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At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18-, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisiême, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Rogêt. I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G-, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a great deal of trouble.

"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as he forebore to enkindle the wick, "we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark."

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities."

"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visiter with a pipe, and rolled towards him a comfortable chair.

"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more in the assassination way, I hope?"

"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd."

"Simple and odd," said Dupin.

"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether."

"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend.

"What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.

"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin.

"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?"

"A little too self-evident."

"Ha! ha! ha-ha! ha! ha!-ho! ho! ho!" roared our visiter, profoundly amused, "oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"

"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked.

"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. "I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one."

"Proceed," said I.

"Or not," said Dupin.

"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession."

"How is this known?" asked Dupin.

"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature of the document, and from the non-appearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber's possession; that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to employ it."

"Be a little more explicit," I said.

"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy.

"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin.

"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose honor and peace are so jeopardized."

"But this ascendancy," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare-"

"The thief," said G., "is the Minister D-, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in question-a letter, to be frank-had been received by the personage robbed while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D-. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving his own letter-one of no importance-upon the table."

"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what you demand to make the ascendancy complete-the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber."

"Yes," replied the Prefect; "and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to me."

"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, "no more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined."

"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that some such opinion may have been entertained."

"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs."

"True," said G.; "and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design."

"But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done this thing often before."

"O yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D- Hotel. My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed."

"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the letter may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?"

"This is barely possible," said Dupin. "The present peculiar condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in which D- is known to be involved, would render the instant availability of the document-its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's notice-a point of nearly equal importance with its possession."

"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I.

"That is to say, of being destroyed," said Dupin.

"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question."

"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own inspection."

"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. "D-, I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course."

"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."

"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggrel myself."

"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your search."

"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret' drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk-of space-to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops."

"Why so?"

"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in the same way."

"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I asked.

"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise."

"But you could not have removed-you could not have taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?"

"Certainly not; but we did better-we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing-any unusual gaping in the joints-would have sufficed to insure detection."

"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets."

"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before."

"The two houses adjoining!" I exclaimed; "you must have had a great deal of trouble."

"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious!"

"You include the grounds about the houses?"

"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed."

"You looked among D-'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?"

"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles."

"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?"

"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the microscope."

"And the paper on the walls?"

"Yes."

"You looked into the cellars?"

"We did."

"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the premises, as you suppose."

"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, Dupin, what would you advise me to do?"

"To make a thorough re-search of the premises."

"That is absolutely needless," replied G-. "I am not more sure that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the Hotel."

"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You have, of course, an accurate description of the letter?"

"Oh yes!"-And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman before. In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said,-

"Well, but G-, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?"

"Confound him, say I-yes; I made the re-examination, however, as Dupin suggested-but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be."

"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked Dupin.

"Why, a very great deal-a very liberal reward-I don't like to say how much, precisely; but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done."

"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, "I really-think, G-, you have not exerted yourself-to the utmost in this matter. You might-do a little more, I think, eh?"

"How?-in what way?'

"Why-puff, puff-you might-puff, puff-employ counsel in the matter, eh?-puff, puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?"

"No; hang Abernethy!"

"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.

"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?'

"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'"

"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter."

"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, "you may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter."

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunder-stricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently recovering himself in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus, when G- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the Hotel D-, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation-so far as his labors extended."

"So far as his labors extended?" said I.

"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it."

I merely laughed-but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.

"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'-he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;'-he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'-what, in its last analysis, is it?"

"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."

"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright, upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured."

"For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; "and the Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are right in this much-that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency-by some extraordinary reward-they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What, for example, in this case of D-, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope and dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches-what is it all but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter,-not exactly in a gimlet hole bored in a chair-leg-but, at least, in some out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not see also, that such recherchés nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal of the article concealed-a disposal of it in this recherché manner,-is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance-or, what amounts to the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude,-the qualities in question have never been known to fail. You will now understand what I meant in suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden any where within the limits of the Prefect's examination-in other words, had the principle of its concealment been comprehended within the principles of the Prefect-its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools."

"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet."

"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect."

"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence."

"'Il y a à parièr,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, "'que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.' The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a term is of any importance-if words derive any value from applicability-then 'analysis' conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' 'religion,' or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorablemen."

"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed."

"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation-of form and quantity-is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability-as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x2+px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x2+px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.

"I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, "that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I know him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I considered, could not fail to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action. He could not have failed to anticipate-and events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate-the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G-, in fact, did finally arrive-the conviction that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed-I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so very self-evident."

"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into convulsions."

"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiæ, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of the street signs, over the shop-doors, are the most attractive of attention?"

"I have never given the matter a thought," I said.

"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word-the name of town, river, state or empire-any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.

"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D-; upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search-the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.

"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D- at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive-but that is only when nobody sees him.

"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the whole apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.

"I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.

"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery fillagree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle-as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D-, the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions of the rack.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D- cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S- family. Here, the address, to the Minister, diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D-, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visiter, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated discussion with the Minister upon a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a terrified mob. D- rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings-imitating the D- cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread.

"The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D- came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay."

"But what purpose had you," I asked, "in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?"

"D-," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers-since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy-at least no pity-for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack."

"How? did you put any thing particular in it?"

"Why-it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank-that would have been insulting. D-, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words-

"'- - Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atrée, est digne de Thyeste. They are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atrée.'"

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'The Purloined Letter' - Edgar Alan Poe in What He Thought was His Best Detective Story

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At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18-, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisiême, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain.

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True!-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily-how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees-very gradually-I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded-with what caution-with what foresight-with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it-oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly-very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously-cautiously (for the hinges creaked)-I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights-every night just at midnight-but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.

Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers-of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back-but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.

I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out-"Who's there?"

I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening;-just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief-oh, no!-it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself-"It is nothing but the wind in the chimney-it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel-although he neither saw nor heard-to feel the presence of my head within the room.

When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little-a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it-you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily-until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye.

It was open-wide, wide open-and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness-all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?-now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eve. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!-do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me-the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once-once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.

If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye-not even his-could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out-no stain of any kind-no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all-ha! ha!

When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock-still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart,-for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.

I smiled,-for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search-search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.

The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct:-It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness-until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.

No doubt I now grew very pale;-but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased-and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound-much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath-and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly-more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men-but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed-I raved-I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder-louder-louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!-no, no! They heard!-they suspected!-they knew!-they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now-again!-hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks! here, here!-It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe | The Short Story Project

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True!-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.

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Maximilian searched for them in the carriage house and the cattle shed, even had a look in the springhouse, although he knew almost at first glance he wouldn't find them there. Rudy wouldn't hide in a place like that, dank and chill, no windows and so no light, a place that smelled of bats.

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"Selfies," by Lavie Tidhar, is a creepy little horror tale about the fate of a young woman who makes the mistake of a lifetime when she buys a new phone in the local mall.

This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

#733

In one of the last pictures I am running. I am running down the street and it is dark, the street lamps are dim and the light oozes down sickly and yellow. I can feel my heart almost bursting in my chest, the taste of something sour and unpleasant in my mouth. I'm running as fast as I can. I have to get away.

The moon is a sickle moon. Its cheek is pockmarked with acne scars. It looks down on me; it hangs overhead like a malformed knife. They're running behind me and they're gaining. They're not even running hard. They spread out around me, they match their pace to mine, easily, without effort. They whisper my name: Ellie, Ellie. Just ahead is the rusty iron gate to the old playground. I used to play on the swings when I was a little girl. They crowd me here. I don't know if kids still use the swings. I stumble through the gate and into the playground. I just have to keep running but I take a picture then, I can't help it, I take a picture and it's just me and the gate and that sickle moon, and no one at all behind me.

"I heard this story about a girl who went mad a few months ago."

"What girl?"

"Her name was Ellie and she was in my year at school. I didn't see much of her after that until they found her dead at the bottom of the old playground down my street one night, a few months ago."

"Oh, I'm really sorry."

"It's all right, I really didn't know her that well. What was funny was, when I saw her, it was only for a moment before they zipped up the bag and took her away. It was her face, see. It was the scariest thing I ever saw, her face. Here, look. Just before they zipped her up I took a photo. Look."

". . . That's disgusting!"

"I didn't put it on Facebook or anything."

"Are those eyes?"

". . ."

"What is she doing with her mouth?"

"I think she's screaming. She was still holding her phone when they found her, even though she was broken up pretty bad. My cousin Dan works in the lab and he said there were thousands of pictures on her phone. Thousands and thousands."

". . ."

"He said the police could construct her last few months almost moment by moment following the pictures. They were mostly selfies. But some of them were pretty weird. Dan said maybe someone Photoshopped them. After a while they didn't even make sense."

"That's pretty vain, though."

"I guess."

". . ."

"You know what the really weird thing was, though?"

"What?"

"A couple of days later I was in the supermarket and I thought I saw her. She was standing in the aisle by the cereal shelves and she was talking on her phone. She was holding a box of Crunchy Nuts. I had this really queasy feeling when I saw her. I mean it couldn't be her, right? Then it was, like, she knew I was standing there and she turned and she gave me this smile. She had these uneven white teeth and she had her hair in this sort of fringe. She used to be really pretty. But when she turned she looked directly at me and it was her eyes. They were like eggshells, without pupils or an iris, they were just entirely white and empty and flat and she smiled."

"You're making it up."

"I had a can of Coke in my hand and it fell down and burst open, and there was a mess. When I looked up again she'd disappeared."

"Did you pay for the Coke?"

"Yeah, I paid for the Coke. They buried her a few days later. I didn't go to the funeral. I mean, like I said, I never really knew her all that well, anyway."

#1

This is right after I buy the phone. The shop behind me has a sign that says previously owned. I don't know if that is its name or just a description, but it is accurate all the same. I'd gone to the mall, just browsing. At the back of the lower level, all the way back, the shops turn dusty and dark. There's a baby clothes store that hasn't seen a baby in years, and a shop for vegan supplies, and a video store that's permanently shut. I'd not noticed this particular shop before. I go in and it's filled with strange objects and all sorts of knickknacks, weird clockwork devices and creepy voodoo dolls and paintings of grotesque creatures like something on the cover of a paperback. At first I don't see anyone in the shop but then I hear a cough and this weird old guy with a long, horse-like face and pale watery eyes, appears behind the counter, almost like he'd just been somehow cut out of the shadows and given form and pushed into the light, and he coughs again and says, "Can I help you, miss?"

I say, "I'm just browsing," and I see his face frown in displeasure and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

"You're very pretty," he says suddenly, and I think I blush, and I shrug a little awkwardly. "No, no, really," he says.

"Thank you," I say.

"Here," he says. He brings something out from behind the counter and it's so startling in the shop among all the old and dusty objects: it's a brand new phone. "Do you have one?" he says.

"A phone?"

"A phone like this one."

"No, no," I say. "I just have this old thing."

"Then take this one," he says. "From me."

"You mean, for free?"

"No," he says, and looks at me like I'm dim. "Of course not. I don't run a charity here."

"Oh. I mean . . ."

"Very cheap," he says, and he pushes the phone at me aggressively. "Take it. Take it!"

He scares me so I take it but as soon as I hold the phone I feel better. It feels so smooth and warm, and it fits snugly into my palm. I swipe across the screen and the icons blink back at me. I barely hear that awful man when he says the price and like in a dream I take out some money and give it to him. He said I was pretty but I guess I never thought of myself as pretty. I mean, I didn't give it much thought one way or another. I step out of the shop and suddenly there is light around me, and air. My finger itches. I hold up the phone in front of me and press the camera button and it's like something in me wakes up for the first time and something inside me dies-I can't describe it. I don't need to. I press the button and there's the image, instead.

#736

In the last picture, I'm dead.

#112

Funny thing is, I go back to the spot where the shop was a few days later and there is no sign of it. Here's me standing with a Cinnabon behind me and the guy behind the counter said it's been there for the past year. In the picture I'm biting my lip and looking worried. I had to keep clicking. I had to keep taking pictures, but the pictures were beginning to lie.

#447

"That was amazing, Ellie!" Noah says. He looks hopped up or something. He gives me this beaming smile.

I say, "What are you talking about?"

I snap a picture. Me standing there looking vaguely irritated, in his kitchen. He has petunias on the windowsill. I don't like the way the light catches them. They look ill, and the sunlight is all blotchy.

"Last night! You were amazing!" Noah says. "I never even . . ." he blushes. "Where did you learn to do that?" he whispers. Comes close and puts his arms around me, and I can smell him, the smell of sweat and sex. And I push him away, and I can feel the tears coming, even though I don't want them to, and I say, "But I wasn't here last night, Noah, don't you remember, I went to the movies with Shelly and I stayed at her place," and he says, "What?" and his hands drop to his sides and then he smiles and says, "You're just fucking with me," and I burst into tears and he stands there looking confused and then angry, and he comes to me again and I push him away and I run up the stairs to his bedroom and see the rumpled sheets and, pinned to the mirror, a photo, it must have been taken last night and freshly-printed, and I am posing for the camera, naked, one hand held suggestively between my thighs while the other is out of sight, holding the camera. In the picture I am grinning into the camera and my teeth are a predator's teeth and my eyes are-but there is nothing in my eyes. And I pull the photo from the mirror and I tear it up, into tiny pieces that fall to the floor at my feet.

#73

Dinner with Mum and Dad and Noah. We're all smiling. Noah has his arm around me and he's grinning stupidly into the camera and so am I. I'm feeling like there's a fire inside me, burning from the inside out, like light falling on a negative, and it's reaching everywhere, it's touching everything with light.

#501

Me in front of the mirror, but the picture is all wrong. This is after I left Noah's place and gone home. I'm crying as I press the button, but the me in the mirror is smiling.

#210

This photo's a little blurry because I'm running. I'm on the street and a man is pursuing me.

#209

Blurry as I turn away from the man, who's still speaking.

#208

He has a nervous excited voice and he keeps shouting about my phone. We're both caught in the photo and for a moment his face is both almost erotically excited and incredibly terrified.

#207

A man approaches me in the street but he's not in the photo. He wants to buy my phone. I can't really understand what he's saying. He is tall and thin with a straggly beard and he smells as though he hasn't washed for a few days. He says his name is Farnsworth and that he's a collector. He keeps asking me where I got my phone and do I know what it is. I tell him it's just a phone but he doesn't really listen. He says something about mimic objects, and parasite mechanics, and things that look like other things.

Dark chamber, he keeps saying, dark chamber, a camera obscura. I don't know what any of it means. I start to turn away from him. I think, from the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection, standing on the street corner, only there is no mirror there.

#600

There is someone standing outside my house under the streetlamp but I don't dare look.

It's so quiet. It's so quiet and nothing moves. Nothing moves but I know it's there. The silence is like a living thing or the echo of living things. It's like a dark chamber in my room and the only illumination comes from outside. The light presses against the curtains.

Something is standing outside under the lamp.

I pull back the corner of the curtain and I don't look out but I take a picture.

In the picture something with my face is standing outside and it's looking back at me and it's smiling.

#342

Someone had slipped an envelope under my door in the night and when I open it I find a piece of paper inside torn from a book. I'm holding it up next to my face. My eyes are puffy. You can just about make out the letters. It says:

The mad Jesuit, Father Alfonse, in his 16 th century manuscript, Umbra Autem Ex Tempore, first wrote of the curious properties of acertain kind of light, or rather shadow, or shadows-it is unclear in view of sometimes contradictory translations. He wrote the manuscript while incarcerated in a monastery in the bogs of Scotland, where he was held for blasphemy for some several years. In it, he describes a device which he claimed to have constructed, a sort of optical instrument or camera obscura, that is to say, a dark chamber, for the capture of such anti-light or shadows, or possibly, in some translations, notably the French Géroux Manuscript of 1653, a soul.

The mad Jesuit committed suicide-or perhaps was killed, the record is obscure-by falling from the top of the monastery to the bogs down below. How he made his way from the stout walls of the cellars that imprisoned him to the top, undetected, is unclear, nor was there any sign of the device found after his death. Though he himself was eventually found and buried, for many months afterwards local peasants reported the unsettling sight of a man answering Father Alfonse's description being seen far and wide, sometimes in the midst of night and sometimes, plainly, in the height of day. But the figure never spoke or, if it had, none had recorded its words.

I don't know what it means; it's gibberish.

#655

It's blurry because my hand is shaking so much and you can't make out anything.

#415

Farnsworth again. I point the phone at him and he shrieks and runs away before I can take his picture so I take mine instead.

#416

And another.

#417

And another.

#418

And another and with each one I feel better and worse like I am being cut up into a lot of tiny little pieces like bits of me are lost like there is me and me and me and me and another.

#12

Standing in the park in the sunshine with my new phone and I'm so happy and everything is going to be all right.

#469

Me with a crying face. Dark. I have red eyes. It's night and I've just been woken. Farnsworth is outside shouting. An ikiry? is a spirit torn from your soul by a curse, who now lives independently.

In some cultures they believe that every photo takes away a little bit of your soul.

"I'll pay you anything!" he says. I can hear a dog barking. "Give it to me!" His voice is so lonely and so desperate. Then the dog stops barking suddenly and Farnsworth gives a high-pitched shriek. I don't have to look outside to see what he sees.

#652

Outside the supermarket.

#653

I go into the supermarket and I bump into another customer and I mumble, "Sorry," and then when I look just for a moment she looks back at me and she smiles with my face.

#654

My hand is shaking. A shot of me against supermarket shelves. Shoppers pushing carts loaded with food and cans and cereal. One by one they stop and raise their heads and look up at me. They smile with my face. They have no eyes.

Someone whispers my name: Ellie, Ellie.

I run.

#729

In one of the last pictures I'm running. The road spreads out ahead of me, and the sleeping suburban homes. The moonlight is sucked into the asphalt. I run, the only sound the beating of blood in my head. The air is scented with jasmine. Ahead of me is the old playground where we used to play. I don't look back when I take the picture, but I know they're there.

"Selfies" copyright © 2014 by Lavie Tidhar.

Art copyright © 2014 by Greg Ruth.

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"Selfies," by Lavie Tidhar, is a creepy little horror tale about the fate of a young woman who makes the mistake of a lifetime when she buys a new phone in the local mall. This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

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The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward, as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him.

He looks ahead. The best thing to do with the homeless mob littering Vancouver is to ignore it. Give them a buck and the beggars cling to you like barnacles.

"Have you seen my children?" the woman asks.

Her voice, sandpaper against his ears, makes him shiver. His heart jolts as though someone has pricked it with a needle. He keeps on walking, but much faster now. It isn't until he is shoving the milk inside the fridge that he realizes why the woman's words have upset him: she reminds him of the Llorona.

He hasn't thought about her in years, not since he was a child living in Potrero.

Everyone in town had a story about the Llorona. The most common tale was that she drowned her children in the river and afterwards roamed the town, searching for them at night; her pitiful cries are a warning and an omen.

Camilo, Ramon's great-uncle, swore on his mother's grave that he met this ghost while riding home one night. It was the rainy season, when the rivers overflow and Camilo was forced to take a secondary, unfamiliar road.

He spotted a woman in white bending over some nopales at the side of a lonely path. Her face was covered with the spines of the prickly pears she had savagely bitten. She turned around and smiled. Blood dripped from her open mouth and stained her white shift.

This was the kind of story the locals whispered around Potrero. It was utter nonsense, especially coming from the lips of a chronic alcoholic like Camilo, but it was explosive stuff for an eight-year old boy who stayed up late to watch black-and-white horror flicks on the battered TV set.

However, to think about the Llorona there in the middle of the city between the SkyTrain tracks and a pawn shop is ridiculous. Ramon never packed ghost stories in his suitcase, and Potrero and the Llorona are very far away.

* * * *

He sees the homeless woman sitting beneath a narrow ledge, shielding herself from the rain. She weeps and hugs a plastic bag as though it were a newborn.

"Have you seen my children?" she asks when he rushes by, clutching his umbrella.

Nearby a man sleeps in front of an abandoned store, an ugly old dog curled next to him. The downtown homeless peek at Ramon from the shadows as he steps over old cigarette butts.

They say this is an up and coming neighborhood but each day he spots a new beggar wielding an empty paper cup at his face.

It is disgraceful.

This is the very reason why he left Mexico. He escaped the stinking misery of his childhood and the tiny bedroom with the black-and-white TV set he had to share with his cousins.

Behind his house there were prickly pears and emptiness. No roads, and no buildings. Just a barren nothing swallowed by the purple horizon. It was easy to believe that the Llorona roamed there.

But not in Vancouver which is new and shiny, foaming with lattes and tiny condos.

* * * *

The dogs are howling. They scare him. Wild, stray animals that roam the back of the house at nights. His uncle told him the dogs howled when they saw the Llorona. Ramon runs to the girls' room and sneaks into his mother's bed, terrified of the noise and his mother has to hold him in her arms until he falls asleep.

But when he wakes up Ramon is in his apartment and it is only one dog, the neighbor's Doberman, barking.

He rolls to the centre of the bed, staring at the ceiling.

* * * *

Ramon spots the woman a week later, her arms wrapped around her knees.

"My children," she asks, with her cloud of dirty hair obscuring her face. "Where are my children?"

Nauseating in her madness, a disgusting sight growing like a canker sore and invading his streets. Just like the other homeless littering the area: the man in front of the drugstore that always asks him for spare change even though Ramon never gives him any, or the gnarled man beneath a familiar blanket, eternally sleeping in the shade of the burger joint.

The city is heading to the gutter. Sure, it looks pretty from afar with its tall glass buildings and its mountains, but below there is a depressing stew of junkies and panhandlers that mars the view. It reminds him of Potrero and the bedroom with the leaky ceiling. He stared at that small yellow leak which grew to become an obscene, dark patch above his bed until one day he grabbed his things and headed north.

He felt like repeating his youthful impulsiveness, gathering his belongings in a duffel bag and leaving the grey skies of Vancouver. But he had the condo which would fetch a killing one day if he was patient, his job, and all the other anchors that a man pushing forty can accumulate. A few years before, maybe. Now it seemed like a colossal waste of time.

Ramon tries to comfort himself with the thought that one day when he retires he will move to a tropical island of pristine white beaches and blue-green seas where the wrecks of humanity can never wash ashore.

* * * *

He's gone to buy groceries and there she is, picking cans out of the garbage in the alley behind the supermarket.

Llorona.

He used to send a postcard to his mother every year when he was younger, newly arrived in the States. He couldn't send any money because dishwashing didn't leave you with many spare dollars and he couldn't phone often because he rented a room in a house and there was no phone jack in there. If he wanted to make a call he had to use the pay phone across the street.

Instead, he sent postcards.

Carmen didn't like it.

His sister complained about his lack of financial support for their mother.

"Why do I have to take care of mom, hu? Why is it me stuck in the house with her?" she asked him.

"Don't be melodramatic. You like living with mom."

"You're off in California and never send a God damn cent."

"It ain't easy."

"It ain't easy here either, Ramon. You're just like all the other shitty men. Just taking off and leaving the land and the women behind. Who's gonna take care of mom when she gets old and sick? Whose gonna clean the house and dust it then? With what fucking money? I ain't doing it, Ramon."

"Bye, Carmen."

"There's some things you can't get rid of, Ramon," his sister yelled.

He didn't call after that. Soon he was heading to another city and by the time he reached Canada he didn't bother sending postcards. He figured he would, one day, but things got in the way and years later he thought it would be even worse if he tried to phone.

And what would they talk about now? It had been ages since he'd left home and the sister and cousins that had lived in Potrero. He'd gotten rid of layers and layers of the old Ramon, moulting into a new man.

But maybe Carmen had been right. Maybe there's some things you can't get rid of. Certain memories, certain stories, certain fears that cling to the skin like old scars.

These things follow you.

Maybe ghosts can follow you, too.

* * * *

It's a bad afternoon. Assholes at work and in the streets. And then a heavy, disgusting rain pours down, almost a sludge that swallows the sidewalks. He's lost his umbrella and walks with his hands jammed inside his jacket's pockets, head down.

Four more blocks and he'll be home.

That's when Ramon hears the squeal. A high-pitched noise. It's a shriek, a moan, a sound he's never heard before.
What the hell is that?
He turns and looks and it is the old woman, the one he's nicknamed Llorona, pushing her shopping cart.

Squeak, squeak, goes the cart, matching each of his steps. Squeak, squeak. A metallic chirping echoed by a low mumble.

"Children, children, children."

Squeak, squeak, squeak. A metallic chant with an old rhythm.

He walks faster. The cart matches his pace; wheels roll.

He doubles his efforts, hurrying to cross the street before the light changes. The cart groans, closer than before, nipping at his heels.

He thinks she is about to hit him with the damn thing and then all of a sudden the sound stops.

He looks over his shoulder. The old woman is gone. She has veered into an alley, vanishing behind a large dumpster.

Ramon runs home.

* * * *

The dogs are howling again. A howl that is a wail. The wind roars like a demon. The rain scratches the windows, begging to be let in, and he lies under the covers, terrified.

He feels his mother's arm around his body, her hands smoothing his hair like she did when he was scared. Just a little boy terrified of the phantoms that wander through the plains.

His mother's hand pats his own.

Mother's hand is bony. Gnarled, long fingers with filthy nails. Nails caked with dirt. The smells of mud, putrid garbage, and mold hit him hard.

He looks at his mother and her hair is a tangle of grey. Her yellow smile paints the dark.

He leaps from the bed. When he hits the floor he realizes the room is filled with at least three inches of water.

"Have you seen my children?" the thing in the bed asks.

The dogs howl and he wakes up, his face buried in the pillow.

* * * *

He takes a cab to work. He feels safer that way. The streets are her domain, she owns the alleys.

When he goes to lunch he looks at the puddles and thinks about babies drowned in the water; corpses floating down a silver river.

Don't ever let the Llorona look at you, his uncle said. Once she's seen you she'll follow you home and haunt you to death, little boy.

"Oh, my children," she'll scream and drag you into the river.

But he'd left her behind in Potrero.

He thought he'd left her behind.

* * * *

Ramon tries to recall if there is a charm or remedy against the evil spirit. His uncle never mentioned one. The only cure he knew was his mother's embrace.

"There, there little one," she said, and he nested safe against her while the river overflowed and lightning traced snakes in the sky.

* * * *

In the morning there is a patch of sunlight. Ramon dares to walk a few blocks. But even without the rain the city feels washed out. Its colour has been drained. It resembles the monochromatic images they broadcasted on the cheap television set of his youth.

Even though he does not bump into her, the Llorona's presence lays thick over the streets, pieces of darkness clinging to the walls and the dumpsters in the alleys. It even seems to spread over the people: the glassy eyes of a binner reflect a river instead of the bricks of a building.

He hurries back home and locks the door. But when it rains again, water leaks into the living room. Just a few little drops drifting into his apartment.

He wipes the floor clean. More water seeps in like a festering boil, cut open and oozing disease.

* * * *

The Llorona stands guard in the alley. She is a lump in the night looking up at his apartment window. He feels her through the concrete walls and the glass. Looking for him.

He fishes for the old notebook with the smudged and forgotten number.

The rain splashes against his building and the wind cries like a woman.

The dial tone is loud against his ear.

More than ten years have passed. He has no idea what he'll say. He doesn't even understand what he wants to ask. He can't politely request to ship the ghost back to Mexico.

He dials.

The number has been disconnected.

He thinks about Carmen and his mother and the dusty nothingness behind their house.

There might not even be a house. Perhaps the night and the river swallowed them.

* * * *

The Llorona comes with the rain. Or maybe it is the other way around: the rain comes with her. Something else also comes. Darkness. His apartment grows dimmer. He remains in the pools of light, away from the blackness.

Outside, in the alley, the Llorona scratches the dumpster with her nails.

The dogs howl.

Ramon shivers in his bed and thinks about his mother and how she used to drive the ghosts away.

* * * *

She is sitting next to a heap of garbage in the middle of the alley, water pouring down her shoulders. She clutches rags and dirt and pieces of plastic against her chest, her head bowed and her face hidden behind the screen of her hair.

"My children. My children."

She looks up at him, slowly. The rain coats her face, tracing dirty rivulets along her cheeks.

He expects an image out of a nightmare: blood dripping, yellow cat-eyes or a worn skull. But this is an old woman. Her skin has been torn by time and her eyes are cloudy. This is an old woman.

She could be his mother. She might be, for all he knows. He lost her photograph a long time ago and can't recall what she looks like anymore. His mother who ran her fingers through his hair and hugged him until the ghosts vanished. Now he's too old for ghosts, but the ghosts still come at nights.

The woman looks at him. Parched, forgotten, and afraid.

"I've lost my children," she whispers with her voice of dead leaves.

The alley is a river. He goes to her, sinks into the muck, sinks into the silvery water. He embraces her and she strokes his hair. The sky above is black and white, like the pictures in the old TV set and the wind that howls in his ears is the demon wind of his childhood.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him. He looks ahead.

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"Fabulous Beasts" by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling of the family upon her uncle's release from prison.

Please be warned that this story deals with difficult content and themes, including child abuse, incest, and rape.

"Eliza, tell me your secret."

Sometimes I'm cornered at parties by someone who's been watching me from across the room as they drain their glass. They think I don't know what's been said about me.

Eliza's odd looking but she has something, don't you think? Une jolie laide. A French term meaning ugly-beautiful. Only the intelligentsia can insult you with panache.

I always know when they're about to come over. It's in the pause before they walk, as though they're ordering their thoughts. Then they stride over, purposeful, through the throng of actors, journalists, and politicians, ignoring anyone who tries to engage them for fear of losing their nerve.

"Eliza, tell me your secret."

"I'm a princess."

Such a ridiculous thing to say and I surprise myself by using Kenny's term for us, even though I am now forty-something and Kenny was twenty-four years ago. I edge past, scanning the crowd for Georgia, so I can tell her that I've had enough and am going home. Maybe she'll come with me.

My interrogator doesn't look convinced. Nor should they be. I'm not even called Eliza. My real name is Lola and I'm no princess. I'm a monster.

We, Kenny's princesses, lived in a tower.

Kath, my mum, had a flat on the thirteenth floor of Laird Tower, in a northern town long past its prime. Two hundred and seventeen miles from London and twenty-four years ago. A whole world away, or it might as well be.

Ami, Kath's younger sister, lived two floors down. Kath and I went round to see her the day that she came home from the hospital. She answered the door wearing a black velour tracksuit, the bottoms slung low on her hips. The top rose up to reveal the wrinkled skin that had been taut over her baby bump the day before.

"Hiya," she opened the door wide to let us in.

Ami only spoke to Kath, never to me. She had a way of ignoring people that fascinated men and infuriated women.

Kath and I leant over the Moses basket.

"What a diamond," Kath cooed.

She was right. Some new babies are wizened, but not Tallulah. She looked like something from the front of one of Kath's knitting patterns. Perfect. I knew, even at that age, that I didn't look like everyone else; flat nose with too much nostril exposed, small eyelids and small ears that were squashed against my skull. I felt a pang of jealousy.

"What's her name, Ami?"

"Tallulah Rose." Ami laid her head on Kath's shoulder. "I wish you'd been there."

"I wanted to be there too. I'm sorry, darling. There was nobody to mind Lola. And Mikey was with you." Kath must have been genuinely sorry because normally she said Mikey's name like she was sniffing sour milk. "Where is he now?"

"Out, wetting the baby's head."

Kath's expression suggested that she thought he was doing more than toasting his newborn. He was always hanging around Ami. Just looking after you, like Kenny wants, he'd say, as if he was only doing his duty. Except now that there were shitty nappies to change and formula milk to prepare he was off, getting his end away.

Ami wasn't quite ready to let Kath's absence go.

"You could've left Lola with one of my friends."

Ami knew better. Kath never let anyone look after me, not even her.

"Let's not fight now, pet. You're tired."

Ami's gaze was like being doused in ice water. It contained everything she couldn't say to me. Fucking ugly, little runt. You're always in the way.

"You must be starvin'. Let me get you a cuppa and a sandwich and then you can get some sleep."

We stood and looked at the baby when Ami had gone to bed.

"Don't get any ideas. You don't want to be like your aunt, with a baby at sixteen. You don't want to be like either of us."

Kathy always spoke to me like I was twenty-four, not four.

Tallulah stirred and stretched, arms jerking outwards as if she was in freefall. She opened her eyes. There was no squinting or screaming.

"The little scrap's going to need our help."

Kath lifted her out and laid her on her knee for inspection. I put my nose against the soft spot on her skull. I fell in love with her right then.

"What do you wish for her?" Kath asked, smiling.

Chocolate. Barbies. A bike. A pet snake. Everything my childish heart could bestow.

Saturdays were for shopping. Kathy and I walked down Cathcart Street towards town. We'd pass a row of grimy Victorian mansions on our way that served as a reminder of once great wealth, now carved up into flats for social housing or filled with squatters who lay in their damp dens with needles in their arms.

After these were the terraces, joined by a network of alleyways that made for easy assaults and getaways. This model of housing was for the civic minded when everyone here had a trade, due to our proximity to the city of Liverpool. The ship-building yards lay empty, and the 1980s brought container ships that did away with the demand for dockers. The life inside spilled out into the sun; women sat on their steps in pyjama bottoms and vest tops, even though it was lunchtime. Fags in hand, they'd whisper to one another as Kathy passed, afraid to meet her gaze. A man wore just shorts, his pale beer belly pinking up in the sun. He saluted when he saw Kathy. She ignored him.

I followed Kathy, her trolley wheels squeaking. The sound got worse as it was filled with vegetables, cheap meat shrink wrapped on Styrofoam trays, and bags of broken biscuits.

Kathy stopped to talk to a woman with rotten, tea stained teeth. I was bored. We were at the outskirts of town, where the shops were most shabby. House clearance stores and a refurbished washing machine outlet. I wandered along the pavement a way until something stopped me. The peeling sign over the shop window read "Ricky's Reptiles". The display was full of tanks. Most were empty, but the one at the front contained a pile of terrapins struggling to climb over one another in a dish of water.

The shop door was open, revealing the lino floor that curled up at the corners. It was a shade of blue that verged on grey, or maybe it was just dirty. I could see the lights from the tanks. The fish were darting flashes of wild colour or else they drifted on gossamer fins. I was drawn in. The man behind the counter looked up and smiled, but to his credit he didn't try and talk to me, otherwise I would've run.

Then I saw it, a long tank along the back wall. I went closer. The snake was magnificent, from the pale skin on her belly to the brown scales on her back.

She slithered closer, eyeing me and then raised her head and the front third of her body lifted up as if suspended on invisible thread. I put my forehead against the glass.

"She likes you," the man murmured.

She moved up the side of the tank. I realised that I was swaying in time with her, feeling unity in the motion. I was aware of her body, each muscle moving beneath her skin, her very skeleton. I looked into the snake's black eyes and could see out of them into my own. The world was on the tip of her forked tongue; my curiosity, the shopkeeper's sweat and kindness, the soft flavour of the mice in the tank behind the counter.

A hand gripped my shoulder, hard, jerking me back to myself. It was Kathy.

"Get away from that thing." Her fingers were digging into me. "Don't you ever come in here again, understand?"

She looked at the snake, shuddering. "God, it's disgusting. What's wrong with you?"

She shouted at me all the way home, for putting the wind up her, letting her think some pervert had taken me. I didn't realise just how afraid she was. That she was looking at me like she didn't know what she'd birthed.

The novelty of motherhood soon wore off. Ami sat in the armchair of our flat, her toenails painted in the same tangerine shade as her maxi dress. She was sunbed fresh and her lips were demarcated in an unflatteringly pale shade of pink. Her hair was in fat rollers ready for her evening out.

"Guess where I went today?" she asked, her voice bright and brittle.

"Where, doll?" Kath puffed on her cigarette, blowing a stream of smoke away from us.

If Ami was slim, Kath was scrawny. The skin on her neck and chest was wrinkled from the lack of padding and twenty-five cigarettes a day. She wore a series of gold chains and her hands were rough and red from perpetual cleaning. Her face was unbalanced: nose too small and large ears that stuck out. Round eyes that never saw make-up. I forget sometimes, that she was only twenty-four then.

"To see Kenny."

Tallulah got up and I thought she was leaving me for Ami but she was just fetching her teddy. When she sat back down next to me, she wriggled against me to get comfortable. Ami bought Tallulah's clothes. Ridiculous, expensive things to dress a toddler in, old fashioned and frilly.

"Kenny always asks after you." Ami filled the silence.

"Does he?" Kath tipped the ash from her cigarette into the empty packet. God love her, she didn't have many vices.

"He never says but he's hurt. It's all over his face when I walk in and you're not with me. You're not showing him much respect or loyalty. All he wants to do is look after you and Lola, like he looks after me and Tallulah."

"I don't want Kenny's money. He's not Robin Hood. He beat a man to death."

"He's our brother."

Which was funny, because I didn't know that I had an uncle.

Kath's face was a shutter slamming shut.

"He loves to see pictures of Lola."

"Photos? You showed him photos?" Kath was blowing herself for a fight.

"I only showed him some pictures. He wanted to see her. What's up with you?"

"Lola's my business. No one else's."

"Well, I'm taking Tallulah for him to see next time."

"No, you're not. Not to a prison."

"She's mine. I'll take her where the fuck I want."

"You've done well to remember you've got a daughter."

"What's that mean?"

"You're always out with your bloody mates. You treat me like an unpaid baby sitter. She spends more time here than with you and then you've got the cheek to tell me to mind my own."

"So it's about money?"

"No," Kath threw up her hands, "it's about you being a selfish, spoilt brat. I'm your sister, not your mum. And it's about how you treat Tallulah."

"At least I know who her dad is."

Kath slapped her face. A sudden bolt that silenced them both. It left a red flush on Ami's cheek. Whenever I asked about my dad, Kath told me that she'd found me in a skip.

"I'm sorry, Ami..." Kath put out her hands. "I didn't mean to. I mean..."

"Tallulah," Ami snapped, holding out her hand.

Tallulah looked from me to Kath, her eyes wide. Ami pulled her up by the arm. She screamed.

"Be careful with her."

"Or what, Kath?" Ami lifted Tallulah up, putting her under one arm like she was a parcel. "Are you going to call Social Services? Fuck off."

Calling Social Services was a crime akin to calling the police.

Tallulah was in a full on tantrum by then, back arched and legs kicking. Fierce for her size, she proved too much for Ami who threw her down on the sofa. She lay there, tear stained and rigid. Ami had started to cry too. "Stay here then, see if I sodding care."

There are times when I feel lost, even to myself, and that what looks out from behind my eyes isn't human.

I'm reminded of it each day as I go to work at the School of Tropical Medicine.

Peter, one of the biochemists from the lab downstairs has come up for a batch of venom. He watches me milk the snakes when he can overcome his revulsion.

Michael, my assistant, tips the green mamba out of her box. I pin her down with a forked metal stick, while Michael does the same, further along her body. I clamp a hand just beneath her neck, thanking her silently for enduring the indignity of this charade. If it were just the two of us, she'd come to me without all this manhandling. I'll make it up to her later with mice and kisses. She's gorgeous in an intense shade of green, her head pointed.

"You have to stop that work when you get too old," says Peter, "you know, reflexes getting slow and all that."

The deaths of herpetologist are as fabled as snakes are touchy. There's no room for lax habits or slowness. Handled safely for years, a snake can turn on you, resulting in a blackened, withered limb, blood pouring from every orifice, paralysis and blindness, if not death.

Peter's a predator. He's been a swine to me since I knocked him back. I turn to him with the snake still in my hand. She hisses at him and he shrinks away.

I hook the mamba's mouth over the edge of the glass and apply gentle pressure. The venom runs down the side and collects in a pool.

What Peter doesn't know is that when my darlings and I are alone I hold them in my arms and let them wind around my neck. Our adoration is mutual. They're the easy part of my job.

"They like Eliza," Michael is offended on my behalf. There's not been a bite since I've been here.

"Concentrate." I snap at him as he brings the mamba's box to me. I regret my churlishness straight away. Michael is always pleasant with me. He never takes offence at my lack of social graces but someday he will.

Snakes are easy. It's people that I don't know how to charm.

Tallulah trailed along beside me. She looked like a doll in her school uniform; pleated skirt and leather buckled shoes. I didn't begrudge her the lovely clothes that Ami bought her. She jumped, a kittenish leap, and then she took my hand. We swung arms as we walked.

We turned onto Cathcart Street. Laird Tower was ahead of us, dwarfing the bungalows opposite. Those used by the elderly or infirm were marked out by white grab handles and key safes.

A pair of girls sat on a wall. They jumped down when they saw us. School celebrities, these playground queens, who knew how to bruise you with a word. They'd hurt you for not being like them, or not wanting to be like them.

"Is she your sister?" Jade, the shorter one asked Tallulah.

"No," Tallulah began, "she's..."

"Of course not," Jade cut across her, keen to get out the rehearsed speech. Jade didn't like my prowess in lessons. I tried to hide it, but it occasionally burst out of me. I liked the teacher. I liked homework. I even liked the school, built in red brick, that managed to still look like a Victorian poorhouse.

Jade was sly enough not to goad me for that, going for my weakness, not my strength. "You're too pretty to be Lola's sister. Look at her ugly mug."

It was true. I remained resolutely strange; my features had failed to rearrange themselves into something that would pass for normal. Also, my sight had rapidly deteriorated in the last few months and my thick lenses magnified my eyes.

"Be careful." Jade leant down into Tallulah's face. "You'll catch her ugliness."

Tallulah pushed her, hard, both of her small hands on her chest. Jade fell backwards a few steps, surprised by the attack. She raised a fist to hit Tallulah.

My blood was set alight, venom rising. Water brash filled my mouth as if I were about to be sick. I snatched at Jade's hand and sunk my teeth into her meaty forearm, drawing blood. I could taste her shock and fear. If she was screaming, I couldn't hear her. I only let go when her friend punched me on the ear.

After I'd apologised I sat in the corner of the room while Kath and Pauline, Jade's mum, talked.

"I thought it would be good if we sorted it out between us, like grown ups," Pauline said.

Social Services had already been round to confirm that I was the culprit.
Has she ever done anything like this before?
No, Kathy was calm and firm, Lola wasn't brought up that way.

"I'm so sorry about what happened." Pauline lifted her mug of tea, her hand trembling a fraction. She took a sip and set it down, not picking it up again.

"Why?" Kath sat up straighter. "Lola bit Jade. I'm sorry and I'll make sure that she is too by the time I'm done with her."

"Yes, but Jade was picking on her."

"That's no excuse for what Lola did. She should've just walked away."

"It's time that someone cut Jade down to size."

"My daughter bit yours." Exasperation raised Kathy's voice a full octave.

"She was asking for it."

Kathy shook her head. Then, "How is she?"

Jade had lain on the pavement, twitching. Red marks streaked up her arm, marking the veins.

"She's doing okay," Pauline swallowed. "She's on antibiotics. She's a bit off colour, that's all."

"The police and Social Services came round earlier."

"I've not complained. I'm not a nark. I'd never do that."

"I didn't say you had."

"You'll tell Kenny, won't you? We're not grasses. We won't cause you any bother. I'll skin Jade if she comes near your girls again." We were known as Kathy's girls.

"Kenny?" Kathy repeated dully.

"Please. Will you talk to him?"

Kath was about to say something but then deflated in the chair.

"Ami's says she's visiting him soon, so I'll make sure he gets the message."

Kathy closed the door after Pauline had gone.

"What did you do to her?" It was the first time she'd looked at me properly since it had happened.

"It wasn't her fault." Tallulah stood between us. "She was going to hit me."

"What did you do to her?" Kathy pushed her aside. "Her arm swelled up and she's got blood poisoning."

"I don't know," I stammered. "It just happened."

She slapped me. I put my hands out to stop her but she carried on, backing me into the bedroom. She pushed me down on the floor. I curled my hands over my head.

"I didn't bring you up to be like that." Her strength now was focused in a fist. Kathy had hit me before, but never like that. "I swear I'll kill you if you ever do anything like that again. You fucking little monster."

She was sobbing and shrieking. Tallulah was crying and trying to pull her off. Kathy continued to punch me until her arm grew tired. "You're a monster, just like your father."

We stayed in our bedroom that night, Tallulah and I. We could hear Kathy banging about the flat. First, the vacuum hitting the skirting boards as she pulled it around. A neighbour thumped on the wall and she shouted back, but turned it off and took to the bathroom. She'd be at it all night, until her hands were raw. The smell of bleach was a signal of her distress. There were times when I thought I'd choke on the stench.

The skin on my face felt tight and sore, as if shrunken by tears. Tallulah rolled up my t-shirt to inspect the bruises on my back. There was a change coming, fast, as the shock of Kathy's onslaught wore off.

It hurt when Tallulah touched me. It wasn't just the skin on my face that felt wrong. It was all over. I rubbed my head against the carpet, an instinctual movement as I felt I'd got a cowl covering my face. The skin ripped.

"I'll get Kathy."

"No, wait." I grabbed her wrist. "Stay with me." My skin had become a fibrous sheath, my very bones remoulding. My ribs shrank and my slim pelvis and limbs became vestigial. My paired organs rearranged themselves, one pushed below the other except my lungs. I gasped as one of those collapsed. I could feel my diaphragm tearing; the wrenching of it doubled me over.

I writhed on the floor. There was no blood. What came away in the harsh lamplight was translucent. Tallulah held me as I sloughed off my skin which fell away to reveal scales. She gathered the coils of me into her lap. We lay down and I curled around her.

I couldn't move. I could barely breathe. When I put out my forked tongue I could taste Tallulah's every molecule in the air.

The morning light came through the thin curtain. Tallulah was beside me. I had legs again. I put a hand to my mouth. My tongue was whole. My flesh felt new. More than that, I could see. When I put my glasses on the world became blurred. I didn't need them anymore. The very surface of my eyes had been reborn.

My shed skin felt fibrous and hard. I bundled it up into a plastic bag and stuffed it in my wardrobe. Tallulah stretched as she watched me, her hands and feet splayed.

"Tallulah, what am I? Am I a monster?"

She sat up and leant against me, her chin on my shoulder.

"Yes, you're my monster."

I ache for the splendid shabbiness of my former life, when it was just Kath, Tallulah, and me in the flat, the curtains drawn against the world and the telly droning on in the background. Tallulah and I would dance around Kath, while she swatted us away. The smell of bleach and furniture polish is forever home. Kath complaining when I kept turning the heating up. Being cold made me sluggish.

Endless, innocuous days and nights that I should've savoured more.

"How was your test?"

"Crap." Tallulah threw down her bag. "Hi, Kath."

"Hi, love," Kathy shouted back from the kitchen.

Tallulah, school uniformed, big diva hair so blonde that it was almost white, a flick of kohl expertly applied at the corner of her eyes.

"I'm thick, not like you." She kicked off her shoes.

"You're not thick. Just lazy."

She laughed and lay on her belly beside me, in front of the TV. She smelt of candy floss scent that she'd stolen from her mum. Tallulah was the sweetest thing.

There was the sound of the key in the door. I looked at Tallulah. Only her mum had a key. We could hear Ami's voice, followed by a man's laugh. A foreign sound in the flat. Kathy came out of the kitchen, tea towel in hand.

Ami stood in the doorway, flushed and excited, as if she was about to present a visiting dignitary.

"Kath, there's someone here to see you."

She stood aside. I didn't recognise the man. He was bald and scarred. Kathy sat down on the sofa arm, looking the colour of a dirty dishrag.

"Oh, God," he said, "aren't you a bunch of princesses?"

"Kenny, when did you get out?" Kath asked.

"A little while ago." He took off his jacket and threw it down. A snake tattoo coiled up his arm and disappeared under the sleeve of his t-shirt. It wasn't the kind of body art I was used to. This hadn't been driven into the skin in a fit of self loathing or by a ham fisted amateur. It was faded but beautiful. It rippled as Kenny moved, invigorated by his muscles.

"Come and hug me, Kath."

She got up, robotic, and went to him, tolerating his embrace, her arms stiff by her sides.

"I've brought us something to celebrate."

He handed her a plastic bag and she pulled out a bottle of vodka and a packet of Jammy Dodgers.

"Just like when we were kids, eh?" he grinned.

"See, Kenny's got no hard feelings about you staying away." Ami was keen to be involved. "He's just glad to be home."

They both ignored her.

"Now, girls, come and kiss your uncle. You first, Tallulah."

"Well, go on." Ami gave her a shove.

She pecked his cheek and then shot away, which seemed to amuse him. Then it was my turn. Kath stood close to us while Kenny held me at arm's length.

"How old are you now, girl?"

"Eighteen."

"You were born after I went inside." He sighed. "You've got the family's ugly gene like me and your mum but you'll do."

For what? I thought.

Kenny put his fleshy hand around Kath's neck and pressed his forehead against hers. Kathy, who didn't like kisses or cuddles from anyone, flinched. I'd never seen her touched so much.

"I'm home now. We'll not talk about these past, dark years. It'll be how it was before. Better. You'll see. Us taking care of each other."

Georgia's unusual for a photographer in that she's more beautiful than her models. They're gap toothed, gawky things that only find luminosity through the lens. Georgia's arresting in the flesh.

I hover beside our host who's introducing me to everyone as though I'm a curio. We approach a group who talk too loudly, as if they're the epicentre of the party.

"I find Georgia distant. And ambitious."

"She lives on Martin's Heath. In one of the old houses."

"Bloody hell, is that family money?"

"Rosie, you've modelled for Georgia. Have you been there?"

"No."

Rosie sounds so quiet and reflective that the pain of her unrequited love is palpable. At least I hope it's unrequited.

"Have you seen her girlfriend?"

"Everyone, meet Eliza," our host steps in before they have a chance to pronounce judgement on me within my earshot, "Georgia's partner."

I shake hands with each of them.

"Georgia's last shoot made waves. And I didn't realise that she was such a stunner."

We all look over at Georgia. Among all the overdressed butterflies, she wears black trousers, a white shirt, and oxblood brogues.

"Don't tell her that," I smile. "She doesn't like it."

"Why? Doesn't every woman want that?" The man falters, as if he's just remembered that I'm a woman too.

These people with their interminable words. I came from a place where a slap sufficed.

"Don't be dull," I put him down. "She's much more than her face."

"What do you do, Eliza?" another one of them asks, unperturbed by my rudeness.

"I'm a herpetologist."

They shudder with delicious revulsion.

I glance back to Georgia. A man with long blonde hair reaches out to touch her forearm and he shows her something on his tablet.

I'm a pretender in my own life, in this relationship. I know how my jealousy will play out when we get home. I'll struggle to circumnavigate all the gentility and civility that makes me want to scream.

Eventually Georgia will say, What's the matter? Just tell me instead of trying to pick a fight.

She'll never be provoked, this gracious woman, to display any savagery of feeling. I should know better than to try and measure the breadth and depth of love by its noise and dramas but there are times that I crave it, as if it's proof that love is alive.

Ami took Tallulah away with her the first night that Kenny came to the flat.

"But it's a school night. And all my stuff's here."

"You're not going to school tomorrow." Ami picked up her handbag. "We're going out with Kenny."

Tallulah didn't move.

"Mind your mum, there's a good girl." Kenny didn't even look up.

After the front door closed, Kathy locked and chained it.

"Get your rucksack. Put some clothes in a bag. Don't pack anything you don't need."

"Why?" I followed her into her bedroom.

"We're leaving."

"Why?"

"Just get your stuff."

"What about college?"

Kathy tipped out drawers, rifling through the untidy piles that she'd made on the floor.

"What about Tallulah?"

She sank down on the bed.

"There's always someone that I have to stay for. Mum. Ami. Tallulah." She slammed her fist down on the duvet. "If it had been just us, we'd have been gone long ago."

"Stay?"

She wasn't listening to me anymore.

"I waited too long. I should've run when I had the chance. Fuck everyone."

She lay down, her face to the wall. I tried to put my arms around her but she shrunk from me, which she always did when I touched her and which never failed to hurt me.

If we were his princesses then Kenny considered himself king.

"Kath, stop fussing and come and sit down. It's good to be back among women. Without women, men are uncivilised creatures." He winked at me. "Tell me about Ma's funeral again, Kath."

Ami sat beside him, looking up at him.

"There were black horses with plumes and brasses. Her casket was in a glass carriage." Kath's delivery was wooden.

"And all the boys were there?"

"Yes, Kenny. All the men, in their suits, gold sovereign rings, and tattoos."

"Good," he said, "I would've been offended otherwise. Those boys owe me and they know it. I did time for them. Do you know the story?"

"Bits," Tallulah said.

"I told her, Kenny." Ami was keen to show her allegiance.

"You were what, twelve?" He snorted. "You remember nothing. We did a job in Liverpool. A jeweller who lived in one of those massive houses around Sefton Park. We heard he was dealing in stolen diamonds. I went in first," he thumped his chest. "At twenty-three I was much thinner back then, could get into all sorts of tight spots. I let the others in afterwards. We found his money but he kept insisting the diamonds were hidden in the fireplace, but his hidey hole was empty. He kept acting all surprised. He wouldn't tell, no matter what." Kenny shrugged. "Someone grassed. A copper picked me up near home. Under my coat, my shirt was covered in his blood. I kept my trap shut and did the time. The others were safe. Eighteen years inside. My only regret is what happened to Ma. And missing her funeral."

"There were white flowers, everywhere, spelling out her name." Ami said. He patted her arm in an absent way, like she was a cat mithering for strokes.

"I wish they'd let me out for it. Ma was a proper princess, girls. She was touched, God bless her, but she was a princess."

Kath sat with her hands folded on her knees.

"Do you remember what Dad said when he was dying?"

Kath stayed quiet.

"He said, You're the man of the house, Kenny. And you're the mother, Kathy. Kenny, you have to look after these girls. Poor Ma, so fragile. When I heard about her stroke, I was beside myself. It was the shock of me being sent down that did it. Whoever grassed me up has to pay for that, too. I should've been here, taking care of you all."

"I managed," Kathy squeezed the words out.

"I know. I hate to think of you, nursing Ma when you also had a baby to look after. You were meant for better things. We didn't always live in this shithole, girls. We grew up in a big rambling house. You won't remember much of it, Ami. Dad bred snakes. He was a specialist. And Ma, she was a real lady. They were educated people, not like 'round here."

The words stuck in my gut. 'Round here was all I knew.

"Happy days, weren't they, Mouse?" Kenny looked directly at Kathy, waiting.

"Mouse," Ami laughed like she'd only just noticed Kathy's big eyes and protruding ears, "I'd forgotten that."

Mouse. A nickname that diminished her.

"What's my pet name?" Ami pouted.

"You're just Ami." He said it like she was something flat and dead, not shifting his gaze from Kathy.

There it was. Even then, I could see that Kathy was at the centre of everything and Ami was just the means to reach her.

There's a photograph in our bedroom that Georgia took of me while we were travelling around South America. It embarrasses me because of its dimensions and scares me, because Georgia has managed to make me look like some kind of modern Eve, desirable in a way that I'll never be again. My hair is loose and uncombed and the python around my shoulders is handsome in dappled, autumnal shades. My expression is of unguarded pleasure.

"Let's stay here, forever," I said to her when she put the lens cap back on, "It's paradise."

What I was really thinking was What would it be like to change, forever, and have the whole jungle as my domain?

"Do you love it that much?" Georgia replied in a way that suggested she didn't. "And put him down. Poor thing. If he's caught he'll end up as a handbag."

So it is that serpents are reviled when it's man that is repulsive.

I got off the bus at the end of Argyll Street and walked towards home. Kenny sat on a plastic chair outside The Saddle pub, drinking a pint. He was waiting for me.

"What have you been doing today?" He abandoned his drink and followed me.

"Biology." I was at college, in town.

"Clever girl. That's from your grandparents. I used to be smart like that. You wouldn't think it to look at me."

There was an odd, puppyish eagerness to Kenny as he bounced along beside me. I darted across the road when there was a gap in the traffic. The railway line was on the other side of the fence, down a steep bank. Part way down the embankment was a rolled up carpet, wet and rotted, and the shopping trolley that it had been transported in.

"Let me carry your bag. It looks heavy."

"I can manage."

"I wasn't always like this. I had to change for us to survive. Fighting and stealing," he shook his head, embarrassed. "I only became brutal to stop us being brutalised. Do you understand?"

The sky had darkened. Rain was on its way.

"We lost everything when Dad died. The house. The money. Your grandma lost her mind. It was the shock of having to live here. We were posh and we paid for that. On our first day at school a lad was picking on Kathy. Do you know what I did? I bit him, Lola. Right on the face. He swelled up like a red balloon. He nearly choked. Nobody picks on my princesses."

Nobody except him.

"Are you special, Lola?"

"I don't know what you mean."

I dodged him as he tried to block my path. Tallulah wouldn't have told him anything. Ami though, she had told him to prevent Pauline and Jade getting a battering.

"I can wait," he didn't pursue me, just stood there in the drizzle. "We have lots of time now."

"We're going for a ride today." Kenny followed Kath into the kitchen. He'd started turning up at the flat every day.

"I can't, Kenny, I've got loads to do."

"It can all wait."

Kenny had the last word.

"Where are we going?" Tallulah asked.

"You're not going anywhere except to Ami's. She needs to get her house in order. A girl needs her mum. She's sorting your bedroom, so you're going to live with her. Properly."

"I don't want to."

"Want's not in it."

Kathy stood between them. He pushed her aside.

"I live here." Tallulah wouldn't be moved.

"You live where I tell you." He had this way of standing close to you, to make himself seem more imposing, and lowering his voice. "You act like you're something with that pretty little face of yours. Well, I'm here to tell you that you're not special. You're fucking Mikey Flynn's daughter. And he's a piece of dead scum."

Poor Mikey Flynn, rumoured to have done a runner. I wondered where Kenny had him buried.

"Go home, Tallulah." Kathy raised her chin. "Kenny's right. You're not my girl. You should be with your own mother."

Tallulah's eyes widened. I could see the tears starting to pool there.

"Go on, then," Kathy carried on, "you don't belong here."

"Mum," I opened my mouth.

"Shut it." Kathy turned on me. "I've been soft on you pair for too long. Now help Tallulah take her stuff to Ami's."

"No," Kenny put a hand on my arm, "Lola stays with us."

As Kenny drove, the terraces changed to semis and then detached houses. Finally there were open fields. It felt like he'd taken us hours away but it wasn't more than thirty minutes. We turned up an overgrown drive. Branches whipped the windscreen as Kenny drove.

"Kenny." Kath's voice was ripped from her throat. He patted her hand.

The drive ended at a large house, dark bricked with tall windows. It might as well have been a castle for all its unfamiliar grandeur. Overgrown rhododendrons crowded around it, shedding pink and red blossoms that were long past their best.

"Come on."

Kenny got out, not looking back to see if we were following.

Kath stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up at the open front door. There were plenty of window bars and metal shutters where I grew up, but the windows here were protected by wrought iron foliage in which metal snakes were entwined. The interior was dim. I could hear Kenny's footsteps as he walked inside.

"This is where we used to live." Kathy's face was blank. She went in, a sleep walker in her own life. I followed her.

"Welcome home." Kenny was behind the door. He locked it and put the key on a chain around his neck.

Kenny showed us from room to room as if we were prospective buyers, not prisoners. Every door had a lock and every window was decorated in the same metal lattice work.

I stopped at a set of double doors but Kenny steered me away from it. "Later. Look through here, Kathy. Do you remember the old Aga? Shame they ripped it out. I thought we could get a new one."

He led us on to the lounge, waving his arm with a flourish.

"I couldn't bring you here without buying some new furniture." He kept glancing at Kathy. "What do you think?"

The room smelt of new carpet. It was a dusky pink, to match the sofa, and the curtains were heavy cream with rose buds on them. Things an old woman might have picked.

"Lovely, Kenny."

"I bought it for us." He slung his arm around her neck. It looked like a noose. "You and me, here again, no interference." His face was soft. "I've plenty of money. I can get more."

"Go and play," Kath said to me.

It'll shame me forever that I was angry at her for talking to me like I was a child when all she was trying to do was get me out of his way.

I went, then crawled back on my belly to watch them through the gap in the door.

Kath broke away from him and sat down. Kenny followed her, sinking down to lay his head on her knee. Her hand hovered over him, the muscles in her throat moving as she swallowed hard. Then she stroked his head. He buried his face in her lap, moaning.

"What happened to us, Mouse?"

Mouse. He'd swallow her whole. He'd crush her.

"You said you can get more money. Do you mean the money from the job in Liverpool?"

He moved quickly, sitting beside Kathy with his thigh wedged against the length of hers.

"Yes." He interlaced their fingers, making their hands a single fist. "I want you to know that I didn't kill anyone."

"You didn't? You were covered in blood."

"It was Barry's son, Carl. He always had a screw loose. The man wouldn't tell us where the diamonds were and Carl just freaked. He kept on beating him."

"But you admitted it."

"Who would believe me if I denied it? I did the time. Barry was very grateful. I knew it would set us up for life. I hated waiting for you. I imagined slipping out between the bars to come to you. I was tempted so many times. I hated the parole board. There were diamonds, Kath. I took them before I let the others in. I stopped here and buried them under the wall at the bottom of the garden. I nearly got caught doing it. Then the police picked me up, on my way back to you. That's why I had to do the stretch, so nobody would suspect. They're safe, now. Shankly's looking after what's left of them." He laughed at his own cryptic comment. Every Merseysider knew the deceased Bill Shankly, iconic once-manager of Liverpool Football Club. "Did I do right, Kath?"

Then she did something surprising. She kissed him. He writhed under her touch.

"Mouse, was there anyone else while I was inside?"

"No, Kenny. There's never been anybody else."

He basked in that.

"It'll be just like I said."

I sensed her hesitation. So did he.

"What's wrong?"

"It won't be like we said though, will it?"

"Why?"

"It should be just us two." She leant closer to him. "Lola's grown up now. She can look after herself."

"Lola's just a kid."

"I was a mother at her age." She put her hand on his arm.

"No, she stays."

Her hand dropped.

"Lola," Kenny called out. "Never let me catch you eavesdropping again. Understand?"

"I'll just say goodnight to Lola." Kath stood in the doorway to my new bedroom, as if this game of fucked-up families was natural.

"Don't be long."

I sat on the bed. The new quilt cover and pillow case smelt funny. Kenny had put them on straight out of the packaging without washing them first. They still bore the sharp creases of their confinement.

"Lola," Kathy pulled me up and whispered to me. "He said to me, when we were kids, 'I'm going to put a baby in you and it's going to be special, like me and Dad,' as if I had nothing to do with it. I can't stand him touching me. When I felt you moving inside me, I was terrified you'd be a squirming snake, but you were mine. I'd do anything to get him away from us and Ami. I was the one who told the police."

Uncle. Father. Any wonder that I'm monstrous?

"Kenny's always been wrong. He thought it was from Dad, although he never saw him do it. It's from Mum. It drove her mad, holding it in. She nearly turned when she had her stroke. I have to know, can you do it too?"

"What?"

"We can't waste time. Can you turn into," she hesitated, "a snake?"

"Yes." I couldn't meet her gaze.

"Good. Do it as soon as I leave." She opened the window. "Go out through the bars. Will you fit?"

"I don't know if I can. I'm not sure that I can do it at will."

"Try. Get out of here."

Panic rose in my chest. "What about you?"

"I'm going to do what I should've done a long time ago." She showed me the paring knife in her back pocket and then pulled her baggy sweater back over it. It must've been all she had time to grab. "I won't be far behind you."

"What if you're not?"

"Don't ask stupid questions," she paused, "I'm sorry for not being stronger. I'm sorry for not getting you away from here."

"Kathy," Kenny's voice boomed from the corridor, "time for bed."

After she left I heard the key turn in the lock.

I went through the drawers and wardrobe. Kenny had filled them with clothes. I didn't want to touch anything that had come from him. There was nothing that I could use as a weapon or to help me escape.

I'd not changed since the time I'd bitten Jade. I lay down, trying to slow my breathing and concentrate. Nothing happened. The silence filled my mind along with all the things he would be doing to Kathy.

I dozed, somewhere towards early morning, wakening frequently in the unfamiliar room. I missed Tallulah beside me in the bed we'd shared since childhood. I missed her warmth and tangle of hair.

When Kenny let me out it was late afternoon.

"Where's my mum?"

"Down here."

There was a chest freezer in the basement. Kenny lifted the lid. Kathy was inside, frozen in a slumped position, arms crossed over her middle. Frozen blood glittered on the gash in her head and frosted one side of her face.

Kenny put his hand on my shoulder like we were mourners at a wake. I should've been kicking and screaming, but I was as frozen as she was.

One of Kathy's wrists was contorted at an unnatural angle.

"She betrayed me. I always knew it, in my heart." He shut the lid. "Now it's just you and me, kid."

He took me up through the house, to the room at the back with the double doors. There were dozens of tanks that cast a glow. Some contained a single serpent, others several that were coiled together like heaps of intestines.

"My beauties. I'll start breeding them."

There were corn snakes, ball pythons, ribbon snakes, though I had no names for them back then, all of which make good pets. I stopped at one tank. He had a broad head with a blunted snout.

"Ah, meet Shankly." Kenny put his hand against the glass. "He was hard to come by. They're called cottonmouths because they open their mouths so wide to show their fangs that you see all the white lining inside."

The cottonmouth must have been young. I remember his olive green colour and the clear banded pattern on his back, which he would lose as he got older.

"Are you special, Kathy?"

"I'm Lola."

"Yes, of course you are. Are you like me?"

"I'm nothing like you. Leave me alone."

"I'll look after you. Like you're a princess. You'll want for nothing. And you'll look after me because that's how it works."

"Don't fucking touch me."

Kenny pressed my face against the tank. Shankly showed me his pale underbelly as he slid towards me.

"Be afraid of him," Kenny nodded at the snake, "he still has his fangs. I'll make a mint from his venom."

Shankly climbed up a branch in his tank and settled there.

Kenny pushed me down with one hand and undid his belt buckle with the other.

"I'm your daughter." It was my last defence.

"I know."

Then he put his forked tongue in my mouth.

I couldn't move. The place between my legs was numb. I'd already tried sex with a boy from college. I knew what it was about. We'd fumbled and fallen in a heap in the bushes by the old boating lake one afternoon. It wasn't an experience to set the world alight but it was satisfactory enough.

This wasn't just a sex crime, it was a power crime. Kenny wanted my fear. I shrunk into the distant corners of myself trying to retreat where he couldn't follow. His orgasm was grudging, delivered with a short, gratified moan.

Afterwards he sat with his trousers open, watching me like he was waiting for me to do something. I was frozen. I'm not sure I even blinked. That was how Kathy must have felt, forever stuck in that single moment of inertia and shock that kept her in the same spot for a lifetime. She was right. She should have run while she had the chance. Fuck her mother. And Ami, for all the good she'd done her.

Kenny stood up. I thought, It's going to happen again and then he's going to dump me in the freezer. Instead, he went upstairs, his tread heavy with disappointment.

"Don't stay up too late, pet."

I think I was waiting for something too, when I should've been searching for something sharp to stick between his ribs. I couldn't summon anything; I was still too deep inside myself.

I was colder than I'd ever been before, even though the summer night was stifling. The room felt airless despite the window being wide open and butting up against the grille. Sometimes, when Georgia's away, I feel that cold.
Get up, get up before he remembers you and comes back down for more.
"Lola." A voice carried through the window.

It was Tallulah, a pale ghost beyond the glass. Her mouth was moving as she clutched at the bars.

I turned my face away, in the childish way of if I can't see her, then she can't see me. I didn't want her to see me like this. It occurred to me that she might have been a witness to the whole thing. I turned back but she'd gone, so I closed my eyes.

I should've known that Tallulah would never leave me. The snakes swayed in their tanks, enraptured. Tallulah was long and white, with pale yellow markings. Slender and magnificent. She glided over me and lay on my chest, rearing up. I couldn't breathe because she took my breath away. I could feel her muscles contracting and her smooth belly scales against my bare chest.
Get up, get up, or he'll come down and find her like this. Are you special?
Her tongue flicked out and touched my lips. I had no choice. I had to do it, for her. There was the rush of lubricant that loosened the top layer of my skin. The change was fast, my boyish body, with its flat chest and narrow hips perfectly suited to the transformation.

I crawled out of my human mantle. Moulting was good. I shed every cell of myself that Kenny had touched.

Both Tallulah and I are unidentifiable among my extensive research of snakes, bearing properties of several species at once. We made a perfect pair for hunting. The pits on my face were heat sensitive, able to detect a variation of a thousandth of a degree, feeding information into my optic nerves. I saw the world in thermal. Kenny's heart was luminous in the dark. I slid up the side of his bed and hovered over his pillow. Tallulah lay beside him on the mattress, waiting.
Look at your princesses, Kenny. See how special we are.
Kenny snored, a gentle, almost purring noise.

It's a myth that snakes dislocate their jaws.

I opened my mouth as wide as I could, stretching the flexible ligament that joined my lower jaw to my skull. I covered his crown in slow increments. He snorted and twitched. I slipped down over his eyes, his lashes tickling the inside of my throat. He reached up to touch his head.

Tallulah struck him, sinking her fangs into his neck. He started and tried to sit up, limbs flailing, which was a mistake as his accelerating heartbeat sent the venom further around his circulation.

Trying to cover his nose was the hardest part, despite my reconfigured mouth. I thought my head would split open. I wasn't sure how much more I could stomach. Not that it mattered. I wasn't trying to swallow him whole. A fraction more and I was over his nostrils completely.

There was only one way to save himself. I recognised the undulations he was making. I could feel the change on my tongue, his skin becoming fibrous. I had to stop him. I couldn't imagine what he'd become.

He was weakening with Tallulah's neurotoxins, slumping back on the bed, shaking in an exquisite fit. He'd wet himself. I stretched my flesh further and covered his mouth and waited until long after he was still.

I woke up on the floor beside Tallulah. We were naked. My throat and neck were sore. The corners of my mouth were crusted with dried blood. We lay on our sides, looking at one another without speaking. We were the same, after all.

"How did you find me?" I was hoarse.

"I had to wait until Ami went out. I found the house details in her bedroom drawer. I didn't have any money so I had to get a bus and walk the rest of the way. I'm sorry that I didn't get here sooner."

"It doesn't matter now."

Tallulah picked up our clothes and then our skins which lay like shrouds. It was disconcerting to see how they were moulds of us, even down to the contours of our faces.

"I'll take these with us. We can burn them later."

I went upstairs. I edged into the darkened room as if Kenny might sit up at any moment. He was a purple, bloated corpse with fang marks in his neck. I fumbled with the chain around his neck, not wanting to touch him.

"Where's Kathy?" Tallulah asked.

I told her.

"Show me."

"No, I don't want you to remember her like that." I seized Tallulah's face in my hands. "You do know that she didn't mean what she said, about you not belonging with us? She was trying to protect you."

Tallulah nodded, her mouth a line. She didn't cry.

"We have to bury her."

"We can't. Tallulah, we have to get out of here. Do you understand? Ami will come for you when she realises you've gone. There's something else."

I put my hand in the cottonmouth's tank. It curled up my arm and I lifted it out, holding it up to my cheek. He nudged my face.

"Lift out the bottom."

Tallulah pulled out bits of twisted branch and foliage, then pulled up the false base. She gasped. Out came bundles of notes and cloth bags. She tipped the contents out on her palm. More diamonds than I could hold in my cupped hands.

We loaded the money into Kenny's rucksack and tucked the diamonds in our pockets.

"What about the snakes?"

We opened the tanks and carried them outside. I watched them disappear into the undergrowth. Except for Shankly. I put him in a carrier bag and took him with us.

There are days when I wake and I can't remember who I am, like a disorientated traveller who can't recall which hotel room of which country they're in.

I'm hurt that Georgia didn't want me to collect her from the airport.
There's been a delay. I won't get in until late. Go to bed, I'll get a cab.
I wished now that I'd ignored her and gone anyway instead of lying here in the dark. The harsh fluorescent lights and the near empty corridors of the airport are preferable to the vast darkness of our empty bed.

Not going is a stupid test with which I've only hurt myself. I've resolutely taken her consideration for indifference. I want her to be upset that I wasn't there, as if she secretly wanted me there all along.

See, I confuse even myself.

The front door opens and closes. I should get up and go to her. She comes in, marked by the unzipping of her boots and the soft sound of her shedding clothes.

Love isn't just what you feel for someone when you look at them. It's how they make you feel about yourself when they look back at you.

Georgia is the coolest, most poised woman that I know. We're older now and our hearts and flesh aren't so easily moved but I still wonder what she sees when she looks at me.

"Do you love me?" It's easier to ask it with the lights off and my head turned away from her.

Everything about us is wrong. We're lovers, sisters, freaks.

She answers in a way that I have to respond to. I glide across the floor towards her and we become a writhing knot. We hunt mice in our grandiose pile and in the morning we are back here in our bed, entwined together in our nest.

When we wake again as human beings she says, "Of course I love you, monster."

When we shed the disguises that are Georgia and Eliza, and then the skins that are Lola and Tallulah, we are monsters. Fabulous beasts.

"Fabulous Beasts" copyright © 2015 by Priya Sharma

Art copyright © 2015 by Jeffery Alan Love

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"Fabulous Beasts" by Priya Sharma is a horror novelette about a strange woman living in luxury with her lover, but irrevocably tied to her childhood of deprivation and dark secrets in northwest England. The woman recalls the unravelling of the family upon her uncle's release from prison.

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Author Lorrie Moore once said, "A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage." With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers

A finalist for the National Book Award in 2019, Kali Fajardo-Anstine's first fiction collection, Sabrina & Corina, unearthed the lives of contemporary indigenous Latina women in the American West. The stories are lush, unvarnished, and breathtaking--fitting for the landscape among which many of them are set.

In "The Yellow Ranch," a photography grad student named Tasha accepts a mysterious invitation-offered to her by a wise and handsome professor-to stay and work at El Rancho Amarillo, a secluded adobe house in Colorado's San Luis Valley. There, she hopes to reconnect with her indigenous heritage, but what seems too good to be true usually is.

A creeping sense of dread pervades the first half of this story before shifting to full-on terror. Fajardo-Anstine deftly upends the tropes of a haunted house narrative while weaving together a frightening fable of exploitation.

"The Yellow Ranch"

"But is the house really haunted?" Tasha asked Arturo, leaning over a chrome café table, a metal glow lightening her eyes. They were in Boulder, a desolate patio on Pearl Street. He was visiting for only a few days.

"It was," Arturo said and let out a clipped laugh. He wasn't wearing his wedding band and was husky in designer denim and mall cashmere. "I had the cleansing done by a local woman, Lucille Mestas. She described it thoroughly, how the house held unrested spirits, a little girl, she had said, attached herself to me."

"Horrible," Tasha said. "I don't know if I can stay in a haunted house."

"It's just an old house now," he said. "All the spirits are gone."

He drank a cappuccino from a white cup, trailing his upper lip with foam. Tasha ran her index finger along her own lip. Arturo grinned, dabbing a paper napkin to his mouth of pretty bright teeth. He appeared much younger than fifty-two, early forties at most. Tasha thought there should be a word for the way he made her feel, but she found too many at once, and so she settled on pulled.

She then asked with seriousness, "It's safe, right? I'll be OK alone?"

"Not just safe," he told her. "It's sacred. People are different down there. You'll see."

*

El Rancho Amarillo spanned hundreds of acres, tall dark fields dotted with distant porch lights and the shining backs of cattle, an adobe home nesting like a brown pearl at its center. The house has stood for over seventy years, sighing and shifting mud walls into muddier earth. The land originally belonged to his grandmother's family while the house was designed by Arturo Lobato's paternal grandfather, Francisco Torres Lobato, the adobe bricks molded by the hands of his two small daughters. When Tasha first heard this story, she felt the house was built, in some way, piece by piece, by its women, and she wondered why Arturo hadn't mentioned any of their names.

She had accepted the invitation to visit El Rancho Amarillo after Professor Arturo Lobato, Distinguished R. F. Morley Chair of Architecture at Cornell University, delivered a guest lecture on her campus.

Tasha was a first-year MFA student at the University of Colorado, studying photography and multimodal narratives. Attend at least one art talk outside your discipline, stated her Ideation in Photo Representation syllabus. She had no interest in architecture, but the talk fit her Thursday schedule and on that mild spring morning as Arturo Lobato took the stage in that small black auditorium, standing erect with a potbelly above pressed denim, Tasha was surprised to find him handsome. He spoke on indigenous architecture and the historical significance of building with earth, noting that his theoretical work was profoundly influenced by his childhood in an isolated alpine valley of Southern Colorado, a portion of the state which had once been Mexico. Tasha wiped her fingers along her jeans until, meekly, she raised her hand, wanting to know more about this valley.

"San Luis," Arturo said swiftly.

"It's just, my own grandma was born there. A town called Saguarita."

"Ah," he said, "you're a Manita."

Afterward, students descended the auditorium stairs, they rushed the exists in backpack mass, Tasha among them when she felt a shock-a hand around her wrist, the dampness of touch, gold wedding ring, brown leather watchband, and those white-flecked nailbeds that people often said were a sign of some deficiency.

"I'd love to learn about your background." It was Arturo, vivid. "Shall we get coffee?"

Tasha peered upward, keeping her eyes halfway hidden beneath clumped-mascara. "Now?"

Arturo ordered their drinks, paid, and selected their seats-outside, away from others, cherry blossoms blowing through the air. What was she was studying? Could he see her work? What a fine eye for detail. She should have applied to the ivies, a shoo-in. Tasha lowered her gaze as she smiled, felt warmth in his attention. They stayed on the patio a long while as violet-blue dusk seeped into the brick road. Tasha searched her iPhone photos for a Día de los Muertos altar, paper marigolds and brass baby shoes, an installation on the cement floor of a Denver gallery named Redline. "For my Grandma Luisa," she finally said, revealing her screen to Arturo and leaning forward. "She left the San Luis Valley in the 1960s."

"We could be cousins," Arturo teased. "But I'm not related to any Espinosas. Not that I know of, at least." He scooted his chair close. He smelled of pine. "Do you know much about the Valley?"

Tasha shrugged in a kind of shame. When her grandmother was still alive, she had emphysema and an old Southern Colorado Spanish accent, making it difficult for Tasha to understand her tales of that dreamlike region to the south. "Not really," she said. "But I've wanted to visit."

Arturo's invitation was presented then, as if awaiting its summons. "You'll get to see where you come from," he suggested. "Or at least some of you."

*

"Like a retreat?" her best friend Chantel had said later that week over brunch mimosas at a restaurant called Quartz, in Denver. Chantel was a coordinator at a youth non-profit on the Westside. She had a loud, hoarse voice and always dressed in black. Earlier they had hiked Table Mountain, still drunk from the night before, smoking weed along the path. Tasha had photographed volcanic rocks and wildflowers. Stretching against a trailhead sign, arms high in neon sleeves, she had gazed east through a smoggy veil at Denver's skyline.

"Or is he trying to fuck you?" Chantel said abruptly.

Tasha looked to the restaurant's dirty floor. "Rude."

"Do you want to?"

She made a face, exaggerated offense. "He's old."

"And married," said Chantel. "And the Chair of some fancy Department. What an asshole." She gulped the last of her clear-ish yellow drink, more champagne than orange juice, her tarantula-like eyelash extensions flapped over her freckled cheeks. "Will anyone else be there? Will he be there?"

"No," Tasha said with resolve. "I'll be alone. It's fine. Just a few days."

"Who the hell is this guy? The wizard of OZ?"

*

She arrived in the dark, parking her red Camry in the dirt drive and slamming the trunk. Tasha dragged her hard-shelled suitcase over mushy ground, languidly, as if the land had reached up, gripping her ankles. At the dim door, her back to a seemingly endless field, Tasha pried cakey mud from the soles of her black sneakers with a long white stick. Great, she said entering the house and flipping on the lights. Mud had spread from her shoes to her hands and across her leggings. She was filthy cold, and The Yellow Ranch, as she called it, was stoically silent, smelling of soil and coal.

All of it-the long main room with a cast iron stove, the walled kitchen sink with a string of twinkly lights, and those barren lopsided bedrooms flanked on either side. Everything seemed dusted in night, lonely, unlived-in. The furniture was an odd mix of 1960s wooden chairs and southwestern inspired West Elm rugs. There was a record player, shelves of old books, and Chicano Power posters, mounted and framed, from the 1970s. The only original art was a triangular God's Eye woven in green and blue yarn. Ojo de Dios, her Grandma Luisa had once said, keeps an eye on the dead.

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That night, after two glasses of Yellow Tail and half a joint labeled Black Hole, Tasha got into bed and posted a photo on Instagram. It was the county road she had driven in on, the cottonwood trees blurred and ridged, gravel varied in headlights, a long dirt way, lonesome and dark. Tasha saturated the image, captioning it, Blue Velvet, and she wasn't surprised when Arturo soon messaged.
It's nice... so far. :) good. u deserve nice. btw, thanks again last night, my stunning subject
Tasha winced, remembering the photo. She had cropped her face, and that had to count for something. He had asked, slipped the request into a text as if inquiring about the weather. It was an old one, topless and taken for herself over floral sheets but Tasha lied, told Arturo- Just. For. You. Mindlessly, she tapped to like his last message. Tasha was high now, recalibrated with weed. She tossed her phone across the patchwork quilt and then switched off the lamp, the darkness heavy, rich, as if sleeping underground.

*

Tasha Nicole Espinosa Spencer was depressed, but it wasn't always this way. Sometimes it felt like the entire universe was powered by an affectionate current, running from sky to earth and into each person's veins. It was better than being drunk or stoned and only matched occasionally by sex. But these moments were rare, and for a long while, Tasha had been adrift. For the two years between college and graduate school, Tasha worked for a tech start-up, selling ad space to real estate companies while sitting in a cubicle on the dreary 5 th floor of a glass and steel high rise, overlooking the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The day Tasha was laid off, she was standing at the window, the coolness of the view emanating onto her skin, when her supervisor, a white woman from Indiana or was it Ohio, asked to speak with her privately.

"Do you like that sculpture," Tasha had said before turning around, her breath fogging the glass. "The one outside the museum, the dagger through the heart? A little cartoonish, huh?"

She was only twenty-six, but she wondered about dying, the finality of it. During her time at the start-up, Tasha used dating apps. She photographed well, her lips naturally plump, her eyes deep mournful pools. There were many matches. Tasha got drunk and met men who had recently moved to Denver and lived off their generational wealth in loft apartments. They smelled of musky soaps, new cars, metallic snow, and expensive booze. One crushed her during sex, laid across her body with all his weight, a tall man over six feet. She had sputtered and gasped for air, and wondered for a moment if this is how it felt to die.

*

"How do you like it so far?" Arturo asked over Facetime audio.

"No cell service is weird, but thank God for Wi-Fi." Tasha stood at the stove, scrambling eggs with salt and pepper, sipping her coffee black. El Rancho Amarillo was airy with open windows, the sheer curtains breathing a sage-scented breeze. Sunflowers blanketed the nearby fields and Tasha imagined napping beneath their sunny petals.

"The house has nice energy," she said after some time.

"Any spirits visit you in the night?"

Tasha laughed, lowering the stove's flame. "Thankfully, no. I did have a weird dream, though."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes," she said, scooping her eggs onto a white dish. "I dreamed an owl was looking at me through the bedroom window."

"Maybe it wasn't a dream." Arturo teased. "Maybe it was real."

"No," she laughed. "Because it was hovering." Tasha set her breakfast on the long cedar table. "Like a hummingbird."

Arturo asked how the dream ended, and Tasha knew he wasn't fully listening, anyway.

"It was the strangest thing. The house closed the curtains, just shut its own blinds."

*

That afternoon Tasha drove into town. Four miles over the country road through farmland rows of lettuce and wheat, and something else. Barley. She studied the fields, abandoned barns and adobe school houses, grooved waterlines of the acequias, those irrigation ditches of the former Spanish Colonies. She thought to return later to take photographs. Each farm house was miles from another, and Tasha couldn't imagine living with so much space, a dizzying reminder of inconsequence. She wondered about her Grandma Luisa as she passed the oldest church in Colorado, Our Lady of Guadalupe, with its bright Spanish doors and double brick towers, a marble statue of La Virgen at its center. There were a lot girls I knew, she once said, covering the tracheostomy hole in her throat with her right index finger, who never got to leave, the land had a way of trapping.

Tasha ended up at The Green House, hot springs housed inside a metal hangar at the base of the Great Sand Dunes, overlooking the impressive National Park. As a little girl during catechism, she had learned about Lot's nameless wife and Tasha imagined the massive white dunes were piles of salt clear to the blue sky. She swam in a vintage black bikini through the mineral rich pools, coming up for air on the far end of the springs and resting her head upon her hands against the stone ledge. There were several pools of different temperatures and sizes. It was busy. Locals, she imagined, and some white tourist families on National Park road trips. Flashes of ancient tattoos faded and winked among freckles and moles. Tasha wondered if she looked out of place, especially as a woman. She was small and noticeable, and most everyone else was partnered or grouped.

"Tasha Nicole Espinosa Spencer was depressed, but it wasn't always this way."

The hot springs were decorated in neon lights and subtropical plants, a tiki bar served box wine and beer and $2 U-Call-Its. Tasha lay across a woven beach chair and sifted through the books she had brought from the ranch library. The first was The San Luis Valley: Ghosts, Legends, and UFOs, a 1990s paperback written in a mixture of old Southern Colorado Spanish and academic jargon. Tasha made it through the introduction before moving onto another book. She had laughed upon seeing it on the shelf. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax, and the cover immediately reminded Tasha of a time she was often trying to remember, filling her mind with images and sounds from the past. Tasha was interested in memories and the Valley felt familiar, though she had never spent time there before. Maybe if a people have been somewhere for hundreds of years, that place, and its memories, is part of them.

"I prefer his later work," said a crisp male voice. He stood against the garage light, shirtless and smiling, a nice build with red swim trunks. He held a can of Tecate with specks of lime pulp down his thumb.

Tasha placed the open book over her stomach, feeling naked speaking to a stranger while in a bikini. "A true fan," she said.

"Hell yes," the man said, lowering himself into the pool before Tasha's feet. He was now eye-level to her legs. He was close enough, Tasha thought, that he could reach out from the water and touch her ankles.

"The Valley felt familiar, though she had never spent time there before."

" Oh, The Places You'll Go. A Classic," he said. "Perfect gift for quinceañera, graduations, funerals."

Tasha laughed and sat up straight, tucking her legs together and placing the book across her lap. "Quite the range."

"It's a life cycle, baby." He laughed and dunked his face under water, coming up in a tremor of waves, his striking smile gleaming, his black hair shiny blue.

He told her his name was Marcus Quintana, and that he was a diesel mechanic nearby in Alamosa, born in Capulin. "You're a city girl," he said. "I see your manicure. Get it."

Tasha pretended to ignore him, drifting back into her book, smirking between the pages.

"You know," Marcus said from the water, "I didn't want to tell you what happens in the end, but I heard he speaks for the trees."

Tasha looked up from her book. She laughed. "As if they can't speak for themselves."

"Exactly," said Marcus. "That's why I want you to come with me to the tiki bar."

Tasha rolled her eyes. She asked what he meant.

"Tell that nice lady what you'd like to drink."

*

His black Silverado tugged at sunset along the two-lane highway. Tasha followed Marcus in her Camry, the windows down, hay-scented warmth of oncoming night moving through her hair. She was listening to the radio, country music, old Rihanna songs, snippets of faraway voices discussing something about wolves in Colorado and then something about sheep. Ridiculous. What she was doing wasn't rational, but it didn't matter because it was summertime and it was late but it was still light out and everything was beautiful and open against the green fields.

They pulled into town, a bar called the Broken Bluff with a red sign, a horse standing on a mesa outlined in bulb lights, many gone dark. The town was a single road with a post office, a small library, a diner, few scattered bars and hair salons. The near-empty parking lot was tinged a grayish night, and an old carwash sign, in the shape of a blue metal cloud, hovered over them, squeaking in the dry wind. By now the sun was fully set. They stood together against Marcus' pickup bed, smoking Marlboro Reds and sipping from his thermos, this one filled with 1800, backup, he had said, for the flask of Jim Beam he kept in the dash. Tasha tipped her head back, swallowing the liquid warmth down her throat and into her belly. She licked her lips, felt happier and sexier standing there looking out at the parking lot, quiet as a church, Tasha wondered why she couldn't feel this way always.

"Thanks for coming with me," she said, taking a drag. "I didn't think you'd want to drive this far into town."

"My old stomping grounds. Besides," he said, brushing his hand along the top of Tasha's. That electric rush moved between them, lodging itself in Tasha's center. "Look at this night. I'd drive through this night forever. Quiet," he said. "Nice," he said.

A silver Grand Prix pulled into the parking lot then. It drove in a wide circle, the windows down, and for a moment Tasha caught the gaze of a little girl in the front seat. Her dark hair blended into the interior and her ghost-like eyes followed Tasha until the car pulled back onto the highway, retreating in a blur of taillights. Marcus tossed what was left of his cigarette after them in a burning arch. He cupped Tasha's hand in his, and kissed her left temple, his saliva over her skin a little too cold as they headed inside, moving quickly to the bar.

"Whatever you'd like," he said, and Tasha pushed forward on her tippy toes against the old-timey wooden bar, the back mirror webbed around a bullet hole. At the jukebox, Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer"played beneath the scattered sports sounds of distant TVs.

"Tequila," she chirped. "A double with coke."

First, red. The vinyl booths, the carpet, the mirrored walls, the bottles of scotch, the register, the bathroom stall, the sinks, the back door, the front door, the pickup truck's seats, the mats on the floor, the lines she imagined on the dirt road, the inside of her eyelids against the bedroom light.............. Then white. Amarillo, the ranch's earthen walls, the soil smell, teeth in the night, the undershirt, the boxers, the shine of the silver crucifix around his neck, how it moved forward and back.....as he moved inside and out? And then there was dark,............. black, the feeling of sleeping with no one.............. .........Alone......... She reached through the sheets and her fingertips grazed the chilled adobe.....................................

walls.....................................................................................................................and she rested like that, keeping her hand there, remembering in some distant part of her brain that she .........................................................................................

was................................................................................................

...........steadied, grounded,.................................................................................

that the world was not tipping on its side and dropping itself inside into nothingness................

Please, she groaned to no one, and thought she had remembered saying no.

*

"Do you know there are people who don't black out?" Chantel had once told her at a Lodo bar called the Giggling Grizzly. They were celebrating it being a Thursday. They were newly twenty-one. "Like they drink and never ever have regrets."

"Must be nice," Tasha had said with genuine surprise. "That's the ultimate in good genes."

"I know, right? So many bad things happen while I'm drunk. I lose jewelry, I spend all my money, I give my number to anyone."

"Yeah," Tasha said. " All the bad things happen while I'm drinking."

"But I mean, I'm not gonna quit."

Chantel laughed. They both did. They laughed until Tasha had tears in her eyes.

*

Tasha woke up at five in the morning-still drunk and still dark, as if she had entered endless night. She only wore a t-shirt, and it was on backwards and inside out. She was surprised and disgusted to find cold vomit beside the toilet. Was it even hers? The front door was unlocked and it felt as though the adobe walls themselves were disappointed in her, pitying her as some broken daughter of the house.

In bed, Tasha pulled the patchwork quilt over her head, hiding from the home. She couldn't remember most of the night. But her body ached, her legs, abdomen, mouth and breasts, everything was tender, harmed-that's how Tasha knew she had had sex. She needed to drive over an hour into Alamosa for Plan B, and she'd have to make an appointment to get tested. Tasha thought to call the university women's clinic then, but there was a time, several months ago, she had slept with an old boyfriend when he visited Denver for the weekend. Tasha was mortified, when weeks after his visit, she tested positive for chlamydia. "No big deal," Chantel had said. "It's literally antibiotics." But the nurse had said something to Tasha over the phone that made her want to die: "This kind of thing doesn't need to happen. You could take better care of your body. Aren't you in graduate school?"

Tasha smoked a joint, the dusty curtains drawn, filtered daylight painful on her swollen face. After some time, she staggered to the kitchen sink and drank water from her cupped hands, the liquid spilling over her bottom lip and onto her neck. She took too many Tylenol, but it all came up anyway and Tasha lay there, nauseous and pained, searching his name on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google. Nothing. A fake, and it served her right. She cried at this, heaving tears, wetting her sheets and pillows.

After some time, Tasha tried Arturo over Facetime audio.

"I can't talk right now," he said when he answered.

Tasha breathed. She mutely cried. "I just-."

"Not now," he said. "I'm with my family."

He hung up then, and Tasha went back to bed, groggy with embarrassment, wishing she could escape herself. Are you fucking kidding me? Chantel had said years earlier. They were having breakfast in a small diner on the Northside, neither had an appetite. Yellow eggs and brown toast rested over plastic plates. Tasha, there's a word for what he did. But Tasha shook her head. She teared up and dripped into her coffee. No, she said, this was different. The shame made her sleep that time, too.

Tasha woke up hours later, the day all but gone. Her car, she realized, was still at the Broken Bluff, and so methodically, painfully, she dressed herself for a long walk.

*

The county road and barbed wire fences lined the desert like a palm. The valley floor was high and wide, bordered by far-off snowy peaks and blue mesas. At the horizon, where sight edged into air, a white pickup truck stirred a halo of dust, as if the sky midway decided to rain dirt. Tasha passed few adobe farm houses, cottonwood trees along ditches, the slithering and bleak body of a bull snake shuffling into the grass. She marched with a stolid expression, her face knotted in perseverance, her dark eyes held in a squint and her mouth fixed in a sweaty line. She tried to think of nothing, repeatedly moved her thoughts to the dirt road. There was eventually a dead bird, a baby owl, stretched out in the road, cruciform in infant wings. Tasha stopped and turned toward a patch of mailboxes. She leaned with her left arm into the post, vomiting into the grass.

The road felt infinite, a flowing dirt path, too warm for late day. Tasha considered turning back, starting again the next morning, but she forced herself to keep walking. She could do it. She had walked further before. Sophomore year of high school, Tasha's mother had taken her to a dermatologist appointment in the suburbs. Tasha accidentally locked the keys in her mother's minivan. She screamed at Tasha in the parking lot, told her that she was always distracted, always lazy. Tasha cried then. She felt worthless, a way she felt often. When her mother went inside to wait for the locksmith, Tasha began walking home. She had underestimated the distance by several miles and walked alongside 72 nd Avenue for what felt like hours. It grew dark. Cars honked and men hurled insults and trash from their windows. They yelled slut and bitch, someone even shouted cunt. Tasha intermittently ran, afraid to be dragged into a truck bed. When she arrived home, past dinner time, aching and shivering, her mother slapped her. What was wrong her? Did she want to get raped?

"You could have picked me up," she had said. "You didn't even try to find me."

*

Homes began to group, three or four trailers on a tire-filled lot. A water tower appeared over high trees and Main Street was within sight. Tasha wiped her sweaty face with the end of her black t-shirt. She thought of her grandmother, buried near Denver, and wondered if she had walked to school like this as a little girl, zigzagging over dirt roads, tucked into the desert, hidden from the major byways of the world.

Pieces of the night came to Tasha as she walked. They laughed, sitting together at the long cedar table in the kitchen. They smoked cigarettes, overlooking the cattle in the dark. A chorus of moos. It wasn't that bad, she tried telling herself. She would have preferred to have been present, that's all. Tasha cried then and bent forward, forcing her hands across her thighs. She readied herself to be sick, but there was nothing left to puke. Far above her in the sky, hawks tilted in flight and the sunflowers, sprinkled throughout the fields, lowered their golden heads, as if they saw nothing at all.

They arrived in silence then, padded sneakers upon the earth. A whole grouping dressed in white. They came from behind Tasha carrying images of the Virgin Mary draped over tall wooden sticks. They were all ages, children, grandparents, young people with ringless fingers. Tasha stood tall and watched as they moved around her like a stream. She was swallowed by the group of twenty or so religious pilgrims. She had seen processions before, in Denver, devout Catholics sometimes walked into the mountains to visit sacred shrines. They walked the dirt road rhythmically in solitary unison. They prayed, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Tasha didn't know if she should adjust her pace, cross the road and walk beside them, going in the same direction separately. A woman turned around, looked deeply into Tasha's eyes. She wore brilliant green humming bird earrings that flickered with fading light. "Pray with us, jita."

Tasha thought to say no, but didn't want to seem rude, and so instinctively, she nodded, stepping into the crowd.

They had come from San Luis, a town some 40 miles west, deep in the valley. Starting at dawn, the pilgrims descended the Stations of the Cross from the high mount overlooking the entire region. Tasha told them that her favorite station was Jesus' second fall, though she had no idea why she had a favorite station in the first place. The people smiled at her. They asked why she was in the Valley, and Tasha told them that she was an artist. "I'm visiting my ancestors," she said, surprising herself. The pilgrims told her that it was special, to be able to create is special. They were on their way to Our Lady of Guadalupe and they carried water and fruit, granola bars tucked into fanny packs. They offered Tasha some, and she ate with enjoyment. They felt like warmth and they whispered to one another, cooing.

"We're going to visit the sacred crown, a miracle," said a little girl with pink ribbons in her braided black hair.

An old man whispered that the church had nearly burned down twice. "But each time," he said. "God protected La Virgen. She wears a crown of smoke now. She is indestructible."

"Don't you get tired along the way?" Tasha asked.

The woman in the humming bird earrings nodded, they floated around her. "Weakness opens us up to grace."

They arrived together in town, crossing train tracks, marching over dirty steel. At a fork in the road, Tasha said that she must turn away now. They embraced her. They smelled of sweat and stones and told her that she was welcome to pray with them anytime. Tasha's car was in the distance, glinting in the dusky bar parking lot, indestructible, she thought, walking off on her own.

*

In the days after the unwelcome visitor, the young woman used more of the rooms, opened all the windows and doors. She aligned with the walls, blurred into the corners, as if built of the same earth. "It's fine that you don't want to talk to me," she spoke. "It's distracting anyway. I'm not able to focus on making art. But I want you to know, Arturo," she said, peering through the window above the sink, in the distance beyond her shoulders, a cemetery. "I'm not just some dumb girl."

She moved about the house, speaking and sleeping and eating and drinking. She had tendencies and tastes, a left around the table instead of a right, one water glass, rinsed each time, drying on the rack. She walked the fields in the mornings and rested in the afternoons, napped with books beside her bed. At night, she kicked the quilt and ground her teeth. When she spoke, her voice often changed. Sometimes, as if reciting her thoughts, a low tone, unadorned. But other times, she cussed and laughed loudly. And other times still, she was meek and somber. "It's just, I have a lot to work on. But I'm glad I got to see this place, this land I come from." She went to say more, but all that came out was, "Bye now, Arturo. Thank you, I guess?"

"The young woman had a sadness that went very deep, a well connected to a spring."

The young woman had a sadness that went very deep, a well connected to a spring. But it was a pleasurable sorrow with the capacity for great feeling, a rare gift, and the house had encountered it before. The girls' names were Teresa and Anita, and they had played in the fields, bristling in colorful dresses and strict braids. When they molded the bricks outside in the merciless sun, they laughed and told jokes in two languages, Spanish and English, and were often scolded by their father. "Back to work, no laying about, no laughing, either." Anita was the first to spit, a clear glistening speckle of salvia. Teresa followed with a phlegmy rush. They took turns spitting into the adobe, laughing at their naughtiness, rubbing the gritty clay between their fingers, pinching at the straw.

*

From afar the girl's jacket caught what little light illuminated the land. Some ways down the dirt road, she walked the edges of the ditch with Our Lady of Guadalupe in blue against her back. Foolish, the old man thought, when it's about to rain. In the distance veins of lightning spread over the mesas like a sky of shattered glass. As he pulled alongside the girl, he saw that she was older than he originally thought, very pretty and looked somewhat Spanish and Indian, though, like his own grandchildren, appeared to be a mixture of many things. He drove beside her for several seconds until she removed the white dangling cords from her ears and with a look of horror, acknowledged his presence with a stifled wave.

The old man rolled down his passenger side window. "Hello," he said.

"Hello," the girl said, quickly without making eye contact.

"It's about to storm," he said. "Are you just out walking?"

The girl heisted for a moment, and the old man knew she must be scared.

"I was on my way to the graves, to visit my people." He held up a fistful of wildflowers, a small stuffed bear. "This one's for the baby."

"I'm on my way there, too," the girl said after some time.

"Pretty far," he told her, "Another twenty-five minutes and by then you'll be soaked. Want a ride?"

Tasha entered the truck oddly without any fear. She'd never done something like this before, but the old man seemed gentle, the way kindness spreads from certain people. They drove without the radio on, the only sounds coming from the gravel and rocks spitting up from the ground and into the truck's undercarriage. The old man said his name was Joseph, and he was born in San Luis on the floor of his parents' adobe ranch in the 1940s. He asked Tasha if she was visiting family, and she lied, saying that she was staying at her cousin's ranch, the Lobatos.

"I just arrived the other day," she said.

"Those Lobatos," he said, and for a moment went silent. "When we were kids, I was in love with the eldest daughter, Teresa. She was a good woman. Gone now."

Tasha let out a sad sigh. She asked about the other sister.

"Anita," he said. "Haven't thought of her in ages. Left as soon as she could. Just married and got out. But I heard he wasn't a good guy. She was back often."

"Tasha gazed at the land, as if it were alive, some part of its soil and rock embedded in her DNA."

Tasha gazed at the land, as if it were alive, some part of its soil and rock embedded in her DNA. It felt like looking into her mother's eyes, like embracing her grandmother, all the women she had ever loved. They soon came to a grouping of trailers, their metal sides dented and torn. It had started to drizzle by now, and the trailers' metal siding blurred into the haze, as if leaking into the air.

They arrived at the cemetery, working together to unlatch the chains around the cattle gate. Tasha helped carry the stuffed bear and flowers from the truck while the old man lifted tools from the back-sheers, a gardening shovel. They stepped past a hand-painted that sign that warned against rattle snakes. The snake looked like a petroglyph. When Tasha asked if it was safe, the old man laughed.

"Snakes all over this land. I don't know why they're warning the dead."

"Do you know much about that land over there, El Rancho Amarillo," Tasha asked.

The old man shook his head. "We don't call it that. That's the Hernandez."

"But the family-"

"That's the grandmother's name, the name of her people."

"Her maiden name," Tasha said.

The old man shrugged. "I used to sheep herd around all these hills. All these bluffs. Up into those mountains. All of it. Motherland, if nothing else."
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This Is a Haunted House Story-But Not the Kind You've Read Before

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Author Lorrie Moore once said, "A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage." With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers A finalist for the National Book Award in 2019, Kali Fajardo-Anstine's first fiction collection, Sabrina & Corina, unearthed the lives of contemporary indigenous Latina women in the American West.

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The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-the villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy"-eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.

The lottery was conducted-as were the square dances, the teen-age club, the Halloween program-by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called, "Little late today, folks." The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three-legged stool, and the stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?," there was a hesitation before two men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them into the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves' barn and another year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make up-of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans, with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what day it was," she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood," Mrs. Hutchinson went on, "and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running." She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time, though. They're still talking away up there."

Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through; two or three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, "Here comes your Mrs., Hutchinson," and "Bill, she made it after all." Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully, "Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson said, grinning, "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe?," and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson's arrival.

"Well, now," Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this over with, so's we can go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"

"Dunbar," several people said. "Dunbar, Dunbar."

Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar," he said. "That's right. He's broke his leg, hasn't he? Who's drawing for him?"

"Me, I guess," a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. "Wife draws for her husband," Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.

"Horace's not but sixteen yet," Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. "Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year."

"Right," Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, "Watson boy drawing this year?"

A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I'm drawing for m'mother and me." He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like "Good fellow, Jack," and "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it."

"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man Warner make it?"

"Here," a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. "All ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names-heads of families first-and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?"

The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said, "Adams." A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. "Hi, Steve," Mr. Summers said, and Mr. Adams said, "Hi, Joe." They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.

"Allen," Mr. Summers said. "Anderson. . . . Bentham."

"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more," Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row. "Seems like we got through with the last one only last week."

"Time sure goes fast," Mrs. Graves said.

"Clark. . . . Delacroix."

"There goes my old man," Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.

"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women said, "Go on, Janey," and another said, "There she goes."

"We're next," Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely, and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hands, turning them over and over nervously. Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.

"Harburt. . . . Hutchinson."

"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed.

"Jones."

"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery."

Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly. "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody."

"Some places have already quit lotteries," Mrs. Adams said.

"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

"Martin." And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke. . . . Percy."

"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish they'd hurry."

"They're almost through," her son said.

"You get ready to run tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.

Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, "Warner."

"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. "Seventy-seventh time."

"Watson." The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, "Don't be nervous, Jack," and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."

"Zanini."

After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers, holding his slip of paper in the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saying, "Who is it?," "Who's got it?," "Is it the Dunbars?," "Is it the Watsons?" Then the voices began to say, "It's Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill Hutchinson's got it."

"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers, "You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!"

"Be a good sport, Tessie," Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of us took the same chance."

"Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.

"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast, and now we've got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time." He consulted his next list. "Bill," he said, "you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?"

"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their chance!"

"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently. "You know that as well as anyone else."

"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.

"I guess not, Joe," Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My daughter draws with her husband's family, that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the kids."

"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr. Summers said in explanation, "and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you, too. Right?"

"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.

"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.

"Three," Bill Hutchinson said. "There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me."

"All right, then," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you got their tickets back?"

Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in the box, then," Mr. Summers directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."

"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. "I tell you it wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Every body saw that."

Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box, and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground, where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.

"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.

"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children, nodded.

"Remember," Mr. Summers said, "take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box, Davy," Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. "Take just one paper," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.

"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward, switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box. "Bill, Jr.," Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, nearly knocked the box over as he got a paper out. "Tessie," Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy," and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.

"It's not the way it used to be," Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't the way they used to be."

"All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's."

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr., opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.

"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper, Bill."

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

"All right, folks," Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."

The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her. ♦

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Fiction, from 1948: "The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around."

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This month we published two of Daphne du Maurier's best-loved and most spine-tingling short story collections as Virago Modern Classics designer hardbacks. Both The Birds and Don't Look Now come with covers by award-winning textiles designer Neisha Crosland - find out more about them on the gorgeous Selvedge blog.

Du Maurier is the queen of the terrifying short story, and we've been rifling through our archives for the perfect seasonal treat (or trick).

In the end we decided to give you this short story, 'The Doll', which went unpublished for over 70 years after it was lost and rediscovered by a bookseller in 2011. It's ghostly, ghastly, a little risqué, and guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. Happy Halloween.

The following pages were found in a shabby pocket book, very much sodden and discoloured by salt water, tucked away between the crevices of a rock in -Bay.

Their owner has never been traced, and the most diligent enquiries have failed to discover his identity. Either the wretched man drowned himself near the spot where he hid his pocket book, and his body has been lost at sea; or he is still wandering about the world trying to forget himself and his tragedy.

Some of the pages of his story were so damaged by exposure as to render them completely illegible; thus there are many gaps, and much of it seems without sequence, including the abrupt and unsatisfactory termination.

I have placed three dots between sentences when words or lines were undecipherable. Whether the wild improbabilities of the story are true, or whether the whole is but the hysterical product of a diseased mind, we shall never know. My sole reason for publishing these pages is to satisfy the entreaties of many friends who have been interested in my discovery.

Signed. DR E STRONGMAN.

-BAY, S ENGLAND.

R

I want to know if men realise when they are insane. Sometimes I think that my brain cannot hold together, it is filled with too much horror - too great a despair.

And there is no one; I have never been so unutterably alone. Why should it help me to write this? . . . Vomit forth the poison in my brain.

For I am poisoned, I cannot sleep, I cannot close my eyes without seeing his damned face . . . If only it had been a dream, something to laugh over, a festered imagination.

It's easy enough to laugh, who wouldn't crack their sides and split their tongues with laughing. Let's laugh till the blood runs from our eyes - there's fun, if you like. No, it's the emptiness that hurts, the breaking up of everything inside me.

If I could feel, I should have followed her to the ends of the earth, no matter how she pleaded or how she loathed me. I should have taught her what it is to be loved by a man - yes - a man, and I would have thrown his filthy battered body from the window, watched him disappear for ever, his evil scarlet mouth distorted . . .

It's the hot feeling that has filled me, the utter incapacity to reason.

And I am deceiving myself when I say she would have come to me. I did not follow her because I knew that it was hopeless. She would never have loved me - she will never love any man.

Sometimes I can think of it all dispassionately, and I pity her. She misses so much - so much - and no one will ever know the truth. What was her life before I knew her, what is it now?

Rebecca - Rebecca, when I think of you with your pale earnest face, your great wide fanatical eyes like a saint, the narrow mouth that hid your teeth, sharp and white as ivory, and your halo of savage hair, electric, dark, uncontrolled - there has never been anyone more beautiful. Who will ever know your heart, who will ever know your mind?

Intense, restrained, and soulless; for you must be soulless to have done what you have done. You have that fatal quality of silence - of a tight repression that suggests a hidden fire - yes, a burning fire unquenchable. What have I not done with you in dreams, Rebecca?

You would be fatal to any man. A spark that lights, and does not burn itself, a flame fanning other flames.

What did I love in you but your indifference, and the suggestions that lay beneath your indifference?

I loved you too much, wanted you too much, had for you too great a tenderness. Now all of this is like a twisted root in my heart, a deadly poison in my brain. You have made of me a madman. You fill me with a kind of horror, a devastating hate that is akin to love - a hunger that is nausea. If only I could be calm and clear for one moment - one moment only . . .

I want to make a plan - an orderly arrangement of dates.

It was at Olga's studio first, I think. I can remember how it rained outside, and the rain made dirty streaks on the window-pane. The room was full, a lot of people were talking by the piano - Vorki was there, they were trying to make him sing, and Olga was screaming with laughter.

I always hated the hard thin reed of her laugh. You were sitting - Rebecca was sitting on a stool by the fire.

Her legs were twisted under her, and she looked like an elf, a sort of boy.

Her back was turned to me, and she wore a funny little fur cap on her head. I remember being amused at her position, I wanted to see her face. I called out to Olga to introduce me.

"Rebecca," she said, "Rebecca, show yourself." . . . flinging off her cap as she turned. Her hair sprung from her head like a savage, her eyes opened wide - and she smiled at me, biting her lip.

I can remember sitting down on the floor beside her, and talking, talking - what does it matter what I said, dull stuff, nonsense of course, but she spoke breathlessly, with a sort of constrained eagerness. She did not say much, she smiled . . . eyes of a visionary, of a fanatic - they saw too much, demanded too much - one lost oneself in them, and became incapable of resistance. It was like drowning. From the moment I saw her then I was doomed. I left her, and came away, and walked down the embankment like a drunkard. Faces spluttered up at me, and shoulders brushed me, I was aware of dim lights reflected on wet pavements, and the hazy throb of traffic - through it all were her eyes and her wild impossible hair, her slim body like a boy . . . all coming clear now, I can see each event as it happened, each moment of the game. I went to Olga's again and she was there.

She came right up to me and said "Do you care for music?" gravely, like a child. Why did she say this, I don't know, there was no one at the piano - I answered vaguely, and noticed the colour of her skin, pale coffee, and clear, clear as water.

She was dressed in brown, some sort of velvet I think, with a red scarf round her neck.

Her throat was very long and thin, like a swan's. I remember thinking how easy it would be to tighten the scarf and strangle her. I imagined her face when dying - her lips parted, and the enquiring look in her eyes - they would show white, but she would not be afraid. All this in the space of a moment, and while she was talking to me. I could drag very little from her. She was a violinist apparently, an orphan, and lived alone in Bloomsbury.

Yes, she had travelled much, she said, and especially in Hungary. She had lived in Budapest for three years, studying music. She did not care for England, she wanted to go back to Budapest. It was the only city in the world.

"Rebecca" someone called, and she glanced over her shoulder with a smile. How much could I write about Rebecca's smile! It was so vivid, so intensely alive, and yet apart, unearthly, it had no relation to anything one said. Her eyes would be transfigured as if by a shaft of silver.

She left early that day, and I crossed the room to ask Olga about her. I was in an agony of impatience to know everything. Olga could tell me little. "She comes from Hungary," she said, "no one knows who were her parents, Jewish, I imagine. Vorki brought her here. He found her in Paris, playing the violin in one of those Russian cafes. She won't have anything to do with him though, she lives entirely alone. Vorki says her talent is marvellous, if she only goes on there will be no one to touch her. But she won't work, she doesn't seem to care. I heard her at Vorki's flat - it sent cold shivers down my spine. She stood at the end of the room, looking like something off another planet - her hair sticking out, a sort of fur bush round her head, and she played. The notes were weird, haunting, I've never known anything quite like it, it's impossible to describe."

Once again I left Olga's studio in a dream, with Rebecca's face dancing before my eyes. I too could see her playing the violin - she would stand straight and firm as a child, her eyes wide open, her lips parted in a smile.

She was to play at Vorki's flat the following evening, and I went to hear her. Olga had not exaggerated, with all her palpable, shallow insincerity. I sat like a drugged man, incapable of movement. I don't know what she played, but it was shattering - stupendous. I was not aware of anything but that I and Rebecca were together - out of the world, away, lost - lost in unutterable bliss. We were climbing, then flying, higher - higher.

At one time the violin seemed to protest, and it was as if she were refusing me, and I were pursuing her - then there came a torrent of sound, a medley of acceptance and denial, a confusion of notes in which were mingled desire and sweetness, and intolerable pleasure. I could feel my heart beating like the throb of some mighty vessel, and the blood pounded in my temples.

Rebecca was part of me, she was myself - it was too much, it was too glorious. We had reached the summit, we could go no farther, the sun seemed to strike into my eyes. I looked up - Rebecca was smiling at me, the violin broke on a note of exquisite beauty - it was fulfilment.

I leant back exhausted on the sofa, my senses swimming - it was too wonderful, too wonderful. Three minutes passed before I came fully conscious again. I felt as if I had plunged in the black abyss of eternity to sleep - and had come awake once more.

No one had noticed me, Vorki was handing round drinks, and Rebecca was sitting by the piano turning over some music. When they asked her to play again, she refused, she was tired, she said. They implored her so she took up her violin and played once more - something quite short, but very lovely and pure, like a child's prayer.

Later in the evening she came and sat beside me, for a few moments I was too moved to speak. Then I cursed myself for a fool, and turned to her, and looked into her face.

"You gave me a marvellous sensation when you played," I told her, "it was beautiful, intoxicating, I shall never forget it. You have a rare - no - a very dangerous talent." She was silent, and then spoke in her restrained, breathless little voice. "I played for you," she said, "I wanted to see what it was like to play to a man." Her words bewildered me, they seemed utterly inexplicable. She was not lying, her eyes looked straight into mine, and she was smiling.

"What do you mean?" I asked her. "Have you never played for anyone before, do you use your gift just to satisfy yourself? I don't understand."

"Perhaps," she said slowly, "perhaps, it's like that, I can't explain."

"I want to see you again," I told her, "I'd like to come and see you alone, where we can talk, really talk. I've thought about you ever since I saw you in Olga's studio, you knew that, didn't you? That's why you played to me tonight, wasn't it?"

I wanted to drag the answer from her lips, I wanted to force her to say yes. She shrugged her shoulders, she refused to be definite, it was exasperating.

"I don't know," she said, "I don't know." Then I asked for her address, and she gave it to me. She was busy, she would not be able to see me until the end of the week. The party broke up soon after and she disappeared.

The days that passed seemed interminable, I could not wait to see her again. I thought about her ceaselessly.

On Friday I could stand it no longer, so I went to her. She lived in an odd sort of a house somewhere in Bloomsbury. She rented the top floor as a flat. The outlook was dull and dreary, I wondered how she could bear to live there.

She opened the door to me herself, and took me into a large bare room like a studio, with an oil-stove burning. I was struck by the cheerlessness of it, but she did not seem to notice anything, and made me sit down in a shabby armchair.

"This is where I practise," Rebecca told me, "and have my meals. It's a bright room, don't you think?" I said nothing to this and then she went to a cupboard and brought out some drinks, and a few stale biscuits. She took nothing herself.

I found her strange, detached - she seemed bored at my being there. Our conversation was forced and there were pauses. I found it impossible to say any of the things I wanted to say. She played to me for a while, but they were all classical things that I knew, and quite different from what she had played that evening at Vorki's.

Before I left she showed me round her tiny flat. There was a little scullery place she used for a kitchen, a poky bathroom, and her own small bedroom which was furnished like a nun's cell, quite plain and bare. There was another room leading from the studio, but she did not show me this. It was obviously a fair-sized room, as I saw the window from the street afterwards, and watched her draw the heavy curtains across it . . .

( Note. Here some pages were completely illegible, covered with blots, and discoloured. The narrative appears to continue in the middle of a sentence. Dr Strongman.)

. . . "not really cold," she insisted, "I've tried to explain to you that I'm odd in some ways, I've never met anyone to care for, I've never been in love. I've always disliked people rather than been attracted by them." "That doesn't explain your music." I broke in impatiently. "You play as if you knew everything - everything."

I was becoming maddened by her indifference, it was not natural but calculated; she always gave me the impression of concealment. I felt I should never discover what was in her mind, whether she was like a child asleep, a flower before it has blossomed - or whether she was lying to me throughout, in which case every man would have been her lover - every man.

I was tortured by doubt and jealousy, the thought of other men was driving me insane. And she gave me no relief, she would look at me with her great pale eyes, pure as water, until I could swear that she was untouched - and yet, and yet? A look, a smile, and back would come my torture and my misery. She was impossible, she evaded everything, and yet it was this fatal quality of restraint that tore at me and broke at me, until my love for her became an obsession, a terrible driving force.

I asked Olga about her, asked Vorki, asked everyone who knew her. No one could tell me anything, anything.

I'm forgetting days and weeks as I write this, nothing seems to have any sequence for me, it's like rising from the dead, it's like being reincarnated from dust and ashes to live it again, to live my whole cursed life again - for what was my life before I loved Rebecca, where was I, who was I?

I had better write that Sunday now, Sunday that was really the end; and I didn't know it, I thought it was the beginning. I was like someone walking in the dark, no, walking in the light with his eyes open and not seeing - deliberately blinding himself.

Sunday, day of hollow and mistaken happiness. I went to her flat about nine in the evening. She was waiting for me. She was dressed in scarlet - like Mephistopheles, odd strange clothes that only Rebecca could wear. She seemed excited, intoxicated - she ran about the room like an elf.

Then she sat down at my feet with her legs tucked under her, and held out her thin brown hands to the stove. She laughed and giggled childishly, she reminded me of a mischievous child planning some naughtiness.

Then all at once she turned to me, her face pale, her eyes strangely alight. She said, "Is it possible to love someone so much, that it gives one a pleasure, an unaccountable pleasure to hurt them? To hurt them by jealousy I mean, and to hurt oneself at the same time. Pleasure and pain, an equal mingling of pleasure and pain, just as an experiment, a rare sensation?"

She puzzled me, but I tried to explain to her what was meant by Sadism. She seemed to understand, and nodded her head thoughtfully once or twice.

Then she rose and went slowly across the room to the door I had never yet seen opened. She looked oddly pale as she stood there, her mass of queer savage hair springing from her head, her hand on the knob of the door. "I want to introduce you to Julio," she said. I left my chair and went towards her, I had no idea of what she was talking about. She took my hand and then opened the door. I saw a low round-shaped room, whose walls were draped with some sort of velvet hangings as if to deaden any sound, and long thick curtains were drawn across the window. There was a log fire, but it had burnt very low. Near the fireplace was a divan, covered with cushions thrown anyhow, and the only light came from a small shaded lamp, thus leaving the room in a half darkness.

There was one chair in the room, and this was facing the divan.

Something was sitting in the chair. I felt an eerie cold feeling in my heart, as if the room were haunted. "What is it?" I whispered.

Rebecca took the lamp and held it over the chair. "This is Julio," she said softly. I stepped closer, and saw what I took to be a boy of about 16, dressed in a dinner jacket, shirt and waistcoat, and long Spanish trousers.

His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin, with curved nostrils, and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one - the eyes of a hawk. The hair was sleek and dark, brushed right back from the white forehead.

It was the face of a satyr, a grinning hateful satyr.

Then I was aware of a strange feeling of disappointment, a helpless sensation of not understanding, of dumb incredulity.

There was no boy sitting in the chair. It was a doll. Human enough, damnably lifelike, with a foul distinctive personality but a doll.

Only a doll. The eyes stared into mine without recognition, the mouth leered foolishly. I looked at Rebecca, she was watching my face.

"I don't see," I said, "what's the point of all this? Where did you get this loathsome toy? Are you having a joke with me?" I spoke sharply, I felt uneasy and cold. The next moment the room was in darkness, she had turned out the lamp. I felt her arms round my neck, and her mouth upon mine.

"Now shall I tell you I love you?" she whispered, "shall I?"

A hot wave of something swept over me, the floor seemed to swing beneath my feet. She clung to me and kissed my throat, I could feel her fingers at the back of my neck. I let her hands wander over my body, and she kissed me again. It was devastating - it was madness - it was like death.

I don't know how long we stood there, I don't remember anything, words, or thoughts, or dreams - only the silence of that dark room, the feeble glow of the fire, the beating of my heart - the singing in my ears - and Rebecca - Rebecca-. When, - and whether hours had passed or years I cannot tell - when I raised my eyes above her head I looked straight into his eyes - his damned doll's eyes.

They seemed to squint at me and leer, one eyebrow was cocked, and his crimson treacherous mouth was twisted at the corner. I wanted to leap at it, and smash its beastly grinning face, trample on its sordid human body. Was Rebecca mad to keep such a toy, what was her motive, where had she found it? But she would not answer my questions.

"Come away," she said, and dragged me from the room, back once more into the hard glaring light of the bare studio. "You must go now," she said breathlessly, "it's late - I had forgotten." I tried to take hold of her, once more, I wanted to kiss her again and again, she surely did not mean me to go now.

"Tomorrow," she said impatiently, "I promise you tomorrow, but not at the moment. I'm tired and bewildered - don't you see? Let me alone just for tonight, it's been too strong, I can't realise anything."

She stamped her foot with impatience, she looked ill. I saw it was hopeless. I took my things and went - and walked, and walked - all night I think.

I watched the dawn break on Hampstead Heath, grey and sunless; heavy rain fell from a leaden sky.

My body was cold, but my brain was on fire. Once more I was certain that Rebecca had lied to me - from the moment she kissed me I knew that she had lied to me.

She had known five, 10, what matter the number, 20 lovers - and I was not one of them.

No, I was not one of them.

I found myself near Camden Town, buses rumbled along the streets; it was still raining, people straggled past me, their figures bent under umbrellas.

I found a taxi somewhere, and went home. I got into bed without undressing, and slept. I slept for hours. When I awoke it was dark once more; it must have been about six in the evening. I remember washing mechanically, and then once more walking in the direction of Bloomsbury.

I reached the flat and rang at her bell.

She let me in without a word, and then sat down in the studio before the oil stove. I told her I was going to be her lover. She said nothing. There were red rims under her eyes as if she had been crying, and thin lines round her mouth. I bent towards her to kiss her, but she pushed me away.

She began to speak rapidly.

"You must forget what happened last night. Today I realise I made a mistake. I'm not well, I haven't slept. All this has worried me considerably. You must leave me alone."

I tried to seize her, and break down her iron restraint. It was like hammering at an iron wall. She lay cold and still in my arms. Her mouth was icy. I left her in despair. Then followed a week of doubt and torture. Sometimes she sat apart from me without a word, sometimes I could have sworn that she loved me. And she would not let me touch her, she was not in the mood she said. I must wait until she wanted me again. I must wait in suspense, in agony. She never mentioned Julio. We never went into that room again. I asked her what she had done with him. I wanted to know what was at the back of it all. She would answer evasively and change the subject. It was useless to press her. She was maddening. She was intolerable.

And yet I could not keep away from her. I could not live without her.

One evening she would be gentle and affectionate. She would sit at my feet and talk about her music, about her future plans. She was always changing. She was never the same.

I felt hopeless. My position was ridiculous - but what was I to do? She had become a madness to me - an obsession.

I've now come to the last evening, the very last. Then crash - blankness - the depths of hell - and desolation - utter desolation.

Let me get it clear - when was it, what time was it? Seven, eight perhaps. I can't remember. I was leaving the flat and she came to the door with me.

She suddenly put her arms round me and kissed me . . . There have been men in arid deserts where the sun has so disfigured them that they have become things of horror - parched and blackened, twisted and torn. Their eyes run blood, their tongues are bitten through - and then they come upon water.

I know, because I was one of their number.

Laugh at all these comparisons, call me a madman, but the laugh is on my side.

There are women - but you have not kissed Rebecca, you cannot know.

You are a fool asleep. You have never begun to imagine. . .

( Note. Much of this seems completely unintelligible, and the quarter page that follows consists of nothing but broken sentences and half-formed ideas. Then the narrative continues.)

It was shattering. She let me kiss her again and again. I took her face in my hands and looked down into her eyes.

"Who were your lovers?" I said. "How often did you kiss them like that? Who taught you to kiss them like that? Who was the first, the very first? Tell me."

A haze of fury was before my eyes, my hands shook.

"I swear to you that you are the first man I have ever kissed. I swear to you there has been no man before you. Never. Never."

She looked straight at me. Her voice was firm. I saw that she was speaking the truth.

"Now you must go," she said, "tomorrow you shall come, and then we shall have so much to tell each other, so much."

She smiled at me. I saw right through her wall of restraint, right through ice to the flame, the hidden fire.

I remember leaving the flat, and having dinner somewhere. My head was on fire. I seemed to walk among the gods. It was incredible that Rebecca should love me, it was incredible that I should know such happiness. I wanted to shout. I wanted to chuck myself off a roof.

I went home, and paced up and down the room. I couldn't sleep, every nerve in my body seemed alive.

Then suddenly, at midnight, I could stand it no longer. I had to go to Rebecca, I had to.

I felt my love for her was so strong that she would know. She would wait for me. She would understand. She would have to understand.

I don't know how I got to her flat. Seconds seemed to flash by, and I was standing outside in the street, gazing up at the windows.

I persuaded the night porter to let me in, he was half asleep and he let me pass upstairs. I listened outside her door - not a sound came from within. It might have been the entrance to a tomb.

I put my hand on the door knob, and turned it slowly. To my surprise it was not locked - Rebecca must have forgotten to turn the key after I left.

I stepped inside, everything was in darkness. "Rebecca", I called softly, "Rebecca". No answer.

The door of her bedroom was open, there was no one inside.

Then I went into the kitchen and the bathroom, both were empty.

Then I knew. Something gripped my heart, cold, clammy fear.

I looked towards that other room - his room - Julio's room.

I knew that Rebecca was in there, with the doll - with Julio.

I felt my way across the room and beat against the door. It was locked. I kicked against the panel, and tore at it with my nails. It gave way beneath my weight. I heard a cry of fury from Rebecca, and she turned on the lamp.

Oh! Christ, I shall never forget her eyes, the terrible light - the unholy rapture in her eyes, and her ashen - ashen face.

I saw everything - the room, the divan - I knew everything. I was seized with deadly sickness - a terrible despair.

And all the time his vile filthy face was looking at me. His eyes never left me, staring with a lifeless, glassy immobility. The wet crimson mouth was sneering - the sleek dark hair hung in streaks across his cheek. He was a machine - something worked by screws - he was not alive, not human - but terrible, ghastly.

And Rebecca turned to me. Her voice was cold - apart - unearthly.

"And you expect me to love you. Don't you see that I can't - I can't? How can I care for you, or any man? Go away, leave me. I loathe you. I loathe you all. I don't need you. I don't want you."

Something cracked inside my heart. I turned away. I left them. I left them alone. I ran into the street - tears were pouring down my face - I sobbed aloud - I shook my fist at the stars . . .

And that is all, there is no more to say, no more to tell. I went the next day and she had gone, they had both gone. No one knew where she was. I asked everyone I saw - no one could tell me.

Everything is dim, everything is useless. I shall never see Rebecca again - no one will see her again. It will always be Rebecca and Julio. Days will come, and nights, and nothing - they will haunt me - I shall never sleep - I'm cursed. I don't know what I'm saying, what I'm writing. What am I going to do? Oh! God, what am I going to do? I can't live - I can't cope . . .

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A Halloween treat from Daphne du Maurier - read 'The Doll'

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This month we published two of Daphne du Maurier's best-loved and most spine-tingling short story collections as Virago Modern Classics designer hardbacks. Both The Birds and Don't Look Now come with covers by award-winning textiles designer Neisha Crosland - find out more about them on the gorgeous Selvedge blog.

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I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead. Why you choose to pretend to be, and what you hope to gain from it: this is what interests me.

Now it is your turn to listen to me, to listen to my proofs, though I know you will not be convinced. Imagine this: walking through the countryside one day you come across a paddock. Lying there on their sides, in the dust, unnaturally still, are four horses. All four are prone, with no horses standing. They do not breathe and do not, as far as you can see, move. They are, to all appearances, dead. And yet, on the edge of the paddock, not twenty yards distant, a man fills their trough with water. Are the horses alive and appearances deceptive? Has the man simply not yet turned to see that the horses are dead? Or has he been so shaken by what he has seen that he doesn't know what to do but proceed as if nothing has happened?

If you turn and walk hurriedly on, leaving before anything decisive happens, what do the horses become for you? They remain both alive and dead, which makes them not quite alive, nor quite dead.

And what, in turn, carrying that paradoxical knowledge in your head, does that make you?

I do not think of myself as special, as anything but ordinary. I completed a degree at a third-tier university housed in the town where I grew up. I graduated safely ensconced in the middle of my class. I found passable employment in the same town. I met a woman, married her, had children with her-three or perhaps four, there is some disagreement on that score-and then the two of us fell gradually and gently out of love.

Then came an incident at work, an accident, a so-called freak one. It left me with a broken skull and, for a short time, a certain amount of confusion. I awoke in an unfamiliar place to find myself strapped down. It seemed to me-I will admit this too-it seemed for some time, hours at least, perhaps even days, that I was not in a hospital at all, but in a mental facility.

But my wife, faithful and everpresent, slowly soothed me into a different understanding of my circumstances. My limbs, she insisted, were restrained simply because I had been delirious. Now that I no longer was, the straps could be loosened. Not quite yet, but soon. There was nothing to worry about. I just had to calm down. Soon, everything would return to normal.

In some ways, I suppose everything did. Or at least tried to. After the accident, I received some minor compensation from my employer, and was sent out to pasture. Such was the situation. Myself, my wife, my children, at the beginning of a hot and sweltering summer, crammed in the house together with nowhere to go.

I would awaken each day to find the house different from how it had been the day before. A door was in the wrong place, a window had stretched a few inches longer than it had been when I had gone to bed the night before, the light switch, I was certain, had been forced half an inch to the right. Always just a small thing, almost nothing at all, just enough for me to notice.

In the beginning, I tried to point these changes out to my wife. She seemed puzzled at first, and then she became somewhat evasive in her responses. For a time, part of me believed her responsible: perhaps she had developed some deft technique for quickly changing and modifying the house. But another part of me felt certain, or nearly so, that this was impossible. And as time went on, my wife's evasiveness took on a certain wariness, even fear. This convinced me that not only was she not changing the house, but that daily her mind simply adjusted to the changed world and dubbed it the same. She literally could not see the differences I saw.

Just as she could not see that sometimes we had three children and sometimes four. No, she could only ever see three. Or perhaps four. To be honest, I don't remember how many she saw. But the point was, as long as we were in the house there were sometimes three children and sometimes four. But that was due to the idiosyncrasies of the house as well. I would not know how many children there would be until I went from room to room. Sometimes the room at the end of the hall was narrow and had one bed in it, other times it had grown large in the night and had two. I would count the number of beds each morning when I woke up and sometimes there would be three, sometimes four. From there, I could extrapolate how many children I had, and I found this a more reliable method than trying to count the children themselves. I would never know how much of a father I was until I counted beds.

I could not discuss this with my wife. When I tried to lay out my proofs for her, she thought I was joking. Quickly, however, she decided it was an indication of a troubled mental state, and insisted I seek treatment-which under duress I did. To little avail. The only thing the treatment convinced me of was that there were certain things that one shouldn't say even to one's spouse, things that they are just not ready-and may never be ready-to hear.

My children were not ready for it either. The few times I tried to fulfill my duties as a father and sit them down to tell them the sobering truth, that sometimes one of them didn't exist, unless it was that sometimes one of them existed twice, I got nowhere. Or less than nowhere: confusion, tears, panic. And, after they reported back to my wife, more threats of treatment.

What, then, was the truth of the situation? Why was I the only one who could see the house changing? What were my obligations to my family in terms of helping them see and understand? How was I to help them if they did not desire to be helped?

Being a sensible man, a part of me couldn't help but wonder if what I was experiencing had any relation to reality at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps, I tried to believe, the accident had changed me. I did try my level best, or nearly so, to see things their way. I tried to ignore the lurch reality took each morning, the way the house was not exactly the house it had been the night before, as if someone had moved us to a similar but not quite identical house as we slept. Perhaps they had. I tried to believe that I had three, not four, children. And when that did not work, that I had four, not three, children. And when that didn't work, that there was no correlation between children and beds, to turn a blind eye to that room at the end of the hall and the way it kept expanding out or collapsing in like a lung. But nothing seemed to work. I could not believe.

Perhaps if we moved, things would be different. Perhaps the house was, in some manner or other, alive. Or haunted maybe. Or just wrong. But when I raised the idea of moving with my wife, she coughed out a strange barking laugh before enumerating all the reasons this was a bad idea. There was no money and little prospect of any coming in now that I'd had my accident and lost my job. We'd bought the house recently enough that we would take a substantial loss if we sold it. We simply could not afford to move. And besides, what was wrong with the house? It was a perfectly good house.

How could I argue with this? From her perspective of course she was right, there was no reason to leave. For her there was nothing wrong with the house-how could there be? Houses don't change on their own, she told me indignantly: this was not something that reason could allow.

But for me that was exactly the problem. The house, for reasons I didn't understand, wasn't acting like a house.

I spent days thinking, mulling over what to do. To get away from the house, I wandered alone in the countryside. If I walked long enough, I could return home sufficiently exhausted to sleep rather than spending much of the night on watch, trying to capture the moment when parts of the house changed. For a long time I thought that might be enough. That if I spent as little time in the house as possible and returned only when exhausted, I could bring myself not to think about how unsound the house was. That I would wake up sufficiently hazy to no longer care what was where and how it differed from before.

That might have gone on for a long time-even forever or the equivalent. But then in my walks I stumbled upon, or perhaps was led to, something. It was a paddock. I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn't be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say. I noticed a man on the far side of the paddock filling their trough with water, facing away from them, and wondered if he had seen the horses behind him, and if not, when he turned, whether he would be as unsettled as I. Would he approach them and determine they were dead, or would his approach startle them to life? Or had he seen them dead already and had his mind been unable to take it in?

For a moment I waited. But at the time, in the moment, there seemed something more terrible to me about the idea of knowing for certain that the horses were dead than there was about not knowing whether they were dead or alive. And so I hastily left, not realizing that to escape a moment of potential discomfort I was leaving them forever in my head as not quite dead but, in another sense, nearly alive. That to leave as I had was to assume the place of the man beside the trough, but without ever being able to turn and learn the truth.

In the days that followed, that image haunted me. I turned it over, scrutinized it, peered at every facet of it, trying to see if there was something I had missed, if there was a clue that would sway me toward believing the horses were alive or believing they were dead. If there was a clue to reveal to me that the man beside the trough knew more than I had believed. To no avail. The problem remained insolubly balanced. If I went back, I couldn't help asking myself, would anything have changed? Would the horses still, even now, be lying there? If they were, would they have begun to decay in a way that would prove them dead? Or would they be exactly as I had last seen them, including the man still filling the trough? What a terrifying thought.

Since I'd stumbled upon the paddock, I didn't know exactly where it was. Every walk I went on, even every step I took away from the house, I risked stumbling onto it again. I began walking slower, stopping frequently, scrutinizing my surroundings and shying away from any area that might remotely harbor a paddock. But after a while I deemed even that insufficiently safe, and I found myself hardly able to leave the house.

And yet with the house always changing, I couldn't remain there either. There was, I gradually realized, a simple choice: either I would have to steel myself and return and confront the horses or I would have to confront the house.

Either horse or house, either house or horse-but what sort of choice was that really? The words were hardly different, pronounced more or less the same, with one letter only having accidentally been dialed up too high or too low in the alphabet. No, I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a manner of speaking, simply found again the house. It was, it must be, that the prone horses were there for me, to teach a lesson to me, that they were meant to tell me something about their near namesake, the house.

The devastation of that scene, the collapse of the horses, gnawed on me. It was telling me something. Something I wasn't sure I wanted to hear.

At first, part of me resisted the idea. No, I told myself, it was too extreme a step. Lives were at stake. The lives of my wife and of at least three children. The risks were too great.

But what was I to do? In my mind I kept seeing the collapsed horses and I felt my thoughts again churn over their state. Were they alive or were they dead? I kept imagining myself there at the trough, paralyzed, unable to turn and look, and it came to seem to me my perpetual condition. In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us. And from there, I slipped back to the house-which, like the horses, seemed in a sort of suspended state: I knew it was changing, that something strange was happening, I was sure of that at least, but I didn't know how or what the changes meant, and I couldn't make anyone else see them. When it came to the house, I tried to convince myself, I could see what others could not, but the rest of the world was like the man filling the horse trough, unable to see the fallen horses.

Thinking this naturally led me away from the idea of the house and back instead to the horses. What I should have done, I told myself, was to have thrown a rock. I should have stooped and scraped the dirt until my fingers closed around a stone, and then shied it at one of the horses, waiting either for the meaty thud of dead flesh or the shudder and annoyed whicker of a struck living horse. Not knowing is something you can only suspend yourself in for the briefest moment. No, even if what you have to face is horrible, is an inexplicably dead herd of horses, even an explicably dead family, it must be faced.

And so I turned away from the house and went back to look for the paddock, steeling myself for whatever I would find. I was ready, rock in hand. I would find out the truth about the horses, and I would accept it, no matter what it was.

Or at least I would have. But no matter how hard I looked, no matter how long I walked, I could not find the paddock. I walked for miles, days even. I took every road, known and unknown, but it simply wasn't there.

Was something wrong with me? Had the paddock existed at all? I wondered.

Was it simply something my mind had invented to cope with the problem of the house?

House, horse-horse, house: almost the same word. For all intents and purposes, in this case, it was the same word. I would still throw a rock, so to speak, I told myself, but I would throw that so-called rock not at a horse, but at a house.

But still I hesitated, thinking, planning. Night after night I sat imagining coils of smoke writhing around me and then the rising of flames. In my head, I watched myself waiting patiently, calmly, until the flames were at just the right height, and then I began to call out to my family, awakening them, urging them to leave the house. In my head we unfurled sheets through windows and shimmied nimbly to safety. We reached safety every time. I saw our escape so many times in my head, rendered in just the same way, that I realized it would take the smallest effort on my part to jostle it out of the realm of imagination and into the real world. Then the house would be gone and could do me no more damage, and both myself and my family would be safe.

I had had enough unpleasant interaction with those who desired to give me treatment since my accident, however, that I knew to take steps to protect myself. I would have to make the fire look like an accident. For this purpose, I took up smoking.

I planned carefully. I smoked for a few weeks, just long enough to accustom my wife and children to the idea. They didn't care for it, but did not try to stop me. Since my accident, they had been shy of me, and rarely tried to stop me from doing anything.

Seemingly as a concession to my wife, I agreed not to smoke in the bedroom. I promised to smoke only outside the house. With the proviso that, if it was too cold to smoke outside I might do so downstairs, near an open window.

During the third, or perhaps fourth, week after I took up smoking, with my wife and children asleep, it was indeed too cold-or at least I judged that I could argue it to have been such if confronted after the fact. So I cracked open the window near the couch and prepared the images in my mind. I would, I told myself, allow my arm to droop, the tip of my cigarette to nudge against the fabric of the couch. And then I would allow first the couch and then the drapes to begin to smoke and catch fire. I would wait until the moment when, in my fantasies, I was myself standing and calling for my wife and children, and then I would do just that and all would be as I had envisioned. Soon my family and I would be safe, and the house would be destroyed.

Once that was done, I thought, perhaps I would find the paddock again as well, with the horses standing this time and clearly alive.

And yet, the fabric of the couch did not catch fire, instead only smoldering and stinking, and soon I pressed the cigarette in too deeply and it died. I found and lit another, and when the result was the same I gave up on both the couch and the cigarette.

I turned instead to matches and used them to ignite the drapes. As it turned out, these burned much better, going up all at once and lighting my hair and clothing along with them.

By the time I'd flailed about enough to extinguish my body, the whole room was aflame. Still, I continued with my plan. I tried to call to my wife and children but when I took a breath to do so, my lungs filled with smoke and, choking, I collapsed.

I do not know how I lived through the fire. Perhaps my wife dragged me out and then went back for the children and perished only then. When I awoke, I was here, unsure of how I had arrived. My face and body were badly burned, and the pain was excruciating. I asked about my family but the nurse dodged the question, shushed me and only told me I should sleep. This was how I knew my family was dead, that they had been lost in the fire, and that the nurse didn't know how to tell me. My only consolation was that the house, too, the source of all our problems, had burnt to the ground.

For a time I was kept alone, drugged. How long, I cannot say. Perhaps days, perhaps weeks. Long enough in any case for my burns to slough and heal, for the skin grafts that I must surely have needed to take effect, for my hair to grow fully back. The doctors must have worked very hard on me, for I must admit that except to the most meticulous eye I look exactly as I had before the fire.

So, you see, I have the truth straight in my mind and it will not be easy to change. There is little point in you coming to me with these stories, little point in pretending once again that my house remains standing and was never touched by flame. Little point coming here pretending to be my wife, claiming that there was no fire, that you found me lying on the floor in the middle of our living room with my eyes staring fixedly into the air, seemingly unharmed.

No, I have accepted that I am the victim of a tragedy, one of my own design. I know that my family is gone, and though I do not yet understand why you would want to convince me that you are my wife, what you hope to gain, eventually I will. You will let something slip and the game will be over. At worst, you are deliberately trying to deceive me so as to gain something from me. But what? At best, someone has decided this might lessen the blow, that if I can be made to believe my family is not dead, or even just mostly dead and not quite alive, I might be convinced not to surrender to despair.

Trust me, whether you wish me good or ill, I do hope you succeed. I would like to be convinced, I truly would. I would love to open my eyes and suddenly see my family surrounding me, safe and sound. I would even tolerate the fact that the house is still standing, that unfinished business remains between it and myself, that somewhere horses still lie collapsed and waiting to be either alive or dead, that we will all in some senses remain like the man at the trough with our backs turned. I understand what I might have to gain from it, but you, I still do not understand.

But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.

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I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces blackened and bubbled, just as did my own. But in their case they did not recover, but perished. You are not one of them, you cannot be, for if you were you would be dead.

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"African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence."

-Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel Laureate

This is a tale you will only hear once. Then it will be gone in a flash of green light. Maybe all will be well after that. Maybe the story has a happy ending. Maybe there is nothing but darkness when the story ends. We were three women. Three friends. We had goals, hopes and dreams. We had careers. Two of us had boyfriends. We owned houses. We all had love. Then I made these... wigs. I gave them to my two friends. The three of us put them on. The wigs were supposed to make things better. But something went wrong. Like the nation we were trying to improve, we became backward. Instead of giving, we took. Walk with me. This is the story of How the Smart Woman Tried to Right Her Great Wrong. Dawn
With the wig finally off, Coco and Philo felt more distant to me. Thank God.

Even so, because it was sitting beside me, I could still see them. Clearly. In my head. Don't ever mix juju with technology. There is witchcraft in science and a science to witchcraft. Both will conspire against you eventually. I realized that now. I had to work fast.

It was just after dawn. The sky was heating up. I'd sneaked out of the compound while my boyfriend still slept. Even the house girl who always woke up early was not up yet. I hid behind the hedge of colorful pink and yellow lilies in the front. I needed to be around vibrant natural life, I needed to smell its scent. The flowers' shape reminded me of what my real hair would look like if the wig hadn't burned it off.

I opened my laptop and set it in the dirt. I put my wig beside it. It was jet black, shiny, the "hairs" straight and long like a mermaid's. The hair on my head was less than a millimeter long; shorter than a man's and far more damaged. For a moment, as I looked at my wig, it flickered its electric blue. I could hear it whispering to me. It wanted me to put it back on. I ran my hand over my sore head. Then I quickly tore my eyes from the wig and plugged in the flash drive. As I waited, I brought out a small sack and reached in. I sprinkled cowry shells, alligator pepper and blue beads around the machine for protection. I wasn't taking chances.

I sat down, placed my fingers on the keyboard, shut my eyes and prayed to the God I didn't believe in. After all that had happened, who would believe in God? Philo had been in Jos when the riots happened. I knew it was her and her wig. A technology I had created. Neurotransmitters, mobile phones, incantation, and hypnosis- even I knew my creation was genius. But all it sparked in the North was death and mayhem. During the riots there, some men had even burned a woman and her baby to death. A woman andher baby!

I didn't want to think of what Philo gained after causing it all. She never said a word to me about it. However, soon after, she went on a three-day shopping spree in Paris. We could leave Nigeria, but never for more than a few days.

"Oh God, I'm so sorry," I whispered. "I meant well." I opened my eyes and looked at my screen. The background was a plain blue. The screen was blank except for a single folder. I highlighted the folder and pressed "delete."

I paused, my hands shaking and my heart pounding in my chest.

"If this doesn't work, they will kill me," I whispered. Then I considered what they'd do if I didn't finish. So many others would die and Nigeria would be in further chaos, for sure. I continued typing. I was creating a computer virus. I would send it out in a few hours. When they'd both be busy. Then all hell would break loose...for me, just me. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

My name is Rain and if I didn't get this right, the corruption already rife in this country would be nothing compared to what was to come. And it would all be my fault.
The Market I am beast. I am lovely. I am in control. I was born beautiful.
All this Philo thought as she walked through the fruit and vegetable section of the open-air market. Around her, women slaved away. They sat behind tables and in booths selling tomatoes, peppers, plantain, egusi seeds, greens, yams. All those things that they'd have to cook at home for their families after a long day. Philo didn't live that life. She'd chosen better. She was above all of them.

Philo was tall and voluptuous, as she sashayed past women and men in her pricey high heels and brown designer dress that clung to her every inch. Her foundation make-up made her skin look like chocolate porcelain. Her eyelids sparkled with purple eye-shadow. Her lips glistened bright sensual pink. Perfect. Sexy. Hot. And her wig was awful. A washed-out black with auburn frosted tips, it looked as if it were made of colored straw and sat on her head like it knew it did not belong there.

"Here," a woman said, running up to Philo and handing her a roll of naira. "Take. You will make better use of it than me." The woman paused and frowned, obviously confused by her own actions and words.

"Thank you," Philo said, with a chuckle. She grabbed the money with her long nailed painted fingers and stared into the woman's eyes. Philo felt her wig heat up and then a dull ache in the back of her head. Then she felt it behind her eyes, which turned from deep brown to glowing green. Philo sighed as the laser shot from her eyes into the woman's eyes. The woman slumped, looking sadly at her feet. It always felt so good to take from people, not just their money but their very essence. Philo quickly moved on leaving the tired sad-looking woman behind.

She passed a group of young men. They stared and she stared back, zapping and taking. Their ravenous looks grew blank. Philo smirked knowingly. She felt amazing. She strolled into a booth where a man sold hundreds of Nollywood movie DVDs. She glanced over the array of colorful dramatic covers where women and men scowled, wept, grinned, pointed, accused, laughed. "I'll take this one," she said, picking a DVD at random. She'd watch it. She'd enjoy it. She loved Nollywood. These days, she enjoyed everything. The world was hers. Soon it would be, at least.

She tucked the DVD into her purse and left the booth without paying. No one stopped her. As she stepped into the sunshine, she turned, absolutely loving herself. She knew everyone was looking at her, just as she knew she was sucking the life from them as they stared. Her wig's heat increased and her brown eyes glinted a bright green as she smiled at any man who caught her eye. By the time she left this market, she'd be weighed down with naira given and life juices taken. Market by Market. It was like this every day.

Her cell phone went off. A male voice happily drawled, " Hellllo Moto," then upbeat music began to play. Everything about Philo rattled as she stopped and lifted her purse- the jangling bangles on her arms, her jingling earrings, and her three gold chain necklaces. She was clicks and clacks, shines and sparkles.

"Oh where is it," she said, digging in her purse, mindful of her long nails. "Where, where where." She pushed aside her lipstick, her unnecessary wallet, tissues, compact case, a pack of gum, wads and rolls of naira. Her cell phone continued going off. She laughed. She already knew who it was. Rain, the weakest link in the chain. She could tell by the ring tone. However, she could also tell by more than that. In her mind's eye, Philo could see Rain standing outside her compound, next to some flowers, holding her cell phone to her ear, waiting. Philo found her phone, flipped it open and held it to her ear. It clicked against her long gold earring.

"What?" she said, grinning with all her teeth. She heard nothing. "Rain, I know it's you. Say someth..."

She felt it before she saw it. A coolness that contrasted horribly with the heat of her wig. She frowned as the phone made an odd beeping sound. She held it before her just as the phone glinted a deep green similar to the one her eyes flashed when she sucked psychic energy from those around her. Her phone buzzed, an electrical current zipping across it before disappearing. Green smoke began to dribble from it.

" Chey!" Philo exclaimed staring at it. If she were smart, she'd have dropped it. But Philo was never really that intelligent. Just greedy. Rain didn't know that before but she knew that now. A text message appeared on the screen but Philo could make no sense of it. It was a series on nonsensical symbols, rubbish. She dropped the phone, pressing a hand to her wig. "That bitch," she snarled, looking around with wide enraged eyes. "How dare she even try." In the sunshine, her canines almost looked pointed.

Right then and there, Philo disappeared in a flash of green.
His House
Coco had just lit a cigarette. She leaned back on the plush white leather couch and crossed her legs. She held her glass of champagne up to the photo of her husband on the wall. He was out. He was always out. Working. For her. She laughed, scratching under her itchy wig with her long-nailed index finger. Scritch scritch. It was spiky, dark red and short and no one in his or her right mind would wear it. She got up and looked at her reflection in the glass that protected her husband's photo. Her skinny jeans and t-shirt fit wonderfully snug. Her face was flawless. And her hair was power.

"Mwah," she said, blowing herself a kiss.

She ambled into the living room where two fans were blasting. She stood very still between them, her wig's "hairs" blowing about her face. It felt secure, despite the blowing air. She shut her eyes and inhaled deeply. Behind her eyelids, she could see. Then she began to draw it in from...
The busy street. People sitting in bustling bush taxies and perched atop hundreds of okada motorbikes. Market women walking alongside the road. The mish-mash of old and modern buildings of Lagos. Disabled beggars in the road. Boys playing soccer on a field.
When she opened her eyes, they glowed a deep green and the wig glinted an electric blue. The blowing fans made the heat from her wig more bearable. Her cell phone went off and she nearly jumped. " Hellllo, Moto," it said as it played its dance music.

" Ah ah, what now?" she muttered. But she was smiling. The wig. It always left her feeling so good. Minus the heat, which left the actual wig feeling like a burning helmet. She ran to her cell phone on the couch. It was Rain. What did she want now? In her mind, the wig showed Rain standing outside her compound looking worried. The woman always looked so worried; she should have been at the top of the world.

Coco held the phone to her ear as she brought out some lipstick. "Hello?" she said, smearing on a fresh coat. She grinned, sure of what she'd hear. She frowned. "Hello? Rain, what is it? Speak up."

But she heard nothing. She held the phone to her face when it suddenly became like a chunk of ice in her hand. "Iiieeey!" she exclaimed, throwing it on the couch. As she stared at it, appalled, the cell phone began to dribble green smoke. A text box opened on its screen. Coco squinted trying to read it. It looked like rubbish. But, like Philo, Coco understood what was happening.

"Oh," Coco said, out of breath. "You want to play now, eh? Ok." She threw her lipstick on the leather seat, the lid still off. It left a smear on the pillow. "Someone will die today, o. And it will not be me."

She disappeared.

*
I have made my choice. That's why I am still here, standing in these lilies. I run my hand over my shaved head. Waiting. The sun shines bright and happy in the sky, unaware of what's about to happen to me. Unaware of what I have done and will soon suffer the consequences for. Unconcerned. Philo appears. She is standing on the lilies, mere feet away from me. "What is wrong with you?" she shouts. She looks beautiful and ghastly in her tight brown dress that probably cost more naira than a market woman makes in two years. "I'm..." Fear pumps through my veins like adrenaline and blood. "Why is your wig off, eh? You look horrible." Her wig flashes as the digital virus tries to cripple it. Notice I say "tries". "I took it off," I snap. "This is wrong, o! This is wrong! Wake up!" Philo chuckles. "And what is wrong about it? We have everything we want." "Stealing from people is not what I made these for! I made them to help us give! To cure the deep seated culture of corruption by giving people hope and a sense of patriotism. Remember??"
She looks at me as if I am crazy. The wig has made her forget. Na wao. Tricky tricky things, these wigs.
"Put it back on," she says, pointing a long nail at me. "No," I say. "It has made us cruel witches. Look at you!" Coco appears behind me. She hisses like a snake. She is in no mood for words. Her wig flashes. The virus is not working. When you mix juju with technology, you give up control. You are at the will of something far beyond yourself. I am done for. See how it all ends? Or does it begin? I am watching them approach me now. I tell you while my life hangs on its last thread. I am putting my wig on. It is so hot. I should have paid more attention to the cooling system when I made these. I hear the heartbeat of everyone around me now, including the irregular rhythm of Coco and Philo's. But oh, the power. It rushes into me like ogogoro down the throat of a drunk. See Philo bare her teeth. They are indeed sharp like those of a bloodsucker. The virus is working through her wig now. But something has gone very wrong. They are both smiling. For a year, we have been psychic vampires but now as they come at me, mouths open, teeth sharp, I see that they have become the blood-sucking kind. I feel my own teeth sharpening too as I prepare to defend myself. This is new but I can't think about that right now. I tear the wig off and throw it aside. "Come then!" I shout. Then, I... "Hello, Moto" copyright © 2011 Nnedi Okorafor
Art copyright © 2011 Jillian Tamaki

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Original story Hello, Moto by Nnedi Okorafor

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At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, shadows that have no source in anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of unease that will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stuck in a stone lion's mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. 'Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?' She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

The castle is mostly given over to ghostly occupants but she herself has her own suite of drawing room and bedroom. Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her inevitable Tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpiece and the dark red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the neglected roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies in the corners of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpiece in soft grey nets. But the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing.

She sits in a chair covered in moth-ravaged burgundy velvet at the low, round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the Countess will wake it for a brief cadenza by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape.

She rises when the sun sets and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patience until she grows hungry, until she becomes ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.

The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the room's four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin.

A chignoned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk teeth grew. Just as they staked him out, the fatal Count cried: 'Nosferatu is dead; long live Nosferatu!' Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his vast domain; she is the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chateau, who penetrate the woods in the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and the butter refuse to come, who ride the horses all night on a wild hunt so they are sacks of skin and bone in the morning, who milk the cows dry and, especially, torment pubescent girls with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination.

But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.

On moonless nights, her keeper lets her out into the garden. This garden, an exceedingly sombre place, bears a strong resemblance to a burial ground and all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her in the castle of her inheritance. When the back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bedroom into the bowl, she washes her face with the wincing, fastidious gestures of a cat.

The voracious margin of huntress's nights in the gloomy garden, crouch and pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her life or imitation of life. The eyes of this nocturnal creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing. She resorts to the magic comfort of the Tarot pack and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible.

An old mute looks after her, to make sure she never sees the sun, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her-in short, to perform all the functions of the servants of vampires. Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror-except her horrible reluctance for the role.

Nevertheless, if an unwise adventurer pauses in the square of the deserted village to refresh himself at the fountain, a crone in a black dress and white apron presently emerges from a house. She will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will follow her. The Countess wants fresh meat. When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and contented herself entirely with baby rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated voluptuousness, with voles and field-mice that palpitated for a bare moment between her embroidress's fingers. But now she is a woman, she must have men. If you stop too long beside the giggling fountain, you will be led by the hand to the Countess's larder.

All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mother's wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust. And it is the same with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, come to wash the dust from their feet in the water of the fountain; the Countess's governess brings them into the drawing room where the cards on the table always show the Grim Reaper. The Countess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, precious cups, and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.

Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the Countess's cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bone that have lodged there.

Fee fie fo film
I smell the blood of an Englishman.

One hot, ripe summer in the pubescent years of the present century, a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, visiting friends in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-known uplands of Romania. When he quixotically decided to travel the rutted cart-tracks by bicycle, he saw all the humour of it: 'on two wheels in the land of the vampires'. So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure.

He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows-and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that generation for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France. This being, rooted in change and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern.

Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man's welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

A single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.

The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called Les Amoureux. Never, never before ... never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving love. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death.

Be he alive or be he dead
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

At the mauvish beginnings of evening, the English m'sieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a great way off; he must dismount and push his bicycle before him, the path too steep to ride. He hopes to find a friendly inn to rest the night; he's hot, hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty ... At first, such disappointment, to discover the roofs of all the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters hanging disconsolately from their hinges, an entirely uninhabited place. And the rank vegetation whispers, as if foul secrets, here, where, if one were sufficiently imaginative, one could almost imagine twisted faces appearing momentarily beneath the crumbling eaves ... but the adventure of it all, and the consolation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming sunset, all these considerations soon overcame his disappointment, even assuaged the faint unease he'd felt. And the fountain where the village women used to wash their clothes still gushed out bright, clear water; he gratefully washed his feet and hands, applied his mouth to the faucet, then let the icy stream run over his face.

When he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lion's mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the square, an old woman who smiled eagerly, almost conciliatorily at him. She wore a black dress and a white apron, with a housekeeper's key ring at the waist; her grey hair was neatly coiled in a chignon beneath the white linen headdress worn by elderly women of that region. She bobbed a curtsy at the young man and beckoned him to follow her. When he hesitated, she pointed towards the great bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her mouth, rubbed her stomach again, clearly miming an invitation to supper. Then she beckoned him again, this time turning determinedly upon her heel as though she would brook no opposition.

A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.

In the subtle and haunting light of the setting sun, that golden light rich with nostalgia for the day that is just past, the sombre visage of the place, part manor house, part fortified farmhouse, immense, rambling, a dilapidated eagle's nest atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of childhood tales on winter evenings, when he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves half out of their wits with ghost stories set in just such places and then had to have candles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to bed. He could almost have regretted accepting the crone's unspoken invitation; but now, standing before the door of time-eroded oak while she selected a huge iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.

The old lady unlocked the door, which swung back on melodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took charge of his bicycle, in spite of his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse where they would not oil it or check its tyres. But, in for a penny, in for a pound-in his youth and strength and blond beauty, in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of Nosferatu's castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.

The crone took him to a little chamber where there was a black oak table spread with a clean white cloth and this cloth was carefully laid with heavy silverware, a little tarnished, as if someone with foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one place only. Curiouser and curiouser; invited to the castle for dinner, now he must dine alone. All the same, he sat down as she had bid him. Although it was not yet dark outside, the curtains were closely drawn and only the sparing light trickling from a single oil lamp showed him how dismal his surroundings were. The crone bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a glass from an ancient cabinet of wormy oak; while he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared but soon returned bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He was hungry after his long day's ride, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse food was hardly the entertainment he'd expected from the gentry and he was puzzled by the assessing glint in the dumb woman's eyes as she watched him eating.

But she darted off to get him a second helping as soon as he'd finished the first one and she seemed so friendly and helpful, besides, that he knew he could count on a bed for the night in the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish lack of enthusiasm for the eerie silence, the clammy chill of the place.

When he'd put away the second plateful, the old woman came and gestured he should leave the table and follow her once again. She made a pantomime of drinking; he deduced he was now invited to take after-dinner coffee in another room with some more elevated member of the household who had not wished to dine with him but, all the same, wanted to make his acquaintance. An honour, no doubt; in deference to his host's opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.

He was surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the house was-cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; but the mute crone resolutely wound him on the reel of her lantern down endless corridors, up winding staircases, through the galleries where the painted eyes of family portraits briefly flickered as they passed, eyes that belonged, he noticed, to faces, one and all, of a quite memorable beastliness. At last she paused and, behind the door where they'd halted, he heard a faint, metallic twang as of, perhaps, a chord struck on a harpsichord. And then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the song of a lark, bringing to him, in the heart-had he but known it-of Juliet's tomb, all the freshness of morning.

The crone rapped with her knuckles on the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his life softly called out, in heavily accented French, the adopted language of the Romanian aristocracy: 'Entrez.'

First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity since it caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a machine. All the light in the room came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the crone who accompanied him shielded her lantern with her hand, as if to protect her mistress from too suddenly seeing, or their guest from too suddenly seeing her.

So that it was little by little, as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-dark, that he saw how beautiful and how very young the bedizened scarecrow was, and he thought of a child dressing up in her mother's clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order to bring her, however briefly, to life again.

The Countess stood behind a low table, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-wire birdcage, hands outstretched in a distracted attitude that was almost one of flight; she looked as startled by their entry as if she had not requested it. With her stark white face, her lovely death's head surrounded by long dark hair that fell down as straight as if it were soaking wet, she looked like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even-but he put the thought away from him immediately-a whore's mouth. She shivered all the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she must be only sixteen or seventeen years old, no more, with the hectic, unhealthy beauty of a consumptive. She was the chatelaine of all this decay.

With many tender precautions, the crone now raised the light she held to show his hostess her guest's face. At that, the Countess let out a faint, mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her hands, as if pushing him away, so that she knocked against the table and a butterfly dazzle of painted cards fell to the floor. Her mouth formed a round' o' of woe, she swayed a little and then sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewildering reception. Tsk'ing under her breath, the crone busily poked about on the table until she found an enormous pair of dark green glasses, such as blind beggars wear, and perched them on the Countess's nose.

He went forward to pick up her cards for her from a carpet that, he saw to his surprise, was part rotted away, partly encroached upon by all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they meant nothing to him, though they seemed strange playthings for a young girl. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one-of two young lovers, smiling at one another, and put her toys back into a hand so slender you could almost see the frail net of bone beneath the translucent skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks.

At his touch, she seemed to revive a little and almost smiled, raising herself upright.

'Coffee,' she said. 'You must have coffee.' And scooped up her cards into a pile so that the crone could set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver coffee pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups ready on a silver tray, a strange touch of elegance, even if discoloured, in this devastated interior whose mistress ethereally shone as if with her own blighted, submarine radiance.

The crone found him a chair and, tittering noiselessly, departed, leaving the room a little darker.

While the young lady attended to the coffee-making, he had time to contemplate with some distaste a further series of family portraits which decorated the stained and peeling walls of the room; these livid faces all seemed contorted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the huge, demented eyes that all had in common bore a disquieting resemblance to those of the hapless victim of inbreeding now patiently filtering her fragrant brew, even if some rare grace has so finely transformed those features when it came to her case. The lark, its chorus done, had long ago fallen silent; no sound but the chink of silver on china. Soon, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted china.

'Welcome,' she said in her voice with the rushing sonorities of the ocean in it, a voice that seemed to come elsewhere than from her white, still throat. 'Welcome to my chateau. I rarely receive visitors and that's a misfortune since nothing animates me half as much as the presence of a stranger ... This place is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one companion, alas, she cannot speak. Often I am so silent that I think I, too, will soon forget how to do so and nobody here will ever talk any more.'

She offered him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the antique china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips like the obese roses in her garden, lips that do not move-her voice is curiously disembodied; she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist's doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality, like a sad Columbine who lost her way in the wood a long time ago and never reached the fair.

'And the light. I must apologize for the lack of light ... a hereditary affliction of the eyes ...'

Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face back to himself twice over; if he presented himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at because it would shrivel her up at once, poor night bird, poor butcher bird.

Vous serez ma proie.

You have such a fine throat, m'sieu, like a column of marble. When you came through the door retaining about you all the golden light of the summer's day of which I know nothing, nothing, the card called 'Les Amoureux' had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it.

I do not mean to hurt you. I shall wait for you in my bride's dress in the dark.

The bridegroom is come, he will go into the chamber which has been prepared for him.

I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you.

I will be very gentle.

(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?)

See, how I'm ready for you. I've always been ready for you; I've been waiting for you in my wedding dress, why have you delayed for so long ... it will all be over very quickly.

You will feel no pain, my darling.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu's sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.

(One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.)

Nervously, to conceal her inner voices, she keeps up a front of inconsequential chatter in French while her ancestors leer and grimace on the walls; however hard she tries to think of any other, she only knows of one kind of consummation.

He was struck, once again, by the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous hands; the sense of strangeness that had been growing on him since he buried his head under the streaming water in the village, since he entered the dark portals of the fatal castle, now fully overcame him. Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fear-stiffened legs, but he is not a cat: he is a hero.

A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself; he would have said, perhaps, that there are some things which, even if they are true, we should not believe possible. He might have said: it is folly to believe one's eyes. Not so much that he does not believe in her; he can see her, she is real. If she takes off her dark glasses, from her eyes will stream all the images that populate this vampire-haunted land, but, since he himself is immune to shadow, due to his virginity-he does not yet know what there is to be afraid of-and due to his heroism, which makes him like the sun, he sees before him, first and foremost, an inbred, highly strung girl child, fatherless, motherless, kept in the dark too long and pale as a plant that never sees the light, half-blinded by some hereditary condition of the eyes. And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the Devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick.

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

He will learn to shudder in the trenches. But this girl cannot make him shudder.

Now it is dark. Bats swoop and squeak outside the tightly shuttered windows. The coffee is all drunk, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a stop; she twists her fingers together, picks at the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her condition squeak and gibber all around us. Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other consummation than the only one she can offer him. She has not eaten for three days. It is dinner-time. It is bedtime.

Suivez-moi.
Je vous attendais.
Vous serez ma proie.

The raven caws on the accursed roof. 'Dinnertime, dinnertime,' clang the portraits on the walls. A ghastly hunger gnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her life without knowing it.

The handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his luck, will follow her into her bedroom; the candles around her sacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. She will assure him, in the very voice of temptation: 'My clothes have but to fall and you will see before you a succession of mysteries.'

She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. To touch the mineral sheen of the flesh revealed in the cool candle gleam is to invite her fatal embrace; in her low, sweet voice, she will croon the lullaby of the House of Nosferatu.

Embraces, kisses; your golden head, of a lion, although I have never seen a lion, only imagined one, of the sun, even if I've only seen the picture of the sun on the Tarot card, your golden head of the lover whom I dreamed would one day free me, this head will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and not of death. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed. Stark and dead, poor bicyclist; he has paid the price of a night with the Countess and some think it too high a fee while some do not.

Tomorrow, her keeper will bury his bones under her roses. The food her roses feed on gives them their rich colour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures.

Suivez-moi.

'Suivez-moi!'

The handsome bicyclist, fearful for his hostess's health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the other room; he would like to take her into his arms and protect her from the ancestors who leer down from the walls.

What a macabre bedroom!

His colonel, an old goat with jaded appetites, had given him the visiting card of a brothel in Paris where, the satyr assured him, ten louis would buy just such a lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist played the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the customer took his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretended corpse. He had good-naturedly refused the old man's offer of such an initiation; how can he now take criminal advantage of the disordered girl with fever-hot, bone-dry, taloned hands and eyes that deny all the erotic promises of her body with their terror, their sadness, their dreadful, balked tenderness?

So delicate and damned, poor thing. Quite damned.

Yet I do believe she scarcely knows what she is doing.

She is shaking as if her limbs were not efficiently joined together, as if she might shake into pieces. She raises her hands to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of her dark glasses. She can't take off her mother's wedding dress unless she takes off her dark glasses; she has fumbled the ritual, it is no longer inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it most. When she takes off the dark glasses, they slip from her fingers and smash to pieces on the tiled floor. There is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears across her face with her fist. What is she to do now?

When she kneels to try to gather the fragments of glass together, a sharp sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels among the broken glass and watches the bright bead of blood form a drop. She has never seen her own blood before, not her own blood. It exercises upon her an awed fascination.

Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done.

All the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted ancestors turn away their eyes and grind their fangs.

How can she bear the pain of becoming human?

The end of exile is the end of being.

He was awakened by larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom were all opened up and light and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as in the theatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outside into the room and this crimson residue swirled fragrantly about the floor. The candles had burnt out and she must have set her pet lark free because it perched on the edge of the silly coffin to sing him its ecstatic morning song. His bones were stiff and aching, he'd slept on the floor with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he'd put her to bed.

But now there was no trace of her to be seen, except, lightly tossed across the crumpled black satin bedcover, a lace négligé lightly soiled with blood, as it might be from a woman's menses, and a rose that must have come from the fierce bushes nodding through the window. The air was heavy with incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess must have got up early to enjoy the sunshine, slipped outside to gather him a rose. He got to his feet, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. At first, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a long-caged thing, but, when he tossed it up on to the currents of the air, it spread its wings and was up and away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a lift of joy in his heart.

Then he padded into the boudoir, his mind busy with plans. We shall take her to Zurich, to a clinic; she will be treated for nervous hysteria. Then to an eye specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her teeth into better shape. Any competent manicurist will deal with her claws. We shall turn her into the lovely girl she is; I shall cure her of all these nightmares.

The heavy curtains are pulled back, to let in brilliant fusillades of early morning light; in the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her round table in her white dress, with the cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of destiny that are so fingered, so soiled, so worn by constant shuffling that you can no longer make the image out on any single one of them.

She is not sleeping.

In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human.

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.

And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.

My keeper will attend to everything.

Nosferatu always attends his own obsequies; she will not go to the graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialized, weeping, and roughly gestured him to begone. After a search in some foul-smelling outhouses, he discovered his bicycle and, abandoning his holiday, rode directly to Bucharest where, at the poste restante, he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment at once. Much later, when he changed back into uniform in his quarters, he discovered he still had the Countess's rose, he must have tucked it into the breast pocket of his cycling jacket after he had found her body. Curiously enough, although he had brought it so far away from Romania, the flower did not seem to be quite dead and, on impulse, because the girl had been so lovely and her death so unexpected and pathetic, he decided to try and resurrect her rose. He filled his tooth glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface.

When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.

Next day, his regiment embarked for France.

*This story is taken from The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Published by Vintage, 1993. Copyright © Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of The Estate of Angela Carter clo Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

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The Lady of the House of Love - Angela Carter | The Short Story Project

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At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, shadows that have no source in anything visible; by

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You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother's eyes.

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain.

I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.

But that was later. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.

And there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. He did not see me approaching, and he did not look up until I said, "I used to do that. Gather the wool from the thorn-bushes and twigs. My mother would wash it, then she would make me things with it. A ball, and a doll."

He turned. He looked shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere. And I had not. I had walked many a mile, and had many more miles to go. I said, "I walk quietly. Is this the house of Calum MacInnes?"

The boy nodded, drew himself up to his full height, which was perhaps two fingers bigger than mine, and he said, "I am Calum MacInnes."

"Is there another of that name? For the Calum MacInnes that I seek is a grown man."

The boy said nothing, just unknotted a thick clump of sheep's wool from the clutching fingers of the thorn-bush. I said, "Your father, perhaps? Would he be Calum MacInnes as well?"

The boy was peering at me. "What are you?" he asked.

"I am a small man," I told him. "But I am a man, nonetheless, and I am here to see Calum MacInnes."

"Why?" The boy hesitated. Then, "And why are you so small?"

I said, "Because I have something to ask your father. Man's business." And I saw a smile start at the tips of his lips. "It's not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. And she said, 'Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.' And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. They knew that I was a most dangerous person. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed."

"Did the boy call you?" said the lad.

"It was no boy," I told him, "but me myself, it was. And they'd had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers."

The boy laughed. Then he said, "Why were the Campbells after you?"

"It was a disagreement about the ownership of cattle. They thought the cows were theirs. I maintained the Campbells' ownership of them had ended the first night the cows had come with me over the hills."

"Wait here," said young Calum MacInnes.

I sat by the burn and looked up at the house. It was a good-sized house: I would have taken it for the house of a doctor or a man of law, not of a border reaver. There were pebbles on the ground and I made a pile of them, and I tossed the pebbles, one by one, into the burn. I have a good eye, and I enjoyed rattling the pebbles over the meadow and into the water. I had thrown a hundred stones when the boy returned, accompanied by a tall, loping man. His hair was streaked with grey, his face was long and wolfish. There are no wolves in those hills, not any longer, and the bears have gone too.

"Good day to you," I said.

He said nothing in return, only stared; I am used to stares. I said, "I am seeking Calum MacInnes. If you are he, say so, I will greet you. If you are not he, tell me now, and I will be on my way."

"What business would you have with Calum MacInnes?"

"I wish to hire him, as a guide."

"And where is it you would wish to be taken?"

I stared at him. "That is hard to say," I told him. "For there are some who say it does not exist. There is a certain cave on the Misty Isle."

He said nothing. Then he said, "Calum, go back to the house."

"But da-"

"Tell your mother I said she was to give you some tablet. You like that. Go on."

Expressions crossed the boy's face-puzzlement, hunger, happiness-and then he turned and ran back to the white house.

Calum MacInnes said, "Who sent you here?"

I pointed to the burn as it splashed its way between us on its journey down the hill. "What's that?" I asked.

"Water," he replied.

"And they say there is a king across it," I told him.

I did not know him then at all, and never knew him well, but his eyes became guarded, and his head cocked to one side. "How do I know you are who you say you are?"

"I have claimed nothing," I said. "Just that there are those who have heard that there is a cave on the Misty Isle, and that you might know the way."

He said, "I will not tell you where the cave is."

"I am not here asking for directions. I seek a guide. And two travel more safely than one."

He looked me up and down, and I waited for the joke about my size, but he did not make it, and for that I was grateful. He just said, "When we reach the cave, I will not go inside. You must bring out the gold yourself."

I said, "It is all one to me."

He said, "You can take only what you carry. I will not touch it. But yes, I will take you."

I said, "You will be paid well for your trouble." I reached into my jerkin, handed him the pouch I had in there. "This for taking me. Another, twice the size, when we return."

He poured the coins from the pouch into his huge hand, and he nodded. "Silver," he said. "Good." Then, "I will say good-bye to my wife and son."

"Is there nothing you need to bring?"

He said, "I was a reaver in my youth, and reavers travel light. I'll bring a rope, for the mountains." He patted his dirk, which hung from his belt, and went back into the whitewashed house. I never saw his wife, not then, nor at any other time. I do not know what colour her hair was.

I threw another fifty stones into the burn as I waited, until he returned, with a coil of rope thrown over one shoulder, and then we walked together away from a house too grand for any reaver, and we headed west.

*

The mountains between the rest of the world and the coast are gradual hills, visible from a distance as gentle, purple, hazy things, like clouds. They seem inviting. They are slow mountains, the kind you can walk up easily, like walking up a hill, but they are hills that take a full day and more to climb. We walked up the hill, and by the end of the first day we were cold.

I saw snow on the peaks above us, although it was high summer.

We said nothing to each other that first day. There was nothing to be said. We knew where we were going.

We made a fire, from dried sheep dung and a dead thorn-bush: we boiled water and made our porridge, each of us throwing a handful of oats and a fingerpinch of salt into the little pan I carried. His handful was huge, and my handful was small, like my hands, which made him smile and say, "I hope you will not be eating half of the porridge."

I said I would not and indeed, I did not, for my appetite is smaller than that of a full-grown man. But this is a good thing, I believe, for I can keep going in the wild on nuts and berries that would not keep a bigger person from starving.

A path of sorts ran across the high hills, and we followed it and encountered almost nobody: a tinker and his donkey, piled high with old pots, and a girl leading the donkey, who smiled at me when she thought me to be a child, and then scowled when she perceived me to be what I am, and would have thrown a stone at me had the tinker not slapped her hand with the switch he had been using to encourage the donkey; and, later, we overtook an old woman and a man she said was her grandson, on their way back across the hills. We ate with her, and she told us that she had attended the birth of her first great-grandchild, that it was a good birth. She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at my palm.

She said, "I see death in your past and death in your future."

"Death waits in all our futures," I said.

She paused, there in the highest of the high lands, where the summer winds have winter on their breath, where they howl and whip and slash the air like knives. She said, "There was a woman in a tree. There will be a man in a tree."

I said, "Will this mean anything to me?"

"One day. Perhaps." She said, "Beware of gold. Silver is your friend." And then she was done with me.

To Calum MacInnes she said, "Your palm has been burned." He said that was true. She said, "Give me your other hand, your left hand." He did so. She gazed at it, intently. Then, "You return to where you began. You will be higher than most other men. And there is no grave waiting for you, where you are going."

He said, "You tell me that I will not die?"

"It is a left-handed fortune. I know what I have told you, and no more."

She knew more. I saw it in her face.

That was the only thing of any importance that occurred to us on the second day.

We slept in the open that night. The night was clear and cold, and the sky was hung with stars that seemed so bright and close I felt as if I could have reached out my arm and gathered them, like berries.

We lay side by side beneath the stars, and Calum MacInnes said, "Death awaits you, she said. But death does not wait for me. I think mine was the better fortune."

"Perhaps."

"Ah," he said. "It is all nonsense. Old-woman talk. It is not truth."

I woke in the dawn mist to see a stag, watching us curiously.

The third day we crested those mountains, and we began to walk downhill.

My companion said, "When I was a boy, my father's dirk fell into the cooking fire. I pulled it out, but the metal hilt was as hot as the flames. I did not expect this, but I would not let the dirk go. I carried it away from the fire, and plunged the sword into the water. It made steam. I remember that. My palm was burned, and my hand curled, as if it was meant to carry a sword until the end of time."

I said, "You, with your hand. Me, only a little man. It's fine heroes we are, who seek our fortunes on the Misty Isle."

He barked a laugh, short and without humour. "Fine heroes," was all he said.

The rain began to fall then, and did not stop falling. That night we passed a small croft house. There was a trickle of smoke from its chimney, and we called out for the owner, but there was no response.

I pushed open the door and called again. The place was dark, but I could smell tallow, as if a candle had been burning and had recently been snuffed.

"No one at home," said Calum, but I shook my head and walked forward, then leaned my head down into the darkness beneath the bed.

"Would you care to come out?" I asked. "For we are travellers, seeking warmth and shelter and hospitality. We would share with you our oats and our salt and our whisky. And we will not harm you."

At first the woman, hidden beneath the bed, said nothing, and then she said, "My husband is away in the hills. He told me to hide myself away if the strangers come, for fear of what they might do to me."

I said, "I am but a little man, good lady, no bigger than a child, you could send me flying with a blow. My companion is a full-sized man, but I do swear that we shall do nothing to you, save partake of your hospitality, and dry ourselves. Please do come out."

All covered with dust and spiderwebs she was when she emerged, but even with her face all begrimed, she was beautiful, and even with her hair all webbed and greyed with dust it was still long and thick, and golden red. For a heartbeat she put me in the mind of my daughter, but that my daughter would look a man in the eye, while this one glanced only at the ground fearfully, like something expecting to be beaten.

I gave her some of our oats, and Calum produced strips of dried meat from his pocket, and she went out to the field and returned with a pair of scrawny turnips, and she prepared food for the three of us.

I ate my fill. She had no appetite. I believe that Calum was still hungry when his meal was done. He poured whisky for the three of us: she took but a little, and that with water. The rain rattled on the roof of the house, and dripped in the corner, and, unwelcoming though it was, I was glad that I was inside.

It was then that a man came through the door. He said nothing, only stared at us, untrusting, angry. He pulled off his cape of oiled sacking, and his hat, and he dropped them on the earth floor. They dripped and puddled. The silence was oppressive.

Calum MacInnes said, "Your wife gave us hospitality, when we found her. Hard enough she was in the finding."

"We asked for hospitality," I said. "As we ask it of you."

The man said nothing, only grunted.

In the high lands, people spend words as if they were golden coins. But the custom is strong there: strangers who ask for hospitality must be granted it, though you have a blood feud against them and their clan or kind.

The woman-little more than a girl she was, while her husband's beard was grey and white, so I wondered if she was his daughter for a moment, but no: there was but one bed, scarcely big enough for two-the woman went outside, into the sheep pen that adjoined the house, and returned with oatcakes and a dried ham she must have hidden there, which she sliced thin, and placed on a wooden trencher before the man.

Calum poured the man whisky, and said, "We seek the Misty Isle. Do you know if it is there?"

The man looked at us. The winds are bitter in the high lands, and they would whip the words from a man's lips. He pursed his mouth, then he said, "Aye. I saw it from the peak this morning. It's there. I cannot say if it will be there tomorrow."

We slept on the hard-earth floor of that cottage. The fire went out, and there was no warmth from the hearth. The man and his woman slept in their bed, behind the curtain. He had his way with her, beneath the sheepskin that covered that bed, and before he did that, he beat her for feeding us and for letting us in. I heard them, and could not stop hearing them, and sleep was hard in the finding that night.

I have slept in the homes of the poor, and I have slept in palaces, and I have slept beneath the stars, and would have told you before that night that all places were one to me. But I woke before first light, convinced we had to be gone from that place, but not knowing why, and I woke Calum by putting a finger to his lips, and silently we left that croft on the mountainside without saying our farewells, and I have never been more pleased to be gone from anywhere.

We were a mile from the place when I said, "The island. You asked if it would be there. Surely, an island is there, or it is not there."

Calum hesitated. He seemed to be weighing his words, and then he said, "The Misty Isle is not as other places. And the mist that surrounds it is not like other mists."

We walked down a path worn by hundreds of years of sheep and deer and few enough men.

He said, "They also call it the Winged Isle. Some say it is because the island, if seen from above, would look like butterfly wings. And I do not know the truth of it." Then, " 'And what is truth?' said jesting Pilate."

It is harder coming down than it is going up.

I thought about it. "Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take."

Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, "You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside."

We crested the ridge, and we looked down to the coast. I could see villages below, beside the water. And I could see high black mountains before me, on the other side of the sea, coming out of the mist.

Calum said, "There's your cave. In those mountains."

The bones of the earth I thought, seeing them. And then I became uncomfortable, thinking of bones, and to distract myself, I said, "And how many times is it you have been there?"

"Only once." He hesitated. "I searched for it all my sixteenth year, for I had heard the legends, and I believed if I sought I should find. I was seventeen when I reached it, and came back with all the gold coins I could carry."

"And were you not frightened of the curse?"

"When I was young, I was afraid of nothing."

"What did you do with your gold?"

"A portion I buried and I alone know where. The rest I used as brideprice for the woman I loved, and I built a fine house with it."

He stopped as if he had already said too much.

There was no ferryman at the jetty. Only a small boat, hardly big enough for three full-sized men, tied to a tree trunk on the shore, twisted and half dead, and a bell beside it.

I sounded the bell, and soon enough a fat man came down the shore. He said to Calum, "It will cost you a shilling for the ferry, and your boy, three pennies."

I stood tall. I am not as big as other men are, but I have as much pride as any of them. "I am also a man," I said. "I'll pay your shilling."

The ferryman looked me up and down, then he scratched his beard. "I beg your pardon. My eyes are not what they once were. I shall take you to the island."

I handed him a shilling. He weighed it in his hand, "That's ninepence you did not cheat me out of. Nine pennies are a lot of money in this dark age." The water was the colour of slate, although the sky was blue, and whitecaps chased one another across the water's surface. He untied the boat and hauled it, rattling, down the shingle to the water. We waded out into the cold water, and clambered inside.

The splash of oars on seawater, and the boat propelled forward in easy movements. I sat closest to the ferryman. I said, "Ninepence. It is good wages. But I have heard of a cave in the mountains on the Misty Isle, filled with gold coins, the treasure of the ancients."

He shook his head dismissively.

Calum was staring at me, lips pressed together so hard they were white. I ignored him and asked the man again, "A cave filled with golden coins, a gift from the Norsemen or the Southerners or from those who they say were here long before any of us: those who fled into the West as the people came."

"Heard of it," said the ferryman. "Heard also of the curse of it. I reckon that the one can take care of the other." He spat into the sea. Then he said, "You're an honest man, dwarf. I see it in your face. Do not seek this cave. No good can come of it."

"I am sure you are right," I told him, without guile.

"I am certain I am," he said. "For not every day is it that I take a reaver and a little dwarfy man to the Misty Isle." Then he said, "In this part of the world, it is not considered lucky to talk about those who went to the West."

We rode the rest of the boat journey in silence, though the sea became choppier, and the waves splashed into the side of the boat, such that I held on with both hands for fear of being swept away.

And after what seemed like half a lifetime the boat was tied to a long jetty of black stones. We walked the jetty as the waves crashed around us, the salt spray kissing our faces. There was a humpbacked man at the landing selling oatcakes and plums dried until they were almost stones. I gave him a penny and filled my jerkin pockets with them.

We walked on into the Misty Isle.

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I've seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

I say that, but my time on the Misty Isle, that is also called, by the wise, the Winged Isle, reminds me of nothing but itself.

It is a day from that jetty until you reach the black mountains.

Calum MacInnes looked at me, half his size or less, and he set off at a loping stride, as if challenging me to keep up. His legs propelled him across the ground, which was wet, and all ferns and heather.

Above us, low clouds were scudding, grey and white and black, hiding each other and revealing and hiding again.

I let him get ahead of me, let him press on into the rain, until he was swallowed by the wet, grey haze. Then, and only then, I ran.

This is one of the secret things of me, the things I have not revealed to any person, save to Morag, my wife, and Johnnie and James, my sons, and Flora, my daughter (may the Shadows rest her poor soul): I can run, and I can run well, and, if I need to I can run faster and longer and more sure-footedly than any full-sized man; and it was like this that I ran then, through the mist and the rain, taking to the high ground and the blackrock ridges, yet keeping below the skyline.

He was ahead of me, but I spied him soon, and I ran on and I ran past him, on the high ground with the brow of the hill between us. Below us was a stream. I can run for days without stopping. That is the first of my three secrets, and one secret I have revealed to no man.

We had discussed already where we would camp that first night on the Misty Isle, and Calum had told me that we would spend the night beneath the rock that is called Man and Dog, for it is said that it looks like an old man with his dog by his side, and I reached it late in the afternoon. There was a shelter beneath the rock, which was protected and dry, and some of those who had been before us had left firewood behind, sticks and twigs and branches. I made a fire and dried myself in front of it and took the chill from my bones. The woodsmoke blew out across the heather.

It was dark when Calum loped into the shelter and looked at me as if he had not expected to see me that side of midnight. I said, "What took you so long, Calum MacInnes?"

He said nothing, only stared at me. I said, "There is trout, boiled in mountain water, and a fire to warm your bones."

He nodded. We ate the trout, drank whisky to warm ourselves. There was a mound of heather and of ferns, dried and brown, piled high in the rear of the shelter, and we slept upon that, wrapped tight in our damp cloaks.

I woke in the night. There was cold steel against my throat-the flat of the blade, not the edge. I said, "And why would you ever kill me in the night, Calum MacInnes? For our way is long, and our journey is not yet over."

He said, "I do not trust you, dwarf."

"It is not me you must trust," I told him, "but those that I serve. And if you left with me but return without me, there are those who will know the name of Calum MacInnes, and cause it to be spoken in the shadows."

The cold blade remained at my throat. He said, "How did you get ahead of me?"

"And here was I, repaying ill with good, for I made you food and a fire. I am a hard man to lose, Calum MacInnes, and it ill becomes a guide to do as you did today. Now, take your dirk from my throat and let me sleep."

He said nothing, but after a few moments, the blade was removed. I forced myself neither to sigh nor to breathe, hoping he could not hear my heart pounding in my chest; and I slept no more that night.

For breakfast, I made porridge, and threw in some dried plums to soften them.

The mountains were black and grey against the white of the sky. We saw eagles, huge and ragged of wing, circling above us. Calum set a sober pace and I walked beside him, taking two steps for every one of his.

"How long?" I asked him.

"A day. Perhaps two. It depends upon the weather. If the clouds come down then two days, or even three . . ."

The clouds came down at noon and the world was blanketed by a mist that was worse than rain: droplets of water hung in the air, soaked our clothes and our skin; the rocks we walked upon became treacherous and Calum and I slowed in our ascent, stepped carefully. We were walking up the mountain, not climbing, up goat paths and craggy sharp ways. The rocks were black and slippery: we walked, and climbed and clambered and clung, we slipped and slid and stumbled and staggered, and even in the mist, Calum knew where he was going, and I followed him.

He paused at a waterfall that splashed across our path, thick as the trunk of an oak. He took the thin rope from his shoulders, wrapped it about a rock.

"This was not here before," he told me. "I'll go first." He tied one end of the rope about his waist and edged out along the path, into the falling water, pressing his body against the wet rock face, edging slowly, intently through the sheet of water.

I was scared for him, scared for both of us: holding my breath as he passed, only breathing when he was on the other side of the waterfall. He tested the rope, pulled on it, motioned me to follow him, when a rock gave way beneath his foot, and he slipped on the wet rock, and fell into the abyss.

The rope held, and the rock beside me held. Calum MacInnes dangled from the end of the rope. He looked up at me, and I sighed, anchored myself by a slab of crag, and I wound and pulled him up and up. I hauled him back onto the path, dripping and cursing.

He said, "You're stronger than you look," and I cursed myself for a fool. He must have seen it on my face for, after he shook himself (like a dog, sending droplets flying), he said, "My boy Calum told me the tale you told him about the Campbells coming for you, and you being sent into the fields by your wife, with them thinking she was your ma, and you a boy."

"It was just a tale," I said. "Something to pass the time."

"Indeed?" he said. "For I heard tell of a raiding party of Campbells sent out a few years ago, seeking revenge on someone who had taken their cattle. They went, and they never came back. If a small fellow like you can kill a dozen Campbells . . . well, you must be strong, and you must be fast."

I must be stupid, I thought ruefully, telling that child that tale.

I had picked them off one by one, like rabbits, as they came out to piss or to see what had happened to their friends: I had killed seven of them before my wife killed her first. We buried them in the glen, built a small cairn of stacking stones above them, to weigh them down so their ghosts would not walk, and we were sad: that Campbells had come so far to kill me, that we had been forced to kill them in return.

I take no joy in killing: no man should, and no woman. Sometimes death is necessary, but it is always an evil thing. That is something I am in no doubt of, even after the events I speak of here.

I took the rope from Calum MacInnes, and I clambered up and up, over the rocks, to where the waterfall came out of the side of the hill, and it was narrow enough for me to cross. It was slippery there, but I made it over without incident, tied the rope in place, came down it, threw the end of it to my companion, walked him across.

He did not thank me, neither for rescuing him, nor for getting us across; and I did not expect thanks. I also did not expect what he actually said, though, which was: "You are not a whole man, and you are ugly. Your wife: is she also small and ugly, like yourself?"

I decided to take no offence, whether offence had been intended or no. I simply said, "She is not. She is a tall woman, almost as tall as you, and when she was young-when we were both younger-she was reckoned by some to be the most beautiful girl in the lowlands. The bards wrote songs praising her green eyes and her long red-golden hair."

I thought I saw him flinch at this, but it is possible that I imagined it, or more likely, wished to imagine I had seen it.

"How did you win her, then?"

I spoke the truth: "I wanted her, and I get what I want. I did not give up. She said I was wise and I was kind, and I would always provide for her. And I have."

The clouds began to lower, once more, and the world blurred at the edges, became softer.

"She said I would be a good father. And I have done my best to raise my children. Who are also, if you are wondering, normal-sized."

"I beat sense into young Calum," said older Calum. "He is not a bad child."

"You can only do that as long as they are there with you," I said. And then I stopped talking, and I remembered that long year, and also I remembered Flora when she was small, sitting on the floor with jam on her face, looking up at me as if I were the wisest man in the world.

"Ran away, eh? I ran away when I was a lad. I was twelve. I went as far as the court of the King over the Water. The father of the current king."

"That's not something you hear spoken aloud."

"I am not afraid," he said. "Not here. Who's to hear us? Eagles? I saw him. He was a fat man, who spoke the language of the foreigners well, and our own tongue only with difficulty. But he was still our king." He paused. "And if he is to come to us again, he will need gold, for vessels and weapons and to feed the troops that he raises."

I said, "So I believe. That is why we go in search of the cave."

He said, "This is bad gold. It does not come free. It has its cost."

"Everything has its cost."

I was remembering every landmark-climb at the sheep skull, cross the first three streams, then walk along the fourth until the five heaped stones and find where the rock looks like a seagull and walk on between two sharply jutting walls of black rock, and let the slope bring you with it . . .

I could remember it, I knew. Well enough to find my way down again. But the mists confused me, and I could not be certain.

We reached a small loch, high in the mountains, and drank fresh water, caught huge white creatures that were not shrimps or lobsters or crayfish, and ate them raw like sausages, for we could not find any dry wood to make our fire, that high.

We slept on a wide ledge beside the icy water and woke into clouds before sunrise, when the world was grey and blue.

"You were sobbing in your sleep," said Calum.

"I had a dream," I told him.

"I do not have bad dreams," Calum said.

"It was a good dream," I said. It was true. I had dreamed that Flora still lived. She was grumbling about the village boys, and telling me of her time in the hills with the cattle, and of things of no consequence, smiling her great smile and tossing her hair the while, red-golden like her mother's, although her mother's hair is now streaked with white.

"Good dreams should not make a man cry out like that," said Calum. A pause, then, "I have no dreams, not good, not bad."

"No?"

"Not since I was a young man."

We rose. A thought struck me: "Did you stop dreaming after you came to the cave?"

He said nothing. We walked along the mountainside, into the mist, as the sun came up.

The mist seemed to thicken and fill with light, in the sunshine, but did not fade away and I realized that it must be a cloud. The world glowed. And then it seemed to me that I was staring at a man of my size, a small, humpty man, his shadow, standing in the air in front of me, like a ghost or an angel, and it moved as I moved. It was haloed by the light, and shimmered, and I could not have told you how near it was or how far away. I have seen miracles and I have seen evil things, but never have I seen anything like that.

"Is it magic?" I asked, although I smelled no magic on the air.

Calum said, "It is nothing. A property of the light. A shadow. A reflection. No more. I see a man beside me, as well. He moves as I move." I glanced back, but I saw nobody beside him.

And then the little glowing man in the air faded, and the cloud, and it was day, and we were alone.

We climbed all that morning, ascending. Calum's ankle had twisted the day before, when he had slipped at the waterfall. Now it swelled in front of me, swelled and went red, but his pace did not ever slow, and if he was in discomfort or in pain, it did not show upon his face.

I said, "How long?" as the dusk began to blur the edges of the world.

"An hour, less, perhaps. We will reach the cave, and then we will sleep for the night. In the morning you will go inside. You can bring out as much gold as you can carry, and we will make our way back off the island."

I looked at him, then: grey-streaked hair, grey eyes, so huge and wolfish a man, and I said, "You would sleep outside the cave?"

"I would. There are no monsters in the cave. Nothing that will come out and take you in the night. Nothing that will eat us. But you should not go in until daylight."

And then we rounded a rockfall, all black rocks and grey half-blocking our path, and we saw the cave mouth. I said, "Is that all?"

"You expected marble pillars? Or a giant's cave from a gossip's fireside tales?"

"Perhaps. It looks like nothing. A hole in the rock face. A shadow. And there are no guards?"

"No guards. Only the place, and what it is."

"A cave filled with treasure. And you are the only one who can find it?"

Calum laughed then, like a fox's bark. "The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter."

"And is that true? Does it make you evil?"

" . . . No. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are," he paused, "things are flat. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss . . ." He looked at the cave mouth and I thought I saw fear in his eyes. "Less."

I said, "There are many for whom the lure of gold outweighs the beauty of a rainbow."

"Me, when young, for one. You, now, for another."

"So we go in at dawn."

"You will go in. I will wait for you out here. Do not be afraid. No monster guards the cave. No spells to make the gold vanish, if you do not know some cantrip or rhyme."

We made our camp, then; or rather we sat in the darkness, against the cold rock wall. There would be no sleep there.

I said, "You took the gold from here, as I will do tomorrow. You bought a house with it, a bride, a good name."

His voice came from the darkness. "Aye. And they meant nothing to me, once I had them, or less than nothing. And if your gold pays for the King over the Water to come back to us and rule us and bring about a land of joy and prosperity and warmth, it will still mean nothing to you. It will be as something you heard of that happened to a man in a tale."

"I have lived my life to bring the king back," I told him.

He said, "You take the gold back to him. Your king will want more gold, because kings want more. It is what they do. Each time you come back, it will mean less. The rainbow means nothing. Killing a man means nothing."

Silence then, in the darkness. I heard no birds: only the wind that called and gusted about the peaks like a mother seeking her babe.

I said, "We have both killed men. Have you ever killed a woman, Calum MacInnes?"

"I have not. I have killed no woman, no girls."

I ran my hands over my dirk in the darkness, seeking the wood and center of the hilt, the steel of the blade. It was there in my hands. I had not intended to ever tell him, only to strike when we were out of the mountains, strike once, strike deep, but now I felt the words being pulled from me, would I or never-so. "They say there was a girl," I told him. "And a thorn-bush."

Silence. The whistling of the wind. "Who told you?" he asked. Then, "Never mind. I would not kill a woman. No man of honour would kill a woman . . ."

If I said a word, I knew, he would be silent on the subject, and never talk about it again. So I said nothing. Only waited.

Calum MacInnes began to speak, choosing his words with care, talking as if he was remembering a tale he had heard as a child and had almost forgotten. "They told me the kine of the lowlands were fat and bonny, and that a man could gain honour and glory by adventuring off to the southlands and returning with the fine red cattle. So I went south, and never a cow was good enough, until on a hillside in the lowlands I saw the finest, reddest, fattest cows that ever a man has seen. So I began to lead them away, back the way I had come.

"She came after me with a stick. The cattle were her father's, she said, and I was a rogue and a knave and all manner of rough things. But she was beautiful, even when angry, and had I not already a young wife, I might have dealt more kindly to her. Instead I pulled a knife, and touched it to her throat, and bade her to stop speaking. And she did stop.

"I would not kill her-I would not kill a woman, and that is the truth-so I tied her, by her hair, to a thorn tree, and I took her knife from her waistband, to slow her as she tried to free herself, and pushed the blade of it deep into the sod. I tied her to the thorn tree by her long hair, and I thought no more of her as I made off with her cattle.

"It was another year before I was back that way. I was not after cows that day, but I walked up the side of that bank-it was a lonely spot, and if you had not been looking, you might not have seen it. Perhaps nobody searched for her."

"I heard they searched," I told him. "Although some believed her taken by reavers, and others believed her run away with a tinker, or gone to the city. But still, they searched."

"Aye. I saw what I did see-perhaps you'd have to have stood where I was standing, to see what I did see. It was an evil thing I did, perhaps."

"Perhaps?"

He said, "I have taken gold from the cave of the mists. I cannot tell any longer if there is good or there is evil. I sent a message, by a child, at an inn, telling them where she was, and where they could find her."

I closed my eyes but the world became no darker.

"There is evil," I told him.

I saw it in my mind's eye: her skeleton picked clean of clothes, picked clean of flesh, as naked and white as anyone would ever be, hanging like a child's puppet against the thorn-bush, tied to a branch above it by its red-golden hair.

"At dawn," said Calum MacInnes, as if we had been talking of provisions or the weather, "you will leave your dirk behind, for such is the custom, and you will enter the cave, and bring out as much gold as you can carry. And you will bring it back with you, to the mainland. There's not a soul in these parts, knowing what you carry or where it's from, would take it from you. Then send it to the King over the Water, and he will pay his men with it, and feed them, and buy their weapons. One day, he will return. Tell me on that day that there is evil, little man."

*

When the sun was up, I entered the cave. It was damp in there. I could hear water running down one wall, and I felt a wind on my face, which was strange, because there was no wind inside the mountain.

In my mind, the cave would be filled with gold. Bars of gold would be stacked like firewood, and bags of golden coins would sit between them. There would be golden chains and golden rings, and golden plates, heaped high like the china plates in a rich man's house.

I had imagined riches, but there was nothing like that here. Only shadows. Only rock.

Something was here, though. Something that waited.

I have secrets, but there is a secret that lies beneath all my other secrets, and not even my children know it, although I believe my wife suspects, and it is this: my mother was a mortal woman, the daughter of a miller, but my father came to her from out of the West, and to the West he returned when he had had his sport with her. I cannot be sentimental about my parentage: I am sure he does not think of her, and doubt that he ever knew of me. But he left me a body that is small, and fast, and strong; and perhaps I take after him in other ways-I do not know. I am ugly, and my father was beautiful, or so my mother told me once, but I think that she might have been deceived.

I wondered what I would have seen in that cave if my father had been an innkeeper from the lowlands.

You would be seeing gold, said a whisper that was not a whisper, from deep in the heart of the mountain. It was a lonely voice, and distracted, and bored.

"I would see gold," I said aloud. "Would it be real, or would it be an illusion?"

The whisper was amused. You are thinking like a mortal man, making things always to be one thing or another. It is gold they would see, and touch. Gold they would carry back with them, feeling the weight of it the while, gold they would trade with other mortals for what they needed. What does it matter if it is there or no if they can see it, touch it, steal it, murder for it? Gold they need and gold I give them.

"And what do you take, for the gold you give them?"
Little enough, for my needs are few, and I am old; too old to follow my sisters into the West. I taste their pleasure and their joy. I feed, a little, feed on what they do not need and do not value. A taste of heart, a lick and a nibble of their fine consciences, a sliver of soul. And in return a fragment of me leaves this cave with them and gazes out at the world through their eyes, sees what they see until their lives are done and I take back what is mine.
"Will you show yourself to me?"

I could see, in the darkness, better than any man born of man and woman could see. I saw something move in the shadows, and then the shadows congealed and shifted, revealing formless things at the edge of my perception, where it meets imagination. Troubled, I said the thing it is proper to say at times such as this: "Appear before me in a form that neither harms nor is offensive to me."
Is that what you wish?
The drip of distant water. "Yes," I said.

From out of the shadows it came, and it stared down at me with empty sockets, smiled at me with wind-weathered ivory teeth. It was all bone, save its hair, and its hair was red and gold, and wrapped about the branch of a thorn-bush.

"That offends my eyes."

I took it from your mind, said a whisper that surrounded the skeleton. Its jawbone did not move. I chose something you loved. This was your daughter, Flora, as she was the last time you saw her.

I closed my eyes, but the figure remained.

It said, The reaver waits for you at the mouth of the cave. He waits for you to come out, weaponless and weighed down with gold. He will kill you, and take the gold from your dead hands.

"But I'll not be coming out with gold, will I?"

I thought of Calum MacInnes, the wolf-grey in his hair, the grey of his eyes, the line of his dirk. He was bigger than I am, but all men are bigger than I am. Perhaps I was stronger, and faster, but he was also fast, and he was strong.

He killed my daughter, I thought, then wondered if the thought was mine or if it had crept out of the shadows and into my head. Aloud, I said, "Is there another way out of this cave?"
You leave the way you entered, through the mouth of my home.
I stood there and did not move, but in my mind I was like an animal in a trap, questing and darting from idea to idea, finding no purchase and no solace and no solution.

I said, "I am weaponless. He told me that I could not enter this place with a weapon. That it was not the custom."

It is the custom now, to bring no weapon into my place. It was not always the custom. Follow me, said the skeleton of my daughter.

I followed her, for I could see her, even when it was so dark that I could see nothing else.

In the shadows it said, It is beneath your hand.

I crouched and felt it. The haft felt like bone-perhaps an antler. I touched the blade cautiously in the darkness, discovered that I was holding something that felt more like an awl than a knife. It was thin, sharp at the tip. It would be better than nothing.

"Is there a price?"
There is always a price.
"Then I will pay it. And I ask one other thing. You say that you can see the world through his eyes."

There were no eyes in that hollow skull, but it nodded. "Then tell me when he sleeps."

It said nothing. It melded into the darkness, and I felt alone in that place.

Time passed. I followed the sound of the dripping water, found a rock pool, and drank. I soaked the last of the oats and I ate them, chewing them until they dissolved in my mouth. I slept and woke and slept again, and dreamed of my wife, Morag, waiting for me as the seasons changed, waiting for me just as we had waited for our daughter, waiting for me forever.

Something, a finger I thought, touched my hand: it was not bony and hard. It was soft, and humanlike, but too cold. He sleeps.

I left the cave in the blue light, before dawn. He slept across the cavemouth, catlike, I knew, such that the slightest touch would have woken him. I held my weapon in front of me, a bone handle and a needlelike blade of blackened silver, and I reached out and took what I was after, without waking him.

Then I stepped closer, and his hand grasped for my ankle and his eyes opened.

"Where is the gold?" asked Calum MacInnes.

"I have none." The wind blew cold on the mountainside. I had danced back, out of his reach, when he had grabbed at me. He stayed on the ground, pushed himself up onto one elbow.

Then he said, "Where is my dirk?"

"I took it," I told him. "While you slept."

He looked at me, sleepily. "And why ever would you do that? If I was going to kill you I would have done it on the way here. I could have killed you a dozen times."

"But I did not have gold then, did I?"

He said nothing.

I said, "If you think you could have got me to bring the gold from the cave, and that not bringing it out would have saved your miserable soul, then you are a fool."

He no longer looked sleepy. "A fool, am I?"

He was ready to fight. It is good to make people who are ready to fight angry.

I said, "Not a fool. No. For I have met fools and idiots, and they are happy in their idiocy, even with straw in their hair. You are too wise for foolishness. You seek only misery and you bring misery with you and you call down misery on all you touch."

He rose then, holding a rock in his hand like an axe, and he came at me. I am small, and he could not strike me as he would have struck a man of his own size. He leaned over to strike. It was a mistake.

I held the bone haft tightly, and stabbed upward, striking fast with the point of the awl, like a snake. I knew the place I was aiming for, and I knew what it would do.

He dropped his rock, clutched at his right shoulder. "My arm," he said. "I cannot feel my arm."

He swore then, fouling the air with curses and threats. The dawn light on the mountaintop made everything so beautiful and blue. In that light, even the blood that had begun to soak his garments was purple. He took a step back, so he was between me and the cave. I felt exposed, the rising sun at my back.

"Why do you not have gold?" he asked me. His arm hung limply at his side.

"There was no gold there for such as I," I said.

He threw himself forward, then, ran at me and kicked at me. My awl blade went flying from my hand. I threw my arms around his leg, and I held on to him as together we tumbled off the mountainside.

His head was above me, and I saw triumph in it, and then I saw sky, and then the valley floor was above me and I was rising to meet it and then it was below me and I was falling to my death.

A jar and a bump, and now we were turning over and over on the side of the mountain, the world a dizzying whirligig of rock and pain and sky, and I knew I was a dead man, but still I clung to the leg of Calum MacInnes.

I saw a golden eagle in flight, but below me or above me I could no longer say. It was there, in the dawn sky, in the shattered fragments of time and perception, there in the pain. I was not afraid: there was no time and no space to be afraid in, no space in my mind and no space in my heart. I was falling through the sky, holding tightly to the leg of a man who was trying to kill me; we were crashing into rocks, scraping and bruising and then . . .

. . . we stopped. Stopped with force enough that I felt myself jarred, and was almost thrown off Calum MacInnes and to my death beneath. The side of the mountain had crumbled, there, long ago, sheared off, leaving a sheet of blank rock, as smooth and as featureless as glass. But that was below us. Where we were, there was a ledge, and on the ledge there was a miracle: stunted and twisted, high above the treeline, where no trees have any right to grow, was a twisted hawthorn tree, not much larger than a bush, although it was old. Its roots grew into the side of the mountain, and it was this hawthorn that had caught us in its grey arms.

I let go of the leg, clambered off Calum MacInnes's body, and onto the side of the mountain. I stood on the narrow ledge and looked down at the sheer drop. There was no way down from here. No way down at all.

I looked up. It might be possible, I thought, climbing slowly, with fortune on my side, to make it up that mountain. If it did not rain. If the wind was not too hungry. And what choice did I have? The only alternative was death.

A voice: "So. Will you leave me here to die, dwarf?"

I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

His eyes were open. He said, "I cannot move my right arm, since you stabbed it. I think I broke a leg in the fall. I cannot climb with you."

I said, "I may succeed, or I may fail."

"You'll make it. I've seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree."

I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.

He said, "Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear-swear by shadows and eagle feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me."

"You know what I am?" I said.

"I know nothing," he said. "Only that I want to live."

I thought. "I swear by these things," I told him. "By shadows and by eagle feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back."

"I would have killed you," said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. "I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own."

"I know."

His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. "You could come back with ropes," he said. "My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you'd need more than that."

"Yes," I said. "I will come back with ropes." I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.

I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. "I will come back for you," I said. "With ropes. I have sworn."

"When?" he asked, and he closed his eyes.

"In a year," I told him. "I will come here in a year."

I began to climb. The man's cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.

It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.

When I reached the ledge, the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.

*

© by Neil Gaiman. Used by permission. From the collection , edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.

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Fifty-Two Stories " 25. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains

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You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city.