The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 13 —

JANE CAUGHT BILLY BUGABOO'S LAST SPURT OF SEMEN ON a watch glass, then drew up a measured amount in a Sahli pipette. "Ahhh." She diluted it with saline solution and rocked the pipette to mix the two. Then she let a drop fall into the chamber of a cytometer, slapped on a cover slip, and clipped it onto the microscope stage. "Let's see what the omens are."

Billy rolled over and watched as she pulled up her jeans and panties and bent over the microscope. The sheets rustled mournfully.

"I can't figure you out."

"You're not supposed to."

Without removing her eye from the microscope, Jane groped for her brassiere. She snapped it around her stomach then twisted it right side around, straightening momentarily to fit herself into it. Her blouse was draped across the same chairback as the brassiere had been. "Make yourself useful and button me up," she said. Billy obeyed.

"I know you've got other guys. Are you like this with them too, or is it just me?"

"My roommate's due back from class any minute now," Jane said coldly. "Time you got dressed, stud-muffin."

With a sigh, Billy groped under the bed for his trousers. One at a time, he folded and unfolded his legs like a stork to fit them in. He was of a rarefied type, rawboned and spindle-shanked as a scarecrow. Sitting, his head reached almost to the ceiling. Standing, he stooped.

The door rattled in its frame, then boomed as it was struck by angry fists. "That's probably her now. Get the dead bolt, why don't you?"

Before Billy could reach the door, though, the transom pushed open. Monkey came clambering through. Impulsively, he seized her under the arms and, swinging her around like a doll, set her atop her own desk. She stood there, face darkening like a fireplace coal. Billy grinned a snaggle-toothed welcome at her that curled around either side of his face. It was at times like this, when he was at his most amiable, that he looked the most grotesque. Monkey scowled past him at Jane.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing, locking me out of my own fucking room?"

The signifiers in the slide were not good. Then again, Teind year omens never were. If you tested a sample—a clipping of hair, urine, horn scrapings, anything—in a spectrophotometer, the resulting spectrum inevitably showed a thick black bar marking the Teind's approach. Even if you survived the winnowing yourself, odds were you'd lose somebody close to you. "I was preparing a slide," she muttered distractedly. Billy buckled his belt and hastily buttoned his shirt. "Couldn't have you bursting in, right in the middle of things, now could I?" Technically, she wasn't supposed to be applying esoteric techniques to Intermediate Scrying, but doing so would save her countless hours staring into a pool of ink or poring over goat entrails.

"You've been getting mighty pushy lately, Miss Do-What-I-Will Alderberry." Monkey hopped down from the table. "I don't recall giving you permission to use my room for any fucking private assignations."

"Uh, listen, I gotta go now, I'm kind of late. For a class." Billy bundled his shoes and socks under one arm. Bobbing awkwardly, he backed out of the room, a leaf before a storm. "'Bye."

The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences. Jane began jotting down her observations in her lab book.

Monkey snatched the pencil from her hand and snapped it in two.

Jane closed her eyes and traced the sigil of Baphomet with her inner vision. When she was calm again, she slid open a drawer.

"All right." There was a pair of latex gloves within. "I wasn't going to do this." She pulled them on. "But you don't exactly give me much choice, do you?"

Credit where credit is due, Monkey didn't back down. There was a touch of the trickster in her heritage, and the trickster gene was a dominant. She licked her lips nervously as Jane pretended to lift an invisible box from the drawer. "You don't scare me."

"Good." Jane swung a hinged lid back and reached within. "It works best if you don't believe." She removed an equally imaginary scalpel and held it up between thumb and forefinger, admiringly turning it one way and the other.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Jane smiled. "This!"

She slammed her fist into Monkey's stomach. The small goblin doubled over in pain and Jane was on top of her, ignoring her shrieks and forcing her down on the floor. She yanked Monkey's blouse up over her head and removed from a pocket a small bladder she had prepared for just this occasion. "A little higher," she said, jabbing stiff forefingers into the exposed abdomen. "There!"

She crushed the bladder.

Blood gushed. A dark crimson stain spread over Monkey's crotch and belly. Jane stepped back, the broken bladder in her hand. It looked for all the world like a scrap of body tissue. Monkey struggled up, tugging down her blouse, just as Jane popped it in her mouth. Jane chewed and swallowed.

It was done.

With swift efficiency then, Jane put away the scalpel in its box and returned both to the drawer and oblivion. She stripped off the gloves and threw them in the wastebasket. She was done. Leaning back against her desk, she waited to see if her roommate had bought it.

Monkey came to her feet. "What the fuck did you just do?"

"Hopefully, I bought myself a little peace and quiet."

"You don't fool me—that was just sleight of hand."

"Believe what you will."

Picking up a heavy stapler, Monkey advanced on her. "Suppose I hit you over the head with this, huh? I'll bet you anything it would hurt you more than it would me.

"There's only one way to find out."

Monkey chewed her lip indecisively. Then, with disgust, she threw the stapler to the floor and herself into a chair. "Shit." She was all fists-and-eyes with rage. Then, abruptly, all tension left her body and she chuckled to herself. With elaborate casualness she said, "I met an old friend of yours today."

"Now that," Jane said, "is what I call a truly stunning non sequitur." Rubbing a speck of blood from her chin, she went back to her microscope. But try as she would, she could not ignore Monkey's remark. It niggled in her brain. Finally she sighed and added, "Who was it?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

Monkey's voice was gleeful, mocking, triumphant. Without taking her eyes from Jane, she lifted one corner of her bloodstained blouse and began to suck on the cloth.

Jane spent a long hour staring at the flimsy before she set out. The yellow paper was already fading at the creases where she'd folded it. Bad news always came on the cheap, in gray print with the proper names and specifics badly typed in third-generation carbon capital letters that floated slightly above the line. She'd read and reread the thing a dozen times since receiving it yesterday.

To: Magister/Mistress ALDERBERRY

From: Office of Penitence and Truth, Division of Financial Assistance

In these times of fiscal austerity, it is necessary that we all do what we can to reduce or eliminate all such expenses as will not adversely affect the quality of your education. Thus, as a cost-cutting measure, we are eliminating such portions of your MERIT SCHOLARSHIP as are covered by this office. We know that you join with us in wishing the University a swift recovery from its temporary financial woes, and strongly encourage you to investigate the many means open to you of financing your education through the private sector. A schedule of your obligations will be posted to you in THREE WEEKS.

Jane's anger was long gone. She read the flimsy only to drain it of power, to purge herself of the last traces of emotionality, to ensure that she did what she had to calmly and alertly. Then it was time.

The University library opened its doors at midnight and closed at dawn. The rationale given for such extraordinary hours was that they discouraged dilettantes and idlers from wasting the library's facilities. Jane suspected darker motives were at work, but this once she was just as glad for the privacy of its empty halls and echoing rooms. By side passages and wrought iron spiral stairways, she traced a labyrinthine path to the more obscure reaches of the collected lore.

To make the most of limited floor area, the older stacks were fitted with electric bookshelves. Only one pair in ten had an aisle's worth of space between them; the others were all pushed together like old furniture in a storage room. Jane walked alongside them, reading the placards, until she came to the one she wanted and flicked a switch on the side of the shelf. A hidden motor hummed to life. Slowly, clumsily, the other shelves huddled away from Jane's, closing the existing aisle and making a new one where she wanted it.

The books were all old and browning. Some were held together with string or with rubber bands so ancient they broke when they were touched but did not fall away for they had over the decades melted onto the book covers. The more valuable were preserved in folded acid-free cardboard containers carefully cinched with ribbons. Even these, though, were rotting at the core, falling away in flakes, inexorably oxidizing, as were all the books, in a process so pervasive that Jane could smell it, an autumnal haze that clung to the stacks like smoke from a distant grass fire. They were all, without exception, dying by degrees.

So it was with no sense of violation whatsoever that Jane used a razor blade to slice the security strip from the spine of one particular volume.

Her contact met her by the main elevator bank. He was wearing a shabby brown leather flight jacket with patches from the Broceliande campaign, old jeans, and older boots. "Puck Aleshire," he said. "You got the thing?"

"In my purse."

"Then let's go."

Puck, as it turned out, was the control from Jane's Comp-and-Spec class. His eyes were dark, overserious, all but unblinking. To make him smile, Jane said, "The last time I saw you, you were naked and standing next to a corpse."

He looked at her, said nothing.

In silence they went up ten floors and across a skywalk to Hindfell, where they caught a clanky public elevator down to street level. "Why couldn't we just go down to the ground floor and out from our own lobby?" Jane wondered.

"That's Crip territory. You really don't know anything if you want to hit Crip turf at night."

"Oh."

Hindfell's lobby was bleak and vacant. The store windows had been emptied for the night and a lone dwarf in doorman's red stood yawning and oblivious to their passage. A sheet of newspaper spread its wings and leaped at Jane when Puck opened the door, but was caught by a crosswind and flew sideways into a wall. She clutched her parka tighter about her.

They stepped out into a dark and fearsome emptiness. Streetlights struggled in vain to reach the ground. Neon reflected blurrily from the rain-slicked asphalt. The air echoed with the growls of unseen behemoths and the ugly yak-yakking laughter of streetcorner gnomes in a nearby bar. Somewhere a door swung open, releasing a snatch of music, then, closing again, swallowed it back. Nobody was out on the street.

Jane had to scurry to keep up with Puck's long stride. "You're a rude one," she remarked.

"And you're a rich bitch."

"What?"

"You heard me. I know your kind, with your prep school attitudes and your down-filled quilted parkas. Laughing at the likes of me because the arms of my jacket are pulling apart at the seams and I have to take whatever work comes to hand. Well, let me tell you something. There are worse ways to make money than by standing naked next to a corpse, as you so charmingly put it. And what money I do make goes to pay for my education, not because I want a little extra pixie dust to shove up my nose."

"I never—"

"Sure, sure." Puck's anger burned down as quickly as it had flared up. He hunkered his head. "Forget I said anything. No business of mine anyway." The signs glowed bright over the stores they passed—AMBROSIUS, GRANDFATHER TROUT, GNOMOLOGICA, THREE SILK SHOES—but the shops themselves were all dark as caves behind their locked security grates. "Here we are."

Their destination was a stone mansion with gabled roofs and terra-cotta trim. It was squeezed between two skyscrapers, a lone revenant of a bygone era. Graffiti disfigured the first floor. Five empty beer bottles huddled in the shelter of the steps. "She's expecting us," Puck said. He knocked.

The door opened.

Within was one vast room, cold and unlit. The interior walls had all been ripped out. In the dim light from the street Jane glimpsed distant brick, scorch marks, a rotting mattress, and a sarsen stone twice her height. The stone stood not far from a tiled fireplace.

The door closed, immersing them in blackness.

With a sudden spasm of panic, Jane realized just how thoroughly she was at Puck's mercy. Anything could happen to her here. She wondered how she could have been fool enough to put herself in this position.

"It's not usually this bad," Puck muttered. "Shit." A soda bottle rattled and rolled away from his boot tip. "Hey, you old dingbat! We're here—turn on the fucking lights!"

The lightlessness intensified odors, the rots and mildews from mattress and wallpaper, the smell of charred wood, and beneath them all a pervasive ophidian stench. Could there be snakes living in this ruin? Jane fervently hoped not.

"One second, please."

The flat, sexless voice came from the heart of the living darkness. There was a metallic clank, the smell of kerosene, the skritch of a sulfur match. Light flared, dazzled, resolved into a lantern. It hung in midair, suspended from a scrawny brown hand. The sarsen stone's shadow leaned toward them and then away.

"You may advance now into our presence."

Behind the lantern, where Jane had to squint to see, floated the ghost of a face. Parchment skin stretched over a fleshless skull. It was the mask of a crone, high forehead, heavy lids housing shadow. Aeons of weariness nested in the corners of those eyes. She wore a black turtleneck so that her upper body could only be inferred and not seen; of her body below the waist Jane could make out nothing. A lipless mouth moved, said: "Where is it?"

The expression that spread across that face as Jane removed the book from her purse was as lean and hungry as a candle flame.

She stretched out a hand.

Jane put the offering in it.

The creature raised the book to her nose and sniffed. She riffled it open, tore out three pages, and stuffed them in her mouth. Sourly, she chewed. Skipping forward, she hesitated over another page, then decisively tore it out and ate it as well. Finally she ripped a page from the index. When her mouth was empty again, she returned the book to Jane. "The rest is of no interest to me." The brown hand disappeared, reappeared with an envelope. "Here is your quittance. I trust it is sufficient."

Jane stuffed the envelope unopened into her purse. She hesitated, then asked, "Why are you doing this?"

"Those pages contained a name. One I wish forgotten."

"But why did you eat them?"

"I am destroying my past."

"But why?"'

With a dry rustle, as of silks on marble, the face floated nearer her. The mouth hung open in a parody of despair, tightened into a determination that was truly frightening. "I smell iron, cold iron, hard fate, and betrayal." She jerked the lantern into Jane's face. "You are not one of my children! What are you doing here?"

Jane shrugged, frightened.

The lantern withdrew. "It does not matter. Sit down by the hearth, and I will tell you all."

Shadows leaped as she thrust the lantern into the empty fireplace. From nowhere she produced two small chairs. "Fucking waste of time," Puck grumbled as he and Jane settled uncomfortably down on them. A cold breeze gusted from the chimney's throat without throwing up any soot. It had been a long time since fire had dwelt therein.

Their hostess did not sit.

"Things are not as they were," she said. "I ask you to picture an age when there were no dwellings taller than a long spear, no machines more complex than a loom, no calendars but the Moon herself. It was a time when all women lived in harmony."

Puck snorted.

"What about the men?" Jane asked.

"There were no men. We had not invented them yet." The face twisted toward the sarsen stone. The stone reflected no light but drank it all in, a looming darkness within the darkness. "That was my sin, in fact, the separation of women into male and female. It was the first sin and the most hideous, for it was that which set the Wheel in motion."

A cabinet door clicked open and she removed a cut glass decanter and poured herself a drink. She tonged ice from a bucket, then replaced its lid. Gracefully she glided to the sarsen stone and with a slithering sound circled it three times. Each time her face and hands reappeared, they had risen higher in the gloom. "I was powerful then, yes, and beautiful beyond your imagining, as fair and pale as Lady Death. We had no rulers in that long ago age, nor any authority other than the honor of old age, but my standing was great among the mighty, and for my accomplishments the Council of Seven made me their Lamia."

She waited until Jane said, "I don't know what a lamia is."

A rustle like dried newspapers. The face rose yet higher. "It was a very great title, child. And a great responsibility. For we controlled such sorceries then as this sad and disenchanted age cannot even remember. With these two hands"—she held them palms upward—"I could command the mountains to open and the seas to part. I summoned stars to the surface of the earth, that I might walk and converse with them and so learn.

"Nobody died in those days. There was no need for it."

With a rattle and a sizzle, an electric heater came on by Jane's feet. Startled, she stared down at it. The heating elements glowed in red circles, casting a dull crimson light upon the wall. A stain in the wallpaper shrank away to nothing. She had missed a few words.

"—did not listen to it at first. It was just an idle fancy, a voice in the back of my head."

One side of Jane's body was cold and the other overly warm. The smell of kerosene was overwhelming. The lantern flickered and the sarsen stone seemed to flare, as if it were sprouting gray butterfly wings. In Jane's swimming vision it wavered between two irreconcilable forms, between monolith and two-bladed ax head.

A great weariness settled over Jane. "It seemed impossible to me that evil should come of so simple an idea," the Lamia said. Jane was finding it hard to follow the meaning of what was being said. She yawned, pinched the corners of her eyes, shook her head. By slow degrees the quietly monotonous voice lulled her into a half-dreaming state where it seemed to her that all the room dissolved to nothing, leaving only the sarsen stone unchanged.

In her imaginings, Jane was standing on a bright plain, and the Lamia had grown young again. From the waist down she was a serpent. Her coils wrapped three times around the stone. But so beautiful was she, so innocently naked and sweet smelling, that Jane was not at all frightened. The scales were bright as jade. They glittered in the sun. Her eyes were green and unblinking.

"Where am I?" Jane asked.

From above the Lamia said, "This is the Omphalos, the unturning pivot. All the world revolves about it. The farther from the center you go, the faster and less tolerable the motion becomes. The easier it is to fall. Look about you."

Jane looked. To every side the world fell away from the sarsen stone. She could see to its very end. Highways ran like threads to cities laid out in perfect miniature, and beyond them were mountains, oceans, and ice. It was just like the plaster-and-lichen tableaux the sophomore geomancers put together every year to illustrate such themes as Electricity in the Service of Industry or Allegory Enlightening the Masses. "It's round!" she cried. "The world is round!"

"It is round because it is only an illusion. The world does not exist—not in any important sense—and so it takes on the shape of change." Now the disk was turning, slowly but visibly spinning under the cloud-studded bowl of the sky. "This is change made visible—what the wise call the Wheel. You are seeing existence now as the Goddess herself sees it." Jane was beginning to feel dizzy. Quickly she shifted her vision down from the horizon. Still her stomach felt queasy.

The Lamia's voice grew wild and visionary. "It was I who set the Wheel in motion, through my pride and folly, and so I was punished, condemned that my children should walk on two legs, condemned to be scorned and disbelieved by my descendants, condemned cruelest of all to immortality, so that I might see the consequences of my deed." The lands spun faster. Jane staggered, caught her balance. "As a mercy only slightly less cruel than the punishment itself, I have been promised that some day, when I have destroyed the last trace of my existence, I shall be granted surcease. But that day is long, long in coming."

Winds shrieked up from the spinning lands. "Meanwhile, the Wheel turns. The humble are exalted and the mighty are humbled. The best are inevitably defeated, and the scum always rises to the top. Here is the source of all the world's pain, that restless turning, ever accelerating, always bringing us around again to where we were before, but older, changed, scarred, and sorrowful. Had I only known the identity of the whisperer, I would never have listened. The Wheel would not have been set in motion."

Jane squeezed tight her eyes. Her head whirled. She staggered a step closer to the stone and sank to her knees to keep from falling. "Whose was the voice?" she cried. "Who tempted you?"

"Who indeed? Who was it who punished me for listening to her? Who determined to set the Wheel in motion and decided the guilt for it should be mine? They are one and the same."

"Who?"

The Lamia's voice grew very calm.

"Why, the Goddess, of course. Who else would dare?"

Jane reached out to steady herself against the stone. The instant her fingers touched it, the swirling stopped. Her dizziness was gone. Her eyes snapped open, and she stared up at the Lamia. Up past the perfect geometries of her coils. Past the languid swell and curve of her abdomen. The coral halos surrounding her nipples. Into the universe of her irises, the black holes of her pupils.

The Lamia smiled. It was a warm and confident smile, one that burned from the very center of her being. "You want me."

"Yes," Jane said wonderingly. She had never felt particularly drawn to her own sex before this. Boys had always seemed more interesting. But there was a compellingly androgynous quality to the Lamia, as if she were all that Jane found attractive in the male sex and feminine as well.

"Then kiss me."

The Lamia lowered her mouth toward Jane. Her lips parted moistly to reveal a pink glimpse of tongue. Heart fluttering like a bird between two hands, Jane yearned helplessly upward toward it.

"None of that, douchebag!"

Puck seized Jane by the shoulders and pulled. She stumbled over an ottoman and fell backward onto the floor.

The Lamia had grown old again, old and repulsive. A look of mild regret flickered on the mask of her face for the briefest instant and was gone. She folded her arms, making her hands disappear.

"We're leaving," Puck said firmly.

"I'll turn on the lights for you."

"Don't bother yourself."

Puck hauled Jane to her feet and steered her out of the room. While she dreamed, the mansion had healed itself. The interior walls had been restored, and were covered with flocked paper. They passed through rooms that were genteelly carpeted and comfortably furnished. In the hall, frosted glass sconces gently lit their way. The beer bottles were gone from the stoop when they emerged. The graffiti had been reabsorbed into the stone.

"She's crazy as shit," Puck said when they were back on the street. "All those nutty stories. This stunt tops them all, though. If I didn't need the money so bad I'd—" He made a disgusted noise. Without slowing his pace, he shook open and donned a pair of aviator glasses. Neon rainbows slid across their black glass surfaces. They made him look sinister, insectoid. He should have been blind in them this late at night, but his step was sure and unfaltering.

"What was she trying to do?" Jane asked hesitantly. She was still a little dazed, unsure which was real—the world as she saw it now or as it had been revealed to her in the Lamia's vision.

It was late enough that the grigs and gaunts were out in force, rising up from the subway vents, service tunnels, and storm sewers, forming small cliques by the lampposts, watching the action from doorways. A wolf-boy stared at Jane, chewing on a finger. He spat out a knucklebone as they went past. "You don't know?" Puck said. "She was going to—"

"Hey, college boy!" A behemoth slowed to a stop beside them and a grizzled old troll leaned his head out of the cab. He leered down at them, revealing brown teeth and hideous gums. "How come they ain't kicked you out yet?" He looked at Jane. "See ya got a new girlfriend."

"Wicked Tom." Puck's grin was wary, insincere. "What's the good word?"

They slapped hands and Jane caught a glimpse of a small plastic-wrapped package before it disappeared into her escort's pocket. The troll ran a hand over his brown-spotted head and in a lowered voice said, "Rumor is the bane has hit the street."

Puck took a step back from the curb. "Oh no. I'm not touching that shit."

"Nobody's asking ya to touch nothing," Wicked Tom said irritably.

"Just find yourself somebody else."

"Okay, okay."

"I'm not in that business."

"No? Well, too bad. There's good money in it."

The behemoth snorted impatiently, and Wicked Tom disengaged the clutch and revved the engine to keep it in line. He winked at Jane. "Gotta go now—keep in touch, hear?"

When the behemoth was gone, Jane asked, "What's the bane?"

"Bad news. Don't get involved with it."

In silence they returned to Hindfell and across the skywalk to Bellegarde. As Puck was turning away at the elevator banks, Jane said, "There's something I want to make clear. I am not a rich bitch, as you so charmingly put it."

It took Puck a second to remember his earlier comment. When he did, he scowled. "Hey, I said I was sorry."

"You listen to me! I'm here on scholarship, okay? I don't have any other source of income. No patrons, no job, no savings, no nothing. Only my scholarship, and the University just took that away. So what ebbs, must flow. The money's got to come from somewhere."

"But your clothes—"

"I stole them. These clothes are nice because if you're going to steal something, you might as well make it the best, right? So I just wanted you to know. I'm not rich or anything. I'm just doing my best to get by."

"Hey, me too." Puck sounded amazed. "I mean, I'm not necessarily scholarship material, but my education means a lot to me. I'm going to the College of Pharmacology. I'm only going through all this crap to pay for it."

"So okay. We understand each other now." Jane started to turn away. She was trembling a little, though whether from anger or the aftershock of fear, she did not know.

But Puck lingered. "Um, listen. Maybe you'd like to go out sometime? We could go dancing, maybe." He saw her begin to shake her head, and lightly rapped his forehead with his knuckles. "What an idiot—I haven't charmed you yet." He dug about in his pockets, slapping his jeans, thrusting hands deep into his jacket. "You'll love this, it's as close to a foolproof charm as was ever made. If I can only—Ah. Here it is." From his jacket he removed the ghost of a rose. The petals were a red deeper than blood, with purple highlights. It was faintly but noticeably transparent.

Bowing deeply, he presented it to her.

When her fingers closed about the stem, the rose faded to nothing. And Puck was right. Jane was charmed.

"So how about it?"

He pocketed his shades and stared deep into her eyes. There was no mistaking his sincerity. Against her better judgment, Jane found herself liking Puck. There was solid stuff beneath his rough exterior. More than that, she felt enormously drawn to him. Something within her vibrated to his presence. "No," she said.

Jane was still a little stoned when she got back to her room from Jenny Greenteeth's study party. The radiator hissed and rattled, blowing little spit-bubbles from the air vent.

It was a cold autumn afternoon. The City looked dull and inert through the window. Off in the distance, iron-dark anvil heads billowed. Black specks moved before them, storm hags in flight. A few leathery oak leaves, lofted high by who knew what winds, stuck wetly to the glass.

Jane ratcheted the curtains shut and in the subdued light undressed herself. Monkey was away on a field trip and would not return until late tomorrow. She lay down on her bed and began to touch herself, unhurriedly caressing her breasts, running her palm down her belly. At first she thought about Puck, and then she thought about nothing at all.

She lazily stared down between her breasts, past the swelling plain of her belly. Luxuriant hair grew thickly upon the round hill of her pubic mound. Sometimes she liked to imagine it was a forest and she the most diminutive of explorers, wandering through it. Her fingers slipped down to the opening of her labyrinth, felt moistness, and lingered. It was an enchanted forest, and silent. Not even birds sang in the branches. She wandered it, gazing about in wonder. Her fingers moved a little more quickly. Everything was hushed, expectant, waiting. Her fingers slowed. They began to tease out her clitoris. Far ahead there was a rise. In no hurry at all, by roundabout forest paths, she approached it.

Simultaneous with her fantasy, Jane was aware of the dorm room about her, of the bed beneath and the ceiling above. As she played with her button, she felt as though she were rising, the bed shooting up under her with gathering speed, rocketing straight into the sky. The room fell away, the University and the City and all its buildings crumbling and falling down, farther and farther.

The ceiling throbbed and spread out, thinning and attenuating. The first stars of evening appeared through its vanishing haze. They multiplied and thickened. Jane gasped and writhed on the bed. The sheets were bunching up underneath her. Faster now. The sky purpled.

She was soaring.

With a heightened sense of expectation, she began running up the slope. Trees flew by to either side. Faster and faster, in time to the urgent movement of her fingers, she ran, one with the Jane who, worlds away, was rocketing into the sky. She topped the rise and stared in wonder and disbelief.

There was a cottage below.

It was a low house, white, and alien in design, and though surely she could never have seen such a building, it was as familiar to her as a recurrent dream. An outbuilding abutted it, windowless but with a door that filled one wall. A short road, wide as it was, led to that door. On the roof was what must have been a television antenna, for it lacked the warding hexes a lightning rod would have had.

Entranced, Jane followed a slow, winding path to the back door. It opened with a push, and she stepped into the kitchen. Heartbreakingly familiar smells wrapped themselves around her.

A woman was there, and while reason said she must be a total stranger, yet something leaped up happily within Jane at the sight of her. She sat at a Formica-topped table, hunched despondently, head down. A bottle of whiskey and a half-filled glass stood by one elbow, an ashtray by the other.

Jane tiptoed inside, afraid to speak, compelled to draw closer. The woman—her hair was dark, cut midlength and curly—did not hear. Jane touched her elbow. "Mom?" With a little shriek, her mother looked up.