orgy, continued to demand its share of sugar: a hunger impossible to satisfy. There was something that required explanation.

That passage in which the song slowed down before bursting forth explosively ... Faustine would have give a great deal to hear that clearly. It teased her senses and her brain, by dint of keeping them in a state of tension: the torture of Tantalus readapted to her scale. It is difficult to appreciate music when a wall separates you from it. She still knew it only in fragmentary form, when its thread demanded nothing less than to be laid entirely bare.

On the seventh evening, rooted in front of the studio door, Faustine pushed audacity to the point of pressing her ear to the keyhole. The sound seemed clearer there, and closer than ever—within arm's reach, so to speak. There was no longer the thickness of a wall separating them, but a simple wooden panel—hardly anything to speak of, but still one barrier too many. The bass line's vibration had already reached her bones. One gesture would be enough to bring them together, so intimately that she had not dared imagine it.

The door swung open without any resistance, without even a creak of protest. To think that she had always believed it to be locked, as if it were a sanctuary!

Finally freed from its shackles, the vague sound unfurled, engulfing her with its clarity. It brought Faustine out in goose-pimples. She was now at the heart of things.

The studio seemed so tiny. Judging by the noise of footsteps coming through the wall, and the pattern they traced, she had imagined that it would be more spacious. Her only previous incursion into the room had taken place more than a year ago. Since then, a kind of superstitious dread had prevented her from going into it. The place was impregnated with an indefinable odour of paint and chemicals: an alchemist's lair, Faustine thought, undoubtedly possessed by something similar; it was a place where mysteries were created and penetrated.

Seated directly on the carpet, with his back to one of the walls, Papa did not appear to notice her intrusion. The source of the music, his CD player, was set at his feet. Faustine was sufficiently emboldened to take a step into the room, so that she might close the door behind her. It was a bad idea to let the notes spread out into the corridor; Mama would arrive within a minute to call loudly for silence.

With the exception of the one that Papa was facing, the studio walls were covered with postcards and film stills, pinned directly to the wallpaper: decoration worthy of a teenager's bedroom, not of the room where a family man earned his daily crust. Papa designed book covers; that was what Faustine wrote on the card on which her teacher asked her to write down her personal details at the beginning of each school year, under the heading ‘parent's profession'. The studio was reminiscent of William's bedroom, with its walls covered in football posters.

The fourth wall had been stripped in order to be plastered with as many drawings as space permitted. To judge by their perfect alignment, they had been arranged in this manner quite recently, in order that they might be taken in by a single glance from the spot occupied by Papa.

Faustine crept forwards like a mouse, obliged to zigzag between the dirty plates and empty beer- and soda-cans strewn upon the carpet. Excitement knotted her gut; if she placed herself right beside Papa, at the very source of the music, she would understand what she had been hearing for seven days. She would put her finger on its essence.

When she sat down next to her father, without a word, he gave her only the briefest glance. He obviously had not shaved since he had closed the door between himself and the world, not to mention changing his clothes. Between these four walls the notion of time took on an entirely different meaning. Apparently it had more than one.

The voices...

Faustine had always expected there to be only one voice. It was obvious now that she had overcome the last barrier, though, that she had been listening to two voices all along, without being able to tell them apart: two male voices, so similar in their texture that a wall was sufficient to efface their differences; two voices that alternated before joining together in subtle harmony.

The bass vibrations slowly insinuated themselves beneath her skin to blossom inside her. She felt so well, as if she had found her true place. Every now and again, the song would interrupt itself in order to begin anew: a slide, a burgeoning hum, a crescendo. Then one of the voices would pronounce the first words; everything would go smoothly.

But the voice that was raised first was her father's.

"I can't draw any more, Faustine. It's over."

Slightly embarrassed, she resisted the temptation to stare at him. It was difficult to believe that this was the father she had seen full of smiles while he added the final touch to a new drawing: the father who sometimes sang joyful tunes in the privacy of the studio, while he naively thought himself sheltered from indiscreet ears. To judge by his tone, she thought he was about to burst into tears. But what was the world coming to, if fathers dissolved in tears in front of their young daughters?

Faustine redirected her attention to the drawings. Her toes, like the fingers that clasped her knees, were trying to twitch in time to the rhythm, moved by an innate energy. She had not come in here to listen to a confession of impotence.

The wall was plastered with drawings, some of which overlapped for want of space. Faustine recognised some of them, but ... they were not the same. Altered. And not merely because she had seen them in other circumstances, to the sound of other music than this. All of them, without exception, had changed to varying degrees: effaced by blots or scribbles, or torn as if by invisible talons, eaten away by an acid that had spared their backgrounds.

There was a besieged and snowbound village; a pack of wolves with blood-reddened fangs; a sword embedded in a stone; a cloud of crows; a half-human, half-fox creature standing in a boat; a crocodile standing up on its hind legs. And, at the centre of the collage, lined up side by side: four dragons—as similar as drawings traced by the same hand could be—identical to a fifth dragon enthroned in the heart of the room, isolated on an easel.

"That one lasted a good twelve days,” Papa said. “The contagion got to them all, one by one. It all began with the zebra—do you remember the zebra? The one William wanted to hang up in his room? Completely erased in the space of three days. Imagine a skin disease that spreads like wildfire ... but one that attacks paintings. A disease that has no cure. Do you understand?"

"You can draw them again. I liked that one—the zebra."

"I've tried to restore the missing parts, but it does no good. The following day, everything has reverted to its former state. I can't draw any more, Faustine. There's nothing left for me to do."

Faustine only heard the end of the sentence, because at that precise moment the song reached what she had nicknamed the ‘roller-coaster passage'—the one that she had never quite been able to make out through her bedroom wall, asking herself night after night what was hidden in that sudden silence. But the cut-off was not quite as abrupt as she had always thought. The transition was too subtle for her to be able to perceive it until she found herself at the heart of things. The whole piece built up to that moment: the progressive slowing down; the resumption preparing for the explosion, like a wild beast bracing its muscles before leaping upon its prey; the same savagery following the same cool premeditation. Faustine saw herself momentarily at the top of the roller-coaster, anticipating the moment when her stomach would turn in the intoxication of the descent. Until she heard this song, she had not known that music was able to reproduce such a sensation.

It was necessary to concentrate to hear Papa over the music, and she had no desire to make any such effort now that she had heard it for the first time. If only Faustine could worm permission out of her parents to camp out in the studio for the whole of the following day, with that music, instead of going to school ... she had so much to discover, more than she had ever learned in a day spent on the school benches. It was there: true knowledge.

"The music,” Papa went on. “You must have wondered about it, no?"

Faustine pricked up her ears involuntarily. He had pronounced the key word.

"I've always drawn to music. Do you see all those drawings, on the wall? Every one of them was born of a song. Sometimes just in the details, although I've sometimes based an entire composition on a song—but never in so perfect a fashion as with that dragon."

This was true. Faustine's gaze had already lingered upon the dragons, entirely naturally. They were measuring one another as two creatures of the same species do when encountering one another for the first time. She thought she had made out a familiar gleam in the beast's eyes, doubtless because it seemed perfectly integrated with the musical passage. The combination of the dragons and the music, their juxtaposition, gave Faustine an impression of plenitude—at least so long as she made the effort to ignore the areas etched by the void, which ruined the perfection of the design.

"Every song has a story to tell, you know,” Papa went on. “Sometimes one accepts me into its confidence, letting me tell it in pictures. I drew that dragon—the first, the one on the easel—in a single session, in a state of grace. I've never known anything like it, and I'll never be able to repeat it. If I could just save one—that one, especially...

"I've tried to stand guard in the studio, day and night, hoping that the contagion would cease if I remained here watching them all. One sometimes gets funny ideas, eh? But it was no good. It was then that I decided to try to copy it. They aren't as good, the four others, don't you think? I drew them to the sound of the same song, though. It hasn't stopped cycling since."

Even from where she was sitting, at the far side of the room, Faustine had no difficulty in differentiating between the drawings, but she could not quite understand why. The four copies pinned to the wall had the contours, the colours and the textures of the original, down to the smallest details. The same proud bearing, the same positioning of the tail and the limbs, the same reflections in the complex mosaic of their scales—but the heart was no longer there. None of them truly resembled the song. None of them reproduced the spark of life that shone in the gaze of he original dragon. Their scales did not reflect the light with such precision. They could only simulate life, while the fifth possessed its essence.

"When it began, I had the impression that the contagion spread less rapidly once I had set the song on a continuous loop. It was just enough, sometimes, to give me false hope. It was only two hours after I finished the last when they began to crumble away—all four of them, with a common accord. They'd certainly taken a rise out of me, so to speak."

It was odd, though, that Papa had not shown her this drawing before. More than once he had erupted into Faustine's bedroom after her bed-time to show her his most recent work, as happy as only a man intoxicated by his own creativity can be. It was so very convenient, her room being so close to his studio. Then too, Mama did not give his drawings the same attention she once had: ten years as a teacher is sometimes enough to deform the most innocent gaze. And William had decided, since starting at the college, to relegate his father's drawings to the category of things associated with childhood, and hence detrimental and embarrassing—especially in front of his friends. Faustine alone still possessed an entirely virginal gaze.

"Is that really possible—a song in the shape of a dragon?"

Papa answered her with the smile that he gave her every time that Faustine tried to dismantle the workings of questions reserved for adults, as if to say: she understands things, my little girl.

"In a manner of speaking. Listen carefully ... the riff, for example. Do you hear the riff?"

"What's that—the reef?"

By way of reply, Papa set himself to reproduce on the ground, with the tip of his index finger, the motif woven by the guitars. It was a rough approximation, but sufficient to allow Faustine to identify the designated element.

"There it is, the riff—do you hear it? It has always evoked the image of a dragon in me. Imagine a dragon with a body as supple as a serpent's, which might undulate to the rhythm. And the progression ... I don't know how to explain it ... You've noticed that the song starts very slowly, to the sound of the bass line, and that the tension mounts progressively? I don't know about you, but I find that it speaks of an immense worm in the process of waking up."

Faustine understood, now. The music assumed the contours of a dragon, right down to its colour. She did not know yet how sounds could be translated into colours, but if this song had one, it was definitely the blood-red of its scales. Perhaps, too, because the sleeve of the CD, placed next to the player, was itself almost uniformly red?

And that was not all. There was that impression of strength, of pure energy, when the song attained its apotheosis at the end of the third minute. That was the spark in the dragon's eyes, the muscles that played behind its scaly carapace, the wings on the point of unfurling. And the stormy sky in the background. The slowness of the opening, so very restrained, suggested the step of an enormous beast making the ground shake.

"Tell me, that funny noise you can hear at the beginning..."

"Yes, Faustine?"

She hesitated. How could she translate into words the subtle skimming of cymbals that she had only just noticed? For want of the right terms, she found herself reduced to reproducing it with the tips of her fingers on the wall. Papa shook his head, visibly intrigued.

"I think one might call it the sound of talons rubbing against rocks.” Papa pointed a finger at the easel, at the rocky ground that formed a casket around the beast's taloned feet: the ground already corroded by the promise of impending obliteration. Although the dragon was still virtually intact, the scenery was beginning to crumble into fragments.

It all seemed so clear now. The pulsation that breathed music into her life was the beating of an enormous heart. So much still remained to be discovered in this arrangement of sounds, so many successive layers to strip away. Every day, more of it would be revealed to her, provided that she learned to listen.

"You know, Faustine, I've been thinking quite a lot about this all week. I've begun to ask myself whether I might have used up my capital. It may be the case that people like me only receive their gift for a fixed period, their mission being to get the best out of it. What do you think? Might it really be taken back? Because if that's the case ... how can I put it...?” Papa searched for words with the air of a good pupil caught in flagrante delicto, having no ready answer to a teacher's question. “...I've never been able to do anything else."

Faustine did not reply. Since when did adults allow themselves to speak of confidential matters like that in her presence? Parents usually kept that kind of subject for whispering behind closed doors. Faustine was not sure that she had any desire to play the role of an outlet for secrets—not if that implied seeing her father throw in the towel. Cowardice, in a grown-up, was too embarrassing to confront.

Anyway, that wasn't the important thing.

If he hadn't found the solution, that was doubtless because he hadn't really looked for it. In those sounds, however, in the architecture of those voices, there was the promise of a rebirth: an amulet against the void.

Faustine slept peacefully that night, cradled by the domesticated song, curled up in the hollow of its belly. A gentle warmth had taken over her body. She felt so well. Now, when the music slid under the door like a ray of light, it was a token of connivance; they already knew one another, and were learning to know one another better. Faustine could hear through walls now.

The silence took her by surprise the following evening, as did its unexpected arrival. It interrupted the song just as Faustine pricked up her ears to catch the renewal of the roller-coaster passage in all its splendour. It was as if a horse were brutally held back in its course, unbalanced to the point of falling. The silence spread throughout the house like the contents of an inverted bottle: a thick silence that clogged the ears.

Faustine took refuge in a corner of her room, hands plastered over her ears, and began to sing in a low voice to dispel the vertigo that was almost a drowning sensation. Silence had become alien to her body. It was unnatural, to be so close to the studio wall and to hear nothing therein but her father's footsteps echoing in the emptiness. It wasn't normal.

An hour passed, dragging its seconds beyond the bounds of tolerability. To bring Faustine out of her torpor required another distinct sound: that of the studio door opening and closing again. It had become sufficiently incongruous for her to understand immediately what it implied.

Faustine half-opened the door to her room and slid a timid glance into the corridor. A ray of light cut through the shadows like an accusatory arrow. Papa was abandoning his retreat. His creased clothes were the ones he had been wearing the previous evening, which he had doubtless not changed throughout the time the song had accompanied him. His face was as firm as a mask, if a mask could have contrived to grow several days’ worth of facial hair.

Papa met Faustine's eyes and shook his head negatively before turning his back on her. The signal passed a sentence of death on the dragons. And perhaps on himself, in the longer term. Since when did adults have the right to admit defeat?

At nightfall, the music still had not been reawakened. Faustine slipped into the studio. Under the gaze of the agonised creatures pinned to the walls, she filched the CD that was in the player. Scrupulously, she put it back in its box before carrying her booty to her room. The next step was to get into William's den without anyone seeing or knowing. As chance would have it, big brother was spending the night at a friend's house. In the battlefield that served as his lair, he would undoubtedly not notice the disappearance of his portable CD player-at least, she hoped so, given that William was inclined suddenly to discover the absence of a magazine forgotten four days earlier, under a pile of clothes. It was an eternal subject of arguments between him and mother. All she had to do was be careful not to disturb his disorder.

That night, Faustine slept with the earphones securely plugged into her ears, preventing the intrusion of silence. Within the shelter of the bedclothes, the two voices now whispered for her alone, with an entirely new intimacy. Everything was in order again. She had the fugitive impression, as she dropped off to sleep, of the fingertip touch of another reality, soon out of range. Removed from the studio walls, the song became different, but it was still too soon to get fully to grips with it.

The following morning, her decision was made. The day was as long as the anticipation-charged nights preceding the revelation of Easter eggs or Christmas presents. She could not put the plan into action until the whole house was asleep, when even the adults had gone to bed.

It was lucky that Faustine's room was the only one next to the studio; no one would hear her go in. No one would go along the corridor to see the light gleaming beneath the studio door. If Mama and William had one useful quality, it was their total lack of unpredictability.

An abandoned warehouse: that was what the room resembled now. The kind of place that one could easily imagine infested with rats and populated by spiders. Faustine did not remember having felt so cold there during her previous visit. Behind the mingled perfumes of paint and chemicals was an insistent reek of mouldiness. The only vestiges of her father's presence were the dirty plates and empty cans that he had not taken the trouble to remove.

Faustine was prepared for the necessity of meeting the gaze of the creatures pinned to the wall, but almost nothing remained of it. Their degeneration had accelerated in a spectacular fashion since the music had ceased. All that remained of the cloud of crows was a swarm of grey stains scattered in a near-virginal background. What had been a sword embedded in a stone, now deprived of shape, bore no resemblance to anything identifiable. Even the wallpaper seemed duller than it had before, by virtue of some strange effect of mimesis.

The music had reclaimed its rights—but for Faustine alone, equipped with her precious earphones. She could not run the risk of being heard.

Choice inevitably took her towards one of the dragons, and not only because they were the only ones conserving some semblance of shape, although she could not do battle with the original dragon just yet. For her apprenticeship, it was necessary to grapple with one of the copies—but time was pressing; she only had until dawn.

There was an arrangement, a movement. If the notes were gathering in such a fashion, it could not be the fruit of chance. It was necessary for Faustine to seize the collective movement and let it imprint its vibrations upon her hand—to let it run over her skin, and breathe in the dragon there.

She began with the area where, previously, the beast's tail had coiled around its massive body. She had only to let herself be guided by the riff that bristled the crest surmounting the scaly carapace: a single stroke of the outstretched hand, quite simply; learning the textures and the colours before conceding to superior strength. It wasn't difficult to trace the scales in Crayola, to fight the void with its own weapons.

A stroke of the crayon responded to every note, a colour to every nuance; Faustine allowed herself to be entirely, euphorically caught up by the slide towards the sonorous chorus. Nothing is more intoxicating than the impression of authority that is born when one senses life flowing between one's fingers—more privilege than power.

The moment eventually came when she understood that the music was so securely rooted within her that the earphones were unnecessary; not until then was she sufficiently polished to attack the original drawing. Time was pressing, and this opportunity would be the first and the last. She finally understood how to give physical form to the song.

Her fingers adapted themselves to the rhythm of the music, and even when the piece finished the transition no longer interrupted her. Faustine watched out for the notes that dictated her every gesture, her every impulse, and the two voices, each in their turn, took command of her hands. They imprinted a pulsation upon her that ran through her to the tips of her fingers, as far as the point of the crayon—and Faustine knew then what it felt like to be lifted by a dragon's wings, with the wind whistling in one's ears and the minuscule world far below.

The roller-coaster would be definitive. It was that, more than anything else, which dictated the dragon's posture. Every time she heard it, at that precise moment, Faustine felt her heart stop beating. Time was suspended before the great dive into empty space, three sublime and terrifying seconds to tie one's guts in knots. That was the image of a dragon cocking and drawing back its head, preparing to spit fire—and the explosion of guitars that followed was a jet of flames and sparks. If she succeeded in capturing that movement, down to the colour of the flames, them Faustine would have won her victory. The burning breath of the dragon brushed her ears in a roar of overstretched guitars, and swept away everything in its path.

And she knew that she was capable, in her own fashion, of taming the void.

Throughout the following day, Faustine dozed on her school desk. The teacher gave her lines to copy by way of punishment, but she couldn't care less. While she blackened pages following the cadence of an imaginary drum kit in the lunch hour, her thoughts were wandering elsewhere. To her father's studio, to be precise, and that to which she had given birth the previous night. A dragon, whole but hybrid, in paint and Crayola, which mocked the others in their decrepitude. It was still intact when Faustine had quit the studio shortly before dawn. If it had not regressed while she was at school, then she would have won her victory, against oblivion and against the void.

The two voices played hide-and-seek in the innermost recesses of her brain, in the background but just present enough to surprise her with the turn of a phrase that suddenly seemed to reveal them. She would gladly have blackened the pages of her exercise book with their words, if only she understood their language and its barbaric orthography. Faustine did not despair of mastering them one day; for the moment, it was still necessary to listen to them exchanging their dark secrets in an unknown code.

It was Papa who opened the door of the house to her on her return. Faustine understood immediately, by his expression, that something was worrying him. If he had discovered the surprise, he did not exactly seem to be overjoyed by it. She had hoped so much that he would be glad.

He waited for Faustine to take off her satchel and coat before seizing her by the shoulders to force her to look him in the eyes.

"I'd be glad, Faustine, if you didn't go into my studio again."

"But I've left my crayons there. Can I go back to look for them?"

"I'll get them myself. I'm asking you not to cross that threshold again, understand?"

His voice and expression assumed the hardness of a sharp blade, more appropriate to accompany a slap or a reprimand: the kind of pressure adults preferred to exert on those smaller than themselves, by virtue of which a simple prohibition took on the force of law. Grown-ups obtained their victories thus, simply by raising their voices.

Faustine bit her lower lip, caught between resignation and deception. It would, however, be necessary for her to cross that threshold. How else would she know whether the graft had taken?

Papa came back to find her at the kitchen table, where she was eating her tea. He set down in front of her the box of crayons she had forgotten the night before. In his other hand, he displayed the key to the studio, while holding it at a respectable distance from Faustine, as if tempting her to try to snatch it: the gesture that William used when he shook magazines bought with his pocket money under his little sister's nose, which he hid away to prevent her from reading them. “It's clearly understood, Faustine? You won't go into the studio again."

"Tell me, Papa—has the dragon been erased?"

He didn't reply, but she read in his eyes that it was not gone. That was exactly what had made him angry. The victory was Faustine's, not his. She knew then that he was capable of going into the studio to destroy every trace of the dragon. Who knew whether he had already burned it, while she was in class? Against the void, Faustine had been able to find weapons, but how could a dragon be defended against its own creator?

Everyone knows that once midnight has passed, apprehension never entirely vanishes no matter how safe the circumstances. What if someone should come along the corridor to discover her bedroom light on? Faustine kept the switch of her bedside lamp within arm's length, ready to extinguish it at the first warning sign. Fear lent a delightful electrical sensation to her epidermis; it was not, fundamentally, the most disagreeable of stimulants. Discretion was second nature to her.

Papa had thrown in the towel? Well, in that case her turn had come to pick it up again. It was necessary that the music should find another foundation through which to express itself. It still had not given its all.

A song belonged to everyone and no one at the same time, but there was doubtless only a handful of people in the world capable of hearing it properly. Should the fancy take hold of Papa to go into the studio to destroy the dragon, Faustine had decided not to get in the way—not now that she had understood the real nature of the music. She had other priorities now.

In her father's territory, she had only been able to reproduce his own version of it. Another setting was required—her bedroom, her own point of anchorage—in order that it might finally dictate its true message ... and the flow of energy ran through her fingers, guided her hand with even greater facility than before. The time had come to give birth to a new work.

Papa had not understood. This song did not have the shape of a dragon at all. It undulated like a serpent, and the piano notes that pierced the riff here and there, so discreet that one could scarcely make them out, shone like the moon reflected from jet-black scales. The two voices were declining a litany of sibilant hisses, according to a scheme known only to themselves.

Not a dragon, to be sure, but a serpent. It would soon be embodied on the sheet of paper that Faustine was filling with broad strokes of Crayola. And this was one that Papa would not have: a serpent in the moonlight, united with the earth by some secret bond.

Faustine had already completed four similar ones, which she kept hidden under her bed. She would not have allowed them to be taken away from her, for anything in the world.

Copyright © 2007 Mélanie Fazi

Jesus Was Here

Every year, from the first few days of December, certain individuals begin loitering in certain parts of central Tokyo, lining up in the busy thoroughfares around the station exits. Dour-faced men and women holding long poles with loudspeakers on the top, broadcasting the same monotone, recorded message. Are they Emperor-worshipping right-wingers? Is it a political campaign? No—they're some of Japan's one-percent-of-the-population Christians, and the repeated words echoing through the streets are Iyesus Kuristo (Jesus Christ) and Kuristo Shuukyo (Christianity).

Japan has had a long and troubled relationship with Christianity. First brought to these shores by Francis Xavier and other missionaries in the mid-16th Century, it was at first a tolerated curiosity, then outlawed by the military government under General Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Japanese at that time were particularly creative in the ways they persecuted members of the foreign faith. Crucified, burned alive, tied in sacks and thrown into the sea, dunked in the boiling water of volcanic hot springs, or—as in the case of Saint Magdalene of Nagasaki—suffocated to death while suspended upside down in a pit of offal on a gibbet; the nation's warlords gave the Spanish Inquisition a serious run for their money.

In some parts of the country, people suspected of being Christian were forced to trample over a painting of Christ placed on the floor, to prove or disprove their loyalty. Strangely enough, history repeated itself in the months after the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, when some members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult who'd been arrested were forced by police officers to trample over a photograph of their guru, Shoko Asahara.

Thanks to this atmosphere of persecution, southern Japan's followers of Christ went underground, conducting secret rituals in hidden rooms and isolated open spaces. They became known as the Hidden Christians (Kakure Kirishitan), and over the centuries their worship continued but the meanings of the Latin prayers themselves were lost. Ceremonies known as Kerendo (credo), Sarube Jina (Salve Regina), and Konchirisan (Act of Contrition) were passed down from generation to generation, until none of the acolytes knew what the prayers actually meant. The worship continued until the mid-1900s, and the death of the last surviving Kakure Kirishitan.

Perhaps General Hideyoshi would have shown more respect if he'd known that when it came to Christ, Japan has a very odd claim to fame. Forget the intrigues of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the The Da Vinci Code, Jesus actually escaped crucifixion and travelled across Siberia to Japan, changed his name, settled down, had three daughters, and lived until the ripe age of a hundred and six—or at least this is the legend in the remote northern village of Shingomura.

The story goes that in the 1940s a Shinto priest named Kiyomaru Takeuchi visited the shrines of Shingomura and came across a document that purported to be Christ's last will and testament. It claimed that the Messiah had escaped crucifixion through his brother (known in Japanese as Isukiri) taking his place on the cross. Jesus had travelled incognito from the Middle East across Russia and Siberia, landing in Japan during the reign of the eleventh Emperor, Suinin. Settling in Herai village (now called Shingomura), Christ lived a long and apparently comfortable life tending crops under the name of Daitenku Taro Jurai. In the grounds of the Village of Christ Legend Museum, the Messiah's burial mound is marked by a plaque and a modest wooden cross, and beside it, an identical grave holding his Japanese wife, Miyuko.

So if we haven't been living an enormous lie for the last two thousand years, whose grave is it? The museum remains frustratingly unhelpful on alternative theories, simply claiming that Jesus is buried here and leaving it at that. The evidence of middle eastern connections are local place names said to be derived from ancient Hebrew, families that have the Star of David as their crest, and a traditional dance called the Nanyado Yara, its lyrics neither Japanese or Hebrew but phonemes with meanings lost in the mist of time. The original documents found by Takeuchi were allegedly (and conveniently) destroyed in the war, and archeologists have confirmed that a crypt exists below the two graves, but applications to excavate have been denied. Whatever the truth, the grave site rests at the centre of a web of mysteries. Shingomura is in Aomori prefecture the northernmost prefecture of the Japanese mainland, a melancholy and sparsely populated area that's dotted with sacred sites, curious alignments of stone ‘pyramids’ and archeological anomalies.

Yes, we've got Jesus, and don't tell Indiana Jones but we're also hiding the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Several years ago, a retired teacher turned writer named Masanori Takane published a book, examining ancient folk legends that Mount Tsurugi on the southern island of Shikoku is the resting place of the aforementioned Ark. The legends say that the Japanese are descended from one of the ten lost tribes that fled the Holy Land, bringing the Ark with them. What is certain is that Japanese town festivals (Matsuri) usually feature a palanquin called an Omikoshi being carried through the streets. This Omikoshi, with its four poles, gold plating and figurines of mythical creatures on top, does indeed resemble the Ark as described in the Bible. In a sequel written by Takane's son, Mitsunori, Alexander the Great also faked his own death and travelled to Japan, where he was responsible for recovering the Ark from Palestine and hiding it in a ceremonial chamber buried beneath Mount Tsurugi. Can we see a trend starting here? The grave of Elvis behind the local noodle shop? Was that lady in a kimono shuffling discreetly through the streets of Kyoto really Princess Diana with dyed black hair?

The average Japanese lives in blissful ignorance of these curiosities buried in their homeland. For the majority their sole contact with Christianity will be putting on a wedding dress and having a blond, blue-eyed priest (often a moonlighting language teacher) administer a marriage service, a custom sandwiched between a Shinto christening and a Buddhist funeral.

Christianity remains one of those quaint and peculiar ideas that gaikokujin (foreigners) get all worked up about. The Christmas period itself is just a cycle of cute but empty rituals, illuminated trees outside shopping malls the size of cathedrals, effigies of Colonel Sanders swapping their cream suits for Father Christmas costumes, young men taking their girlfriends out for a gourmet dinner, usually with a gift of expensive jewellery and a trip to the nearest Love Hotel thrown in.

Now this might bring forth snorts of derisive laughter, but who's got it wrong? The nation's Shinto beliefs are close to the ideas of ancient paganism—and the year-end orgy of self-indulgence recalls the celebratory eating, drinking and gift-giving of the Babylonian Feast of the Son of Isis and the Roman Saturnalia. Who are the real hypocrites?

Whatever the answer, one urban legend remains a constant source of amusement to us festive expatriates. At some unspecified year after World War Two, when Christmas was still a novel and mysterious concept, the story goes that one department store got rather confused on what it was all about. They put a fully dressed Santa Claus manikin in the window display—standing up, arms outstretched, and its back against a plain wooden cross.

Copyright © 2007 John Paul Catton

In the long and terrible summer of Ivy's eleventh year, the summer she spent smiling with her mouth closed because she was still losing her baby teeth (she suffered from a socially lethal combination of being both too small and too smart for her age), the summer she itched and sweated through a cast on her arm acquired not a week after school ended (she broke it falling off the porch at her Nana's house), the summer her sister Holly went missing, the summer something called Ash-Mouth crept into Ivy's nightmares and crouched in the shadows of her waking life like one of the furies in her Children's Encyclopedia of Greek Myths, that same summer, a black and white kitten turned up in her backyard with a dead lizard in its mouth and a feral glint in its eyes. Ivy's mother pitched a fit when she caught her daughter feeding it dinner scraps, saying she could barely make ends meet as it was without worrying about paying for vet bills and cat food, but then Holly disappeared and nothing more was said about what Ivy was and wasn't allowed to do.

Ivy's Nana suggested a name for it, Chiaroscuro, shortened to Kiki because no one could pronounce or remember it and anyway, Nana said, it was a special word: not ordinary, an artists’ word, which made it an enchanted word, a word about the contrast between black and white, light and dark. Nobody, Nana said, nobody was all one or all the other, even if they tried to tell you different, and the most magical place of all was the place where light met dark; but that was a great secret.

Why? Why is that a secret? Ivy, ever-inquisitive, had to know.

Nana said, I'll tell you when you're older, but she never did, and the years passed and Kiki turned into a cat, grew old and died, and Ash-Mouth faded into the epoch of childhood dread, and Holly never came home. Twenty-five years later, Ivy, easing her car to the curb in front of Nana's little white bungalow, boxing herself between a red pickup trick with a Jesus fish on the bumper and a bright yellow VW Beetle, found herself looking at her hands, looking at the Beetle in her rearview window, looking at everything she could think of to look at that was not Nana's house, and not knowing why.

It was dusk, and the eaves did not seem to extend far enough to cast such long dark shadows, and yet they did; and why did the dark sit in squat dense patches round the shrubbery? Ivy hurried up the walkway and rapped on Nana's door, telling herself it was only the chill of late autumn that made her anxious to get inside. The door swung in and Nana peered round it, blinking. Her healthy color was gone, her face drawn and pale, her hair oily and yellow-looking.

Ivy, she's saying someone is following her from room to room. I can't talk to her. Can you go see?

"Oh!” said Nana. “Was it today you were coming?” and opened up the door a little more so Ivy could step past her into the gloom of the narrow hallway. It was just as cold inside as out, and it smelled, though Ivy couldn't say what it reminded her of. The sounds of a cheering studio audience drifted down joylessly from the television in the living room. “Did you drive all the way here in one day? What about your job?"

"I'm visiting Mom, remember?” Ivy leaned to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. “And I'm on sabbatical, anyway. I told you that.” She saw that the word meant nothing to her grandmother. “I'm not doing any teaching right now, just research."

"That's right. I remember,” and Nana nodded, even though she didn't remember. “I know it's not good how things come and go. Your mother gets so angry at me when it happens! She's very irritable, isn't she?"

"I don't know,” Ivy said. “She said you'd been having some trouble."

"I saw you on that television program!” Nana exclaimed. “The one with all the scientists. I couldn't understand a thing you folks were talking about, except that it was something to do with outer space."

She was dissembling. “I'm a scientist now, too, Nana. I'm glad you got to see it. I can get you a tape of it if you want. But let's talk about why I'm here."

"You'll want some coffee,” Nana said.

Ivy followed her into the kitchen, where an ancient percolator wheezed and hissed on the stove. The room itself was cheerless, the bare bulb in the ceiling inadequate to dispel the gloom. “It's awfully cold in here, Nana. You're not having trouble with the heating, are you?"

"It's always something.” Nana shook her head as she filled two mugs and passed one to Ivy. “The man came to look at it and he said he didn't see a problem."

"Well, do you want me to put another light bulb in here for you?” Ivy took one sip of her coffee and set it down; it tasted old, and her mouth was gritty with grounds.

"I'm not helpless. I know your mother made it sound that way, but I'm not. She never believes a word I say.” Nana leaned in closer. “I know she comes here, looking for me. She gets in at night and she prowls the walls and the ceiling. And sometimes I can hear her in the pipes."

"Who? Who's getting in here?"

Nana whispered it. “Ash-Mouth."

It had been Holly's idea.

"I don't want to,” Ivy had said.

"Scaredy-cat.” Holly's eyes got narrow and mean. “Chickenshit.” They were sitting across from one another in a booth at the Mini-Burger, eating corndogs.

"I heard that,” Big Ray said from behind the counter. “You don't be talking to your little sister that way.” Big Ray was always scolding you like you were one of his own, even though his kids had all been grown up forever. He'd run the Mini-Burger for as long as the girls had been alive, maybe the whole forty years it had been open. When the owner had died a couple of summers back, his son had come down from Atlanta and tried to ‘update’ the menu. According to Ray, “We run that Yankee on back out of town so fast he didn't know what hit him."

"Atlanta ain't Yankee,” Holly had whispered to Ivy when Big Ray told them this story.

"It is to Big Ray,” Ivy had whispered back. “Don't say ain't."

Just then, Holly was ignoring Big Ray. “When school starts back, I'm telling everyone you're scared of everything."

That was how it had started, and so it was all Holly's fault, and she ought to leave, that was what she ought to do; it was Holly's fault and nobody else's that she hadn't come out of the culvert after scaring Ivy the way she did, scaring her screaming out onto the flat dead-grass lots of Milltown. Behind her, the big concrete drainage pipe cut into the hillside, and above it ran a disused railway track that had once carried passengers, then freight, then nothing at all. The opening of the pipe looked ragged and wounded with branches from above hanging down over it. All around her, the vacant lots where kids went to drink and get high on weekends were littered with crushed beer cans, cigarette butts, the occasional spent condom. Ivy kicked at an empty vodka bottle. It was hot, her arm itched under her cast, and she wanted to go home.

All Holly's fault. If we find Ash-Mouth, maybe she won't take Nana away.

Ash-Mouth came for you when you died, according to Nana. She knew this because when she was a little girl, her cousin had died of polio, and she had seen Ash-Mouth steal into his room on the night he died. Nana had described Ash-Mouth to them. She had bone-colored hair, and a sludgy-looking smoke trailed from her fingertips. Her hair gave off sparks. In place of a heart, she had a piece of coal burning at the center of her chest, and her teeth—which were very sharp—were made up of diamonds brought up from the core of the earth, where monsters still lived. Her mouth itself was the yawning maw of a grave; her breath stunk like a crematorium: burning flesh, cold damp ashes, and death.

I bet there's no such thing, Holly had whispered in Ivy's ear the first time Nana told them about Ash-Mouth, but Ivy knew better, because she could close her eyes and picture her just the way Nana described her. So it was easy enough for Holly to talk about looking for Ash-Mouth when she only half-believed in it, if that much. She had been like that all summer: bossy and insufferable, a word Ivy had learned in the school spelling bee. Holly was insufferable because Ivy was what her parents called precocious, and due to that precociousness she was going to skip right over the sixth grade and move up to the junior high with Holly. Holly wasn't happy with this arrangement. Their parents argued about it, but their parents argued about everything. Ivy had stood in the doorway of the kitchen watching them fight, and they were so angry at one another they never even noticed her there.

Ivy's father said it wasn't good for either one of the girls. “What are we supposed to do, then?” their mother had said. “Ivy's bored to tears, and it's not like this town has a private school, even if we could afford one.” That wasn't strictly true; there was a Christian school operating out of Bethel Holiness Church where about fifty kids (all of them white) made up the entire student body, but Ivy didn't think that was the kind of private education her mother meant. She went on, “We're not going to handicap Ivy just to save Holly's feelings."

Ivy was ashamed to be the source of so much trouble between her parents and her sister. She resolved then that she would try to do worse in school, but when the time came the test or the homework assignment was always so babyish she couldn't pretend it wasn't effortless. Anyway, Ivy planned to be an astronaut when she grew up. She didn't have that kind of time to waste, not even when the kids called her that name, Poison Ivy, not even when Brandi Henderson, who was big and mean, grabbed her in the bathroom and said Ivy better let her copy off her test paper or she'd stick her head in the toilet. Ivy kept her tests carefully covered after that, and avoided the bathroom at all costs, even if it meant eating and drinking nothing at all from the time she woke up in the morning until she got home from school.

At the junior high, at least, she wouldn't have Brandi to worry about. With any luck, Brandi would never make it past sixth grade.

"Hey,” someone said behind her, and she jumped, but it was only Greg, a boy who lived over in Milltown, a boy who was a grade ahead of Holly in school. Holly had a crush on him.

"Hey,” Greg said again, “what are you doing?"

He was wearing a white muscle shirt and blue shorts that hung down to his knees. Grownups didn't like Greg. Ivy and Holly's father had told them to stay away from Milltown altogether—because it was full of drunks and addicts and poor white trash—and Greg in particular—because his brother Rusty was mixed up with some Mexican drug dealers and his father had done time in prison. But their father had moved out of the house at the beginning of the summer, a betrayal so acute that nothing he said could hold sway over them any longer.

"Where's your sister?” Greg asked.

"I don't know,” Ivy said. “She went in there,” pointing at the culvert.

"What'd she do that for?"

"We were playing a game,” Ivy said, vague. “I think she's trying to scare me. She's hiding somewhere. Playing a trick on me.” Ivy hoped that this would turn out to be true.

Greg grinned. “We should play one back at her."

"We shouldn't,” Ivy said. “We should tell her to get on out of there right now."

Nana had gotten sick at the beginning of the summer, right after Ivy broke her arm, and since then she had been in and out of the hospital for something the girls’ mother wouldn't talk to them about. She was the last of their grandparents; indeed, the only one they'd ever known. People said her husband, their grandfather, had just up and disappeared one day, but Nana had told Holly and Ivy that wasn't true. What had happened was that Nana woke up in the morning and realized he hadn't come to bed the night before. She went downstairs to look for him and all she found was a pile of ashes in the seat of his favorite leather chair, a singed spot on the arm, and one shoe.

"He burned himself up?” Ivy said in amazement.

It looked like he had just caught on fire, but how could that happen without anything else burning up too? Nana cleaned up what she could. It was only one of many strange things that happened to Nana in her lifetime, and she hadn't liked him much by then anyway, so she took it in her stride. But for the rest of her life she kept half-expecting that he'd come through the door, and she was scared people would say she'd done away with him. Years later she read a book about other, similar cases, and when she told Holly and Ivy the story she showed them a picture from the book: spontaneous human combustion, the caption read, and below it a hard-to-make-out photo that the text beneath explained was a shot of the unblemished kitchen where a woman had gone up in flames before the shocked eyes of her family.

Nana told them other stories, too, frightening, extraordinary stories. When I was a little girl, Nana said, I didn't realize the stories in books were made up. I thought they were true.

That had confused Ivy. All stories in books were made up, but that didn't mean they weren't true.

I have always seen ghosts hovering round. It took me half my life to learn to hold my tongue until I was sure whatever I was looking at was bound to this earth.

Nana's family had been very religious, and had tried to cast the devil out of her when she was a little girl. Later on she spent time in a mental hospital (we don't call them insane asylums, the girls’ mother would tell them, her mouth tight, when she overheard them talking about it, and anyway, Mother's not to be telling you stories like that). Nana said they had drilled electricity right into her brain; Ivy pictured her with all her hair standing on end and lightning shooting out of her ears.

They'll do that to you if they find out how weird you are, Holly had said to her.

So she wouldn't tell Greg what she had seen in the culvert before she lost Holly, down in the earth in the deep dark.

"It's dangerous in there, you know,” Greg said. “Kids go in and they don't come out the other side. Happens all the time."

"It does?"

He laughed. “Naw, it ain't even that long. I been through it a million times. I bet Holly's on the other side, waiting to scare you."

"No,” said Ivy, “she didn't go out the other end."

"Come on,” Greg said. “I'll go with you. There's nothing to be scared of, you'll see."

The only thing worse than going back in there was waiting while somebody else went in and maybe didn't come out the other side. She didn't know what she'd do if that happened, so she followed Greg.

Just inside the culvert, spray-painted names and obscenities and declarations of 4-ever love covered the concrete. At other times of year a wash ran down the middle but the summer had been so dry that the tips of grasses in the vacant lots and the leaves hanging down over the opening were yellowing.

Once they passed out of the sunshine, the air was cold, like it wasn't almost a hundred degrees that day. Ivy looked back toward the opening, at the summer day framed there, and the houses of Milltown beyond.

"You scared about going to the middle school this fall?” Greg said, and Ivy was grateful for the distraction. She shrugged and then realized that in the dark he couldn't tell she'd done so. “No,” she lied.

"My sister Amy's going into seventh grade. You know her?"

Ivy thought: pictured a dark-haired girl in too-tight jeans, smoking. “I think so."

"I'll tell Amy to look out for you. She'll do what I tell her. Now in a minute we'll start to see the light at the other end. See, I bet Holly ran out the other side. She's probably sitting at your house right now, laughing at you."

"No,” said Ivy, and here was where the ground turned suddenly downward, just like last time, leading them deeper into the earth, not out the other side. Here was where Holly had let go of her hand and grown quiet, then sidled up to her and shrieked right in her ear, panicking Ivy, and then there was something with them in the dark.

I dare you. That was what Holly had said, to get her to go into the tunnel. I dare you to go in there and call for Ash-Mouth. She lives in places like that, down in the dark, Nana said so.

"That's weird,” Greg said, “it doesn't go downhill here.” But it did. Ivy wanted to say I told you so, but that sounded bratty, people were always telling her she sounded bratty when she was only pointing out what she knew to be true.

As they descended the air was damp, not like above, and the sound of their breathing was matched by the drip of water on stone. Ivy put one hand out to feel her way through the blackness by touching the concrete wall, and snatched it back as her fingertips skidded across something slimy. Greg's voice came back, thin and insubstantial, as if he were disappearing just like Holly. “We'll see the other end. Just a few seconds now."

"Wait up,” she said. She heard a noise and then Greg held a lighter above his head. He was a few feet in front of her, and in the flickering light he looked like a figure out of a horror movie, all eyes and cheekbones and teeth, and his face empty of color.

"Don't!” she cried, and ran to him, smacking his arm. Whatever had been in the dark with her and Holly before could probably find them with or without a light, but there was no need to expose themselves. The lighter clattered away and with the noise she realized the path beneath them was no longer dirt, but made of stone.

"Goddammit!” Greg said. “Now what are we gonna do?"

"I thought you knew your way."

"We should go back how we came,” Greg said. “There must be a fork in the tunnel. I never heard of that before, but that must be it."

"Well,” said Ivy, “you said you'd been down here a million times. Can't something change on the million-and-first visit?"

"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Like all the sudden the road starts going in a direction it never went before."

"Why not?” Ivy said. “Change is constant.” That's what her father had said to her while she sat and watched him packing, putting shirts and socks and the ties she and Holly had given him over a lifetime of Christmases into a big hard-shelled suitcase. She had wished that he would cry or show some sort of emotion, but his eyes just stayed red and he said lots of things about how sometimes people needed to be apart from one another. And he said, Don't think of it as something ending, Ivy; it's just change. Things change. One thing you can be sure of in life, change is constant. But it's nothing to be afraid of.

He had been wrong, of course. Everything that mattered had changed.

"Roads don't change on their own,” Greg said. “Not roads, or drainage pipes. Not solid things, just out of nowhere. We have to go back."

But they found they were turned around, and then they were arguing about which way would take them out and which would lead them deeper in, and Greg said, “Dammit, what did you make me drop my lighter for?” Ivy felt like she'd been spinning round and round in her father's office chair. She remembered reading somewhere about avalanches, how people died trying to dig their way out because they couldn't tell which way was up and only worked themselves deeper into the snow. She opened her mouth to warn Greg about that, and when she did the dark rushed in.

"Let's go in the living room,” Nana said. “The news is fixing to come on. There's none of them left I know anymore,” like the network anchormen were her neighbors. “You can stay for dinner if you like but I don't each much. I just heat up a can of soup."

"A can of soup is fine for me, Nana."

"Well, I only eat half the can at a time. I don't know if half a can is enough for you."

"I'm not really that hungry. I'm sure it will be all right."

The living room was as dismal as the kitchen had been, dark and chilly and, like the hallway, smelling faintly of something unpleasant that she couldn't identify. When had Nana's house become so inhospitable? It felt like the home of someone who could no longer manage to look after it, and maybe the coffee had been days old. Maybe Nana wasn't managing to clean or bathe or look after herself. Maybe Ivy's mother was right.

"Listen,” she said. “Nana, listen to me. You've got to help me out here. Mama's talking like you need to go to a home and I've got to tell her something to reassure her. You have to stop calling her up and scaring her like you do."

Nana, sitting in a big armchair that made her look small and helpless, was blinking very rapidly. “Well,” she said, and put down the cup of coffee she had brought in with her. “Well,” she said again. “Well. I don't know how to answer that. Some of my group is coming over tonight. They don't treat me like a crazy person. They treat me the way family is supposed to. Maybe you ought not to stay here with them coming over."

Ivy kept her face expressionless when Nana talked about her group. The past few years she had attracted a flaky little assembly of lost souls, spiritual drifters who gathered round her after exhausting the extreme outposts of mainstream religions and the obscure secrets of the occult: they came trailing the detritus of Charismatic Christianity and Jewish mysticism, abandoning Sufi dervishes and flying yogis, pagan priestesses and Gnostic apologists. There was something pitiful in their easy acquiescence to belief—about which they were not choosy; any belief at all, it seemed, would do, and when one was used up they simply transferred their fervor to another. Faith was not a problem for them. Finding a suitable focus for it was the challenge, and in Nana they seemed to have done so at last. Ivy had seen them in a photograph Nana showed her once, and she would not have believed it if it had been described to her; an odder assortment of people she had never seen gathered together. They were clustered in front of the blooming dogwood in Nana's backyard: a small shrunken orange-haired woman with a hump on her back, twin albino boys, a small neat gentleman in a turban, a twenty-ish young man improbably clad in a vintage suit several generations older than he was.

Ivy took a deep breath. “Nana, I'm a scientist. I believe in things I can measure and observe, or at least extrapolate from my observations.” She saw Nana blink at the word extrapolate and barreled on. “What I'm telling you is that I don't believe in any of these things. I don't believe in Ash-Mouth. It's just a story you made up when we were little. I don't know what happened to Holly, I can't even imagine, but I know Mama got it in her head that you had something to do with it and that's just crazy. I'm trying to help you out here. I'm on your side."

"You leave your mother to me,” Nana said. “I can handle her just fine."

Ivy didn't know what she was going to say next until it was out of her mouth. “Nana,” she said, “what really happened to my grandfather?"

"I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone, except for you girls, of course,” Ivy's mother said. Ivy was sixteen and they were driving home from Boston, where she had been offered a full tuition scholarship to the aeronautics program at MIT. They were on the flat and uneventful stretch of highway between Charlotte and Greenville, and had been on the road for too many hours. “When he walked out the door like he did my heart broke, even though I was already grown up and living away from home by then."

Over the years, as Ivy's father had retreated from their lives (making a new life with a woman named Regina, whom Ivy loyally despised), her mother had increasingly turned to her as a confidante. It was a forced and uncomfortable intimacy, one-sided and painful.

"I hated her for a long time after that,” Ivy's mother went on. “I wished she had died instead, and left him behind."

Ivy watched the billboard and exit signs slipping past, counted license plates from faraway states, prepared to suggest that they stop at a Waffle House where perhaps over runny eggs and lukewarm hash browns her mother's emotional revelations would be inhibited.

"She never even acted like she cared he was gone. What did she ever tell you about all that?"

Ivy was startled, like she'd been caught daydreaming in class. “What?"

"Ivy, you heard me."

"That he burned up.” The words were out before she could stop them. She hoped that somehow her mother would mishear.

"He burned up?"

"Well..."

"That he burned up? My God, just when I think she can't surprise me anymore she goes and does it again."

"Don't tell her I said so,” Ivy pleaded, but her mother was too angry to listen.

"She might as well have killed him.” Her mother was rummaging in her purse for cigarettes and weaving a little as she did so. “She destroyed him before he left. I'm surprised he was able to get away. You're old enough to hear this now,” but Ivy did not think she was, did not think she would ever be old enough to hear these sorrows and hatreds churned up like this. “She has no capacity for empathy. She's the most self-centered person I've ever met in my life.” She retrieved her cigarettes and righted the car. “I won't let her rot away and die, because she's my mother, but that's just duty. And God, she's so overbearing. Do you know she insisted on naming you two?” She glared at Ivy, as though suddenly blaming her. “Honestly, Holly and Ivy. Such a ridiculous name for a set of sisters. Would it have been better or worse if you'd been twins? I don't know why I let her do it. She said you needed special names. So manipulative. Just like the old witch she wants everyone to believe she is."

Ivy thought about her friend Karen's mother, who was very sweet unless she was drunk. Sometimes, she thought, it would be easier to have a drunk for a mother, because then at least you could draw a definite line between the two states.

"You could always call me by my middle name,” she suggested.

"Don't be ridiculous,” her mother said, and they made the rest of the trip home in silence. That night Ivy heard her, for the first time in ages, moving about in Holly's room. For a few years after Holly's disappearance she spent a lot of time in there; sometimes she slept in Holly's bed. Ivy wondered how her mother would manage being all alone in the house once she moved a thousand miles away. The following day she announced that she really hadn't liked the campus at MIT, and even accounting for the tuition scholarship, she'd save money by living at home and commuting someplace local. Her mother agreed distantly, like Ivy was a long way off on the telephone, in a country far away.

Nana said, “I told you what happened to him. He just went away."

"You said he burned up."

"What?"

"When we were little. You said he had burned up. You showed us a picture."

"Of him burning?"

Ivy bit back an exasperated noise. “Not him. Someone else."

"Now, why would I do something like that? I always did say he smoked too much. I don't know. Maybe he did leave, or maybe he did burn up. I can't remember anymore."

Someone knocked at the front door. “That'll be Xerxes from my group, he's always early,” Nana said. “Come in, Xerxes!"

"You shouldn't leave your front door unlocked like that."

Nana said, “It's not what's outside that I'm worried about."

That day in the culvert, when the neighbors had heard her screaming, this time louder and longer than the first so they realized it wasn't just kids playing games any longer, they thought at first that she had been attacked, because sometimes people did things like that, snatched little children and dragged them into places like the culvert and hurt them in the dark. When she was able to stop screaming she didn't mention Greg, because any way she tried to tell the story it came out wrong, and she was afraid he'd be blamed for whatever they imagined had happened to her—and to Holly—on that day.

Because they wouldn't have believed anything she told them; when people came into the tunnel to find her there, they didn't get lost. They didn't find it winding and twisting, making forks where it ought not to be, leading them into the center of the earth. Things just didn't change like that. Greg was right.

Some men from the sheriff's department, and her parents, had questioned her over and over again, and it always ended with her breaking down in tears; one of the deputies suggested that Holly had, in fact, run away, because there were no signs of what they called “foul play.” Ivy saw the deputies exchanging looks with one another when her mother started shouting at them, asking what kind of policeman thought a twelve-year-old girl just up and ran off like that? Ivy knew that sometimes they did; she had seen television shows where troubled young kids ran away to big cities and got taken in by people who turned them into drug addicts and worse, but she wanted to tell the deputies that Holly wasn't like that, she was just a normal kid who didn't have any reason to run off.

Ivy told herself it had happened just like everyone said; her imagination had gotten the better of her, and if she thought about it too much she'd end up like her Nana, locked up somewhere with electricity shot into her brain. She would not tell anyone about the nightmares that did not dissipate at dawn but followed her throughout the day; that sometimes she had to shut her eyes to keep from seeing things lurking at the edge of her vision. It was a small price to pay for having escaped the madness that took Nana when she was young. Ivy threw herself into her schoolwork, and found that facts and figures anchored her to an earth that threatened to unbind her from its laws and logics.

She went to Greg's house once, partway through the school year. She had heard a rumor from a kid at school that he'd run off, too, but nobody had ever connected his disappearance with Holly's that day; maybe his parents had never even reported him missing, and someone else said no, he'd gone to live with his grandparents in Calhoun Falls. Ivy rang the doorbell and Greg's mother answered, still wearing a bathrobe and slippers even though it was four o'clock in the afternoon. She looked like an old woman, and reeked of alcohol. Ivy had no idea why she had gone there; she had not prepared herself for what she would do or say (she did not even know what to say to her own mother), and so she whispered, “I'm sorry, I have the wrong house,” and ran away and told herself she would not think of it again.

"Come in, Xerxes!” Nana said again.

But there was no response, and no further knocking. Ivy went to the door herself. The front porch was empty, just dead leaves skittering across it in a gust of wind.

Nana seemed agitated when Ivy returned to the living room. She suggested dinner, and asked Ivy to go to the kitchen with her to heat the soup.

They ate in the living room, bowls on their laps, the television still flickering in the corner with the volume low. Nana was talking too much, about her group, about the past. “That summer,” she said. “I was so sick. I don't even think I knew what had happened to Holly until I got better in the fall."

"What was wrong with you? Mama wouldn't tell us what you had."

Nana shook her head. “They didn't know. The doctors found all kinds of things wrong with me, just like I told them, but they couldn't figure out what was causing any of it. And then I got better."

"Holly was looking for Ash-Mouth,” Ivy said. “She said we could find her and make sure she didn't try to take you away with her. I don't even think she believed that. I sure did. I was scared to death that day. But Nana, Ash-Mouth was just a story. You know that. I bet a house this old makes a lot of settling noises at night. That's what you're hearing."

Nana said, “Remember when I told you when you were older, I'd explain what was secret about the place where light met dark?"

"I think so."

"Here it is,” Nana said. “Angels live in the light and demons in the dark. But what about the in-between, the places that are neither, or the space between the end of the light and the beginning of the dark?"

In the long silence that followed Ivy thought she heard, ever so faintly, the sound of someone whispering: then she realized it was only voices from the television.

Nana said, “The world's full of places like that. You can't hide from them forever. Even I can't. You should go now. You can't do anything for me. My group will be here soon and they'll sit with me and I promise I won't try to talk to your mother about it anymore."

Nana died the following year—presumably in peace, though Ivy could not shake the image of Ash-Mouth leaning over her frightened grandmother to suck the breath from her lungs, like the old wives’ tales about cats and babies. She had not seen her Nana again since the night she'd tried to persuade her that Ash-Mouth did not exist, but Nana had stopped calling her mother and frightening her, and that was the important thing. Nana's ‘group’ came for her funeral but kept to themselves; it had been Xerxes, the young man in the old suit, who found her.

Nana's funeral fell on a flawless spring day, with a sky so blue it broke Ivy's heart. Afterwards they all retired to Nana's house, her group included, where they ate and reminisced and Ivy and her mother began making plans to meet back in a few weeks to sort through Nana's things. Everyone remarked on how sunny and light the house seemed, and the funeral had been as nice a one as anybody could remember. Ivy left them to wander from room to room, but nowhere in evidence was the odor that had suffused Nana's house the previous year; it had come to her that night only as she was leaving, rising up like nausea, the source of the smell that she had not been able, until that moment, to name: it was the redolence of cold damp ashes.

Copyright © 2007 Lynda E. Rucker

SHAMANS AND SHITMEISTERS

I had a bit of a run-in recently with my friend Jonathan Romney, the film critic, about his review of Eastern Promises in Screen International: “David Cronenberg once again displays the sign of a true auteur—someone who can take seemingly uncharacteristic material and make it entirely his own.” However, later he also writes: “The film can be seen as a follow-up of sorts to screenwriter Steve Knight's Dirty Pretty Things.” In that case, I asked, isn't Steve Knight the true author? Or, if not, doesn't the latter quote contradict, or at least seriously inhibit, the auteur theory, at least in this case?

Jonathan replied by saying his point was that Cronenberg's sensibility, approach, touch, however you define it, makes Eastern Promises look very much of a piece with his last film, and with many of those before that ... and ultimately it's the director who decides what ends up on the screen.

Which is exactly what I have thought for many a long year now: that the auteur theory (or ‘Un Film de Michael Bay', if you will) is essentially nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with who is in control.

How can the ‘possessory’ title be otherwise, if the director continues to have the power to fire and replace the writer, tell them what to write, reinterpret and rewrite their work, and, often, resist even their creative presence in the process?

What irks me even more is the way our cultural pundits regularly and pathetically reinforce this obvious injustice, following the studio-created lie like so many sheep. Empire, SFX, Newsnight Review, tabloids and broadsheets alike, all discuss a film invariably as if it is the megaphone-wielder's brainchild, completely ignoring the contribution of the poor writer who might have sweated over it literally for decades (or sometimes back-slapping the wrong writer; Tom Stoppard after all was only the hack re-writer of Shakespeare in Love, but the only one the twerps had heard of).

So what gives? What's behind the histrionic hagiography of The Director? Where does the mystique come from? Is it because they hobnob with actors? Because they're there on a low loader in sandstorms and sometimes shag the leading lady? Granted, it's a more romantic life than being hunched goggle-eyed at your laptop at 4am tearing your hair out to answer impossible notes, but does a director work harder? No way. Do they have more talent than screenwriters? Don't make me shit myself laughing.

If I'm less than besotted by the cult of celebrity directors (nowadays meaning all directors), let me at least point out my reasons. I've worked with a few. Not one of them gave me a Road to Damascus moment, and not one of them had a gift which made me shield my eyes or fall on my knees in amazement. Most, to their credit, approached the job without waiting for the clouds to part and give them the lightning bolt of inspiration. To them, like most of us grunts, work is work (that's why they call it Work).

When I had a script with Penny Marshall (Awakenings, A League of Their Own, Big) she was at the pinnacle of her game and had made the transition from top sitcom actress (Laverne and Shirley) to top female director. Unfortunately being Hollywood Royalty meant she was inevitably surrounded by sycophants who hung on her every word. (I had to hang on her every word: that Brooklyn accent was impenetrable and I had to have a de-brief with her script people afterwards, hoping one of us had understood what she meant.) I liked her, she was very funny and razor-sharp, but occasionally she let her assistant cut up her food for her. Literally. Finally, after six or seven drafts all you want is for your director to be decisive, and that's often the one thing big directors are not. Because they don't need to be. They're at the top of their tree: why make that decision if the decision might be wrong? Once, Sony was so desperate for her to direct Sondheim's musical Into the Woods they organised a reading with Steve Martin, Danny De Vito and Robin Williams at her house. Still she didn't do it, and didn't do my script either. Indecision prevailed.

By contrast, I worked on a book adaptation project with William (The Exorcist) Friedkin, who is a force to be reckoned with, to put it mildly. A Touretter in draw-string pants, he's not above extending a script meeting all the way to the urinals and back, and did, often. Hurricane Billy put me through the wringer, turning me into Barton Fink in a LA hotel room for three months, and I'd like to say the finished film (The Guardian) was worth it, but it wasn't. Every day I'd deliver fifteen pages to this genius/madman and every day there'd be a million reasons they were wrong. I had some kind of nervous breakdown, feeling I never wanted to touch a computer keyboard again. For real. No joke.

There again Ken Russell, contrary to expectations perhaps, was an utter sweetie. He was perhaps past his bête noir days when he directed Gothic in 1986, but he was effusively excited about the script and certainly didn't butcher it (many might say better if he had). The one thing he did was delete my opening and closing scenes featuring Mary Shelley as an old woman on her deathbed. My idea was to put the film in a kind of parenthesis, saying the story was the subjective (and therefore unreliable) memory of Mary reliving the birth of Frankenstein and the events of 1816. Ken didn't want that, I think because he wanted it to be Ken Russell's fantasy, not Mary Shelley's. And so it was. I'd written it on spec in a dingy flat in Stoke Newington all on my ownsome, but finally it became ‘A Ken Russell Film’ forever.

Bright young turk Marcus Adams (Long Time Dead) directed my British horror film Octane, which, inevitably, became another ‘film by'. The concept was a woman with her twelve-year-old daughter stuck on the eternal loop of the m4, discovering that a tribe of vampires are posing as the emergency services, living off car crash victims. Marcus took it on. Then we heard he had problems. Does the daughter have to be twelve? Does it have to be the m4? And finally, does it have to be vampires?

As you might glean from the above, often when you work with directors it is change for change's sake, or, as my writer friends and I call it: “Pissing on the Post.” The purpose here is not a quest for deeper meaning, it is for the director to make the film theirs. Not better—just theirs.

For example, I have a feature in development at BBC Films. The producer recently attracted the attention of an up-and-coming European director who's had one or two art-house hits. I was excited to come to meet this wunderkind, but at the meeting it became increasingly clear to me he wanted to make a totally different film than the one I'd written. Mine was a subtle Henry James-style English psychological ghost story. He talked about magic mushrooms and Aleister Crowley, kept getting my character's name wrong, and never even took my script out of his rucksack. After a few days’ troubled sleep I bit the bullet, had to tell the truth, picked up the phone to the producer and said “I'm really sorry but I can't work with this guy, his ideas are incompatible to mine, and they take the project in completely the wrong direction.” The producer, to his credit, said: “Well, we commissioned this because we wanted to work with you.” As a result, hot young European was out of the picture, on his way home. We don't have a director yet, but at least we don't have the wrong director.

Maybe I'm learning something in my old age. Maybe, more to the point—and not before time—so are producers.

Copyright © 2007 Stephen Volk

Douglas had just finished shaving when it first happened. It was a Tuesday morning. Early. Ordinary. Gayle was stumbling around in the semi-darkness behind him. He was a morning person, she wasn't. He caught her reflection in the mirror. She wore only a beige slip. She was in her early fifties, her face puffy and naked, her hair spectacularly unregulated, and yet his heart quickened at the sight of her. He smiled, revealing a last dot of foam hiding in a dimple. He smoothed it off with a finger. A fraction of a second later his reflection did the same. He frowned and again it took a heartbeat, maybe two, for the face in the mirror to catch up.

"Gayle,” he said.

"Where are my tights?"

"Did you see that?"

She was behind him, her hand cool on his shoulder. “I can't see anything without my glasses."

"My face."

"Oh, it's not so bad. All things considered."

"I mean, my reflection..."

She moved away from him. “I have no idea what you are talking about. I can't find my tights. Have you cut yourself shaving?"

"What? No..."

"Are you wearing your contacts?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you need new ones. You should make an appointment. No, I'll make you an appointment. You'll only forget.” She was halfway down the stairs. “Do you want toast or cereal?"

"Toast,” Douglas said. His reflection said the same thing at the same time, which he found reassuring.

On Saturday morning he played squash with Richard. He was on the point of losing the second game and was chasing down an evil lob to his backhand when the ball and Richard, who had claimed the ‘T’ in textbook fashion and was waiting for the kill, both stuttered then froze for a second, maybe two. Douglas was momentarily aware of his heartbeat and the exaggerated sound of his breathing as his shoes squeaked on the wooden flooring. His racquet continued its movement towards where he believed the ball to be heading before it become becalmed in still air. Naturally he completed his shot too soon and when the laws of physics kicked in again the ball dropped lamely over his racquet, rebounded off the back wall and hit him on the left thigh.

"Jesus, Douglas. That was poor, even for you."

"Didn't you see that, Richard? Didn't you feel anything?"

Richard regarded him quizzically. “I think the expression you are looking for is four-love. My serve."

He held his hand out. Douglas tossed him the ball, watching its flight carefully. He saw that Richard wasn't even sweating. The bastard. “Seriously..."

"No excuses. I want to get this whitewash completed before our time runs out."

He was serving already. Douglas’ forehand reply limped into the tin.

"You could at least try,” Richard said, turning and preparing to serve again.

Douglas didn't win another point.

After the game they drank orange juice in the club bar. Richard looked slim and tanned and younger than he had any right to, Douglas thought. Gayle once said that he resembled his namesake, Mr Gere. She had a dreamy, faraway look on her face at the time that Douglas didn't appreciate.

Richard talked. Douglas was usually good at pretending to listen but today he was distracted and he felt his façade of interest crumble.

Richard finally stopped in mid-flow, leant forward and said, “Douglas? Are you all right man?"

"You're asking about me? My goodness."

"What?"

"I'm fine."

"You're as white as a sheet."

Douglas hesitated. Who else could he tell? Nominally, Richard was his best friend. In reality this meant nothing. The only person he loved, needed, would ever need, was Gayle. Which meant that sometimes she was the last person he could talk to. Richard on the other hand ... he didn't care at all what Richard thought of him.

He told him about the incident in front of the shaving mirror and what had happened on court a little earlier.

Richard nodded and tried to look thoughtful. “It could be a tumour,” he said.

"Well, thanks."

"That or The Matrix was, in fact, a documentary."

"The Matrix?"

Richard sighed and adopted a heavily patronising tone that he thought Douglas found amusing. He was wrong. “It was a popular motion picture, Douglas. I'm astonished it escaped your notice."

"I'm only four years older than you."

"Hard to believe, isn't it? I take it you've heard of Keanu Reeves?"

Douglas said nothing. The only reason he'd heard of Richard Gere was because Gayle tended to drool over him.

Richard sighed again then précised the plot of The Matrix and its sequels.

"I must be missing the point,” Douglas said.

"No shit,” Richard said. Douglas looked blank. Richard said, “Don't worry about it. I think we can safely assume that reality isn't fracturing. Something up with your eyes, old boy, that's all. You're at that age, aren't you? It's not a big deal. I don't know what you're making such a fuss about."

"Hardly a fuss, Richard. I just thought I'd mention it."

"I suppose in a world as serene and perfect as yours you notice the tiny flaws. How is Gayle?"

"Still beautiful. Have you heard from the twins?"

Richard angled his face towards the bar. His voice was dry. “Since last week? No. It's been six years, after all."

Douglas nodded. He and Richard had worked for the same engineering firm for the best part of a decade. Richard left to form a new company with a senior colleague. The venture bombed after eighteen months, leaving Richard at the brink of bankruptcy. His wife, with the money, the lifestyle gone, no longer tolerated his affairs and left taking their twin daughters with her. Contact was fitful, then nonexistent. Richard's tendency towards being an arrogant prick meant that none of his former colleagues kept in touch. Except Douglas. They had remained friends in spite of Richard's bitterness and jealousy and the fact that they didn't actually like each other.

But Richard preferred not be reminded of his failure as a father and husband. Douglas asked after his ex-family every time they met; solicitously, as a friend would.

Douglas said, “She's a cold one, that Serena."

"Yes,” Richard said. Something in his voice made Douglas look at him more closely. Richard's expression was almost comically bereft, and Douglas realised he was close to tears. “Douglas, I've got to tell you something."

Douglas stood. Richard was displaying genuine emotion. Was on the point of unloading it onto Douglas. Who was appalled. This wasn't part of the contract. “Richard, look ... the time. I've got to go. Now. I'm sorry."

Richard stood as well. Douglas stiffened. People were watching. Richard said, “Please..."

Douglas thought, shit, shit, shit. He said, “The time. God, didn't realise.” He shot Richard a stupid, sideways grin. “It's Gayle.” He said her name twice more in a sing-song voice, all the time backing towards the door.

Richard watched him, his hands tucked into the waistband of his shorts, his expression bewildered and hurt.

As Douglas drove home a thunderhead formed with alarming speed in the east. It had been a benign April day but by the time he pulled into the drive of his detached house the sky was pewter-coloured and swollen. Thunder was rumbling like the hunger pangs of a wild animal. Rain snapped out of the low sky and instantly became all embracing. Douglas stepped out his BMW and the force of the water hitting his scalp and shoulders cowed him, held his breath in abeyance as he scuttled crab-like to the door. He flung it open, shouted, “Jesus Christ,” as he crossed the threshold.

"What?” Gayle said, the living room door banging behind her, her face creased with impatience, or concern, or both.

Douglas was still hunched, his hands bunched over his head. He realised suddenly that his hair was dry, as was his shirt, his face. He glanced through the open front door. The sun was shining. The air was still and blue.

"What on earth is wrong, Douglas?” Impatience was winning now. Understandably, perhaps.

He straightened. “Nothing. Just a pain, that's all. I'm fine now."

Her voice softened. “What sort of pain?"

He leant towards her, let her arms take him, pressed a smile into her hair and skin. “Old war wound, I reckon. Sorry I shouted."

"Silly old bear,” she said. “Is it your head? Did you get your eyes checked?"

As long as she was squeezed against him everything was fine. “Too old for squash, that's all."

She stepped back from him. “Did Richard beat you again?"

"Narrowly."

"How is he?"

"Fantastic. You know Richard."

Gayle wandered towards the kitchen. Douglas followed. “I haven't seen him for ages."

"He's such a busy man. It's a shame."

"Did you give him my love?"

"As always."

Gayle made him a cup of strong tea.

He looked out of the window. “Had any rain?"

"What?” Gayle said.

"I thought it clouded over earlier."

"Hardly. It's as clear as a bell. Thought we could get out into the garden later.” She put a hand on his brow. “If you're up to it."

"I'm fine."

"Do you want me to cancel tonight?"

Tonight, Douglas thought. Shit. Dinner party. Four of Gayle's old teacher friends. She'd retired four years earlier. Missed it every day, she said. “Cancel? God, no. Can't wait.” Gayle rewarded the lie with a sweet smile that made his heart skip.

The evening passed without incident. The last of the guests left a little before one.

"You look tired,” Douglas said. “Go to bed. I'll clear up."

"You are a sweetheart,” Gayle said, kissing his cheek. “Clarissa is always telling me how lucky I am."

"Such a perceptive woman."

Gayle hesitated in the doorway, appraising him. She wore a raspberry-coloured woollen dress and her hair was down. She looked so beautiful Douglas ached. “Did you have a good time? You seemed distracted."

No more than usual, Douglas thought. The irony was that he was popular with Gayle's friends. They considered him a thoughtful host and an excellent listener. They found him reflective and intelligent. In reality he barely heard a word they spoke. He had no interest in their lives or opinions. He had trained himself to smile or chuckle at the appropriate time. If he spoke at all it was merely to encourage or flatter. It was enough. It kept Gayle happy and that was the point of it all. For over thirty years every ounce of his charm and charisma and talent had been focused on her happiness. On being the husband she wanted, needed. He had worked hard at a job he didn't particularly enjoy, genuflected to men he despised, to provide for her materially. He was no longer aware of his own needs. They were there somewhere, he supposed, circling deep and distant. It didn't matter. “It was, as ever, a triumph. Your cooking just gets better and better, I swear it does."

Gayle's smile deepened. Then her eyes left his and fixed on a spot above his head. The smile shrank, her expression emptied.

"Gayle?"

Her face was white and waxy. Her mouth fell open, shaped as though to scream, although no sound came out.

"Gayle?” he said again. His voice was shrill, bird-like. He tried to move towards her but a hand, several hands, pinned him in place. They were made of metal, it seemed, and invisible.

Now her face was deeply lined, aging visibly, shrinking in on itself. Douglas watched it implode. The raspberry dress emptied, fluttered to the floor. Dust settled on it.

The hands released him. He fell to his knees. The knowledge that this couldn't be real didn't help at all. His screams were as thin and reedy as a child's. He longed for unconsciousness. Then something huge struck him in the small of the back and the floor rushed up to meet him, granting his wish.

Douglas woke to the sound of music. The radio was on. Classic FM. It wasn't tuned properly but he was pretty sure it was something by Bach. His face was gummed to the floor. He freed it, straightened, wincing at the shaft of pain between his shoulder blades. He turned the radio off and glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten past three. He walked to the doorway. No dress lay on the floor, no dust, no body parts. No trace of Gayle at all, apart from her scent and Douglas could smell that anywhere, at any time.

It seemed to take an eternity to reach the top of the stairs. Gayle was asleep in bed, laying on her side, snoring quietly, prettily. Douglas nearly wept with relief.

He went to the bathroom, tried to urinate, but couldn't. He drank some water from the tap then braced his arms on the wash-basin and stared at his reflection in the shaving mirror.

"You started it,” he said in a whisper.

He gazed back at himself implacably. He half-expected things to change again; for his face to melt, perhaps, or for something large to emerge from the shadows behind him. But the night ticked on, silent, without comment. A tumour, Richard had said. Maybe he was right.

Douglas briefly considered consulting his GP. He didn't even remember the man's name, it had been so long since he'd seen him. But he rejected the idea immediately. To do so would mean facing things, taking action. Illness meant weakness. If he was weak he might lose Gayle.

To Douglas, truth was an interesting concept. The previous evening—it already seemed years distant—Clarissa had said something about valuing the truth above all else. He couldn't remember the context. He'd smiled and nodded. He thought it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

Richard finally caught up with him ten days later. Douglas had cancelled their squash game at the weekend, leaving a message on Richard's mobile. For Douglas the days had passed slowly, but without incident. It seemed that normality was reasserting itself. He was wary, though. He moved with an odd sense of deliberation that puzzled and irritated Gayle. He believed that if he braced himself for the unexpected it was less likely to happen. He couldn't explain this to Gayle though, as that would mean dwelling on the previous incidents. To her he simply appeared to be acting strangely. He also phoned in sick for two days, something he hadn't done for twenty-five years. This irritated Gayle further. Douglas was hurt. He thought she might like having him around, but she seemed disproportionately put out and he ended up driving to the park and walking away an afternoon.

The day he cancelled the squash game was the first Saturday of the month and that evening he and Gayle made love as usual. Except it wasn't as usual. He was tense, as he thought this was an obvious time for reality to distort again. He found it difficult to get an erection and when he did he was reluctant to let himself ejaculate. Finally, fifteen minutes after Gayle had come, or at least pretended to, he grunted and rolled off her, onto his back.

"Have you finished?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

"I think I know..."

She put her hand on him. His head fell back onto the pillow. “Why lie about it, Douglas?"

"It's just..."

"Is it me?” She sat up in bed. Her voice had a quality to it, a brittleness that he'd worked all his life to avoid hearing.

"Of course not. I'm just tired."

He didn't like the silence that followed. He thought he could hear her thinking. Finally she said, “It's just..."

He waited but she didn't go on. Her voice had changed again, though. It was thicker, clotted. It scared Douglas. He didn't want her to continue speaking. It would only be of regrets, recriminations. If they were never voiced he could believe they didn't exist.

To his relief she just lay back in the darkness and said, “Go to sleep."

Eventually, he did.

On Wednesday evening he found Richard waiting for him outside his office. “They seek him here, they seek him there,” he said.

"I've been meaning to call,” Douglas said. He kept walking towards his car.

Richard fell into step beside him. “Really?"

"I've not been well."

"I didn't think you'd been ill a day in your life."

They reached the BMW. Douglas opened the door. “I must go. I've got an appointment."

"I've got to talk to you. It's about Gayle."

Douglas stopped, stood in silence for a moment. “What could you possibly have to tell me about Gayle?"

Richard turned his head away. A breeze was getting up and it flicked a strand of Richard's hair across his face. “This is so hard. I could hardly believe it myself."

"What are you talking about?"

"Not here."

Douglas gestured at the passenger door. “Get in."

They found a pub nearby. It was a new place, or at least Douglas had never noticed it before. It was horribly trendy, all blond wood and muted lighting. It was almost empty. They got their drinks and found a corner seat. Douglas hadn't spoken since Richard had got in the car.

"You mustn't shoot the messenger, Douglas,” Richard said. He kept his eyes cast down. Douglas said nothing. “You've heard of Internet dating?” Douglas looked at him. “I mean, you know what the Internet is, right? I know what an old Luddite you are.” The grin was off-centre and brief.

"Just tell me,” Douglas said.

"About the Internet?"

Douglas closed his eyes. “About Gayle.” He almost left then. Just walked away. He didn't have to listen to this. But, actually, he did.

"I've been on a few singles sites since Serena left. They're quite respectable these days. Nothing to be ashamed of..."

"I'm not interested in judging you. Just tell me if you've slept with my wife."

"What?” His eyes were wide with indignation. “Of course not. What kind of man do you take me for?"

Douglas didn't want to answer that. Didn't want to do anything. “What, then?"

Richard visibly braced himself. “Gayle's on one of the sites."

"A singles site?"

Richard squirmed. “Not exactly. It's a little more adult than some of the others.” He hesitated, turned his head away. “To quote her profile, she's seeking younger men for daytime meetings. No strings. She says that she's married."

"How do you know it's her?"

"Her photo, Douglas."

Douglas longed for reality to change again. Wondered if it already had. “What sort of photo?"

"Not what you're thinking. She's wearing a red dress, she's got her hair down. She looks—"

"I know how she looks."

"I couldn't believe it. She's been a member for over a year."

"This is ridiculous. Her photo? Anyone could see it. She must have known that someone would..."

As Douglas faltered Richard said, “I'm sorry."

"I don't believe you."

"Look, I know this is hard, but—"

"I don't believe any of it. Is this what that charade at the squash club was about?"

"Charade?"

"You were almost in tears. I didn't know you could act."

"You're my oldest friend. I knew how you'd take it. Of course I was upset."

"You've always been jealous of us, haven't you? Especially since Serena saw sense and left."

"Why would I lie? I can show you the site..."

"I don't need to see it. I don't need anything from you. We don't all screw around behind each others’ backs."

"You're deluded,” Richard said.

Douglas stood and made his way to the door.

"She's making a fool of you,” Richard said, following him.

Douglas walked to his car without looking back.

Richard stood at the pub entrance and shouted, “Nothing ever touches you, does it? You're a fucking iceman."

Douglas got into the car and drove away.

He drove towards London. He didn't want to go to London particularly, he didn't like the place. It was too big, too crowded. He'd only ever been there to humour Gayle. But he didn't want to go home, either. Not yet, at least.

Nothing ever touches you, Richard said, and he was right. For once he had cut straight to the heart of things. When Douglas was nine years old his baby sister died of meningitis. It happened with appalling speed, over a weekend. He remembered that suddenly no longer having a baby around meant that the house was quieter and it was easier to sleep. He remembered also being bewildered by the intensity of his parents’ grief. It scorched them, left them shredded, empty, useless to him, to each other, to anyone else as far as Douglas could see. His sister had been a tiny blob of a thing. She ate, cried, slept. It was sad when she died, a shock. But...

Within a year both his parents were dead as well. His father had a heart attack. His mother took an overdose. Douglas found her body. He never forgot the look of relief on her face.

As he approached Thetford his mind was clear and empty. Dusk was falling. Something by Bach played on the radio. The windscreen blurred suddenly, then cleared and Douglas saw the dual carriageway in front of him distort. It was rippling, forming languid waves of tarmac. The car in front of him, a silver Lexus, was flicked aside as though it was a toy. Douglas braked sharply, to no effect. He rode the waves, found he didn't need to steer. Ahead an articulated lorry jack-knifed and he passed it on the inside as the cab toppled sideways and ploughed into a transit travelling in the opposite direction. Douglas felt the heat of the vehicles as they exploded. He travelled faster and faster although his foot had left the accelerator. He felt no fear, no exhilaration. Debris passed him like a meteor storm; a chunk of masonry clunked off his windscreen, leaving no mark at all. He was no longer breathing. It didn't matter. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again he was parked on the hard shoulder, bent double, dry-heaving onto cold tarmac.

When he straightened a coach screamed past, horn blaring, missing him by inches.

"You're late,” Gayle said.

Her voice came from the kitchen. It seemed higher than usual. Douglas hesitated in the hallway. He felt wiped out, insubstantial. He wasn't sure he could face Gayle. He no longer knew what to say, what to think. Everything was slipping away from him. “I'm sorry,” he said.

She was standing by the sink, her back to him. Her shoulders were taut, her arms cradled at her front. He thought she was angry with him for being late. He knew he had an anger of his own somewhere, but he wasn't sure how to retrieve it. He expected the kitchen to smell of cooking, of the meal he had missed, but all the surfaces were clean and empty and the only scent was that of Gayle's perfume.

"Richard was here,” she said.

"What? When?” He was wrong-footed again. It was becoming a habit.

"An hour. A little less. I know what he said to you. I know why."

He thought suddenly that he should rush to her side, hold her, make sure she was real. But he couldn't. “What are you talking about?"

Gayle turned. Her face was cast down briefly then she tilted it upwards into the light. There was a bruise under one eye and a crust of dried blood stained her upper lip. She had been crying, was close to crying again.

"I rejected him once, years ago.” She was propped against the sink. Douglas was yards away. Neither moved to reduce the distance between them. She looked at the floor. “I've always found him attractive. But I love you, Douglas."

He pointed at her face. “He did this?” She nodded. “Did he—"

"No. He was angry. He lashed out."

"But why now?” Douglas felt numbed by the stupidity of it all. It made no sense. Then a thought occurred to him and he cursed his own stupidity. His life had been built around absolute control but that was fading now, becoming useless. Something white and pure was swelling within him and it felt good.

"I've got to go,” he said.

Gayle's eyes held his, noted the expression on his face. He expected her to protest, to plead with him to stay with her and not to do anything rash. But she didn't.

Richard answered his door promptly. Douglas pushed him firmly in the chest and he staggered backwards, falling onto his side as his leg caught the edge of a decorative table.

"We haven't got a computer,” Douglas said.

Richard hauled himself upright. “What are you doing?"

"We haven't got a fucking computer!"

The fact that Douglas swore seemed to shock Richard more than the physical attack. A flicker of fear crossed his face that Douglas relished. “Look, I'm younger than you, and fitter, so don't—"

Then Douglas was on him, driving him into the lounge, bouncing him off one wall, then another, then pinning him to the thickly carpeted floor. Before Richard could speak he punched him in the face. It felt good so he did it twice more then his hand hurt so he stood and kicked at Richard's torso and groin until the prone man squealed and pulled himself into a ball. Douglas was breathing heavily. He rested on his haunches for a moment then kicked Richard in the back and buttocks with his left foot until he felt his big toe break. Richard was whimpering softly and barely moving. Douglas hobbled into the kitchen, found a bread knife, then went back into the lounge. He knelt on the floor, forced Richard onto his back then stabbed him in the chest until his arm felt numb and the knife blade broke and the air was rich and thick with blood.

Gayle was out when he got home. It was just after eight, the time Douglas had thought it was when he had first arrived home and found Gayle in the kitchen. It had been a long day, though. Longer than it had any right to be. He slumped in an armchair, staining it with blood. Gayle won't be happy about that, he thought distantly. Then he slept.

Gayle's voice woke him. She was in the kitchen again. She's always in the bloody kitchen, he thought, then looked at his hands.

"I'm sorry I'm late,” she called. “Did you get my message? Clarissa is hopeless with that computer. It was hardly an emergency; I had it fixed in no time. But we had a couple of glasses of wine, you know how it is. I don't like not being here when you get home from work, but I didn't think you'd mind. Why didn't you answer your mobile? You had me worried. Didn't you get yourself anything to eat? We can get a takeaway, I suppose, in a minute."

Her voice carried on as she rattled around in the kitchen. Douglas was still looking at his hands. Then the living room door burst open and there she was, her face unblemished. When she saw him she stopped talking. She stood completely still.

Douglas looked at her and tried to think of something to say. He waited for reality to reassert itself. Waited and waited.

Copyright © 2007 Andrew Humphrey