Dagger Key and Other Stories

LIMBO

The first week in September, Detroit started feeling like a bad fit to Shellane. It was as if the city had tightened around him, as if the streets of the drab working-class suburb that had afforded him anonymity for nearly two years had become irritated by the presence of a foreign body in their midst. There was no change he could point to, no sudden rash of hostile stares, no outbreak of snarling dogs, merely a sense that something had turned. A similar feeling had often come over him when he lived back east, and he had learned to recognize it for a portent of trouble; but he wasn’t sure he could trust it now. He suspected it might be a flashback of sorts, a mental spasm produced by boredom and spiritual disquiet. Nevertheless he chose to play it safe, checked into a motel and staked-out his apartment. When he noticed a Lincoln Town Car across the street from the apartment, he trained his binoculars on it. In the driver’s seat was a young man with short black hair and a pugilist’s flattened nose. Beside him sat an enormous, sour-looking man with bushy gray sideburns and a bald scalp, his face vaguely fishlike. Thick lips and popped eyes. Marty Gerbasi. Shellane had no doubt as to what had brought Gerbasi to Detroit. A half-hour later, after doing some banking, he picked up a green Toyota that had been purchased under a different name and kept parked in a downtown garage for the past twenty-nine months, and drove north toward the Upper Peninsula.

At forty-six, Shellane was a thick-chested slab of a man with muscular forearms, large hands, and a squarish homely face. His whitish blond hair had gone gray at the temples, and his blue eyes were surprisingly vital by contrast to the seamed country in which they were the only ornament. He customarily dressed in jeans and windbreakers, a wardrobe designed to reinforce the impression that he might be a retired cop or military man—he had learned that this pretense served to keep strangers at bay. His gestures were carefully managed, restrained, all in keeping with his methodical approach to life, and he did not rattle easily. Realizing that assassins had found him in Detroit merely caused him to make an adjustment and set in motion a contingency plan that he had prepared for just such an occasion.

When he reached the Upper Peninsula, he headed west toward Iron Mountain, intending to catch a ferry across to Canada; but an hour out of Marquette, just past the little town of Champion, he came to a dirt road leading away into an evergreen forest, and a sign that read: Lakeside Cabins—Off-Season Rates. On impulse he swung the Toyota onto the road and went swerving along a winding track between ranks of spruce. The day was sunny and cool, and the lake, an elongated oval of dark mineral blue, reminded Shellane of an antique lapis lazuli brooch that had belonged to his mother. It was surrounded by forested hills and bordered by rocky banks and narrow stretches of brownish-gray sand. Under the cloudless sky, the place generated a soothing stillness. A quarter-mile in from the highway stood a fishing cabin with a screen porch, peeling white paint, a tarpaper roof, and a phone line—it had an air of cozy dilapidation that spoke of evenings around a table with cards and whiskey, children lying awake in bunk beds listening for splashes and the cries of loons. Several other cabins were scattered along the shore, the closest about a hundred yards distant. Shellane walked in the woods, enjoying the crisp, resin-scented air, scuffing the fallen needles, thinking he could stand it there a couple of weeks. It would take that long to set up a new identity. This time he intended to bury himself. Asia, maybe.

A placard on the cabin door instructed anyone interested in renting to contact Avery Broillard at the Gas ’n Guzzle in Champion. Through a window Shellane saw throw rugs on a stained spruce floor. Wood stove (there was a cord of wood stacked out back); a funky-looking refrigerator speckled with decals; sofa covered with a Mexican blanket. A wooden table and chairs. Bare bones, but it suited both his needs and his notion of comfort.

The Gas ’n Guzzle proved to be a log cabin with pumps out front and a grocery inside. Hand-lettered signs in the windows declared that fishing licenses were for sale within, also home-baked pies and bait, testifying by their humorous misspellings to a cutesy self-effacing attitude on the part of ownership. The manager, Avery Broillard, was lanky, thirtyish, with shoulder-length black hair and rockabilly sideburns; he had one of those long, faintly dish-shaped Cajun faces with features so prominent, they seemed caricatures of good looks. He said the cabin had been cleaned, the phone line was functional, and quoted a reasonable weekly rate. When Shellane paid for two weeks, cash in advance, Avery peered at him suspiciously.

“You prefer plastic?” Shellane asked, hauling out his wallet. “I don’t like using it, but some people won’t deal with cash.”

“Cash is good.” Avery folded the bills and tucked them in his shirt pocket.

Shellane grabbed a shopping basket and stocked up on cold cuts, frozen meat and vegetables, soup, bread, cooking and cleaning necessities, and at the last moment, a home-baked apple pie that must have weighed close to four pounds. He promised himself to eat no more than one small slice a day and be faithful with his push-ups.

“Get these pies made special,” Avery said as he shoveled it into a plastic bag. “They’re real tasty.”

Shellane smiled politely.

“Might as well give you one of these here.” Avery handed him a leaflet advertising the fact that the Endless Blue Stars were playing each and every weekend at Roscoe’s Tavern.

“That’s my band,” Avery said. “Endless Blue Stars.”

“Rock and roll?”

“Yeah.” Then, defensively, “We got quite a following around here. You oughta drop in and give a listen. There ain’t a helluva lot else to do.”

Shellane forked over three twenties and said he would be sure to drop in.

“If you’re looking to fish,” said Avery, continuing to bag the groceries, “they taking some pike outta the lake. I can show you the good spots.”

“I’m no fisherman,” Shellane told him. “I came up here to work on a book.”

“You a writer, huh? Anything I might of read?”

Shellane resisted an impulse to say something sarcastic. Broillard’s manner, now turned ingratiating, was patently false. There was a sly undertone to every word he spoke, and Shellane had the impression that he considered himself a superior being, that the Gas ’n Guzzle was to his mind a pit stop on the road to world domination, and as a consequence he affected a faux-yokelish manner toward his patrons that failed to mask a fundamental condescension. He had bad luck eyes. Watered-down blue; irises marked by hairline darknesses, like fractures in a glaze.

“This one’s my first,” said Shellane. “I just retired. Did my twenty, and I always wanted to try a book. So…”

“What’s it about,” Avery asked. “Your book.”

“Crime,” said Shellane, and tried to put an edge on his smile. “Like they say—write what you know.”

It took him until after dark to settle into the cabin, to order an Internet hook-up, to prepare and eat his dinner. Once he’d finished with dessert, he poured a fresh cup of coffee, switched on his laptop and sent an email that prevented a file from being sent to the U.S. Justice Department. The file contained a history of Shellane’s twenty years as a thief, details of robberies perpetrated and murders witnessed and various other details whose revelation might result in the indictment of several prominent members of Boston’s criminal society. It was not that effective an insurance policy. The men who wanted to kill him were too arrogant to believe that he could bring them down, and perhaps their judgment was accurate; but knowing about the file had slowed their reactions sufficiently to allow his escape. He was confident that he would continue to stay ahead of them. However, this confidence did not afford him the satisfaction that once it had. It had been many years since Shellane had derived much pleasure from life. Survival had become less a passion than a game he was adept at playing. Lately the game had lost its savor. Apart from the desire to thwart his pursuers, he was no longer certain why he persevered.

He was about to shut down the computer when he heard a noise outside. He went into the bedroom, took the nine-millimeter from his suitcase, and holding it behind him, went out onto the porch and nudged open the screen door. A slim figure, silhouetted against the moonstruck surface of the water, was moving briskly away from the cabin. Shellane called out, and the figure stopped short.

“I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice said. “I was out for a walk. The lights…I didn’t know the cabin was rented.”

“It’s okay.” Shellane stuck the gun into his belt behind his back and pulled his sweater down over it. “I thought it was an animal or something.”

“Aren’t many animals around anymore,” said the woman as she came into the light. “Just squirrels and raccoons. People say we’ve still got a few wolverines in the woods, but I’ve never seen one.”

She was slender and tall, most of her height in her legs, with long red hair gathered in a ponytail, wearing jeans and a plaid wool jacket. Early thirties, he guessed. A pale country Irish face, with a pointy chin and wide cheekbones. Pretty as a morning prayer. Faint laugh lines showed at the corners of her olive green eyes. Yet she had a subdued air, and he suspected that she had not laughed in a while.

“I’m Grace,” she said.

“Michael,” said Shellane, remembering to use his temporary identity. “Guess you’re my neighbor, huh?”

She gestured toward the lake. “Three cabins down.”

Being accustomed to city paranoia, it surprised him that an attractive woman—any woman, for that matter, would tell a stranger where she lived. He had assumed that following the introduction she would retreat, but she stood there, smiling nervously.

“How about some coffee?” he asked. “I was going to make another pot.”

Once again she surprised him by accepting the invitation. As he fixed the coffee, she moved about the cabin, keeping away from the center of the room, touching things and stopping suddenly, like a cat exploring new territory. Now and then she would glance at him and flash a nervous smile, as if to assure him she meant no harm. She possessed a jittery vitality that drew his eye, alerted him to her every gesture. He set a cup of coffee on the table and she sat on the edge of her chair, ready to take flight.

“I didn’t really want coffee,” she said. “It’s just living out here, I don’t get to meet many people.”

“You’re not renting, then?”

“No, I…no.”

Her mouth thinned, as if she was keeping something back.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked. “Vacation?”

He told his retirement story. Her attention wandered, and he had the idea that she knew he was lying. He asked what she did.

“I…Nothing, really. I take a lot of walks.” She came to her feet. “I should go.”

Maybe, he thought, paranoia just took a while to develop in the Upper Peninsula. He followed her to the door, watched her start toward the lake. She turned, walking backwards, and said brightly, “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”

“Hope so,” he said.

He stood in the doorway until she was out of sight, sorting through his impressions of her, trying to distinguish the real from the imagined. “Trouble,” he said, addressing himself to the shadows along the shore, and went back inside.

That night Shellane had an unusual dream. Unusual both as to its particulars, which bore no obvious relation to the materials of his life, and to the fact that he rarely remembered dreams. He was walking in a roiling gray fog so thick it seemed like flimsy tissue, scraps of the stuff clinging to his clothing. Visibility was severely limited and he was afraid, yet determined. As if on an important errand. Soon a rambling building with a gabled second story partially materialized from the fog. It was fashioned of black boards and had a look of false antiquity redolent of the Gas ’n Guzzle, suggesting that it, too, was a quaint facade housing some less savory enterprise than might be expected. The windows were shuttered; no light escaped from within, and yet there was light enough to see. Except for the weeds that sprang up here and there, the surrounding land was devoid of vegetation. Jutting from the side of the house was an architectural feature he couldn’t quite make out, but seemed curious in some way…At this point the dream had faded. He recalled fragments. Shapes in the fog. Someone running. And that was all.

As though the dream were made of the same clingy stuff as the fog, its imagery stayed with him all the following day, as did his brief encounter with Grace. She had, he believed, been interested in him. Because he was interested in her, he questioned whether he might be flattering himself; but he was not given to assuming that every woman with whom he spoke was attracted to him. He trusted his instincts. She had to be fifteen years younger than he. It would be foolish to get involved with her—under the best of circumstances she would be a problem, and these were far from the best of circumstances.

That evening, however, he went for a walk along the dirt road that followed the shore, half in hopes of running into her. Her cabin, set among the trees high on the bank, was more a house than cabin. A deck out back. Satellite dish on the roof. Light sprayed from a picture window, and Grace was standing at it, wearing jeans and a cable-knit white sweater. Curious about her, wanting to get closer, he climbed the bank to the right of the window. Her head was down, arms folded. She looked miserable. He had an urge to knock, to say he was passing by and had spotted her, but before he could debate the wisdom of obeying this urge, headlights slashed across the front of the house. Rattling and grumbling, a big blue Cadillac at least thirty-five years old pulled up beside the house and the reason—Shellane suspected—for Grace’s misery climbed out. Avery Broillard. He clumped to the door, knocked his boots clean, and went inside. Grace had apparently retreated into the rear of the house. Broillard stood in the front room, hands on hips. “Fuck!” he shouted, and made a flailing gesture. Then he stomped off along a corridor.

As Shellane headed for home a bank of fog moved toward him across the lake, like the ghost of a crumbling city melting up from the past. He was furious with himself. That he had been on the verge of coming between husband and wife, boyfriend-girlfriend, whatever…it spoke to a breakdown in judgment. All it would take to bring the cops nosing around was some asshole like Broillard getting his wind up, and though Shellane could handle the cops, it would be wiser to avoid them. Agitated, unable to calm down, he drove into town, thinking he would eat at a diner; but when he saw the lights of Roscoe’s, a low concrete building with a neon sign that sketched the green image of a snub-nosed pistol above the door, he turned into the parking lot. Inside, he grabbed a seat at the bar and ordered a cheeseburger plate. At the far end of the room was a stage furnished with amps and mike stands and a PA, backed by a sequined curtain. A bearded roadie was engaged in setting up the mikes. All the tables were occupied, and it appeared that more than half the crowd were women. The babble of laughter and talk outvoiced the jukebox, which was playing “Wheel in the Sky,” a song emblematic to Shellane’s mind of the most pernicious form of jingle rock. He nursed a draft, watching the place fill beyond its seating capacity. Apparently Broillard did have a following. People had packed in along the walls and were standing two-deep at the bar.

He had intended to leave before the live music started, but when the lights dimmed and a cheer went up, people massing closer to the stage, jamming the dance floor like a festival audience, curiosity got the better of him. Five shadows moved out from the wings. A spot pinned the central mike stand, where Broillard was strapping on a Telecaster with glittery blue stars dappling its black finish. He flashed a boyish grin and said, “How ’bout somebody bringing me a beer. I feel a thirst coming on.” Then he turned his back on the crowd and the band kicked in.

At best Shellane expected to hear uninspired songs about beer and dangerous roadhouses and wild, wild women played with a rough, energetic competence; because of his distaste for the band’s front man, he hoped for worse. But the Endless Blue Stars had a lyrical sound that was way too big for Roscoe’s, their style falling into a spectrum somewhere between Dire Straits and early Cream. Retro, yet carrying a gloss of millennial cynicism. The first song featured a long intro during which Broillard laid down sweetly melodic guitar lines over a 4/4 with a Brazilian feel that built gradually into a rock tempo. When he stepped to the mike, the crowd waved their arms and shouted.

The bassist and drummer added harmony on the next line:

Then Broillard’s throaty baritone soared over the background:

The mood cast by the song—by all the song—was irresistibly romantic, an invitation to join in a soothing blue dream of love and mystery, and Broillard’s Byronic stage persona was so persuasive, Shellane wondered if he might have misjudged him. But when the band went on break and Broillard came swaggering over to the bar, dispensing largesse to well-wishers, his arm about a pretty albeit slightly overstuffed brunette, caressing the underside of her right breast, Shellane decided this was the thing that made music—all art, for that matter—fundamentally suspect: that assholes could become proficient at it.

Broillard spotted him, dragged the girl over, and said, “Needed a break from all that peace and quiet, eh?”

Shellane said, “Yeah, you were right,” and then, though he was tempted to dishonesty, complimented him on the set.

“I didn’t figure you for a music lover,” said Broillard.

“That song, the one that went into a seven-four break after the second verse…”

“‘Three Fates.’” Broillard looked at him with renewed interest. “You play?”

“Used to,” Shellane said. “I liked that song.”

“Yeah, well,” said Broillard dismissively. “Cool.” He gave the brunette a squeeze. “Annie, this is…”

“Michael,” Shellane said when Broillard couldn’t dredge up the name.

“Right. Mister Michaels is a writer. Crime novels.”

Annie blinked vacantly up at Shellane, too blitzed to say Hi.

Somebody caught Broillard’s shoulder, claiming his attention. As he turned away, he smirked and said to Shellane, “Stick around, man. It gets better.”

Over the next two days Shellane was kept busy in detailing a new passport, setting up bank accounts on-line. Twice he caught sight of Grace walking along the shingle and considered calling to her, but her air of distraction reinforced his belief that she was a woman with time on her hands. Such women had a need for drama in order to give weight to their lives—he did not intend to become the co-star in her therapy. But he continued to speculate about who she was. He remembered no wedding ring, yet she displayed a kind of cloistered unhappiness that reminded him of married women he had known. Perhaps she removed the ring to give herself the illusion of freedom.

Around noon on the third day, he took a couple of beers, a sandwich, the new James Lee Burke novel, and went down to the shore and sat with his back against a boulder that emerged from the bank, a granite stump scoured smooth by glaciers and warm from the sun. He read only ten or fifteen minutes before laying the book aside. If he had done crime in Louisiana, he thought he might have stayed with it. The players there were more interesting than the Southie ratboys he’d crewed with in Boston…at least if he were to trust the novel. Burke might be exaggerating. Crews were likely the same all over, just different accents. He stared out across the sunstruck lake, watched a motor boat cutting a white wake, too far away for the engine noise to carry over the sighing wind and the slop of the water. He half-believed nothing bad could happen here. That was ridiculous, he knew. Yet he felt serene, secure. It seemed the landscape had adjusted to him, reordered itself to accommodate his two hundred and twenty-six pounds, and settled around him with the perfection of a tailored coat. No way he could hack it here for three years as he had in Detroit. But the fit felt better than it had in Detroit, and he could not understand why this was. He stuck out in Champion. There was no cover, no disguise he could successfully adopt.

He finished one beer, ate half the sandwich, and went back to the book, but his attention wandered. Wind ruffled the long reach of the water, raising wavelets that each caught a spoonful of dazzle, making it appear that a myriad diamond lives were surfacing from the depths. The trees stirred in dark green unison. The shingle was decorated with arrangements of twigs, matted feathers and bones, polished stones. Mysteries and signs. Shellane closed his eyes.

“Hello,” said Grace, and his heart broke rhythm. He let out a squawk and sat up, knocking over his freshly opened beer.

“I’m sorry!” Her chin was quivering, hands upheld in a posture of alarm.

“I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.

She relaxed a little, but still seemed wary, and he had the idea that she was used to being frightened.

“It’s okay,” he said. “No big deal.”

She had on jeans, the plaid jacket, and a T-shirt underneath—black with sequined blue stars. Her hair, loose about her shoulders, shined a coppery red under the sun. All her being was luminous, he thought. It was as if a klieg light were trapped in her body.

“Did you eat yet? I’ve got half a sandwich going to waste.” He held out the baggie containing the sandwich.

She stared at it hungrily, but shook her head. The wind lifted the ends of her hair, fluttered the collar of her jacket.

The depth of her timidity astonished him. Broillard, he figured, had a lot to answer for.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

He showed her the book.

“I don’t know him,” she said.

“It’s detective fiction, but the writing’s great.”

She cast an anxious glance behind her, then sank to her knees beside him. “I mostly read short stories. That’s what I wanted to write…short stories.”

“‘Wanted to write’?”

“I just…he…I couldn’t…I…”

She stalled out, and Shellane resisted the impulse to touch her hand.

“I wasn’t very good,” she said.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

As he spoke he recognized that he was casting aside his resolve and making a choice that could imperil him. Something about Grace, and it was not just her apparent hopelessness, pulled at him, made him want to take the risk. Her face serially mapped her emotions: surprise and alarm and fretfulness. Green eyes crystalled with reflected light.

“Your husband,” Shellane said. “Right?”

“It’s not…” She broke off, and glanced off along the shore road. The blue Cadillac was slewing toward them from the direction of Broillard’s cabin. Grace scooted behind the boulder. As the car turned onto the access road, Shellane saw that the brunette from the tavern occupied the passenger seat. The Cadillac skidded in the gravel, then sped off among the evergreens.

“Did he see me?” Grace emerged from behind the boulder. “I don’t think he did.”

He ignored the question. “He brings ’em home? His fucking bimbos? You’re there, and he just brings ’em home?”

Her nod was almost imperceptible, hardly more than a tucking in of the chin.

“Why do you put up with it? What does he do? Does he hit you?”

“He never…No. Not for a long time.”

“Not for a long time? Terrific!”

She opened her mouth, but only shook her head again. Finally she said, “It’s not entirely his fault.”

“Sure, I can see that.”

“You don’t understand! He’s very talented, and he’s been so frustrated. He…”

“So he takes his frustrations out on you. He makes you feel bad about yourself. He tells you you’re worthless. He blames you for his failings.”

Shellane reached for her hand. She looked startled when he touched her wrist, but let him pull her down onto her knees. “If that’s how it is,” he said, “you should leave him.”

The boat that had been racing around at the far end of the lake swung close in along the shore, the sound of its engine carving a gash in the stillness. The driver and the woman with him waved. Neither Shellane nor Grace responded.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Shellane said.

“You don’t know me…and you don’t know him.”

“Twenty-five years ago I used to be him.”

“I doubt that. Avery’s one of a kind.”

“No he’s not. I had a girlfriend…a lot like you. Sweet, pretty. She loved me, but I couldn’t get it together. I was too damn lazy. I thought because I was smart, the world was going to fall at my feet. Eventually she left me. But before that happened, I did my best to make her feel as bad about herself as I felt about myself.”

She was silent a few beats. “Did you ever get it together?”

“I got by, but I never did what I wanted.”

“What was that?”

“It’s a bit of a coincidence, actually. I wanted to be a musician. I wrote songs…or tried to. Screwed around in a garage band. But I settled for the next best thing.”

She looked at him expectantly.

“Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he said.

They sat without speaking for a minute. Shellane told himself it was time to pull back. The pause was an opportunity to quit this foolishness. But instead he said, “Have dinner with me tonight. We can drive into Marquette.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? He’ll be playing tonight.”

“He plays every night.”

“Then why not have dinner? You afraid someone will see us?”

She gave no reply, and he said, “Come over to the cabin, then. I’ll cook up some steaks.”

“I might have to eat at home.” She flattened her palms against her thighs. “I could come over after…maybe.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I don’t want you to think…that…”

“I promise not to think.”

That brought a wan smile. “We can just talk, if that’s all right.”

“Talk would be good.”

She appeared to be growing uncomfortable and, watching her hands wrestle with one another, her eyes darting toward the lake, he timed her and said to himself, the instant before she spoke the same words, I should go.

Late that afternoon it seemed deep November arrived at the lake in all its dank and gray displeasure, a cold wind pushing in a pewter overcast and spatterings of rain. As the dusk turned to dark, a fog rolled in, ghost-dressing the trees in whitish rags that clung to the boughs like relics of an ancient festival. Shellane, who had gone for a walk just as the fog began to accumulate, was forced to grope his way along, guided by the muffled slap of the waves. He had brought a flashlight, but all the beam illuminated was churning walls of fog. He must have been within a hundred yards of the cabin when he realized he could no longer hear the water. He kept going in what he assumed to be the direction of the shoreline, but after ten minutes, he was still on solid ground. He must have gotten turned around, he thought. He shined the flashlight ahead. A momentary thinning of the mist, and he made out a building. If anyone was at home, he could ask directions. The visibility was so poor, he couldn’t see much until he was right up next to the wall. The boards were knotty and badly carpentered, set at irregular slants and coated with pitch. He ran his right hand against one and picked up a splinter.

“Shit!” He examined his palm. Blood welled from a gouge, and a toothpick-sized sliver of wood was visible beneath the skin. He shook his hand to ease the hurt and happened to glance upward. Protruding from the wall some twenty feet overhead was a huge black fist, perfectly articulated and twice the circumference of an oil drum. From its clenched fingers hung a shred of rotting rope.

Shellane’s heart seemed itself to close into a fist. Swirling fog hid the thing from view, but he could have sworn it was not affixed to the wall, but rather emerged from it, the boards flowing out into the shape, as if the building were angry and had extruded this symptom of its mood.

He heard movement behind him and spun about, caught his heel and fell. Knocked loose on impact, the flashlight rolled away, becoming a mound of yellowish radiance off in the fog. Panicked, he scrambled up, breathing hard. He could no longer see much of the building, just the partial outline of a roof.

A guttural noise; pounding footsteps.

“Hey!” Shellane called.

More footsteps, and another voice, maybe the same one.

“Quit screwing around!” he shouted. The hairs on his neck prickled. Who the fuck would own such a place? Some pissant Goths. Rich kids who’d never gotten over The Cure. Movement on his right. Something heavy and ungainly.

Fuck directions, he told himself.

He started away from the building, walking fast, holding his arms out like Frankenstein’s monster to ward off obstructions. Less than ten seconds later, he hit a drop-off and staggered into cold ankle-deep water. He overbalanced and toppled onto his side, raising a splash. He pushed up from the silty bottom, found his way to shore, and stood shivering. Listening for voices. The only sound was that of the water dripping from his clothes onto the sand. He felt foolish at having been spooked by, probably, a bunch of twits who wore eyeliner and drank wine out of silver cups and thought they were unique.

That fist, though. What a freakshow!

If things were different, he thought, he’d give them a lesson in reality. Blow a couple of nine-millimeter holes in their point of view. But his annoyance faded quickly, and after squeezing and shaking the excess water from his clothes, he trudged off along the shore.

He doubted that Grace would show that evening, and truth be told, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to. His experience in the fog had rekindled his caution, and he thought it might be best for them both if she blew him off. He could be no help to her, and she would only endanger him. At nine o’clock he switched on the laptop and called up his crime file. Seeing Marty Gerbasi in Detroit had made him realize it was time to add a more personal reminiscence. He’d been having a beer in the Antrim back in Southie, the winter of ’83, when Marty had come in with Donnie Doyle, a pale twist of a kid with peroxided hair and a rabbity look who occasionally hooked on with a crew as a driver. Stupid as a stopped clock. They’d sat down next to Shellane and all three of them had tried to drink the bar out of Bushmills. Marty was buying, playing the grand fellow, laughing at Donnie’s stories, most of them lies about his gambling prowess, and winking broadly at Shellane as if to say he knew the kid was bullshit. Around 1 AM they staggered out of the bar—at least Donnie had staggered. Marty and Shellane had handled their liquor. No one ever saw Donnie Doyle after that night, and Shellane understood that having Marty buy you drinks was not a good thing. Like so many of Shellane’s associates, he lacked the necessary inch of conscience to qualify as human. Over the years, Shellane’s recognition that he was involved with a company of affable sociopaths had grown more poignant, eventually causing him to rethink his future, to realize that sooner or later Marty would offer to buy him drinks. He never found out what Donnie Doyle had done to deserve his night out with good ol’ Roy Shellane and the guinea angel of death, but he figured it was nothing more than some unfortunate behavior, maybe a tendency toward loquaciousness or…

A knock on the door. Ignoring his determination that he was better off without her, he jumped up to let Grace in. The plaid jacket and jeans again. Ponytail.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said as he stood aside to allow her to pass.

“I didn’t know if you’d make it at all, what with the fog.”

She sat at the table, shrugged out of the jacket; she had on a green turtleneck underneath. “It’s nice and warm in here,” she said, then pointed to his hand, which he had bandaged after removing the splinter. “What happened?”

Her eyes widened when he told her about the black house.

“You know who owns the place?” he asked.

A shake of her head. “It’s really old. Lots of people stay there.”

“Have you met any of them?”

“They don’t talk to me.”

Shellane went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of bourbon. He glanced at her inquiringly, held up the bottle, expecting her to refuse.

“I’ll try it,” she said.

He poured, set the glass in front of her. She touched the rim with her forefinger, closed her hand around it, then had a sip. She sipped again and smiled. “It’s good!”

She was easier around him than before, and this both elated and distressed him. What he felt for her, when he tried to isolate it, was less defined than what he felt toward her husband. He was attracted, but the basis of the attraction confounded him. True, she was sexy, with her green eyes and expressive mouth and strong, slender body. Her vulnerability made him feel protective, and this enhanced the other feelings. But he could not help thinking that a large part of his attraction was due to the danger she posed. For several years he had limited his contact with women to those he met through outcall services; now, alone with her in this secluded place, he wondered if he was not toying with fate, pretending there was something for them other than the moment. She finished her drink and asked for a refill. He doubted she was much of a drinker and thought this might be her way of signaling that she was ready to take a step. He did not believe her capable of discretion. Her spirit was so damaged, if Broillard were to get a whiff of another man and pressured her, she might confess everything. Broillard might no longer care about her…though in Shellane’s experience, men who abused their women were extremely possessive of them.

She asked what he used the laptop for, and he told her the lie about his book. She pressed him on the subject, inquiring as to his feelings about his work, and he fended off her questions by saying he didn’t know enough about writing yet to be able to talk about it with any intelligence.

“But you were a songwriter,” she said.

“I was a wanna-be. That doesn’t qualify me to speak about it.”

“That’s not true. If you want to do something, you think about it. Even if it’s not conscious, you come to understand things about it. Techniques…strategies.”

“Sounds like you should be telling me about your work,” he said. When she demurred, he asked what she would write about if she regained her confidence.

“It’s not my confidence that’s the problem.”

“Sure it is,” he said. “Having enough confidence to fail is most of everything. So tell me. What would you write about.”

“The lake.” She tugged at a strand of hair that had come loose from the ponytail, stretched it down beside her ear so as to contrive a sideburn. “It’s all I know. My father and I lived here from the time I was four. My mother died when I was a baby.”

“It’s your father’s house you’re in now?”

She nodded. “After he died, Avery came along. He helped me with the business.”

“The Gas ’n Guzzle?”

“Avery renamed it,” she said. “It used to be Malloy’s. I wanted to keep the name, but…” She gave another of those glum gestures that Shellane was beginning to interpret as redolent of her attitude toward an entire spectrum of defeats.

“So Avery moved right in, did he?”

“I guess.” She held out her empty glass again and he poured a stiffer drink.

“Looks like I’m going to have to call you a cab,” he said.

She giggled, lifted the glass and touched the liquid with the tip of her tongue. It was the first sign of happiness she had shown him, and it was so pure a thing, evocative of a girlish sweetness, that Shellane, himself a little drunk, was moved to touch her cheek.

Alarmed, she pulled away. He started to apologize, but she said, “No, it’s okay. Really!” But she appeared flustered. At any minute, he thought, he would hear her say she had to go.

She stared into her glass for such a long time, Shellane grew uncomfortable. Then, her tone suddenly forceful, she said, “I could write a hundred stories about the lake. Every day it has a different mood. I never wanted to live anywhere else.” She looked up at him. “You like it here too, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t live here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated,” he said after a pause.

She laid her palms flat on the table and appeared to study their shapes against the dark wood; then she pushed up to her feet. “May I use your restroom?”

She was so long in the bathroom, Shellane began to worry. The water had been running ever since she went in. What could she be doing? Effecting an ornate suicide? Praying? Changing into animal form? He considered asking if she was okay, but decided this was too much solicitude.

Wind jiggled the door latch, and a bough scraped the roof. He stretched out his legs, let his eyelids droop. He pictured Grace with the glass raised to her pale lips, the tawny whiskey and the coppery color of her hair blended by lamplight. He did not notice the sound of the bathroom door opening, but heard her soft step behind him. Her face was freshly scrubbed and shining. She was holding a bath towel in front of her, but let it drop to the side. Her breasts were high and small, strawberry-tipped; the pearly arcs of her hips centered by a tuft of coppery flame. Her eyes locked onto his.

“I’d like to stay,” she said.

There came a point during the night, with the wind sharking through the trees, rattling the cabin as if it were a sackful of bones, knifing through the boards to sting Shellane’s skin with cold…there came a point when he recognized that he understood nothing, either of the world or the ways of women, not even the workings of his own heart. Or maybe understanding was not the key he had thought it was. Maybe it only functioned up to a point, maybe it explained everything except the important things, and they were in themselves like the underside of a cloud, part of an overarching surface that was impossible to quantify from a human perspective. Maybe everything was that simple and that complex. Whatever the architecture and rule of life, whatever chemistry was in play, whatever rituals of pain and loneliness had nourished the moment, it was clear they were not just fucking, they were making love. Grace was a river running through his arms, supple and easy, moving with a sinewy eagerness, as if new to each bend and passage of their course. The wind drove away the clouds, the fog. Moonlight slipped between the curtains, and she burned pale against the sheets, announcing her pleasure with musical breaths. Coming astride him, she appeared to hover in the dimness, lifting high and then her hips twisting cleverly down to conjoin them, face hidden by the fall of her hair. At times she spoke in a whisper so faint and diffuse, it seemed a ghostly sibilance arising from her skin. She would say his name, the name she thought was his, and he would want to tell her his true name, to reveal his secrets; but instead he buried his mouth in her flesh, whispering endearments and promises that, though he meant them, he could never keep. At last, near dawn, she fell asleep, and he lay drifting, so exhausted he felt his soul was floating half out of his body, points of light flaring behind his lids, the afterimages of his intoxication.

He must have slept a while, for the next he recalled she was stirring in his arms. The sun sliced through the curtains, painting a golden slant across the shadow of her face. Her eyelids fluttered, and she made a small indefinite noise.

“Morning,” he said.

Anxiety surfaced in her sleepy face, but lived only a moment. “I wasn’t sure…” she murmured.

“Sure about what?”

“Nothing.” After a second or two she sat up, holding the sheet to her breasts, looking about the room in bewilderment, as if amazed to find herself there.

“You all right?” he asked.

She nodded, settled back onto the pillow. Her eyes, lit by the sun, were weirdly bright, like glowing coins. He turned her to face him, laying a hand on her hip. A tear formed at the corner of her left eye.

“What’s this?” he asked, wiping it away.

Her expression was almost clownishly dolorous. She took his hand and placed it between her legs so he could feel the moistness there, then pushed into his fingers, letting him open her.

“Holy Jesus,” he said. “You’ll be the death of me.”

After she had gone, making another of her sudden exits, leaving before he could determine what she wanted or be assured as to what she felt, Shellane went down to the shore and rested against the old glacial boulder. His thoughts were images of Grace. Her face close to his. How she had looked above him, her hair flipped all to one side in violent toss, like the flag of her pleasure, head turned and back arched as she came. A presentiment of trouble, of Broillard and what he might do, called for his attention, but he was not ready to consider that question. He believed he could handle Broillard—he had handled far worse. The Mitsubishi warehouse in Brooklyn. The New Haven bank job. He recalled a mansion they’d broken into in upstate New York, going after an art collection. An old Nathaniel Hawthorne sort of house with secret rooms and hidden passages. A billionaire’s antique toy. The security system had not been a problem, but the house had been full of 18th-century perils they could never have anticipated, the most daunting of which was a subterranean maze. One man had been skewered by a booby trap, but Shellane had succeeded in unraveling the logic of the maze, and they managed to escape with the art. If he could deal with all of that, he could take care of Mister Endless Fucking Blue Stars.

He chuckled at the brutal character of his nostalgia.

Memories.

He had been hoping Grace would return, but several hours passed and she did not. Around noon, the blue Cadillac roared past the cabin on its way toward Champion, Broillard off to spend the afternoon at the Gas ’n Guzzle, and Shellane headed along the shore toward Grace’s house. He stood on the beach below the place for several minutes, uncertain about approaching. At length he climbed the slope and peeked through the picture window. She was sitting on the carpet with her back toward him, legs drawn up beneath her. Her shoulders were shaking, as with heavy sobs. He had not taken notice of the furniture before—ratty, second-hand stuff in worse shape than the pieces in his cabin. Clothing strewn on the floor. A plate of dried pasta balanced on the arm of the sofa. Piles of compact discs and magazines. Empty pizza boxes, McDonald’s cartons, condom wrappers. Your basic rock and roll decor. He went to the door and knocked. No answer. He pushed on in. She did not look up.

“It’s me,” he said.

She sat staring straight ahead, strands of coppery hair stuck to her damp cheeks.

“Come on,” he said, extending a hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

She did not move; her expression did not change.

He dropped to his knees. “What’s he say to you?” he asked. “That you’re ugly…stupid? That you don’t have a clue? You can’t believe that.”

A damp heat of despondency radiated from her. It was as if she were steeped in the emotion, submerged beneath it, like a statue beneath a transparent lake.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You know things with your heart most people don’t have names for. I can tell that of you…even after just one night.” Though he believed this of her, though belief in her had been born in him, what he said rang false to his ears, as if it were a line he had learned to recite and had chosen to believe.

She began to cry again, silently, her shoulders heaving. Shellane felt incompetent in the face of her despair. He wanted to put an arm around her, but sensed she wouldn’t want to be touched.

“Is it guilt you’re feeling?” he asked. “About last night?”

He might not have been there, for all the attention she gave to him. He remained kneeling beside her for a short while and then asked if she wanted him to go.

It seemed that she nodded.

“All right.” He got to his feet. “I’ll be at the cabin.” He crossed to the door, hesitated. “We can get past this, Grace.”

Once outside, he recognized the idiocy of that statement. She was not going to leave with him—he knew that in his bones. Even if she would, he had no desire to drag her along through the shooting gallery of his life. Anger at Broillard grew large in him. Back at the cabin, he paced back and forth, then flung himself into the Toyota and drove toward town at an excessive rate of speed. He parked in the Gas ’n Guzzle lot and sat with his hands clamped to the wheel, telling himself that if he let go he would charge into the place and play an endless blue tune on Broillard’s head. Yet as he continued to sit there, he recognized that his battle to maintain control was pure bullshit. He was conning himself. Playing at being human. If he let go of the wheel, he would do nothing. He might wish that he would act, that he would lose it and go roaring into the Gas ’n Guzzle and drop the hammer on Broillard in the name of love and honor. But he would never risk it. Twenty years in the cold ditches of the underworld had left him at a remove from the natural demands and fevers of the heart. He supposed he had become, like his old crime partners, an affable sociopath who stood with one foot outside the world, a man whose emotions were smaller than the norm. And this being the case, wasn’t what he felt for Grace equally bullshit?

His anger dimmed and, without ever having left the car, he drove back to the cabin and sat on the steps, practicing calm, gazing out at the tranquil blue surface of the lake, the evergreens standing sentinel along the shadowy avenues leading off among them. Still as a postcard image. Soothing in its simple shapes and colors. He recalled how Grace had talked about it. He believed her view of the place to be romantic delusion, but wished he could share in it. The idea of sharing anything, after the years of solitude, filled him with yearning. But he knew he was incapable of it. Those shadows of Hiroshima burned onto stone, those parings of lives. That was him. A thin dark urgency was all that remained.

Mid-afternoon, and Grace had not appeared. Shellane started toward her house, but thought better of it and took himself in the opposite direction, hoping to walk off his gloom. The sun had sunk to the level of the treeline and, though a rich golden light spread throughout the air, the glaze of mid-day warmth had dissipated. His breath smoked; a chill cut through his windbreaker and hurried his step. He kept his eyes down, kicking at stones, at whatever minor obstructions came to view, manufacturing small goals such as kicking a fish head without breaking stride. He had gone almost a mile when he saw a figure standing among the trees about a hundred feet away. A naked man. Not wearing a stitch. Skinny and tall and pale. Judging by the man’s stillness, Shellane thought he must be waiting for someone. His second impression, based on no clear evidence, was that the man was waiting for him. A pinprick of cold blossomed at the center of his chest and he peered at the man, trying to make out his particulars. He felt as if a channel had opened between them, a clear tunnel in the air, and that along it flowed a palpable menace.

This, he thought, was a sign of how shaky the thing with Grace had made him. There were no grounds for fear. Yet he kept on his guard, uncertain whether to turn back or go forward, and, when the man started toward him, moving with a purposeful stride, he felt a sting of panic that sent him scrambling up the shadowed, needle-covered slopes, in among the trees. After perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, he was overtaken by embarrassment—he did not consider himself the sort to panic for any reason, let alone the appearance of a skinny naked stranger whom he could surely snap in two. He stopped and looked around, but saw no one. He adjusted the windbreaker about his hips and shoulders. Drew a steadying breath and rested a palm against the trunk of a spruce; his palm came away sticky, smeared with reddish resin. He studied the marks—like a little hexagram of tacky blood—and wiped it clean on his trousers.

“Fucking Christ,” he said, and stepped out of hiding.

The man was standing no more than twenty-five feet away, his bony ass was turned to Shellane, and he was staring down at the lake. He was bald, his skull was knobbly, almost bean-shaped, and his skin was bleached and grayish. Shellane eased behind the spruce trunk and turned sideways so as to be completely hidden. The wind built a faltering rush from the boughs, like the amplified issuance of a final breath. His heart felt hot and huge, less beating than pulsing rapidly. A scraping noise caused him to stiffen. The idea that he had nothing to fear wouldn’t stick in his mind—he was terribly afraid, and for no reason he could fathom. Then the man came stalking past Shellane’s hiding place, and a reason became apparent: his face had the glaring eyes and gashed mouth and mad fixity of a jack o’lantern. Outsized features carved into the gray skin. He paused, no more than a dozen feet away, his head tilted. Shellane noticed a ruff of flesh at the base of his neck…maybe it wasn’t flesh. Rubber. The son-of-a-bitch must be wearing one of those rubber Halloween masks. But if it was a mask, Shellane wasn’t eager to learn what lay beneath. He held still, not allowing himself to breathe until the man’s ground-eating stride carried him out of sight.

On his way home he remembered the black house and thought that the man in the mask must be one of the freaks who lived there. The thing to do would be to check the house out…No. That wasn’t it. The wise thing to do, the rational thing, would be to put the lake in his rear view. This place was punching holes in him. Or maybe it wasn’t the place. Maybe the years had worn him down to zero, and he just happened to be here when it all started to fall apart, a sudden erosion like that of a man who’d been granted an extra century of life and on the day the term expired, he turned to dust? What if he was only walking around in his head, and in reality he was no more than two piles of gray dust in a pair of empty shoes?

Bullshit, he said to himself, and picked up the pace. To be that way, to be the dust of a dead spell…he should be so lucky.

By the time Shellane reached the cabin, his desire to leave the lake had been subsumed by concern for Grace and a generalized depression that blunted the sharpness of his fears and muddied his thoughts. Feeling at loose ends, his energy low, he sat at his laptop playing solitaire. The darkness that soon began to gather seemed to compress the space around him, and he saw himself isolated in a little cube of brightness adrift in boundless night. A man holding digital aces, cards made of light, haunted by freaks and old crimes and a weeping woman. It was all bullshit, he realized. This poetry of self-pity leaking from him. He remembered the ridged and bloody hole in Donnie Doyle’s forehead, and he remembered a few seconds before the hole had appeared, Marty Gerbasi handing him the gun and saying, “You do it, Roy.” And he had said, “What?”, as if he didn’t know what Marty meant. But he knew, he knew this was how he bought into the big game, this was the soul price of his profession. Gerbasi said. “I like you, Roy. But that don’t mean shit. You need to do this now, understand?” He understood everything. The moral choices, the consequences attending each choice. And so he took the gun and wrote a song on Donnie Doyle’s forehead, the only important song he had ever authored, a hole punched through the bone…

The door latch rattled at Grace’s knock, so light it might have been a puff of wind. He felt the pressure of her gloom brushing against his own, like two rain clouds merging. He let her in and sank to his knees before her, his face to her belly, the clean smell of wool soaking up and stilling the tumble of his thoughts. When he stood, his hands following the curve of her hips, slipping beneath the sweater to cup her breasts, he felt his fingers were stained white by her flesh, that whiteness was spreading through him. Her lips grazed his ear and she said, “He hit me. In the stomach where it wouldn’t show. He told me I was ignorant. A fat Irish cow.” She went on and on, cataloguing Broillard’s attacks upon her, all in a husky tone doubtless influenced by Shellane’s gentler assault, and yet the list of her husband’s sins had an erotic value of its own, informing and encouraging his gentleness. Rage and desire partnered in his mind, and as he removed her clothing, it seemed he was removing as well the baffles that kept his anger contained, so that when they fell into the bed and made the mattress springs creak in a symphony of strain, it was as if anger were riding between his shoulder blades, spurring his exertions, inspiring him to pin her to the bed like a broken insect and fabricate a chorus of moans and cries. Though joined to her, part of his mind listened with almost critical acuteness as she whispered all manner of breathy endearments. Wind dance, meaningless love garbage. Garbled expressions of comic book word balloon passion, sounding one moment like she was strangling on oatmeal, the next emitting pretty snatches of hummed melody. She bucked and plunged, heels hooked behind his calves, the tendon strings of her thighs corded like wires. They were both fucking to win, he thought. To injure, to defile. Love…love…love…love. The chant of galley slaves stoking his mean-spirited rhythm. When he came, a cry spewing from his throat, he was aware of its rawness, its ugly finality, like that of man gutted by a single stroke, shocked and beginning to die.

She left him with her usual suddenness in the morning, returning, he assumed, to the befouled emptiness of her home. Scatters of rain tap-danced on the roof, and he stood by the bed, staring down at the wet spot on the sheet, which had dried into a shape reminiscent of a gray bird on the wing. The violence of their passion, its patina of furious artificiality, all inspired by her relation of Broillard’s abuse—it unsettled him. He was still angry. Angry at her for trying to use him. That was what she had been doing, he believed. Trying to rouse his anger. And she had succeeded. He was angry at Broillard for having caused her to hate so powerfully, so obsessively, that she would use him, Shellane, as a means of wreaking vengeance. But he didn’t care if that was her intent. He was ready to be used.

He drove into town and parked off to the side of the Gas ’n Guzzle, then walked toward the entrance, moved by an almost casual animus, as if of a mind merely to offer a stern warning. It was no act of self-deception—not this time; it was a mask he wore to hide from others a dangerous mood. Thanks to Grace, he had at least reclaimed something of his old self, the purity of his anger. He pushed the door inward, jingling the bell atop it. A girl in a hooded gray sweatshirt was at the counter, buying cigarettes from Broillard, who offered him a careless one-fingered wave. Shellane ambled along the aisles, picking up a can of soup, spaghetti, a bottle of virgin olive oil. When the girl left, he waited at the counter while Broillard rang up the sale.

“Little pasta tonight, eh?” said Broillard, checking the price of the spaghetti. “How’s it going out there?”

“Real great,” Shellane said. “I’m fucking your wife.”

The words released a cold chemical, sent it flooding through him. His hands were like ice. Broillard gaped at him, an expression that—with his long hair and sideburns—lent him a hayseed look.

“I know how you treat her,” Shellane went on. “But you lay a hand on her, you say an unkind word, I will take you into the deep woods and leave you for the beasts. My word on it.”

“You nuts, man?” Broillard made a grab for something on the shelf beneath the counter, but Shellane caught his wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together. With his free hand, he fumbled about on the shelf. His fingers curled around a wooden shaft—a sawed-off baseball bat. He rapped Broillard with it on the side of his head, hard enough to provoke an outcry.

“Supposing I smash your fingers with this little guy,” Shellane said. “There goes the ol’ career, eh?”

He rapped Broillard again, harder this time, sending him to his knees, hands upheld to stave off another blow.

“I don’t know who it is you’re doing,” Broillard said with whiny outrage, “but it ain’t my wife!”

“Nice-looking redhead name of Grace. Beautiful green eyes, perky tits. Ass round as a teapot. Sound familiar?”

Broillard pushed himself into a corner, as far from Shellane as possible, and his voice unsteady, shrilled, “Get the fuck outta here!”

“Oh, I’ll be going. Soon as I’m certain you understand that I’m your daddy. From this point on, you don’t even whimper unless I give you a kick.”

Broillard summoned breath and shouted, “Help!”

Shellane leaned across the counter and clubbed him on the kneecap. While Broillard was busy absorbing the pain, he went to the door, locked it, and turned the Closed sign outward. He shut the blinds, throwing the interior of the store into a gray twilight.

“Now we can be intimate,” he said, coming back over to the counter. “Now we can communicate.”

“I swear to God,” Broillard said. “If you…”

Shellane shouted, an inarticulate roar that caused Broillard to flatten himself against the wall.

“Grace told me a great deal about you,” Shellane said. “But she didn’t let on what a big pussy you are.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you want, man! This is crazy!”

“Crazy is hitting her in the stomach so it won’t show. Telling her she’s a fat cow and she fucks like a sick fish. Like a cat with the heaves. That was very inventive, Avery…that last. It has the feel of hateful observance.”

Looking stricken, Broillard came to one knee. “Who told you?”

“Grace. She gave me chapter and verse on your sorry ass.”

“She’s dead.” Broillard said it with bewilderment, then more vehemently: “She’s dead! Somebody’s feeding you a bunch of shit!”

Shellane left a pause. “What do you mean she’s dead?”

“She’s dead…she died! Two years ago!” Broillard’s expression gave no indication that he was lying. “She’s dead,” he repeated with an air of maudlin distraction. “I…You can’t…”

“Don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing. It’s the truth!” Broillard put his hands to his head, as if fearful it might explode. “This is too weird, man. What’re you trying to do?”

Shellane wondered if he had been tricked. “You have a picture of her?”

Broillard blinked at him. “Yeah…I think. Yeah.”

“Let me see it!”

“I gotta…” Broillard pointed to the cash register.

“Get it!” Shellane told him.

Broillard reached with two fingers between the cash register and a display case, extracted a dusty photograph with curled edges, and handed it to Shellane. In the picture Broillard was standing in front of the blue Caddy, his arm around Grace, who was shielding her eyes against the sun. He was thinner. The shape of one sideburn barely sketched on his cheek. Grace looked the same as she had that morning. Both wore Endless Blue Stars T-shirts.

“That’s not her,” Broillard said with weak assurance. “She’s not the woman you’re banging, right?”

Shellane had a moment’s dizziness, as if he’d stood up too quickly. He stared at the photograph, unable to gather his emotions, aware only of dread and hopelessness.

“She’s dead!” Broillard said with desperate insistence. “Go out to the cemetery and look, you don’t believe me.”

Shellane let the picture fall onto the counter. “We’ll both go,” he said.

The local boneyard was quiet and neatly landscaped and, as they passed among the ranked stones, a few drops of rain still falling, Shellane was annoyed by the impacted piety of grandfather trees and green lawns and had the thought that death was quiet enough in its own right and he would prefer to wind up in a Third World cemetery, some place with a feeling of community, kids drooling taco juice on your plot, balloon salesmen, noisy families picnicking in front of a loved one’s crypt. Grace’s stone was a modest chunk of gray marble in a corner of graveyard, close by an elderly maple, its crown of yellow leaves half denuded. What looked to be her college yearbook photo, a waist-up shot of a smiling girl in a dark blue sweater, a gold locket on a chain, was recessed in the marble beneath a transparent plastic square. Her legend read:

No flowers were in evidence. The smell of leaf mold and a damp, darker odor.

Numb, uncomprehending, Shellane asked, “How did she die?”

“Natural causes,” Broillard said.

“The hell does that mean? What’s natural about the death of a twenty-nine-year-old woman?”

“She passed out,” said Broillard with a quaver. “Some kinda trouble with her heart. We thought she drowned, ’cause she fell over at the edge of the lake. But the doctor told us her heart just stopped. She didn’t have any water in her lungs.”

Looking off at the sky, Shellane felt that his emotions had been eclipsed by a gray sun. “Lie down,” he said. Broillard tried to dart away, but Shellane caught his arm. “I want you to lie down on the grave.”

When Broillard refused, Shellane swept his legs from beneath him, and he went sprawling atop the grave. He propped himself up on his elbows.

“Lie flat,” Shellane told him. “Get familiar with the pose.”

Reluctantly, Broillard obeyed. “What you gonna do?”

“I know how she died. You drained the life out of her. You beat her down inch by fucking inch. You had her trapped. You took over her home, her business and, for her kindness, you hammered on her until she didn’t care enough to live.”

“You didn’t know her! She was a liar! Anything she wanted she’d lie to get it! She…”

Shellane kicked him in the side; Broillard gasped, clutching the injured area.

“You didn’t know her, man,” he said again.

“If she lied, it was because you tormented her. You gave her no reason to be truthful.” He nudged Broillard’s leg. “Come on, Avery. Confess your sins. Cleanse your soul before you come face to face with the Creator.”

Broillard’s eyes were squeezed shut. “Please…Please don’t.”

Shellane wanted to hurt him, but each time he contemplated doing so, he lost focus. The sky above had the look of a flat gray lid; a maple leaf skated sideways back and forth on the breeze before settling to the ground. “Grace,” he said, testing the truth of the name, finding that it provoked not dread but desolation.

“I’m sorry…I…” Broillard began to weep, his words fractured by sobs.

“Shut up,” Shellane told him.

“I didn’t want her to die!” Broillard said. “I was all fucked up, I just…”

Shellane put his foot on Broillard’s stomach, a light pressure, and Broillard tensed, sucked in his breath.

“I want you to lie there for an hour,” Shellane said. “One full hour. Maybe she’ll come to you.”

“No, man. I…”

Shellane pressed down harder with his foot.

“Maybe she’ll want something from you. Tell her you were fucked up. Stoned. Drunk. Stressed out. Tell her you were crazy. That your creative spirit was suffocating. Buried under a rock of circumstance. And as you struggled to liberate your essence, you accidentally kicked her in the heart ten thousand times. I know she’ll be merciful.” He kneeled beside Broillard. “A full hour. You leave before the hour’s up, I’ll find out. Do you know how?”

Eyes still shut, Broillard shook his head.

Shellane put his mouth close to the man’s ear and whispered very softly, “She’ll tell me.”

Of course he had his doubts. Doubts assailed him as he drove back to the cabin. There must be an explanation other than the obvious. A twin sister, an actress hired to play a part. Something. But that was ludicrous, soap opera-ish. The idea of a ghost was much more logical, and what did that say about the world? That the occult could seem more rational than the mundane. Yet he suspected that he must not believe it. If he did he would be more frightened of returning to the lake; he would want to run into the cabin, scoop up his belongings and be gone. Or was it that he was half a ghost himself? So diminished and deadened by his sins, he was accessible to death’s creatures, immune to their terrors. This struck him with the force of truth, and he tried to dredge up some awful fear hidden momentarily from sight, a mortal terror that would humanize him. He conjured new images of Grace. Imagined himself in bed with a corpse, a skull filled with maggots, a mummified tongue. But she was none of those things. Whatever the physics of her substance, it was akin to his own. When he saw her, he thought, maybe then he’d be afraid. Now it was all speculative, but when he saw her…that would be the test of his humanity. Then he’d know if she was too real for him, or if he was sufficiently unreal to be real for her.

The lake had gone a deep ocean blue under the prison sky, sluggish waves piling in to scour the shingle, and the boughs of the evergreens lifted with the hallucinatory slowness of undersea life. The cabin looked forlorn, a shabby relic. Grace was standing among the trees behind it, watching the road as he pulled up. Like a tiny figure placed in the corner of a landscape to lend perspective and a drop of color. He sat in the car, waiting for her to call out, but she remained silent. He climbed halfway out, one foot on the ground, one on the floorboards, and stared at her across the roof of the car. In her jeans and plaid jacket, she looked entirely ordinary. He wanted her to be real. Whether ghost or flesh-and-blood, it made no difference so long as she was real. As he walked toward her, she folded her arms and ducked her head. He stopped a few feet away, thinking that he would see death in her; but she was only herself. Mouth held tightly. Eyelids lowered. He started to frame a question, but could not come up with one that didn’t sound absurd. Finally he said, “I know what happened to you.”

“Do you?” She gave an unhappy laugh. “I’m not sure I do.” Coppery strands of hair drifted across her face—she did not bother to brush them aside.

“You died,” he said. “Two years ago.” Unable to speak for a second, he put a hand to his brow his fingers trembled. “How’s it possible…for you and me…?”

“I’m not an expert on the subject,” she said with irritation. “I’ve only done it the once.”

“But we can touch each other. That’s…It doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t understand how it happened. When you put your hand on me, the first time, down by the water…I felt it. That’s all I know.” She shrugged. “I’m amazed you can even see me. No one else does, I don’t think.”

“You were worried about Broillard seeing you. The other day on the beach.”

“That’s how I react to him. I don’t go, ‘Oh, he can’t see me.’ I just react.”

The wind poured through the trees, drowning out every other sound, and Shellane turned up the collar of his jacket. He found himself considering Grace’s edges, hoping to determine if they wavered or flickered or displayed any other sign of the uncanny. Which they did not. And yet there was something about her. That luminous quality he had first observed down by the water. With the gray sky above and trouble in the air, she should have looked pale and drawn; but she still had that glow, that eerie vitality, and he thought now this must be a symptom of her unnatural state. The desolation he’d felt beside the grave returned. He had an impulse to hurry back to the car, but his feet were rooted.

“Avery told me,” he said. “I had a talk with him about the way he treated you, and he told me.”

“You must have frightened him. For all his bullying, Avery’s a very frightened man.”

“I was tempted to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

She let out a dismayed sigh. “I wanted you to. That’s why I told you that stuff about him. For a long time, getting back at him was all I thought about.”

Some ducks that had been floating by the margin of the shore flapped up from their rest and beat against the wind toward the far end of the lake. Grace watched them go. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hated him so much.”

“And now you don’t?”

“No, I still hate him. But it doesn’t seem as important.”

She held out her hand and he drew back, both a fearful rejection and one of embittered practicality. If she was a ghost—and what else could she be?—he was not relating to her as such, but rather as he might to a woman with a problem he did not want to get involved in. Like a girlfriend with a drug habit. Fear nibbled at the edges of his awareness, an old Catholic reflex serving to remind him that she was an abomination, a foulness, a scrap of metaphysics. But he could not turn away.

“Why’d you think I’d kill Avery?” he asked.

“I knew things about you from the first moment. It was so weird. I knew who you were. Not your name or anything, but I had a sense of your character. I could tell you’d done violent things.”

“My name’s Roy Shellane.”

She repeated it. “I didn’t think you looked like a Michael.”

The wind came again, and she hugged herself.

“I feel alive,” she said wonderingly. “Ever since you got here, it’s like I’m back in the world. I’ve never felt so alive.”

He studied her face, trying to discern some taint of death, and she asked what was wrong.

“I keep expecting things to be different now I know,” he said. “That you’ll turn sideways and vanish. Something like that.”

“Maybe I will.”

“And I keep thinking I’m going to be afraid.”

“Are you?”

“Just that you’ll vanish,” he said. “And I guess it frightens me that I’m not more afraid.”

The way she was looking at him, he knew she wanted him to reassure her. With only the slightest hesitancy, he stepped forward, half-expecting his arms to pass through her, but she nestled against him, warm and vivid in her reality. He felt a stirring in his groin, the beginnings of arousal, and this caused him to question himself again, to speculate about what he had become.

“Roy,” she said, as if the name were a comfort.

He rested his chin on the top of her head and gazed out over the lake, at the heavy chop, the foot-high waves trundling toward shore, and felt a sudden brilliant carelessness regarding all his old compulsions.

“I know you can’t stay,” she said. “But a little while…maybe that would be all right.”

During the days that followed, it occurred to Shellane that theirs was a pure romance, free of biological imperatives, divorced from all natural considerations, and yet it seemed natural in all its particulars. They made love, they slept, they talked, they were at peace. Even knowing their time together would be brief, that was not so different from the sadness of more conventional lovers whose term of intimacy had been prescribed. Yet Grace’s abrupt departures continued to trouble him. For one thing, he was never certain she would return, and for another, he could not think where she went or into what condition she might have been reduced. If he asked, he believed she would tell him—if she herself knew—but he was afraid to hear the answer, imagining some horrid dissolution. Sometimes when he left her sleeping and was busy at his laptop or puttering in the kitchen, he would have the feeling that in his absence she ceased to exist and sprang back into being whenever he peeked in at her. But these were minor discords in the music of those days. The most difficult thing for Shellane was an increasingly acute feeling that his ability to interact with her hinted at either madness or the imminence of some black onrushing fate. The similarity of his youthful behavior to that of Broillard seemed to tilt the scales of possibility toward the latter, to hint at a karmic synchronicity. Yet he was not prepared to give her up. Whenever he considered leaving, this thought would be pushed aside by more immediate concerns, and though he realized he would soon have to leave, he was unable to confront the fact.

Two days after he had learned the truth about her, while she lay sleeping, Broillard knocked at the door. He was in bad shape. Bloodshot eyes; disheveled; coked up, his sinuses mapped by hectic blotches. Like a vampire beginning to decompose in the strong sun. He wiped his nose and twitched, yet attempted to present a manly appearance by speaking in a stern voice and holding his shoulders square.

“You’n me need to work shit out,” he said.

“Not a good time,” Shellane told him. “I’m occupied.”

“Yeah? Me, too. I’m occupied in figuring out why I shouldn’t call the cops on your ass.”

“Perhaps what stays your hand is the thought that you don’t want them sniffing around your place, looking for drugs.”

“You think I won’t go to the cops? I’ll call ’em right now.”

“I’ll wait inside, shall I? We’ll have a chat when they get here.”

Shellane started to close the door, but Broillard shouldered it open. Abandoning the tactics of machismo, he said with unvarnished desperation, “C’mon! I need to talk to you!”

“It’ll have to be another time.”

“If you’re fucking with me, that’s cool. I don’t care. I just wanna know!”

“I’m not fucking with you,” said Shellane. “Grace is with me now.”

Broillard stood on tiptoes, trying to see past Shellane into the cabin. “Where is she?”

Shellane flirted with the notion that this might all be a hustle involving a fake grave and a pretend ghost, a variation on the Hooker with an Outraged Husband. “Seems I’m the only one who can see her,” he said.

“Oh, sure…yeah.” Confidence soaring on chemical wings, Broillard made as though to push inside, but Shellane elbowed him back.

“You’re more than a little thick, Avery. Where else do you think I learned the sordid facts of your life?”

“She mighta called you…or written you a letter. Like maybe you’re a relative or something.”

“Of course she did. ‘Dear Uncle, the other night Avery sent me to the outlet store to buy him a pair of cashmere socks. He prefers to masturbate in cashmere. We haven’t made love in four months—he says I’m too fat. But he’s gone through dozens of socks.’ Exactly the sort of thing she’d disclose to a relative.”

Broillard gaped at him.

“We’re all sad animals.” Shellane gave him a gentler shove, moving him back from the door. “Some of us manage to rise above the state.”

“You think she’s such a saint? Maybe it was me fucked her up, but she wasn’t never a saint, man. She wanted something, she’d do whatever she needed to get it.” Broillard bunched his fists. “This is my fucking property, and I got a right to inspect it. I’m coming in.”

Shellane was about to repeat his original response, but then, thinking that Broillard might become a problem, he said, “All right. But you won’t be able to see her.”

Once inside, Broillard stood in the center of the room, turning his head this way and that. “Is she here?” He fixed Shellane with a terrified look. “Where is she?”

Shellane pointed to the refrigerator, and Broillard stared at it. “Grace?” he said; then, to Shellane: “What’s she doing?”

“Watching. She doesn’t appear to be overjoyed at your presence.”

Doubt and fear contended for control of Broillard’s expression. He sat heavily in a straight-backed chair beside the table. “Can she hear me?”

Shellane sat opposite him, facing away from the refrigerator. “Give it a try.”

Broillard made an effort to compose his face. “Grace,” he said. “I’m so sorry, baby. I was…”

“She doesn’t like you calling her ‘baby,’” Shellane said. “She never liked it.”

Broillard nodded, swallowed hard. “I didn’t want to hurt you, ba…Grace. It’s like I was watching someone else do the things I did. I don’t know what the fuck was going on.” His voice cracked and he covered his eyes with his right hand. “I’m so sorry!”

Shellane glanced at the refrigerator. Grace was standing next to it, wearing only panties. Tears cut down her cheeks. A cold pressure pushed upward from the base of Shellane’s spine and he had the feeling that something very bad was about to happen.

Broillard’s tone was urgent. “What’s she doing?”

“Crying,” Shellane said.

“Aw, Christ…Grace! I know I can’t make things right. But I’m…” Broillard fumbled in his trouser pocket, pulled forth several folded sheets of notebook paper. “I wrote something. About you…about everything. You want to hear it?”

He looked to Shellane for guidance, and Shellane shrugged, as if communicating Grace’s indifference.

“I don’t know how to talk to you, Grace,” Broillard said in a plaintive voice. “This is the only way I got.”

Her face empty, Grace had come halfway across the room and was standing to his left as he addressed himself to the refrigerator, reading from the sheets of paper, singing the words in a muted but obviously practiced delivery intended to convey anguish:

As he reached the chorus, Broillard built his reading to the level of a performance, half-shouting the words. Shellane could not decide whether his loathing was colored by pity, or if what he felt was embarrassment at seeing another man act with such unabashed stupidity and arrogance.

He began a second verse, and Grace stepped behind him, gazing at the back of his head with dispassion.

Grace trailed her fingers across his neck, and Broillard broke off, stared at Shellane. “What just happened? She do something to me?”

“Did you feel something?”

“What’d she do? I got all cold and shit.”

Grace appeared to have lost interest in Broillard. She was weeping again, her shoulders hunched and shaking, and Shellane recalled how she had acted the afternoon when he had come to her house. Silent; tearful; unmindful of him. He wondered why her fingers never left him cold. “She touched you,” he said.

Broillard scraped back his chair and stood, hands braced on the table. He seemed poised to run, but unable to take the first step. His eyes were bugged, and he breathed through his mouth.

“I don’t think she liked your song,” said Shellane mildly.

“Is she close? Where the fuck is she?”

“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” said Shellane, though Grace had wandered back toward the refrigerator. “You’ll bump into her.”

He took Broillard by the elbow. “Let’s go.” He opened the door to the porch, admitting a glare of the lowering sun, and guided him through it. “You wouldn’t want to piss her off. She gets pissed off, she does all that Exorcist shit.”

Broillard shook free of Shellane’s grasp. “You’re fucking with me, man. You got my imagination playing tricks, but I know you’re fucking with me. I’m calling the cops.”

He started for the outer door, but stopped dead. The door stood open, and framed there, barely visible against the light, a glowing silhouette had materialized. It was as if an invisible presence were drawing the light in order to shape a rippling golden figure with the swelling hips and breasts of a woman, limned by a paler corona that crumbled and reformed like superheated plasma. The figure was so faint, it seemed a trick of the light, similar to an eddy on the surface of a pond that briefly resembles a face. But it brightened, acquiring the wavering substantiality of a mirage, and Shellane saw that the light within the outline was flowing outward in all directions, a brisk tide radiating from some central source.

Broillard made a squeaky noise in his throat.

“Grace?” Shellane said.

With a womanly shriek, Broillard sprang for the door and burst through the figure, briefly absorbed by its golden surface. He went sprawling over the bottom step, rolled up to his knees, and ran. The figure, its brightness diminishing, billowed like a curtain belling in a breeze, then winked out.

Shaken, unable to relate this apparition to what he knew of Grace, Shellane went back inside. The sheets of paper on which Broillard had scribbled his song lay on the floor. He picked them up and stood at the table, unable to think or even to choose a direction for thought. Finally he crossed to the bedroom door and opened it. Grace was still asleep, lying on her side, one pale shoulder exposed. He touched her hip and was so relieved by her solidity, he felt light-headed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She turned to face him, reached out with her eyes closed, groping until her fingers brushed his thigh.

“Grace?”

“I’m here,” she said muzzily.

“Avery’s gone.”

“Avery?”

“Don’t you remember? He was here…a minute ago.”

“I’m glad you didn’t wake me.” She stretched, twisted onto her back, and looked up at him. “What did he want?”

“He wrote you a song.”

“Oh, God!”

“It really sucked.” Shellane crumpled the pages in his hand. “You don’t remember him being here?”

“I was asleep.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s the matter?”

He told her how she’d acted with Avery, how she acted the afternoon he had come inside her house—another occasion she did not recall—and about the apparition. She listened without speaking, sitting with her knees drawn up, and when he had done she rested her head on her knees, so he could not see her face, and asked him if he loved her; then, before he could answer, she said, “I realize that’s a difficult question, since it’s not altogether clear what I am.”

“It’s not a difficult question,” he said.

“Then why don’t you answer it?”

“Every minute I stay here, I know I’m in danger. You probably don’t understand that…”

“I do!”

“Not all of it, you don’t. The fact remains I’m in danger and yet I feel at home. Easy with this place and with you. That frightens me. You frighten me. What you might mean frightens me.”

Her injured expression hardened, but she continued to look at him.

“There’s an old Catholic taint in me wants to deny it,” he said. “It’s telling me this is unnatural. Against God. But I love you. I just don’t know what’s to come of it.”

She said nothing, fingering an imperfection in the blanket.

“And you?” he asked.

She shrugged, as if it were trivial. “Of course. But I wonder if I’d love you if you weren’t my only option.”

His face tightened as he parsed meaning from the words.

“See how we hurt each other,” she said. “We must be in love.”

The light dimmed, clouds moving in from the south to shadow the lake. They started to speak at the same time. Shellane gestured for her to go on, but she said, “No…you.”

“Where do you go when you leave?” he asked. “What happens to you?”

“Limbo,” she said.

The word had the sound of a stone dropped into a puddle. “That’s where unshriven infants go after they die…right?”

“‘Unshriven.’” She laughed palely. “You’re way too Catholic, Roy. Limbo’s just what I call it. I don’t know what it is.” She touched the place on his palm where he had picked up the splinter. “You were there. You saw it.”

“I did?”

“The black house. The one you asked me about.”

He took this in. “You’re saying the afterlife’s a house on the lake?”

“Not on the lake. You could walk around the entire lake, you wouldn’t find it.”

“I found it,” he said.

“You weren’t walking anywhere near the lake.”

All the half-formed suspicions he’d entertained regarding his fate seemed to mist up inside his head, merging into a dark shape. “Then where was I?”

“I’ll tell you what I know…if you want.” She slid down in the bed, curled up in the way of a child getting cozy. “It was night when I died. Avery was off playing somewhere, and I wasn’t feeling well. My chest hurt…but I had an ache in my chest all the time, so I didn’t think it was anything. I went outside to get some air and I was walking along the shore when I had a feeling of weakness. It came on so suddenly! I could tell something was really wrong, and I tried to call for help, but I was too weak. I thought I’d fainted because the next I knew I was sitting up and a fog had gathered. I wasn’t in pain anymore, but I felt…odd. Disoriented. I kept walking and before long I came to the house. I was terrified, but there was nowhere else to go, so I went inside.”

“What it’s like in the house?” Shellane asked.

“When I’m there I feel kind of how I did with Avery. Dejected. Faded. I’m always getting lost. The people there…Nobody talks much to anyone. Maybe I’m projecting, but I get the idea everyone’s like me. They’re people who gave up and now they’re just moping about. There are some others, though. Tall…and really ugly. That’s what I call them. The uglies. I don’t think they’re human. There aren’t very many of them. Maybe twenty. They chase after us—it seems like it’s a game for them. They can’t kill us, of course. But they hurt us…and they use us. Men, women. It doesn’t matter.”

“They use you sexually?” he asked.

A nod. “They act like animals. They’re strong, but incredibly stupid. But they know how to move around in the house without getting lost.”

Shellane recalled the naked man who had pursued him in the woods. “You ever see them around the lake?”

“The uglies? Sometimes they follow me out, but they won’t go far from the house. They only follow a little ways.”

“Why’s it so difficult to get around inside the house?”

“It’s not difficult, it’s just you never know where the doors will take you. The house changes. You go through a door and it kind of sucks you in. Like…whoosh!, and you’re somewhere else. But you can’t retrace your steps. If you go back through the same door, you won’t wind up in the room you left. I try to figure it out, but it seems I never have enough energy. Or I’m too busy hiding from the uglies.”

“But you return here,” he said. “You learned how to do that.”

“That’s different. It’s not like I understand what I’m doing. I get a strong feeling that I have to leave, so I head for the nearest door, and when I step through I’m back at the lake. I think it’s the same for the others. At least I’ve been in rooms when people suddenly space out. They get a blank expression and then they take off.”

She tugged at him, drew him down beside her. He lay on his back, studying the water stains on the ceiling, appearing to map a rippled white country with a sketchily rendered brownish-orange coastline. His arm went about her, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Thinking about the house?”

“It doesn’t do any good.”

“Maybe not.”

“But you’re going to do it anyway?”

“I’m good with problems. It’s what I did for a living.”

“I thought you were a thief.”

“I wasn’t a snatch-and-grab artist. I stole things that were hard to steal.”

A gust of wind shuddered the bedroom window, and coming out of nowhere, a hard rain slanted against the panes.

“When you pass through the doors,” he said, “you say it feels as if you’re being sucked in. Does anything else happen?”

“I get lights in my eyes. Like the sort that come when you’re hit in the head. And right after that, I’ll get a glimpse of other places. Just a flash. I can’t always tell what it is I’m seeing, but they don’t seem part of the house.”

“What makes you think the ugly ones know how to get around in the house?”

“Because whenever they take me with them, we always go the same places. They don’t display any uncertainty. They know exactly where they’re headed.”

“Do they do anything to the doors before opening them? Do they touch anything…maybe turn something, push something?”

She closed her eyes. “When I’m with them, I’m afraid. I don’t notice much.”

“You said there are about twenty of them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about the rest of you…How many?”

“The house is so big, it’s impossible to tell. A lot, though. I hardly ever see anyone I’ve seen before.”

“It doesn’t look all that big.”

“When you’re standing outside,” she said, “you don’t really get the picture.”

Shellane worried the problem, turning it this way and that, not trying to reach a conclusion, just familiarizing himself with it, as if he were getting accustomed to the weight and balance of a stone he was about to throw. He heard a rustling, saw that Grace had picked up the sheets of paper on which Broillard had scrawled his lyrics and was reading them.

“God, this is…” She made a disparaging sound. “Delusional.”

“He’s better when he writes about feelings he doesn’t have,” said Shellane. “Grandiose, beautiful feelings. He’s got no talent for honesty.”

“Not many do,” said Grace.

When she left that afternoon, he did not follow her, though he intended to follow her soon. That was the one path available to him if he was to help her, and helping her was all he wanted now. He sat at his computer and accessed treatises on the afterlife written from a variety of religious perspectives. He made notes and organized them into thematic sections. Then he wrote lists, the way he did before every score he’d ever planned. Not coherent lists, merely a random assortment of things he knew about the situation. Avenues worth exploring. Under the word “Grace” he wrote:

—becomes a real woman in my company

—can taste things, drink, but doesn’t eat

—lapses into ghostly state around others (once with me alone)

—endures a state of half-life at the house

—feels that there is something she’s supposed to do

—“knows” I can help her

He tapped the pen against the table, then added:

—is she telling me everything?

—if not, why?

—Duplicity? Fear? Something else?

It was not that he sensed duplicity in her, but her situation was of a kind that bred duplicity. Just like a convict, wouldn’t she be looking to play any angle in order to improve her lot? And wouldn’t that breed other forms of duplicity? It was not inconceivable that she might love him and at the same time be playing him.

Under the word “House” he wrote:

—In my Father’s house, many mansions…

—Philosophical speculations—particularized form of afterlife? For people who’ve given up. Who, failing to overcome problems, surrender to death. (Look up Limbo in Catholic dictionary)

—The uglies (men?). Demons. Instruments of God’s justice. Forget Christianity. What if the afterlife is an anarchy? Lots of feudal groups controlled by a variety of beings who can cross back and forth between planes of existence.

Science fiction, he thought; but then so was Jesus.

—A maze. Hallucination?

—Mutable reality?

—The doors. Core of the problem? Can they be manipulated?

He made several more notations under “House,” then began a new list under the heading “Me.”

—Have passed over into the afterlife once, maybe, twice if dream can be counted. Why?

He circled the word “Why”—it was an omnibus question. Why had he turned off the highway toward the lake? A whim? Had he been led? Was some ineffable force at work? Why had he, after years of caution, been moved to such drastic incaution? He wrote the word “Love” and then crossed it out. Love was the bait that had lured him, but he believed the hook was something else again.

The lists were skimpy. His preliminary lists for taking down a shopping mall bank had been far more substantial. This would be, he thought, very much like the job in upstate New York, the house with the subterranean maze. He’d have to case the place while attempting to survive it…if survival was possible. And maybe that was the answer to all the “Whys?”. He could feel his body preparing for danger, cooking up a fresh batch of adrenaline, putting an edge on his senses. It was the kick he’d always been a chump for, the thrill that writing songs could not provide, the seasoning he needed to become involved in the moment. He had caught the scent of danger, followed the scent to the lake, and there had taken it in his arms. Like Grace, for the first time in a very long while, he felt alive.

After waking, Grace liked to have a shower. It was not a cleanliness thing—at least so Shellane thought—as much as a retreat. He assumed that she must have taken a lot of showers when she was in the world, hiding from Broillard behind the spray, deriving comfort from her warm solitude. Shellane usually let her shower alone, but the next afternoon, he joined her and they made love with soapy abandon, her heels hooked behind his thighs, back pressed up against the thin metal wall, whose surface dimpled and popped when he thrust her against it. As they clung together afterward, he watched rivulets of water running over her shoulderblades toward the pale voluptuous curves of her ass, gleaming with a film of soap, dappled with bubbles. He saw nothing unusual to begin with—he wasn’t looking for anything. But then he realized that the streams of water were not flowing true, they were curving away from the small of her back, as if repelled by a force emanating from that spot. Curving away and then scattering into separate drops, and the drops skittering off around the swells of her hips. Fear brushed his mind with a feathery touch, a lover’s touch. Instead of recoiling, however, he moved his hand to cover the place that the water avoided, pressing his fingertips against the skin, and imagined that he felt a deep, slow pulse. This was the thing he most wanted, he thought. The seat of what he loved.

“I’m drowning,” Grace said, and pushed him away. “There was a waterfall coming off your shoulder. I couldn’t breathe.”

Her smile lost wattage, and he knew she must have understood the irony of her complaint. He cleared wet strands of hair from her face and kissed her forehead.

“This must be so awful for you,” she said. “To feel comfortable with someone. Almost like normal. And to know it’s anything but.” Soapy water trickled into her left eye and she rubbed it. “It does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“Normal? Yeah, more-or-less.”

She seemed disappointed by his response.

He put his hands on her waist. “All the craziness that goes on between men and women, ‘normal’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe any relationship.”

She slid past him out of the shower and began to dry herself. He had the feeling that she was upset.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m cold,” she said in a clipped tone, and briskly toweled her hair. Then, her voice muffled: “Are you always so analytical?”

“I try to be. Does it bother you?”

She left off drying and held the towel bunched in front of her breasts. “God knows it shouldn’t. I do understand how hard this…” She broke off and started drying her hair again, less vigorously.

Shellane turned off the water, stepped out of the shower. The linoleum was sticky beneath his feet; his skin pebbled in the cool air. The back of his neck tingled, and he had the feeling they were not alone, that an invisible presence was crammed into the bathroom with them.

“It’s almost over, you know,” Grace said. “One of these times soon, I won’t come back. Or else you’ll leave.”

“We’ve got a while yet.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about what’s happening.”

A noise came from the front of the house—a door closing. He threw open the bathroom door and peered out. Nobody in sight.

“Who is it?” asked Grace from behind him.

“Maybe the wind.”

He wrapped a towel about his waist and went out into the living room. On the table next to his laptop was an envelope and a portable cassette recorder. The envelope was addressed to Grace. She came up beside him, wearing his bathrobe, and he offered the letter to her. She shook her head. He tore open the envelope and read from the enclosed sheet of paper.

“Once again Avery offers his apologies,” he said. “He regrets everything.” He read further. “He claims he wouldn’t have treated you so badly if you weren’t unfaithful.”

“He never changes!” Grace folded her arms and scowled at the letter as if it were a live thing and could register disapproval. “He was unfaithful to me every day…with footwear! And then when I…” She made a spiteful sound. “We hardly ever made love after we got married. I was just so desperate…”

“You don’t have to explain,” he said.

“It’s habit. I used to have to explain it to Avery all the time. He liked hearing me explain it.”

Shellane set the letter on the table and pressed the play button on the recorder. Avery’s voice, tinny and diminished, issued forth over a strummed guitar:

“Beauty, where do you sleep tonight?

In whose avid arms, do you conspire…?”

“Our boy’s waxing Keatsian,” said Shellane.

“Turn it off.”

“…beauty is everywhere they say,

but I just can’t find a beauty like thine…”

“Please!” said Grace.

Shellane switched off the recorder. “Sure sounds like he loves you.”

“I believe he did once. But you can’t tell with Avery. He’s adept at mimicry.”

They stood without speaking for a time, then Grace pressed herself against him. “I shouldn’t have pulled you into this,” she said.

He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he would not have foregone the experience of being with her. But though he believed this to be true, he no longer was certain of it. That he could accept her to the point that he could dismiss, even dote upon, the symptoms of her strangeness—this fact had, almost without his notice, so shredded the fabric of his emotions, it had grown difficult for him to separate hope from desire.

After she had gone into the bedroom, to become whatever she became without him, he dressed and sat at the table, studying his lists. They revealed no pattern, no truth other than the nonsensical and menacing truth that he was in love with a dead woman. In love, also, with her deathly condition, with her odd glow and the curious behavior of water on her skin. It was a splendid absurdity worthy of an Irish ballad. The trouble with such tunes, though, they tended to neglect the ordinary heart of things, things such as the commonplace mutuality that had developed between them, and that was the matter truly worth commemorating in song. Nobody sat around scratching their ass or discussing the character of an ex-husband in an Irish ballad. They were all grand sadness and exquisite pain. Of course, sadness and pain were likely headed his way, and he had little doubt they would be grand and exquisite. As if anticipation were itself an affliction, his thoughts spun out of control, images and fragments of emotions whirling up and away, prelude to a despair so profound it left him hunched over the table, eyes fixed on the lists, like a troll turned to stone by an enchantment he had been tricked into reading.

The last of the gray light blended with the mist forming above the lake. Shellane stirred himself, went to the stove and heated a can of soup. He leaned against the counter, watching steam rise from the saucepan, remembering an interview he’d seen with a man who had directed a horror movie—the man said his film was optimistic because, though its view of the afterlife was gruesome, that it lent any credence whatsoever to the afterlife was hopeful. Shellane supposed this would be a healthy attitude for him to adopt. But the prospect was so completely daft…It had been a long while since his Catholic schooldays, and the concepts associated with religion—virgin birth, the Assumption, the hierarchies of angels, and so forth—had lost their hold on him. Now he was being forced to confront a concept even less logical, one concerning which his knowledge was so fragmentary, any conjecture he made about it had the feeling of wild speculation.

Once his soup was hot, he went on the Internet, accessed a Roman Catholic dictionary, and looked up Limbo. According to doctrine, Limbo referred to a place in which unbaptized children, souls born before the advent of Christ, and prudent virgins awaited the Second Coming, at which point they would be assumed into Heaven. Grace did not appear to fit any of these categories; thus it followed that the Church was a bit off-base in its comprehension of the afterlife. No surprise there. Yet the idea of a halfway house, an interim place where souls were parked for the duration, for some term pertinent to their lives—this accorded with what Grace had told him. The black house, however, seemed to incorporate an element of punishment, to be less a limbo than a state of purgatory. A kind of boutique hell targeting a select clientele? “Fuck,” he said, switching off the laptop, and stared at his uneaten soup.

Grace, fully dressed, came out of the bedroom. “I have to go,” she said absently as she crossed the room. He watched her leave, sat a moment longer, then once again said, “Fuck,” heaved up to his feet, grabbed his jacket off the peg beside the porch door, and followed.

He moved cautiously through the fog, listening, peering ahead, and thus he noticed the point at which he crossed over from the lakeshore into whatever plane it was that Grace had made her home. The wind suddenly died, the sounds of the spruce boughs swaying were sheared away, and his anxiety spiked. Despite the cold, a drop of sweat trickled down his back; he felt a pulse in his neck. Each step he took seemed the step of a condemned criminal walking toward the death chamber. Legs weak, mind bright with fear. When he came in sight of the black house, its gabled second story lifting from the murk, he did not think he could go on. Even without the motive force of the wind, the fog boiled around him, as if alive, and the notion that it might be a form of ectoplasmic life, tendrils and feelers plucking at his clothes, trailing across his skin, wanting to touch him…that got him moving again.

He paused at the door. The knob was of black iron and had the shape of an open hand. He would have to give it a shake in order to enter, and the dire symbolism inherent in this made him less eager to proceed. He had a memory of himself as an altar boy, kneeling, striking the bell as the priest intoned the litany, gazing up at the great gold cross mounted against crimson drapes, participating in the medieval magic of the mass. Whatever he had believed then, he wished he could believe it now. He wished he could take the power that had inspired his awe, all that glorious myth and promise, into his shaking heart. But if the house proved anything, it was that God was far more perverse than the Church had ever dreamed. He imagined the fingers of the fog traipsing across the back of his neck, and the fingers of the iron hand seemed to press into his wrist, trying to feel the hits of his heart. Before further doubts could assail him, he clasped it firmly and gave it a turn.

White lights stabbed into his eyes. It was precisely as Grace had described—like the actinic flashes caused by a blow to the head. And then he was drawn deep inside the house, hurtling forward as if on a walkway that was moving much too fast for safety’s sake. For an instant he thought he had been transported to the ground floor of a parking garage. A dark, musty space with a strip of brilliant light to his left. Then either his vision steadied or the house settled on a form, and he realized that he was facing a row of large round holes—perhaps forty or fifty in sum—piercing a wall of black boards, yellow radiance spilling from them. He strained his ears, listening for signs of life. Hearing none, he came closer. The holes were of equal dimension, six feet wide and high, each opening onto a small cell, unfurnished except for a bowl set in the floor. These bowls were the radiant source, light spraying up from them. The first cell he came to held no prisoner and was littered with dried wastes. Shreds of a slick transparent membrane adhered to the edges of the hole. As far as he could tell, the membrane had not been affixed to the wall, but had been extruded from it, as though it were, like the great fist outside, a natural production of the wood. The second hole was also empty, the membrane shredded. Shellane reached in to learn if the bowl could be lifted out and used to light his way. The radiance burned him, provoking a prickly, crawly sensation like that deriving from an inflamed rash. In the third cell sat a figure that appeared to be made of dull, tarnished gold. It had the bulbous shape and pudgy face of an infant, but was the size of a man. Swaddled head to foot in a golden robe that seemed of a piece with its flesh and left only the face exposed beneath a tightly fitted cowl. Its features had an Asiatic cast, and Shellane recalled photographs of Chinese babies clothed in similar fashion. He was so certain it was a statue, when the creature twitched its head toward him, mouth open in what appeared to be a full-throated scream (though he heard nothing), he fell back a step. He punched at the membrane, which was stretched tight across the entrance to the cell. The blow had no effect; the shreds hanging from the entrances of the first two cells were flimsy, the surface of the intact membrane was hard and rubbery. The huge baby lowered its head and, with a chubby hand that emerged from the sleeve of its robe, pawed in apparent agony at its face and gave another silent scream.

Five more cells were occupied, three by normal men, all naked. The other prisoners were two extremely tall men, also naked, with grayish skin and deformed faces, similar in every regard to the man who had chased Shellane along the margin of the lake…except that their deformities were not as severe as his had been. Sunken eyes; their mouths gashes with thin, ragged lips; flat noses, elongated skulls; ruffs of flesh at the back of their necks. This last caused Shellane to realize that his pursuer had not been wearing a mask and to speculate that, due to his fear, he must have exaggerated the man’s deformities. The chests of the two gray-skinned men displayed a peculiar articulation, as if they had too many bones. Their genital areas were hairless and their eyes so deeply recessed, shadowed by prominent ridges, they gave back not a glimmer of light. On seeing him, they reacted in fright, scrambling back against the rears of their cells and gaping. One of the ordinary-seeming men—scrawny, with a careworn face and stringy gray hair—was initially disinterested in him, but after Shellane had been standing in front of his cell for a minute or so, he pushed himself up against the membrane, pleading with his eyes, mouthing words that Shellane could not understand.

Beyond the cells lay a door taller and wider than the first; the doorknob was a clenched fist of black iron. Shellane was still afraid, but he was operating efficiently now. Fear had become a resource, an energy he could tap into, a means of refining judgment—he did not necessarily heed its promptings, but remained aware of them. He inspected the frame and the wall beside it for projections, a declivity that might conceal a control, a switch. At about eye level he found a patch of wormy ridges in the surface of the boards, like a cross between circuitry and varicose veins. He tried pushing at them and felt some give; he pushed harder but achieved no result. At length he opened the door and was swept forward into a space full of shattering light. Like hundreds of flashbulbs being set off. For a second, he seemed to be in a place that was all bright movement and crystalline geometry, and then he found himself on a balcony guarded by a sway-backed railing, overlooking a confusing perspective of other balconies and windows and doors and stairways, above and below and beyond, every structure fashioned of black wood. The scene was confusing partly because of the lack of variation in color, and partly because the architecture had such a uniform character, an Escher-esque repetitiveness of form. It reminded him, in sum, of old wooden tenements in New Orleans with their courtyards and step-through windows and rickety stairs. These structures, with their sagging balconies and cockeyed doors and unevenly set windows, had the same louche aura and arthritic crookedness, the same apparent degree of age and disrepair. But unlike New Orleans, there were no planter boxes, no music, no bright curtains, no brightness of any kind apart from the white glare in which everything was bathed. Instead of a sky, the space was roofed with boards and massive beams, but it was unclear if what he saw was a single enormous building or many separate ones. About a dozen people were in sight and, whether on balconies, in the various rooms, or passing along the street of boards below, they went slowly, hesitantly, their movements suggesting that they were on medication. He wasn’t close enough to see their faces, but they appeared to be of ordinary human dimension.

A stairway led down from the balcony on which he stood, and he descended it, passing empty rooms, crossing other balconies. Three floors down, he encountered a pretty black-haired woman leaning against a railing. Her pale blue eyes flicked toward him—they matched the background color of her flowered summer dress. Though she was young, no more than eighteen or nineteen, a consequential term of disappointment was clearly written in her kittenish face.

“I’m looking for a woman named Grace Broillard,” he said.

“Good luck.”

“You know her? Red hair, green eyes. About thirty.”

She refitted her gaze to the crooked black distance. “Goodbye.”

He was silent a moment. “I need some help, okay?”

“Help? That’s a concept I’m not familiar with.”

He rested a hand on the railing next to hers. “What’s wrong with you? I’m not asking you to do anything except answer…”

“I don’t want to talk,” she said. “I don’t want to share your pain. I don’t want to hear about your pitiful life. I’ve…”

“I’d like to ask you some questions, that’s all.”

“I’ve got my own pitiful life to think about. So fuck off.”

He put a hand on her arm, and she looked up angrily; but anger faded, replaced by shock.

“Shit, man!” She placed a hand on his chest as though to feel his heartbeat.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“You’re alive.” This was voiced in an astonished tone, reminding him of how Grace had behaved toward him on the beach that first day.

“You didn’t notice?” he asked after a pause.

“Un-uh.” She touched his hair. “You’re going to be very popular here…as long as you stay alive.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of how you make me feel. I’m assuming the effect isn’t specific to me.” She smiled. “It’s okay if it is.”

“What did you see just now that made you aware I was alive?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice, I guess. Life’s not something you expect to find here.”

Shellane thought about the gray-haired man in the cell. He had ascribed his delayed reaction to his presence to the fact of his being in pain; but that might not be the case. He had stopped only briefly in front of the other occupied cells.

“Maybe you can help me,” she said. “And maybe I can help you find your friend. I bet the jerks have got her.”

“The jerks?”

“Do you even know where you are? The freaks, the creeps. The tall, geeky fucks.” She disengaged from him and retreated along the railing. “If you can’t find her, she’s probably with them.”

“I don’t follow,” he said. “She could be anywhere. Why would you think she’s with them?”

“That’s how it works here. If you know someone from outside the house, you never stray far from them inside it. So if you can’t find her, she’s probably with the jerks.” She went back to staring out at the black tenements. “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

Her shift in mood had the same abruptness as Grace’s withdrawals, the same switched-off quality, and he wondered if this was a condition of the place or if the people who gravitated here were all prone to similar behavior.

“I don’t know if I can help,” he said. “But I need to find this woman before…”

“Yeah, I know. Grace. The love of your life or some shit. Gotta find her.” She walked off several paces. “Keep going through the doors. You’ll hook up eventually.”

“You want to come with me?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if you want to come…”

He eased up behind her, trying to see her face. She was weeping and appeared no longer to recognize that he was there.

Shellane abandoned the stairs, passing through a number of rooms in rapid succession. One contained several items of furniture, notably a dusty standing mirror in which he glimpsed a haggard, rumpled version of himself, and in three of them he found a single person, two women and a man. They treated him much as had the black-haired woman. They did not recognize immediately that he was alive and, once they did, they answered a few questions, asked for his help, then lost interest. Based on their reactions and what they told him, he constructed a hypothesis.

Religious perspectives on the afterlife were, of course, inaccurate; but it might be that none of them were completely inaccurate. Perhaps the afterlife consisted of many planes, and these planes—or rather a misapprehension of their nature—had given rise to the various religions. Might it not be possible, then, that one such plane had been appropriated by a sub-order of creatures whose power was slight, and who were capable of capturing a certain type of enfeebled soul? Perhaps they were themselves enfeebled—creatures perceived as terrifying by the earthbound, but to those who were familiar with them, those whose fear was colored with contempt, they were jerks, creeps, geeks. The uglies. Metaphysical lowlifes. It seemed a ludicrous proposition until he compared it to the ludicrous propositions of the major religions. The salient difference between those propositions and his own was that his was based to a degree on personal observation.

Beside each door were small patches of ridges in the wood similar to that he had found beside the second door he’d tried. He pushed at them in sequence, two at a time, all to no avail. But then he gave the knob of one door a quarter turn, not sufficient to disengage the lock, and the seams beside the door pulsed as if some charge or fluid were passing through them. He was elated to find that some orderly process was involved. There must be a sequence—many sequences—of constrictions that affected the doors, causing them to take you to different quarters of the house. Either he was not strong enough to manipulate the ridges or else there was some other factor involved that he did not understand.

The last door he tried delivered him into a tunnel with walls of black boards…though at first glance they had the irregular, roughened look of wood in a natural state, making it appear that he was walking along inside a huge hollow limb. Like the fist that protruded from the exterior of the house, the boards here were warped into shapes that simulated nature. Thin gaps between them glowed whitely, effecting a dim lighting. The other parts of the house he had investigated—despite the people he’d encountered—had seemed sterile. Lifeless. But here he caught a vibe of animal presence, and as he proceeded along the tunnel he smelled a fecal odor and observed signs of rough occupancy. Gashes and indentations in the wood; boards that had been pried loose. Evidences, he thought, of rage or frustration or some allied emotion. Or perhaps of a vandal’s idiot frenzy. The tunnel wound downward at a steep angle for approximately forty feet, then straightened and narrowed to the point that he could touch both walls at once; after a stretch of about sixty feet it widened by half and, as he rounded a bend, he spotted Grace standing a few yards ahead, her back pressed against the wall. When he called out, she turned her head and stared at him with an aggrieved expression. Drawing near, he saw that she was imprisoned by bands of black wood that encircled her waist and neck, leaving her arms free.

“Roy!” She strained toward him, then slumped in her restraints. “Get away from here.”

Shellane tugged at the bands. There was no visible lock, no catch. They looked to have grown around her.

“They’ll be back soon.” Grace tried to push him away. “You have to go!”

He studied the wall beside her.

“They’ll kill you,” Grace said.

“Be quiet,” he told her. “I’m working.”

“If they see you, they’ll know. I won’t be able to come to you anymore. Please!”

Next to one end of the band encircling her waist was a single raised seam, barely an inch long. Close by it, a board had been worked loose, leaving a half-inch aperture aglow with white radiance.

“You can’t help. This is just going to make things worse for me,” she said. “I want you to leave now!”

He unbuckled his belt, whipped it off, and pried with the buckle at the loose board.

“What’re you doing?”

“Trying to understand this.”

He managed to pry the board up sufficiently that he could grip it with the tips of his fingers. He pulled it back farther and put an eye close to the gap he had made. A flash of light, and he saw an unfamiliar night sky with too many stars and a glowing red cloud occupying its southern quadrant. Hovering at an unguessable distance between him and the cloud was a dark wormlike structure. He had the impression he was looking at something of immense size.

Another flash of light, then another, and another yet…

In the intervals between flashes, he was afforded glimpses of different vistas. Many he was unable to quantify, their geography too vast and bewildering to be comprehensible. Those that he was able to comprehend all possessed the quality of immensity. Great reaches containing strangely proportioned structures. By the time he pressed the board back into place, he thought he understood the house. A sketchy understanding, but the basic picture was clear. The doors were programmed (he could think of no better term) to admit you to different portions of the house; but before you settled into the room to which you had been directed, you saw the place through which you transited, or perhaps it was simply another place that you might have transited to. A place removed from or perhaps inclusive of the house. There was much he was unsure of, but he was sure of one thing—the doors could be reprogrammed.

Grace continued to warn him away, but he refused to listen. Wishing it were sharper, he pushed the tongue of the belt buckle against the seam beside her neck, denting it slightly. He pushed harder, lodging the point in the dent and jamming it down with both hands. The seam writhed and suddenly deflated; the bands holding her retracted without a sound, appearing to flow back into the boards behind her. She let out a gasp and staggered away from the wall.

“The doors,” he said. “They can be adjusted…calibrated to take you away from the house. I’m not sure what this place is, but it embodies physical principles. Mechanical principles. Maybe…”

Grace planted both hands on his chest and sent him reeling backward. “You’re not hearing me!”

“I’m telling you how to escape,” he said.

She tried to shove him again, but he caught her hands.

“You’re not hearing me,” he said angrily. “I’m trying to help you. The uglies…they manipulate the house. And they’re stupid, right? Everyone I’ve talked to says that. So if they can do it, the chances are you can manage it, too.”

Grace twisted away from him. “You don’t know! You’ve only been here a little while. No time at all. Most of us have been here for years.”

“But you haven’t tried, have you? All you’ve done is mope about. Why don’t you take a moment and…”

“Do you want to die? That’s what’s going to happen.”

“Just listen and I’ll go.”

“I heard what you told me, all right? I’ll check the doors!”

“And watch the uglies,” he said. “When you’re with them, watch what they do with the doors.”

She started to speak, but instead stared past him, looking at something over his shoulder with fierce concentration. There was no sign of fear in her face, though fear, Shellane understood upon turning, must be responsible for her intensity of focus.

Three of the uglies had come into view around a bend and were crouched as if in preparation for an attack, squeezed together by a narrowing of the walls. Two of them resembled the men imprisoned in the cells, but the third, the biggest, was identical to the man who had pursued Shellane through the woods. Severely deformed. Jagged orbits shadowing his eyes, a darkly crimson mouth visible behind a toothy jack o’lantern grimace. Shellane braced himself for a fight. Despite Grace’s assertion that they were strong, they looked spindly and frail, and he believed he could do some damage. But rather than charging at him, they began to whimper like a chorus of terrified children, gaspy and quavering. The one on the right lifted its head to the ceiling, as if seeking divine assistance, and gave forth with a feeble ululation. Urine dribbled down its leg. The others hid their eyes, but continued to peek at him, as if not daring to turn away from the cause of their terror.

They were afraid of him, Shellane realized. No other explanation satisfied. He took a step toward them—their whimpers rose in pitch and volume. Definitely afraid. He caught Grace’s hand, tried to pull her away. If they could get clear, he thought, he would have time to come up with a plan. But she yanked her hand free and dropped to her knees, then sank into a reclining position, her eyes averted, like a child who sees the inevitable, some terrible punishment, and seeks refuge in collapse.

The uglies still seemed afraid, but Shellane’s confidence had been weakened by Grace’s surrender. Nevertheless, he steeled himself and ran at them, waving his arms, shouting, hoping to drive them off. They scuttled away, yet when he stopped his advance, they, too, stopped, huddling together, plucking and clutching at one another like fretful monkeys. He made a second menacing run. Once again they fell back, but not so far this time. A touch of curiosity showed in their crudely drawn faces and one of them growled, bassy and articulated, a bleakly mechanical noise, like the idling of some beastly machine. Two lesser yet equally chilling growls joined in guttural disharmony with the first, and he lifted hands in a defensive posture, knowing now that he would be forced to fight.

But it was no fight.

In a few shambling strides they were on him, a wave of bony edges and jagged, blunt teeth that carried him down, enveloping him in a bitter stench. He managed to land a single punch, striking the chest of the tallest. Like hitting a wall of granite. Then he was tossed, kicked, slammed into the boards, worried, scratched, bitten, and kicked again until he lost consciousness. When he woke, once he managed to unscramble his senses, he found he was being dragged along by the feet. Head bumping, arms flopping. He heard Grace scream and struggled to wrench free, but the hands gripping his ankles were irresistible. He twisted about, trying to find her. Caught a glimpse of her being carried aloft, held by the collar of her jacket in one long-fingered gray hand. Bile flushed into his throat. The effortful grunting breath of the creature dragging him seemed the sound of his panic. He closed his eyes and summoned his reserves, focusing, contriving a central place in his mind from which he could observe and judge what, if anything, might be done.

They came to a door. The creature released one of his ankles; through slitted eyes, Shellane watched it press a forefinger in sequence against the raised seams clumped together on the wall. The door opened and they were sucked inside. Flashing white lights disoriented Shellane and, despite himself, he cried out. His tormentor bent down to him, its insult of a mouth—wide enough to swallow a ham—widened further in a smile, its tongue dark red and thick, like a turtle’s. Beneath the ridges of its orbits, its eyes were visible. Gleaming not with reflected light, it seemed, but with the animal sheen of a rotted deliquescence. It slashed at his face with its thumb. A warm wetness spread across his cheek, and he realized it had sliced him with its thumbnail. It seized him by the shirtfront and he was lifted up, dangled over a gulf—it appeared that a boulder had hurtled down from heaven or the heights of whatever place this was, smashing everything in its path, creating a central shaft in one of the tenements, leaving a hole roughly twenty feet in diameter. The shaft its passage had made fell away into shadow, walled by a broken honeycomb of exposed rooms and splintered black boards. Before he could fully absorb the sight, the creature swung him as easily as he himself might swing a cat and let him fly out through the air. A desperate cry tore from his throat. The ruin pinwheeled. The pull of gravity and death took him at the top of his arc. Turning sideways as he fell, he saw a gaping darkness rush up at him, and the next instant he slammed into something that drove wind from his chest and light from his brain. Only after regaining consciousness a second time did he understand that he had been thrown completely across the gap, and that the uglies, bearing Grace with them, had leaped across after him.

They passed through another door. Shellane was too groggy to register much about the room beyond, but he caught sight of a hearth in which a roaring fire had been built, and though he realized he was not the most reliable of witnesses at the moment, he could have sworn he saw tiny homunculi playing in the flames, hopping from log to log. Grace was speaking urgently, the words unintelligible, but he had the impression that she was pleading. Another room. His head had cleared to a degree, but his vision was still impaired—or so he assumed. Then he recognized that the indistinctness of the large shadowy figure sitting cross-legged in a corner was due not to any failure of his eyesight, but rather to the fact that its black substance was in a state of flux. A muffled shouting issued from the figure, and as Shellane was hauled past it, he saw that the whirling black stuff was a filmy shell encasing a human form, and further saw a man’s face within the shell, pain contorting his features. At the next door the tallest of the uglies again manipulated a little patch of ridges in the wood. Shellane felt a perverse satisfaction in knowing that he had been right about the doors.

The room into which the creature then dragged him was small, the ceiling so low that the uglies had to walk in a half-crouch, with a gabled roof and a shuttered window that extended up from the floor. Shellane was left to lie beside the window and, when one of the uglies threw the shutters open onto a foggy darkness, he saw a huge black fist jutting from the boards directly below and realized where he must be. He was past fighting. His ribs ached, his left knee throbbed, and his mind worked sluggishly. Even when a rope was placed around his neck, he could not rouse himself, but only wondered how they were going to pass his body through the fist, a question answered when another of the uglies pressed a finger to a ridged patch beside the window and, with terrible slowness, the fist uncurled as if to welcome him. Grace let out a shriek. He turned on his back and spotted her at the door. Two of their captors were fondling her roughly, grabbing her breasts and buttocks. He started to tell her something, but forgot what he had been going to say. It became irrelevant as a foot nudged him out the window.

He dropped only a foot or so, but the rope choked him and his feet kicked against the boards. In reflex, he grabbed the rope, tried to haul himself back up; but he was being lowered and made no progress. Overhead, the uglies were framed by the window, one embracing a still-struggling Grace, whose face was pressed into its chest, and the biggest paying out the rope. It was all chaotic, a delirium. His vision darkened, and he felt a tremendous heat inside his skull. His right foot bumped against the half-curled hand, and then he was inside it, waist-deep in its loose grip. He caught at its upper edge, levering himself up with his elbows, refusing to be lowered any farther. The surface of the uppermost finger was crusted with brownish stains. He puzzled over them, wondering what they might be. That question was answered as the hand began to close into a fist and he understood that some who’d had the misfortune to happen onto the house while alive had chosen to be crushed rather than hanged. Gasping for air, his throat constricted, he looked up to Grace, not seeking help but dimly moved to find her. The figures above were joined in a wobbling dance, pushing one another to gain a better view of the proceedings, communicating in grunts and growls and screams. And then the smallest of the four, the shrillest, flung herself at the tallest, clawing at its eyes. The rope came uncoiling down toward Shellane. He released his grip on the hand, allowing himself to fall, this due to a sympathetic reaction to the rope’s fall as much as to his vague comprehension that by doing so he would not hang. His head struck the first joint of the fist’s little finger, and he dropped the last few feet, landing on his back with a jolting impact.

He did not black out, and the recognition that he was free penetrated the confused clutter of his thoughts. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pushed up to a standing position and began a limping retreat. Grace screamed at him to run, and he threw himself forward with his shoulders, dragging his left leg, moving blindly through the fog. He knew she must still be struggling with the uglies, or else they would be on him—his pace was much too slow to outrun them—and this spurred him to limp faster. There was nothing he could do for her, yet this pragmatic view did not sit well with him and every step he took sparked feelings of shame and inadequacy. Wincing whenever he planted his left foot, he kept on going until, after only a little while, he heard the wind sighing in the spruce and water lightly slapping the shore, and realized that he was safe, an infinity removed from certain lesser demons and their rickety black hell, and utterly alone.

Once he had bandaged his wounds, believing that Grace would not return to the cabin, that she was lodged in a cell filled with burning light or enduring some crueler punishment, Shellane spent the remainder of the night hoping he was wrong. Whatever pain she was experiencing, he was to blame—he had insinuated himself into a situation that he had not fully grasped, and as a result he had caused her situation, already bleak, to worsen. Staying at the house would have served no purpose, yet he felt he had breached a bond implicit to the relationship, and he castigated himself for having abandoned her. The hours stretched and he understood once again how frail and attenuated his attachment to life had become. Without Grace, without the renewal of passion she had inspired, he could not conceive of going on as before, preparing a new identity, finding a new hiding place. What could any place offer him apart from the fundamentals of survival? And what good were they without a reason to survive? As it grew increasingly clear that she would not return, he sat at the table breeding a dull fog of thought, illuminated now and then by fits of memory. Her face, her laugh, her moods. Yet those memories did not brighten him. All the ordinary instances of her person that shone so extraordinarily bright in his mind were grayed with doubt. He knew almost nothing about her and he suspected that if he were capable of analysis, he might discover that the things he knew were dross not gold, and that she was not in the least extraordinary. She simply seemed to fit a shape in his brain, to be unreasonably perfect in some essential yet incomprehensible way. Something had been ripped out of him. Some scrap of spirit necessary for existence. Every part of his body labored. Heart slogging, lungs heaving. He felt himself the center of a howling absence.

To distract himself, he wrote lists. Long lists, this time, comprised chiefly of supposition. His knowledge of the house was limited, but he was certain about the doors—the uglies were able, thanks to their strength, to depress the ridged patches on the walls with their fingers and thus program their destination. Though pointless to do so, he could not keep from speculating on the nature of the place and the apparent infinity of locations to which it was, in some unfathomable way, connected. It was hard to accept that the afterlife possessed an instrumentality. Back when he was a believer, his notion of heaven had been diffuse, his vision of hell informed by comic books. Spindly crags and bleak promontories atop which the greater demons perched, peering into the fires where their minions oversaw the barbecue of souls. The house was at odds with both conceptions, but now he had no choice other than to believe that beyond death lay a limitless and intricate plenum whose character was infinitely various, heavens and hells and everything in-between. It was similar to the Tibetan view—souls attracted to destinations that accorded with what they had cherished in life, be it virtuous or injurious. Unlikely, though, that Tibetan cosmology had any analog to the black house. If he found himself trapped in the house, he thought, he’d study the way the uglies manipulated the doors, then devise a mechanism that would allow him to exert more force when pushing…

Why had they been afraid of him?

Reason dictated that they’d presumed him to be dead, and had lost their fear after noticing he was alive and mortally vulnerable. As with everyone else he had met in the house, it took them a while to notice his vitality. But that didn’t explain why they had been afraid when they believed him dead. Perhaps they saw things that people did not. Different wavelengths. Auras. Perhaps they perceived him as a threat, someone who might be able to manipulate the doors. That was self-flattery, but they could have no other cause to fear him. None of which he was aware. Of course if they did know him for a threat, though they weren’t able to kill him, they’d make his life—his afterlife—hell. Punish him. Keep him penned up or too busy to interfere. At least they would try. As primitive as they were, they’d screw up sooner or later and give him an opportunity. But he would have to endure a great deal of torment before the opportunity arose…He understood then that he was not thinking in the abstract, but was contemplating his death. He was, after all, a perfect candidate for the house. He didn’t give a damn about living anymore and like Grace, who’d had Broillard to finish her off, he had his own killers to hand. They would eventually track him down. All he needed to do was wait.

He rebelled against the thought, tempting himself with the prospect of Asia, of new possibilities, yet he felt the pull of a more powerful temptation. How easy it would be to surrender. What was he giving up? Paranoia and solitude, hookers and barflies, no plans for the future but those of escape. A life without significant challenge or involvement. An emptiness that would feel far emptier without Grace. He kept expecting that he would resist these arguments, yet the longer he sat there, the more seductive they seemed. He tried to weaken them with doubt. His belief that he could learn to manipulate the doors—wouldn’t death make of him, as it had of Grace and the rest, a befuddled, energy-less soul incapable of functioning? Then he recalled how he and Grace had interacted inside the house. She had been angry, afraid, but full of vitality. Of life. The two of them together might form a battery that would provide sufficient strength to manage an escape. And what if there were more than two? He had seen—what?—fifty or sixty people in the house, and there had to be more. The energy he and Grace generated might infect the rest. Some of them, anyway. They might be able to overpower the uglies. And if they could do that, together they could determine…

That he could entertain these fantasies, a post-mortem revolution, an overthrow of minor-league demons…Fuck! Next he’d be accepting Jesus as his personal savior. He went into the bedroom and pulled his suitcases from beneath the bed. Out of here now. That was the only agenda that made sense. He began to pack, though not in his usual painstaking style. Balling up shirts and stuffing them in. But gradually his pace slowed. The sheets smelled of her. She was real. Nothing could change that. She was real, the house was real. And however frail the foundation supporting his guesswork, everything he had seen and done was real. He had followed a trail of intuitive decisions and they had led him to the lake, to Grace, to this moment and to these speculations, which his instinct judged sound, and though the logic of the world prevailed against his judgments, he could not refute them.

Leaving his bags open, he returned to the front room. Trees and shrubs and shoreline were melting up from the half-dark, and as they grew sharper, shadowy branches evolving into distinct sprays of needles, the margin of the lake defining itself in precise gray etchings, the things of the world came to seem increasingly imprecise to Shellane. Their precision a clumsy illusion, a poor reflection of the simpler albeit more daunting order he had detected in the house, as if death were simply a refinement of life. He settled back into the chair. Noon approached. Soon a blue Cadillac would come grumbling along the lake road. Soon he would cook breakfast, take a shower, make a plan, erecting a structure that had no other purpose than to repeat itself. He saw himself as he had once been. Rock and roll days. Girlfriend sobbing in a corner of that dingy, brain-damaged apartment in Medford. Him yelling, shouting, because he had no self-justification that could be spoken in a quiet tone or a reasonable voice. The quick drug hit of a score, adrenaline rushes and gleefully desperate escapes, and afterward sitting in a nondescript bar with nondescript men, laughing madly over drink at the skill, the guts and brains required to risk everything for short money in the service of greater men who watched them like spiders watching trained flies and smiled at their ignorance. Walking like a ghost through Detroit. Brushing past the world, touching it just enough to envy its unreal brilliance. Was that it? A life like so many bits of rusty tin threaded onto a gray string? These days of Grace cancelled out every moment of that dreary, heatless past. He put his hand on the telephone, let it rest there for several minutes before lifting the receiver and dialing, not because he was hesitant, but rather stalled, lost in a fugue from which he emerged diminished and uncaring.

A man’s voice spoke in his ear. “Yeah, what?”

“You recording this?” Shellane asked.

A pause. “Who’s asking?”

“If you’re not recording, start the tape. I don’t want to have to repeat myself.”

Another pause. “You’re on the tape, pal. Go for it.”

“This is…” Shellane had a thought. A wicked thought, another addition to his Book of Sin. But damned once, damned twice…What did it matter?

“You still there?”

“My name is Avery Broillard,” Shellane said. “I work at the Gas ’n Guzzle in Champion, Michigan. In the Upper Peninsula, about an hour’s drive west of Marquette.”

“No shit? How’s the weather up there?”

“I can tell you how to find Roy Shellane.”

Silence, and then the man said, “That would be extremely helpful, Avery. Why don’tcha go ahead and tell me?”

“It’s tricky…the directions. I’ll have to show you. I work until seven tonight. Can you have somebody up here by seven?”

“Oh, yeah. We can handle that. But, Avery…whoever the fuck you are. If this is bullshit, I’m gonna be very upset with you.”

“Just have someone here by seven.”

After hanging up he had a moment’s panic, a twinge of fear, an urge toward flight, but these found no purchase in his thoughts. He sat a while longer, then set about making breakfast. Fried eggs and ham, toast, and his last wedge of apple pie.

Shortly after six o’clock that afternoon, a dark green Datsun parked about a hundred feet off along the access road. Shellane pictured Gerbasi crammed into the front seat—the rental car options in Marquette must not have been to his liking. He considered going out to meet them, but though he was eager to have done with it, he was so enervated, worn down by depression, feelings of loss and anxiety, his eagerness did not rise to the level of action. At a quarter to seven the doors of the Datsun opened and two shadows moved toward the cabin, one much bulkier than the other. They vanished behind trees, then reappeared larger, at a different angle to the cabin, like ghosts playing interdimensional tag. Shellane could have picked them off, no problem. He was in an odd mood. So lighthearted that he was tempted to hunt up the nine-millimeter and destroy the men who were intending do what he wanted, just as a prank on himself; but he couldn’t recall where he had put the gun. He heard whispers outside. Probably arguing over whether to shoot through the window. Gerbasi wouldn’t go for it. He enjoyed the laying on of hands. That was his kink. The fat bag of poison wanted you to commune with him before he did the deed. Over thirty years of murdering people who had not necessarily required it, life had been kind to him, except socially. For some years now he had been in love with a woman who shared a house with a guy who claimed to be a gay political refugee from Cuba, a story that scored him few points in the neighborhood, but lent his bond with the woman an innocence that placated Gerbasi, who remained oblivious to the fact that he was being cheated on in plain view. It was amazing, Shellane thought, what there was to know about people.

The door blew inward and Gerbasi’s associate, a light-heavy who must have taken a pounding in the ring—ridges of scar tissue over his eyes—before entering this line of work, posed TV-cop-style with his shiny gun and grunted something that Shellane did not catch but took for an admonition. Then Gerbasi hove into view. Spider veins were thick as jail tattoos on his jowls, and the bags beneath his eyes appeared to have been dipped in grape juice. His breathing was wet and wheezy, and his muted plaid suit had the lumpish aspect of bad upholstery. The lamplight plated his scalp with an orange shine. He waddled three steps into the room and said, “This don’t seem like you, Roy. Just sitting here waiting for it.”

Shellane, his flame turned low, had no reply.

Gerbasi snapped at his helper, telling him to close the door. “What’s going on with you?” he asked of Shellane.

“I surrender,” said Shellane.

“The guy Broillard, he claims he didn’t call us.” Gerbasi’s eyes, heavy-lidded, big and brown like calf’s eyes, ranged the tabletop. “Know anything about that?”

“Broillard? The Gas ’n Guzzle guy? He called you about me?”

Gerbasi’s stogie-sized forefinger prodded Shellane’s laptop. “Somebody called. Broillard says it wasn’t him.”

“Maybe he had a change of heart,” suggested Shellane.

“Maybe you set his ass up.” Gerbasi gave him a doleful look.

“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” Shellane failed to keep the amusement from his voice.

The light-heavy chuckled doltishly. “He ain’t hurting no more.”

“I figure you set him up,” Gerbasi said. “But why would ya do that and still be hanging around?”

“Don’t think about it, Marty. You’ll just break your brain.”

“Maybe he’s got cancer,” offered the light-heavy.

“Worse,” said Shellane.

“What’s worse than cancer?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Gerbasi said to the light-heavy; he removed a long-barreled .22 from his shoulder holster.

“Truth,” Shellane said.

“Y’know, you look way too satisfied for a man’s gonna be wearing his brains in a coupla minutes,” Gerbasi said. “You waiting for rescue, Roy? That it?”

“Why don’t you just do your business.”

“Guy’s in a hurry,” said the light-heavy. “Never seen one be in a hurry.”

“Who cut your face?” Gerbasi asked.

“Just do it, you fat fuck!” said Shellane. “I’ve got places I need to get to.”

“Hear that shit?” said the light-heavy. “Motherfucker’s crazy.”

“Nah, he’s got an angle,” Gerbasi said. “Man’s always got an angle. Don’tcha, Roy?”

Shellane smiled. “I live in certain hope of the Resurrection.”

Gerbasi gave his head a dubious shake. “Know what I useta say about you? I’d say Roy Shellane runs the best goddamn crews of anybody in the business, but he’s too fucking smart for his own good. One of these days he’s gonna outsmart himself.” He seemed to be expecting a response; when none came, he said, “I think maybe that day’s come.”

A bough ticked the side of the cabin; the light-heavy twitched toward the door. Shellane was beginning to understand why Gerbasi enjoyed playing out these scenes—he wanted the fear to grow strong so he could smell it. But though Shellane was not free of fear, it was weak in him, and he thought he must be proving a profound disappointment to Gerbasi.

“You look to me like a man who’s holding good cards, but don’t know he’s in the wrong game,” Gerbasi said.

“Do I have to fucking beg you to shoot?” Shellane asked.

“Hey.” The light-heavy came up beside Gerbasi. “Maybe he’s wearing a wire.”

“He was, they’d already be down on our ass ’cause of what’cha said about Broillard. But something ain’t kosher.” Gerbasi let the gun dangle at his side. “Tell me what’s going on, Roy, or I’m gonna hafta give ya some pain.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do. You understand? I don’t give a shit about anything.”

Gerbasi said, “No, explain it to me.”

“If you had a soul, I wouldn’t need to explain it. You’d feel the same as me. You’d be sickened by what you are.”

“I told ya the guy’s crazy,” said the light-heavy.

“You don’t shut your goddamn mouth, I swear to Christ I’m gonna put one in ya,” Gerbasi told him.

“Jeez!” said the light-heavy. “Fine. Fuck…whatever.”

“The man’s tired of living,” Gerbasi went on. “That’s all he’s saying. Right, Roy?”

“Right.”

“Remember Bobby Sheehan? Man just looks at me and says, ‘Fuck you, Marty.’ Not like he was pissed off. Just weary. Just fed up with it all. I asked, man, I said, ‘Fuck’s wrong with you, Bobby? This how you wanna go out? Like a fucking sick dog?’ And he says, ‘A sick dog’s got it all over me. A sick dog don’t know what’s making it sick.’ It’s kinda like that, ain’t it, Roy?”

“Fuck you, Marty.”

Gerbasi stepped around behind Shellane, and a weakness spread from the center of Shellane’s chest outward, resolving into a chill that coiled the length of his spine. He fixed his eyes on the door, but he seemed to see everything in the room, and he sensed his isolation, the gulf of the surrounding dark with its trillion instances of life. Spiders, beetles, roosting birds, serpents, badgers, moles, fish streaming through the dim forests of the lake bottom. Every least scrap of vitality enviable to him now. Somehow from that darkness he managed to summon the image of Grace’s face. The brightness of her olivine eyes struck deep into him, calmed the fluttering thing that was his life, and filled him with acceptance. This was the end to which he had come. This woman, this unstable chair, this badly hung door, this shabby room drenched in orange lamplight. He felt he was falling forward into a dream.

“You wanna say a prayer?” Gerbasi asked. “I’ll give you a minute.”

Shellane did not answer, absorbed by the particulars of his vision.

“You hear what I said, Roy? Want me to give you a minute?”

“Now would be good,” said Shellane.

In the beginning there was the memory of pain, a pain so vast and white it seemed less a condition of the mind and body than the country of his birth. But it was only a memory and did not afflict him for long. There followed a period of vagueness and confusion, but as he walked, moving through the dark, fogbound country of his death, he came to think that death had not left him much the worse for wear. He recalled what Grace had said about the process and realized that he, too, was coming to feel stronger, more settled in his head…and yet he also felt strangely out-of-sorts, plagued by an ill-defined sense of foreboding. He presumed this feeling would intensify once he reached the black house, and that it contributed to the low energy and aimlessness of the house’s residents; but he told himself that none of them had been informed with such clear purpose and determination—he believed this would shield him to an extent from the effect. And when he saw the gabled roof rising from fog and the black fist protruding from the wall, even after he opened the door and was drawn inside, he remained hopeful, focused on his intention to find Grace, to escape with her. Where they might escape to…Well, that was not something upon which he had expended a great deal of thought. The potentials of the afterlife undoubtedly incorporated worse places than the house, and should they manage to reach a better one, what would they do then? He recognized there were many things he might have considered before acting. Matters of personal as well as metaphysical consequence. But they involved questions best answered by both him and Grace, and so would have to wait judgment.

It was not a room into which he was admitted upon opening the door, but a corridor that appeared to be endless, an unrelieved perspective of black doors and black walls, black floors and ceiling, the surfaces of the boards shiny like newly exposed veins of coal. He received a distinct impression of menace from each door he passed, and he wondered if his ability to apprehend such a psychic reek had been enhanced by his mortal transition. He walked for what must have been twenty minutes. The black perspective continued to recede. If there was an end to the corridor, he had made no appreciable progress toward it, and he realized that he would have to pick one of the doors and deal with whatever lay behind it. But before he could choose, Grace spoke from close behind him, giving him a start, just as she had their first morning on the beach.

“Hello, Roy,” she said.

She was standing no more than fifteen feet away, two of the lanky gray hominids crouched at her side, flanking her like faithful hounds. Her hair was loose about her shoulders, but otherwise she was as always, dressed in jeans and a sweater. Her attitude, however, betrayed no hint of anxiety, and her smile was an act of disdainful aggression. She absently trailed the fingers of her left hand across the scalp of one of the uglies, and it trembled, rolling its sunken eyes toward her.

“Grace…” Stunned, unable to match her coolness, her poise, with anything he knew about her, Shellane was at a loss for words.

“Roy!” She spoke his name in a husky mockery of passion and laughed, her laughter lasting a touch long to be the record of any wholesome emotion. That laugh resolved some of his questions. Not in detail, yet it supplied enough of an answer to make him suspect that his view of her was based on a fundamental misconception.

“Thanks for getting rid of Avery,” she said. “That was sweet of you.” Her tone grew chilly. “All your self-involvement is such a shuck! You’re too much of a coward to admit you’re a conscienceless bully, so you contrive moral dilemmas to hide the truth from yourself. I knew you’d find a way to kill him. It’s who you are.” She gave her hair a toss. “Actually, things couldn’t have worked out better. I can’t have Avery, but I’ve got someone like him to play with. You’ll be much more amusing. Avery wasn’t a deep thinker, but you…you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to understand where you are and what’s really happening. Am I merely an unhappy woman who’s been empowered by death, or was Grace a facade, a disguise used by a creature beyond your comprehension? You’ll drown yourself in that crap.”

Shellane remained speechless, unable to believe that he had been so wrong about her. She looked away, as if made uncomfortable by his stare.

“Come on,” she said after a while. “You must have known deep down no one could love something like you.”

“This…us…It was all about revenge?”

“You say that as if it were trivial. Revenge is beautiful. I can speak with authority on the subject. Haven’t you been hurt by anyone? Didn’t you want to fuck her up? Tear her life apart…like what she did to you? If you’re not feeling that now, you will be soon, I promise. Don’t underestimate the value of revenge. I imagine the thought of it is all that’s going to keep you sane in the years ahead.”

Incredulous, he said, “Why me? How did you lead me here? To the lake?”

“It’s nothing I did. You did it. You found me, you found the house. All your life you’ve been looking for a place that fit you perfectly. That’s how you saw it, anyway. The truth is, you were looking for a suitable punishment.” She tipped her head coquettishly and said, “And here you are!”

“But what did…?”

“No, no, no!” She waggled her forefinger at him. “No more clues. I want you to figure it out for yourself. If you can. I’m not sure I understand everything. But understanding’s overrated, Roy. Try and stay in the moment.”

Maybe, he thought, the desire for revenge had been so strong in her, she had failed to notice what had transpired between them.

“Grace,” he said. “Listen, I can still take us out of here.”

“I don’t want to leave. Don’t you get it? I’m the bitch queen of this little slice of heaven. I’m not about to give up what I’ve won.”

The uglies strained forward at her side, craning their necks toward Shellane, making whimpering sounds.

“Know what hell is, Roy? Hell is repetition. Having to repeat what you did in life forever. When I came here, when I saw all these fucked-up, defeated people, I swore I’d break the mold. I was fed up with taking a beating. But what you did in life was run, and I don’t see how you’re going to change that.” She patted the uglies’ heads with rough affection. “I think the boys here could use a little exercise. How about it? Want to give them a run?”

His mind burned with questions that she would never answer…or that she never could answer. And that, he thought, was the crux of the matter. She didn’t have all the answers. Perhaps she didn’t even have all the questions. If she was the queen of the house, why hadn’t the people he questioned on his first visit known her? Perhaps they had been dissembling, afraid to speak of her, but he didn’t think so. It might be that Grace was not the only power in the house, that there was still power to be had by anyone resourceful enough to grasp it. And then he wondered, if her contempt for him was as she stated, why had she appeared uncomfortable a moment before? Why had she looked away from him? It was as if she was putting on an act for someone and the act had broken down and she’d had to pull it together.

“That’s the spirit!” She tapped her forehead. “I can hear the wheels spinning. If anyone can beat the odds, it’s a great big criminal type like you!”

He could have sworn there was a note of urgency in her voice, of pleading. The uglies surged forward—she snapped at them and they heeled.

“Better get going, Roy,” she said. “I’d like to give you a head start, but I won’t be able to hold them much longer.”

He gripped a doorknob shaped like a hand, and the contact sent a cold charge through his emotions. If she wanted a game, he’d give her one. He’d give her all she could handle. But then he turned the knob, heard the uglies growling at his back, and his anger was drowned beneath a tide of terrible recognitions. The hopelessness of his situation, the complexity of the problem he confronted, and, most disabling of all, the appropriateness of the punishment he faced. To run ceaselessly, to hide, to exist—however fractionally—without the consolations that made existence endurable. He wondered where he would return when he returned to the world. Had to be the lake. Where else? He understood why it had seemed such a good fit. It was his resting place, his final worldly destination. He’d spend eternity, if eternity there was, scurrying through the maze of this black sedated house like a rat in a ruin—all that was left to him of heaven—and mooning about the lake where death and love had found him.

He set these considerations aside and opened the door, passing through flickering white lights and into the shadowy space beyond. He thought again of Grace, her clean beauty, the simple virtues he had so desired. She no longer seemed to embody those qualities, and it would have been easy to hate her; but though revenge had motivated her, or so she claimed, hating her was not in his best interests. If he was to win at this, he knew he had to make it a fool’s game, he had to play himself as she had played him…if she had. If she had been so accomplished an actress that she could counterfeit love in all its frailty, with its self-doubts and confident passions. The longer he considered the question, loping along a black corridor that led everywhere and nowhere, the more certain he became that she was acting now, that her coldness and sarcasm were a show designed to impress some hidden, watchful eye. The real power in the house. And the break in her voice, the momentary lapse in tone…it had let her true self come through. She wanted his help, she was depending on him, but had to present a hostile front in order to maintain her position. And if he were wrong, well, what would be the harm in that? Better to be wrong forever than to live without hope.

He hewed to this logic, letting it build an inspiring edifice within him, gothic and noble, with great arches and vaults into which he could pour his faith, a statue of a redheaded Virgin upon its altar, and, hearing the faint sounds of pursuit at his back, with love in his heart, he began to run.