The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Foster was a man of some education, having gone two years to college before returning home to the farm where he was needed, and he knew the name was classical in origin. The daughter of King Minos, as he recalled, the woman who had loved Theseus and had helped him find his way out of the labyrinth.

Ariadne. A beautiful name. He murmured it aloud. It set right on his tongue and lips.

Ariadne. It fitted her. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. He glanced once more at her, and like that one other time she seemed to have crawled atop the other man. He blinked; surely he could not be seeing what he saw, and yet even though the light in the tent was dim he could make out the outline of the woman straddling the prone DeLance, the skirts of her gown spread out. She rocked back and forth, and murmured all the while, and he could hear DeLance groan.

Embarrassed, Foster still watched; he couldn't look away. DeLance cried out in release, and the woman whispered, and bent down over DeLance's lips and kissed him long.

Foster felt a warmth suffusing through his body and he closed his eyes tightly and thought of Sarah, good-hearted Sarah. Sarah who was just a little too thin because of their hard times; not with a voluptuous body like this woman this Ariadne here in the tent.

A woman in the hospital. Impossible, he told himself, and he looked once more, and Ariadne was rising from DeLance, straightening her skirts. Foster watched as she ran a hand down DeLance's chest to his groin, and DeLance shuddered.

He glanced across at Long, but the man was asleep. Foster looked up and down the double rows and saw that of the other men he was the only one awake, the only one to see what he had seen. But what was that?

The woman — Ariadne — had done something to DeLance. She had climbed atop — no, Foster decided, climbed wasn't quite the proper word. Slithered? No.

She had seduced no, that wasn't the right word. Nothing was right, he decided, nothing tonight.

He closed his eyes and willed sleep to come, but stubbornly it refused.

The following day it rained, and the dampness seeped through the canvas walls and into the bones of the men, chilling them to their very souls. Foster felt the worst he had since coming to the hospital. The flap to the tent had been left open, and he could see the greyness outside, the dripping leaves, the subdued colours, and remembered what autumn was like at home.

He and the other farmers in the area would be done with their harvesting, and the wives and mothers and sisters would have been cooking all day long, and then towards sundown would come the dances in someone's barn. Some man would bring out a fiddle and maybe a mouth harp, then maybe a bucket or two or even some old jugs — they didn't much care what they used as musical instruments as long as it made noise — and William, Foster's oldest slave, a man who'd worked for his father, would bring out his banjo. They'd all dance, too, the slaves and their owners in their own separate circles. The barn would smell of drying apples and old manure, of new hay and dust which rose under the stamping of their feet on the dirt floor. A cow, somewhere down the line in a crib, would low in response, a bird in the eaves might flutter briefly, and in the flickering yellow light of the lanterns they would sing and laugh and drink home-made brew and celebrate the good harvest.

Only the past two years there'd been no good harvest; times had got rougher, and there'd been no dances. There'd been setbacks in the planting, he'd lost a crop or two, and several times army companies had marched through the farmland and taken what food they wanted. They'd also hurt Nell, William's granddaughter, and William had grabbed a pitchfork before Foster could stop him and had run after the retreating soldiers. He'd been shot in the head and he'd simply sunk to his knees, lifeless already, and when Foster had finally reached the old man, his skin was already cooling.

Sarah had cried when Foster and Tom and George, William's sons, buried the old man out on the hill behind the house.

And for a long time after that Foster had sat upon the porch thinking. It had been confederate troops who had come through his farm, who had hurt Nell, killed poor old William.

His own kind, Foster kept saying. His own kind did this. But it was war, one part of him said. That doesn't excuse it, another argued. And he knew then that if the Southern troops would do such awful things, what could he — and Sarah and the others — expect if the Yankees were to come down here, to come through these bountiful farms? What sort of horrors could they expect at these Northerners' hands? What would these Yankees who hated them so much do?

And so the next day he'd kissed his wife goodbye, taken his best hat and best rifle and a pouch full of shot, and had left the farm to volunteer. He would fight, and he would keep the Yankees and the others away from his family. It was the only thing he could do.

But that had been a year ago, and he didn't see that the Yankees were being pushed back. Sometimes the Union forces won a battle, sometimes his people did. And even when they did, there didn't seem to be an advantage. More men got killed and injured, some lay in the fields for days, some were never found. And the officers didn't seem to care for their men, as he thought they would. They weren't the ones at the beginning of the charges. It was the young men like him, some men hardly more than boys, or the old men who should have been at home being waited on by their sons and daughters. It was these men who died, and whose bodies the horses of the mounted officers picked their way over.

Foster rubbed a hand across his face, felt the dampness at the corners of his eyes. A year of fighting, of eating off the land and mostly that meant not eating, of being either too hot or too cold, and mostly too wet, had soured him on the army — Northern or Southern.

He knew now that he should have stayed home, should have laid in as much food as possible, as many supplies as he could find, should have barricaded the house, and kept Sarah and the others together, and maybe they could have fought off anyone who approached.

Maybe it wasn't too late now, though; he had to believe that. As soon as he got out of here he was going home. The doctors might say he was fit to go to the front lines again, but he wasn't. He was going back to Sarah. He would worry about the Yankees when and if they came.

He had no appetite that day. He knew his fever was returning, and nothing tasted good. He laid on the cot, never opening his eyes, hardly moving.

All he could think of was his family, and he wondered if he would ever see them again.

That night Ariadne returned. She was closer now to Foster, and he could see the darkness of her lovely eyes; they looked almost as if they'd been lined with something black; Sarah had called it kohl and said all the fancy ladies wore it. Ariadne's bodice was lower than he'd seen before, and her breasts were full and pale in the dimness.

She murmured to the young man three beds down from Foster, and he responded lethargically. She kissed the man, caressed the back of his hands with her curling eyelashes, and Foster once more felt the stirrings inside him.

He turned his head, though, so he wouldn't watch, but he couldn't escape the sounds of the couple's passion. Illicit passion, he told himself, but those were empty words. What did illicit mean anyway when he'd seen men blown to bits by cannon, horses that screamed in their death agonies?

Once more Foster smelled the scent of Ariadne. Some spice almost like cloves or perhaps cinnamon mixed with musk, and he licked his lips. That strange perfume almost overcame the stench of blood and pus and sweat that pervaded the tent.

When he looked back, she was gone.

The next day when the doctor came, Foster asked when he could leave the hospital. The doctor seemed preoccupied and merely said soon. Still, those few words heartened Foster because before then the doctor had refused to say.

The nurses came in and carried out the body of the young man he had seen the night before.

Foster looked across at Long, who was sitting up once more. "Another one."

"Yeah," Long said. He was chewing a wad and leaned over his bed and spat into the chamberpot.

"She's getting closer," Foster said, his voice low.

"What's that?"

"The woman I saw."

"You on that again? Long shook his head. "You need a woman, boy; I can see it plain and simple."

Foster nodded, slightly distracted, then said, "But there was one. I saw her. She was at the sides of those three men — one of 'em that Irishman and now they're all dead."

"Plenty o' men here are dead, and there ain't been no woman with 'em."

"Not this time."

Long shook his head again and pushed himself down and rolled over, and Foster knew their conversation was over.

That night the woman brought with her the scent of wood smoke and spices, and she knelt beside the red-faced man.

In the morning he was dead. And when the nurses hauled him out, Foster could see that the drinker was no longer red-faced. The dead man was pale, paler than he should have been even in death, and he seemed to have shrunk down upon himself, as if something his blood, his soul had been sucked out of him.

Foster looked at Long. "She's coming down this way."

"You're crazy, you know. Crazy." Long concentrated on drinking his broth.

Foster pushed back the sheet and swung his legs over the side. Momentarily he felt light-headed, and his arm pained him. He tried to push up from the cot to stand, trembled, and fell back. He couldn't escape, not even if he wanted to. He managed to get under the covers again, and saw that Long was watching him.

"You could help me," Foster said. He hated to ask for help — it wasn't his way — but there was no other choice.

"Help you?"

Foster nodded. "To escape."

"You're here to heal, boy, and that's good enough for me. I'll be out in a day or two, or so the docs say. You need to stay a little longer and rest up."

"You don't understand," he said bitterly.

"No, I guess not."

Two nights went by and the woman didn't appear. Then on the third night she was across from Foster, by Long's bed.

"No," Foster said, struggling to sit up, but his limbs were entangled in the sheets, and they dragged him down. His head was spinning, and he couldn't hardly keep his eyes open, and yet he saw the woman, so beautiful, slithering atop Long, who was staring wide-eyed at her. She caressed and kissed the one-eyed man, and delicately nipped at the skin on his chest. Foster watched as her mouth slid lower and lower, and suddenly Long moaned, a loud sensual sound.

She spread her skirts around them, and rode Long like he was a horse being broke, and Foster could hear Long's cry of lust, the cry that was almost a scream.

Foster struggled once more to sit up; he had to help Long. But he couldn't manage, and every time he moved his arm throbbed so fiercely he himself momentarily blacked out. He could only lie back and watch helplessly.

When it was over, Ariadne smoothed her skirts, kissed Long upon the lips and left.

In the dimness Foster stared at Long. The man was pale, too pale.

"Long?" he called.

No response.

And when morning came, the nurses took Long away.

"I don't understand it," Foster called to them. "He was getting better. He was going to be out in a day or two. He didn't have no killing disease."

The burliest of the two nurses shrugged. "It happens sometimes. They seem all right and then just up and die."

"No, no, not Long. He was all right, I tell you." Foster laboured to sit. "That woman came for him. I warned him, I did, but he wouldn't listen. No one would." He looked around the ward, but most of the patients were sleeping or had slipped into their own private hells. "Long didn't listen to me — he didn't believe — and now look at him."

"Calm down," one of the nurses said, and he glanced across at the other. They called for a third nurse, and between the three of them they restrained him and tied him down with ropes to the cot.

He fought and screamed and shouted at them, but they told him it was for his own good, that he was too violent to be left on his own.

He tried to undo his bonds, but couldn't, and after a while he stopped fighting. He closed his eyes. Some time later one of the nurses came back and fed him some broth, this time with a little bit of potato and onion in it. He tasted nothing.

He simply lay there, his eyes shut, and waited. He felt the coolness of the air when the sun went down. And when he smelled the spices, he opened his eyes.

Ariadne stood at the foot of his cot. She was smiling at him.

She whispered his name, and he realized then what that strange odour about her was. It was the smell of death.

Sleeping Cities

Wendy Webb

Wendy Webb has published more than a dozen short stories and has co-edited three anthologies, including Gothic Ghosts with Charles Grant for Tor Books. Much of her time of late has been spent in theatres as a playwright and director .

"I found myself standing in Beijing's Tiananmen Square a few months after the conflict witnessed around the world" reveals the author. "Activity in the square had returned to the honourable duty of jobs, family, and order and tradition all under what seemed watchful eyes.

"During that trip there seemed a consistency among the people in something unspoken and elusive, even though they were always kind to me. An outsider who does not belong and never will might speculate that such behaviour was rooted in culture or genetics, or perhaps directed by those watchful eyes. I don't know.

"In 'Sleeping Cities' I wondered what would happen to an otherwise honourable man who chose to be different from the vast population above ground, as well as those interred below."

With shovels and picks they attacked the hard earth, breaking it into jagged pieces to exhume what lay below.

Men and women, working shoulder to shoulder, sweated with the effort, but continued without complaint, without a spoken word to break the cadence. Last week their priority was the land and growing food for the masses, an honourable duty. It was necessary work for survival.

This week it was different. This week what lay below the land was more important in this time-honouring and slow-paced society.

Delicate instruments replaced destructive equipment. With tiny probes they scraped dirt away from row after row of heads that erupted from the floor of the earthen pit. By removing soil with soft brushes they revealed tiny scraps of silk, red lacquered boxes bound with metal belts, and splinters of wood that once had been limbs.

These were more than mere artefacts, Liu knew. Much more.

He walked the site as an archaeologist in these times. In times past he had been many other things. As a member of a special group, he, too, had chosen to hide in plain sight. His goal, and that of other respected elders, was the same: freedom, finally, from vast darkness.

But, unlike the others, those goals weren't enough for him any more.

This then, was the beginning of a new time. The cycle would once again be renewed.

A small, old man silently appeared at Liu's side. As was his duty, he wore the common man's black pants, thin sweater and sandals, and pressed a tall mug of warm green tea in his boss's hands. Liu accepted the assistant's offering without comment or thanks. As everyone else on these sites, Hsu had a job to do. His compensation came from pride in working with someone as notable and important as the archaeologist. That was more than ample to meet an assistant's minimal needs.

Liu dismissed his assistant with a short wave of his hand, then stroked the surface of the medallion that clung to his chest. He looked around at the black-haired workers, his fellow scientists, and to the rudimentary scaffolding and hand-made ladders that dipped into the newly excavated pits. His own dark eyes rose to scan the rural landscape that stretched out all around him. Prepared for planting, the topography was broken up in its monotony only by the occasional hills that would be ruthlessly farmed for what they could bear, barely concealing the tombs that lay below.

He added another stroke to the piece that hung from his neck and touched his chest. Here, in this place of all places, in this country, the dragon etched clockwise from its fire-breathing head to its curled tail on the medallion was more than just a symbol. It signified good fortune.

But the medallion was only part of what had come to him in recognition of his work and sacrifice. It was Liu's scientific skill, his honed abilities and intuitive gifts that brought him to stand on this hallowed ground in anticipation of that which lay below. These same virtues would prove him a great leader. Contrary to the respected elders, he deserved the ultimate honour. He was owed it.

Liu tapped his watch and looked with some concern to the afternoon sun. Now darkness was the new enemy. But much as he would like, Liu could not push the calendar. It was not the way of his people. Destiny could be controlled, but it could not be rushed.

They had waited, after all, for over 2,000 years for this moment. He could wait a little longer. The time for complete exhumation would come at its own pace.

The first discovery took place in March of 1974. A work brigade of farmers drilling a well accidentally found a subterranean chamber. It had been the first.

There would be many more.

In 1974 Liu had watched from a distance for this finding. His calculations, countless hours of research, and intuition in the form of dreams had led him to this place. The call had been sounded and he had waited patiently for his colleagues to converge on this site near the now modern Chinese city of Xi'an.

They came. And they had worked. Hours turned to days, to months, then years, in the careful and painstaking exhumation of Qin Shi Huang Di's terracotta army. The funerary compound had revealed archaeological treasures that cheered the country and sent ripples of excitement around the world.

For Liu it had been much more than that. The past had now become the future. His future. And he was more than willing to accept the honour this find bestowed upon him. He was owed it after all. It was his right, if not his honour-bound duty, to see it through.

Walking the underground chambers, he had considered his choice carefully. The moment he had waited for would not be until all the armies were fully exhumed. But enough had been carefully dusted and touched with delicate instruments that he would know if his intuition had guided him correctly.

The pottery bodyguard faced east and was poised for battle. Life-sized figures, once brightly painted with mineral colours, were grouped into specific military formation.

He had paused, considered, then made his selection. The chamber of 1,400 figures held a sixty-eight-member elite command unit. They would be the first. Staring into the individual faces, no two of which were alike, he knew the theory was true. These figures, all of them, had been created from life. And somewhere deep in the terracotta, life was ready to resume itself. Liu would be the catalyst in this resurrection, then their leader.

Digging deep into a pack slung across his shoulder, he had pulled out four small purple candles to set in front of the figures. Arranging them in a star-like pattern, he touched match to wick and watched them blaze to life. Liu stepped back, took a long deep breath and held it. He gestured to the four directions that they should bring wholeness back to these terracotta people.

Then he waited.

The breath that had been held too long in his chest began to burn.

Had the figures been the victims of an opposing ceremony? Or, perhaps, they were never touched to begin with.

His lungs ached. Fighting hard against release, he found he could hold his breath no longer. His eyes went from figure to figure for a last-minute sign.

Sadly, it was not to be.

Breath escaped him in a long, singular and disappointed burst.

The first fully exposed soldier, then the second, fifth and tenth, stood tall and immovable. Their individual expressions stayed fixed and rigid as they had for thousands of years and would for thousands more.

The calculations had been wrong. His intuition had been reduced to nothing more than dreams of a common man, among far too many, hoping for something better.

Eyeing the dusty crossbows that had at one time been mechanically triggered to shoot intruders, he had walked from this chamber and would never return. There was no need. Bitterness burned his throat. Disappointment lodged in his stomach and gnawed his insides.

The medallion of the clockwise-etched dragon that clung to his chest swung back and forth with each heavy step as he left this place to the others. There was nothing more for him here. Good fortune would have to wait for another time.

Then, in March of 1990, workers building a highway noticed a strange condition in the soil. A new team of scientists arrived to dig in the fields.

Another special place had been discovered.

And another opportunity had arrived for the archaeologist to test his theory.

Liu removed the top to the porcelain mug Hsu had pressed into his hands, and sipped the warm green tea. Pushing his pack further up his shoulder, he stared at the late afternoon sun, then rubbed his face as if worry could be erased so easily. Turning, he scanned the horizon east of the city of Xi'an.

Over there was where the first emperor of China had chosen to place his terracotta army of 10,000 soldiers in preparation for death. Qin Shi Huang Di had built the Great Wall to protect the lives of his people, but had constructed the 20-square-mile compound for his own protection after his life ended. He needn't have bothered.

But here, at the starting point of the Silk Road, south-west of Xi'an, was the place of Jing Di. And perhaps this time good fortune would arise from the dark and seek the light.

The assistant, Hsu, ran up to him and spoke in rapid staccato tones. The small, old man in black pants, thin sweater and sandals gestured close and animated. "Come quick and see. Quick. It is just finished." He pointed, then stepped behind the archaeologist to watch for a response.

Liu offered a barely perceptible nod and walked to where the old man indicated. Ducking under a makeshift roof held up by wooden scraps used for studs, he gauged his steps in the loose earth. Careful not to disrupt the ledge, he approached the new finding excavated from the tunnel wall. A skeleton, pulled tight as if in a defensive posture, lay face to the wall. Liu knelt beside it with caution and restrained interest.

The skull was broken into jagged pieces. Nearby was a brick.

The old man resumed his quick gestures and rapid discourse with explanation of this event. "An intruder, I think. Someone most unwelcome. Or an accident. Maybe an accident. Maybe it is not. He was not careful. He wished for more than he should have."

"Quiet." Liu spoke harshly. "Your theories are of no interest to me." He dismissed the assistant with a wave of his hand.

Hsu stepped quietly back into the shadow.

Perhaps it was, indeed, an accident. Liu looked about the room and the brush-stroked row of heads that bloomed there. Or perhaps this unwelcome intruder had found more than he had bargained for.

The calendar could not be pushed.

The cycle would soon begin.

This victim had not been the first done in by greed, curiosity, or even vengeance. Grave robbing, it was speculated, had started as far back as the first century, and still continued today. Few had been successful. Far more had lost their lives. Many had even lost their souls.

The philosophy of the elders, and one that had followed since, held that human contact was motivated by self-interest. Here now lay proof of that thinking. Liu stood slowly. He paused, then kicked dust over the intruder.

This week what lay below the land was of more importance than what grew from it. It was a necessary work for survival. An honourable work. But the day was drawing to a close and the farmers would be forced to return to their more meaningful labour.

Liu held back growing impatience that filled his chest and made his head ache. Impatience was unacceptable in this time, in this culture. Urge it away, he told himself, for it cannot win. There is no other way but to let things be as they must.

He could not push the calendar.

Could not could not.

Sighing deeply, he looked out over the edge of the pit.

The sun had dropped. Bright light from the day now became muted and thick. A hint of pink and orange touched the horizon. A short distance away a small aeroplane taxied down the runway and took to the air. The roar of a modest engine followed seconds later.

Early model Russian cars sparsely dotted the highway that ran near this place. Wheezing engines coughed and sputtered black exhaust. A rare bus passed, filled with passengers. The crowd of people bulged from open windows, others barely clung to handrails that lined the steps to the open door.

Nearby a baby cooed.

He turned his attention to a slender young woman making notes on a clipboard some feet away from the edge of the pit. Her foot gently rocked the tightly bound baby, but her work continued. She never made a sound.

The child was a boy. A son.

He was a son of a long line of sons that had created this place. And he was bound. Swaddled in tight cloth for warmth and safety on this day, he was also enclosed by culture and necessity for a lifetime.

It was a legacy of the ages to be enclosed, walled off by others. Qin Shi Huang Di was the first, having built the Great Wall. Now he rested with his army. There had been another in history who built a line of walls and fortresses for protection. But unlike the creator of the Great Wall, this leader and his followers had coveted the dark. Until now.

Liu turned back to glance into the pit.

While the army of Qin Shi Huang Di for ever rested, perhaps the figures of Jing Di only slept.

He stroked the medallion.

There, in the shadow of the waning day, were the first few. Liu spied row after row of heads led now by a few tiny exposed figures

Good fortune.

and walked the narrow path to them.

They were small, much smaller than the terracotta army, and stood only two feet tall. Unlike the sculpted and painted clothes on the armies of Qin Shi Huang Di, these smaller figures had worn garments of silk and other fine materials.

Liu stroked the cold face of a small soldier. Its eyes revealed compassion, the mouth remained upturned ever so slightly in an embarrassed smile. And that one. Here the cheekbones were high, the eyes direct, mouth set. This one was a fighter, determined in a personal goal. Each face was different in their beauty and their varied range of human emotion. There was pride, innocence, high-spiritedness, and there was something else.

Youth.

Liu gasped in recognition and sudden joy.

They were children.

Children. All of them. Offspring. And more important, if he were right, they were descendants. Fathered in mission by Jing Di, these were the minions Liu and the others sought.

The children had waited. Waited for over 2,000 years to come out of the dark.

Liu licked his dry lips and swallowed hard. He had to know if his intuition had steered him correctly this time. The discovery in this pit was far from complete, so if these children slept, they did not sleep alone.

Individually, and collectively — only when they were completely exhumed, brushed free from dirt, and the tiny instruments put away — would they awaken to take their place. Then they would join the vast population of this continent, and the world, to hide in plain sight. And he would be their new leader.

He had to know.

Now.

Reaching into his pack, he produced the four purple candles, arranged them in the star-like shape, then lit them. He pulled a deep breath, stepped back, and called once again upon the four directions to bring these figures to wholeness.

Nothing.

He kept his breath, and whispered soundless hope.

A stirring came then.

An exhalation like muted wind arrived from a distance, but ever so close that he could feel it brush against his cheek.

Far away the howling began. From the four directions a keening travelled close, closer, then converged on a point between the candles. The flames flickered, then went out. Small tendrils of candle-smoke rose and spiralled to the roof of the pit. The sound echoed through the excavated site, then died.

The new cycle had begun.

Liu tempered the small smile on his lips, but in his heart was exaltation. This time he had been right. Still, there was work to be done.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he reached deep into a pocket for a knife. It glittered with the captured lowering rays of sun that would bring about dusk. Closing his eyes, and breathing deep the musky scent of the tombs and newly extinguished candles, he slashed the knife across his open palm. Like the statues void of but one fixed emotion, he clenched his fist, dropped the blade, and approached the figure of the child fighter.

A drop of blood touched the fighter's lips. Then, a second. He moved to the compassionate child, repeated the act, then waited.

His gaze darted from one child to the next.

Unacceptable as the emotion was, he could no longer fight the impatience that grew deep within him. And then he saw it.

The fighter, of course. It pleased Liu the fighter would be the first.

Orange-brown hues in the small terracotta face lightened to grey, then to warmer shades. A hint of blue surrounded the set mouth. The direct eyes turned dark and clear.

Liu touched the young face and felt cold, hard clay begin to warm. The start of a renewed life burned deep within this one.

The compassionate child figure's eyes twinkled with a suggestion of light. New colour touched the upturned smile and spoke of animation as well.

The archaeologist clasped his hands together in reserved delight. The calculations were correct. His dreams, this time, had been accurate and unflinching. The children were awakening from the dark to see the light of his authority. He would lead them to greatness as he deserved. As it was owed to him.

A faint movement in the shadow. Quick. Decided.

The brick crashed down on his head. He crumpled and fell into a tight defensive posture, face to the wall, then looked up at his attacker.

Hsu, the assistant, held the brick high for a second assault if one were needed, then slowly lowered the old weapon. Reaching under his sweater, he pulled out a medallion of a dragon. This one was etched counter-clockwise. He spoke in quiet tones. "It is too soon. The exhumation is not complete."

Liu tried to move, to protest, but his body was unwilling. He stared horrified as Hsu pulled candles out of a satchel, placed them in a single line, then set them ablaze.

The assistant beckoned something unseen, then, palms out, held it back by offering Liu as a companion on its travels.

Liu mouthed the word "no", but the wind had already started. Soon it would touch him. And when the dark came it would take his soul. He would not be the leader of these children as he deserved, as he was owed. The small ceremony performed by the assistant had reduced him to the vulnerabilities of nothing more than a common man among far too many.

"It is finished." Hsu blew out the candles and looked at Liu with pity. "Maybe an accident. Maybe it is not. You wished for more than you should have. It was not the way." The small, old man in black pants, thin sweater and sandals bowed slightly, then kicked dust over the new intruder. He turned and walked from the pit.

The sun dipped behind a hill. Colours on the horizon brightened, then turned dull. Dusk had settled and brought the end of day and a temporary halt to the subterranean work in progress. It was necessary. It was honourable. But it would have to wait.

Growing food for the masses was, for now, more important.

Liu watched through foggy eyes as the little light waned, disappeared, then turned to inky black. Walled in by culture and necessity, he took a final breath.

The calendar could not be pushed. But soon enough, there would be freedom from the darkness. Then, with another more worthy, his child army would awaken.

The trenches were quickly filled in. The pit was covered by sod.

On the surface farmers had begun to sow seed.

The Haunted House

E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is today best remembered for her children's classics The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Railway Children (1906). However, she also wrote a number of short horror stories, often hiding her gender beneath the byline E. Nesbit or, following her marriage in 1880, E. Bland or Mrs Hubert Bland .

The best of these stories are collected in Grim Tales (1893) , Something Wrong (1893) , Fear (1910) and In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (1988), the latter selected and introduced by Hugh Lamb and expanded by a further seven stories for Ash-Tree Press in 2000 .

Her other books include the fantasies The Story of the Amulet (1906) , The Enchanted Castle (1907) , The House of Arden (1908) , Harding's Luck (1909) , The Magic City (1910) and Dormant (1911), plus the collections The Book of Dragons (1899) and Nine Unlikely Tales for Children (1901) .

The following story was originally published in The Strand Magazine for December 1913 under the author's E. Bland pseudonym

It was by the merest accident that Desmond ever went to the Haunted House. He had been away from England for six years, and the nine months' leave taught him how easily one drops out of one's place.

He had taken rooms at the Greyhound before he found that there was no reason why he should stay in Elmstead rather than in any other of London's dismal outposts. He wrote to all the friends whose addresses he could remember, and settled himself to await their answers.

He wanted someone to talk to, and there was no one. Meantime he lounged on the horsehair sofa with the advertisements, and his pleasant grey eyes followed line after line with intolerable boredom. Then, suddenly, "Halloa!" he said, and sat up. This is what he read:

A HAUNTED HOUSE. Advertiser is anxious to have phenomena investigated. Any properly accredited investigator will be given full facilities. Address, by letter only, Wildon Prior, 237 Museum Street, London.

"That's rum!" he said. Wildon Prior had been the best wicket-keeper in his club. It wasn't a common name. Anyway, it was worth trying, so he sent off a telegram.

WILDON PRIOR, 237 MUSEUM STREET, LONDON. MAY I COME TO YOU FOR A DAY OR TWO AND SEE THE GHOST — WILLIAM DESMOND

On returning the next day from a stroll there was an orange envelope on the wide Pembroke table in his parlour.

DELIGHTED — EXPECT YOU TODAY, BOOK TO CRITTENDEN FROM CHARING CROSS. WIRE TRAIN — WILDON PRIOR, ORMEHURST RECTORY, KENT.

"So that's all right," said Desmond, and went off to pack his bag and ask in the bar for a timetable. "Good old Wildon; it will be ripping, seeing him again."

A curious little omnibus, rather like a bathing-machine, was waiting outside Crittenden Station, and its driver, a swarthy, blunt-faced little man, with liquid eyes, said, "You a friend of Mr Prior, sir?" shut him up in the bathing-machine, and banged the door on him. It was a very long drive, and less pleasant than it would have been in an open carriage.

The last part of the journey was through a wood; then came a churchyard and a church, and the bathing-machine turned in at a gate under heavy trees and drew up in front of a white house with bare, gaunt windows.

"Cheerful place, upon my soul!" Desmond told himself, as he tumbled out of the back of the bathing-machine.

The driver set his bag on the discoloured doorstep and drove off. Desmond pulled a rusty chain, and a big-throated bell jangled above his head.

Nobody came to the door, and he rang again. Still nobody came, but he heard a window thrown open above the porch. He stepped back on to the gravel and looked up.

A young man with rough hair and pale eyes was looking out. Not Wildon, nothing like Wildon. He did not speak, but he seemed to be making signs; and the signs seemed to mean, "Go away!"

"I came to see Mr Prior," said Desmond. Instantly and softly the window closed.

"Is it a lunatic asylum I've come to by chance?" Desmond asked himself, and pulled again at the rusty chain.

Steps sounded inside the house, the sound of boots on stone. Bolts were short back, the door opened, and Desmond, rather hot and a little annoyed, found himself looking into a pair of very dark, friendly eyes, and a very pleasant voice said: "Mr Desmond, I presume? Do come in and let me apologize."

The speaker shook him warmly by the hand, and he found himself following down a flagged passage a man of more than mature age, well dressed, handsome, with an air of competence and alertness which we associate with what is called "a man of the world". He opened a door and led the way into a shabby, bookish, leathery room.

"Do sit down, Mr Desmond."

This must be the uncle, I suppose, Desmond thought, as he fitted himself into the shabby, perfect curves of the armchair. "How's Wildon?" he asked, aloud. "All right, I hope?"

The other looked at him. "I beg your pardon," he said, doubtfully.

"I was asking how Wildon is?"

"I am quite well, I thank you," said the other man, with some formality.

"I beg your pardon" — it was now Desmond's turn to say it — "I did not realize that your name might be Wildon, too. I meant Wildon Prior."

"I am Wildon Prior," said the other, "and you, I presume, are the expert from the Psychical Society?"

"Good Lord, no!" said Desmond. "I'm Wildon Prior's friend, and, of course, there must be two Wildon Priors."

"You sent the telegram? You are Mr Desmond? The Psychical Society were to send an expert, and I thought"

"I see," said Desmond; "and I thought you were Wildon Prior, an old friend of mine — a young man," he said, and half rose.

"Now, don't," said Wildon Prior. "No doubt it is my nephew who is your friend. Did he know you were coming? But of course he didn't. I am wandering. But I'm exceedingly glad to see you. You will stay, will you not? If you can endure to be the guest of an old man. And I will write to Will tonight and ask him to join us."

"That's most awfully good of you," Desmond assured him. "I shall be glad to stay. I was awfully pleased when I saw Wildon's name in the paper, because" And out came the tale of Elmstead, its loneliness and disappointment.

Mr Prior listened with the kindest interest. "And you have not found your friends? How sad! But they will write to you. Of course, you left your address?"

"I didn't, by Jove!" said Desmond. "But I can write. Can I catch the post?"

"Easily," the elder man assured him. "Write your letters now. My man shall take them to the post, and then we will have dinner, and I will tell you about the ghost."

Desmond wrote his letters quickly, Mr Prior just then reappearing.

"Now I'll take you to your room," he said, gathering the letters in long, white hands. "You'll like a rest. Dinner at eight."

The bedchamber, like the parlour, had a pleasant air of worn luxury and accustomed comfort.

"I hope you will be comfortable," the host said, with courteous solicitude. And Desmond was quite sure that he would.

Three covers were laid, the swarthy man who had driven Desmond from the station stood behind the host's chair, and a figure came towards Desmond and his host from the shadows beyond the yellow circles of the silver-sticked candles.

"My assistant, Mr Verney," said the host, and Desmond surrendered his hand to the limp, damp touch of the man who had seemed to say to him, from the window of the porch, "Go away!" Was Mr Prior perhaps a doctor who received "paying guests", persons who were, in Desmond's phrase, "a bit balmy"? But he had said "assistant".

"I thought," said Desmond, hastily, "you would be a clergyman. The Rectory, you know — I thought Wildon, my friend Wildon, was staying with an uncle who was a clergyman."

"Oh no," said Mr Prior. "I rent the Rectory. The rector thinks it is damp. The church is disused, too. It is not considered safe, and they can't afford to restore it. Claret to Mr Desmond, Lopez." And the swarthy, blunt-faced man filled his glass.

"I find this place very convenient for my experiments. I dabble a little in chemistry, Mr Desmond, and Verney here assists me."

Verney murmured something that sounded like "only too proud", and subsided.

"We all have our hobbies, and chemistry is mine," Mr Prior went on. "Fortunately, I have a little income which enables me to indulge it. Wildon, my nephew, you know, laughs at me, and calls it the science of smells. But it's absorbing, very absorbing."

After dinner Verney faded away, and Desmond and his host stretched their feet to what Mr Prior called a "handful of fire", for the evening had grown chill.

"And now," Desmond said, "won't you tell me the ghost story?"

The other glanced round the room.

"There isn't really a ghost story at all. It's only that — well, it's never happened to me personally, but it happened to Verney, poor lad, and he's never been quite his own self since."

Desmond flattered himself on his insight.

"Is mine the haunted room?" he asked.

"It doesn't come to any particular room," said the other, slowly, "nor to any particular person."

"Anyone may happen to see it?"

"No one sees it. It isn't the kind of ghost that's seen or heard."

"I'm afraid I'm rather stupid, but I don't understand," said

Desmond, roundly. "How can it be a ghost, if you neither hear it nor see it?"

"I did not say it was a ghost," Mr Prior corrected. "I only say that there is something about this house which is not ordinary. Several of my assistants have had to leave; the thing got on their nerves."

"What became of the assistants?" asked Desmond.

"Oh, they left, you know; they left," Prior answered, vaguely. "One couldn't expect them to sacrifice their health. I sometimes think — village gossip is a deadly thing, Mr Desmond — that perhaps they were prepared to be frightened; that they fancy things. I hope that Psychical Society's expert won't be a neurotic. But even without being a neurotic one might — but you don't believe in ghosts, Mr Desmond. Your Anglo-Saxon common sense forbids it."

"I'm afraid I'm not exactly Anglo-Saxon," said Desmond. "On my father's side I'm pure Celt; though I know I don't do credit to the race."

"And on your mother's side?" Mr Prior asked, with extraordinary eagerness; an eagerness so sudden and disproportioned to the question that Desmond stared. A faint touch of resentment as suddenly stirred in him, the first spark of antagonism to his host.

"Oh," he said lightly, "I think I must have Chinese blood, I get on so well with the natives in Shanghai, and they tell me I owe my nose to a Red Indian great-grandmother."

"No Negro blood, I suppose?" the host asked, with almost discourteous insistence.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Desmond answered. He meant to say it laughing, but he didn't. "My hair, you know — it's a very stiff curl it's got, and my mother's people were in the West Indies a few generations ago. You're interested in distinctions of race, I take it?"

"Not at all, not at all," Mr Prior surprisingly assured him; "but, of course, any details of your family are necessarily interesting to me. I feel," he added, with another of his winning smiles, "that you and I are already friends."

Desmond could not have reasoningly defended the faint quality of dislike that had begun to tinge his first pleasant sense of being welcomed and wished for as a guest.

"You're very kind," he said; "it's jolly of you to take in a stranger like this."

Mr Prior smiled, handed him the cigar-box, mixed whisky and soda, and began to talk about the history of the house.

"The foundations are almost certainly thirteenth century. It was a priory, you know. There's a curious tale, by the way, about the man Henry gave it to when he smashed up the monasteries. There was a curse; there seems always to have been a curse"

The gentle, pleasant, high-bred voice went on. Desmond thought he was listening, but presently he roused himself and dragged his attention back to the words that were being spoken.

" that made the fifth death There is one every hundred years, and always in the same mysterious way."

Then he found himself on his feet, incredibly sleepy, and heard himself say: "These old stories are tremendously interesting. Thank you very much. I hope you won't think me very uncivil, but I think I'd rather like to turn in; I feel a bit tired, somehow."

"But of course, my dear chap."

Mr Prior saw Desmond to his room.

"Got everything you want? Right. Lock the door if you should feel nervous. Of course, a lock can't keep ghosts out, but I always feel as if it could," and with another of those pleasant, friendly laughs he was gone.

William Desmond went to bed a strong young man, sleepy indeed beyond his experience of sleepiness, but well and comfortable. He awoke faint and trembling, lying deep in the billows of the feather bed; and lukewarm waves of exhaustion swept through him. Where was he? What had happened? His brain, dizzy and weak at first, refused him any answer. When he remembered, the abrupt spasm of repulsion which he had felt so suddenly and unreasonably the night before came back to him in a hot, breathless flush. He had been drugged, he had been poisoned!

"I must get out of this," he told himself, and blundered out of bed towards the silken bell-pull that he had noticed the night before hanging near the door.

As he pulled it, the bed and the wardrobe and the room rose up round him and fell on him, and he fainted.

When he next knew anything someone was putting brandy to his lips. He saw Prior, the kindest concern in his face. The assistant, pale and watery-eyed. The swarthy manservant, stolid, silent, and expressionless. He heard Verney say to Prior: "You see it was too much — I told you—"

"Hush," said Prior, "he's coming to."

Four days later Desmond, lying on a wicker chair on the lawn, was a little disinclined for exertion, but no longer ill. Nourishing foods and drinks, beef-tea, stimulants, and constant care — these had brought him back to something like his normal state. He wondered at the vague suspicions, vaguely remembered, of that first night; they had all been proved absurd by the unwavering care and kindness of everyone in the Haunted House.

"But what caused it?" he asked his host, for the fiftieth time. "What made me make such a fool of myself?" And this time Mr Prior did not put him off, as he had always done before by begging him to wait till he was stronger.

"I am afraid, you know," he said, "that the ghost really did come to you. I am inclined to revise my opinion of the ghost."

"But why didn't it come again?"

"I have been with you every night, you know," his host reminded him. And, indeed, the sufferer had never been left alone since the ringing of his bell on that terrible first morning.

"And now," Mr Prior went on, "if you will not think me inhospitable, I think you will be better away from here. You ought to go the seaside."

"There haven't been any letters for me, I suppose?" Desmond said, a little wistfully.

"Not one. I suppose you gave the right address? Ormehurst Rectory, Crittenden, Kent?"

"I don't think I put Crittenden," said Desmond. "I copied the address from your telegram." He pulled the pink paper from his pocket.

"Ah, that would account," said the other.

"You've been most awfully kind all through," said Desmond, abruptly.

"Nonsense, my boy," said the elder man, benevolently. "I only wish Willie had been able to come. He's never written, the rascal! Nothing but the telegram to say he could not come and was writing."

"I suppose he's having a jolly time somewhere," said Desmond, enviously; "but look here — do tell me about the ghost, if there's anything to tell. I'm almost quite well now, and I should like to know what it was that made a fool of me like that."

"Well" — Mr Prior looked round him at the gold and red of dahlias and sunflowers, gay in the September sunshine — "here, and now, I don't know that it could do any harm. You remember that story of the man who got this place from Henry VIII and the curse? That man's wife is buried in a vault under the church. Well, there were legends, and I confess I was curious to see her tomb. There are iron gates to the vault. Locked, they were. I opened them with an old key — and I couldn't get them to shut again."

"Yes?" Desmond said.

"You think I might have sent for a locksmith; but the fact is, there is a small crypt to the church, and I have used that crypt as a supplementary laboratory. If I had called anyone in to see to the lock they would have gossiped. I should have been turned out of my laboratory — perhaps out of my house."

"I see."

"Now the curious thing is," Mr Prior went on, lowering his voice, "that it is only since that grating was opened that this house has been what they call 'haunted'. It is since then that all the things have happened."

"What things?"

"People staying here, suddenly ill — just as you were. And the attacks always seem to indicate loss of blood. And" He hesitated a moment. "That wound in your throat. I told you you had hurt yourself falling when you rang the bell. But that was not true. What is true is that you had on your throat just the same little white wound that all the others have had. I wish" — he frowned — "that I could get that vault gate shut again. The key won't turn."

"I wonder if I could do anything?" Desmond asked, secretly convinced that he had hurt his throat in falling, and that his host's story was, as he put it, "all moonshine". Still, to put a lock right was but a slight return for all the care and kindness. "I'm an engineer, you know," he added, awkwardly, and rose. "Probably a little oil. Let's have a look at this same lock."

He followed Mr Prior through the house to the church. A bright, smooth old key turned readily, and they passed into the building, musty and damp, where ivy crawled through the broken windows, and the blue sky seemed to be laid close against the holes in the roof. Another key clicked in the lock of a low door beside what had once been the Lady Chapel, a thick oak door grated back, and Mr Prior stopped a moment to light a candle that waited in its rough iron candlestick on a ledge of the stonework. Then down narrow stairs, chipped a little at the edges and soft with dust. The crypt was Norman, very simply beautiful. At the end of it was a recess, masked with a grating of rusty ironwork.

"They used to think," said Mr Prior, "that iron kept off witchcraft. This is the lock," he went on, holding the candle against the gate, which was ajar.

They went through the gate, because the lock was on the other side. Desmond worked a minute or two with the oil and feather that he had brought. Then with a little wrench the key turned and re-turned.

"I think that's all right," he said, looking up, kneeling on one knee, with the key still in the lock and his hand on it.

"May I try it?"

Mr Prior took Desmond's place, turned the key, pulled it out, and stood up. Then the key and the candlestick fell rattling on the stone floor, and the old man sprang upon Desmond.

"Now I've got you," he growled, in the darkness, and Desmond says that his spring and his clutch and his voice were like the spring and the clutch and the growl of a strong savage beast.

Desmond's little strength snapped like a twig at his first bracing of it to resistance. The old man held him as a vice holds. He had got a rope from somewhere. He was tying Desmond's arms.

Desmond hates to know that there in the dark he screamed like a caught hare. Then he remembered that he was a man, and shouted, "Help! Here! Help!"

But a hand was on his mouth, and now a handkerchief was being knotted at the back of his head. He was on the floor, leaning against something. Prior's hands had left him.

"Now," said Prior's voice, a little breathless, and the match he struck showed Desmond the stone shelves with long things on them — coffins he supposed. "Now, I'm sorry I had to do it, but science before friendship, my dear Desmond," he went on, quite courteous and friendly. "I will explain to you, and you will see that a man of honour could not act otherwise. Of course, you having no friends who know where you are is most convenient. I saw that from the first. Now I'll explain. I didn't expect you to understand by instinct. But no matter. I am, I say it without vanity, the greatest discoverer since Newton. I know how to modify men's natures. I can make men what I choose. It's all done by transfusion of blood. Lopez — you know, my man Lopez — I've pumped the blood of dogs into his veins, and he's my slave — like a dog. Verney, he's my slave, too — part dog's blood and partly the blood of people who've come from time to time to investigate the ghost, and partly my own, because I wanted him to be clever enough to help me. And there's a bigger thing behind all this. You'll understand me when I say" — here he became very technical indeed, and used many words that meant nothing to Desmond, whose thoughts dwelled more and more on his small chance of escape.

To die like a rat in a hole, a rat in a hole! If he could only loosen the handkerchief and shout again!

"Attend, can't you?" said Prior, savagely, and kicked him. "I beg your pardon, my dear chap," he went on suavely, "but this is important. So you see the elixir of life is really the blood. The blood is the life, you know, and my great discovery is that to make a man immortal, and restore his youth, one only needs blood from the veins of a man who unites in himself blood of the four great races — the four colours, black, white, red and yellow. Your blood unites these four. I took as much as I dared from you that night. I was the vampire, you know." He laughed pleasantly. "But your blood didn't act. The drug I had to give you to induce sleep probably destroyed the vital germs. And, besides, there wasn't enough of it. Now there is going to be enough!"

Desmond had been working his head against the thing behind him, easing the knot of the handkerchief down till it slipped from head to neck. Now he got his mouth free, and said, quickly: "That was not true what I said about the Chinamen and that. I was joking. My mother's people were all Devon."

"I don't blame you in the least," said Prior, quietly. "I should lie myself in your place."

And he put back the handkerchief. The candle was now burning clearly from the place where it stood — on a stone coffin. Desmond could see that the long things on the shelves were coffins, not all of stone. He wondered what this madman would do with his body when everything was over. The little wound in his throat had broken out again. He could feel the slow trickle of warmth on his neck. He wondered whether he would faint. It felt like it.

"I wish I'd brought you here the first day — it was Verney's doing, my tinkering about with pints and half-pints. Sheer waste — sheer wanton waste!"

Prior stopped and stood looking at him.

Desmond, despairingly conscious of growing physical weakness, caught himself in a real wonder as to whether this might not be a dream — a horrible, insane dream — and he could not wholly dismiss the wonder, because incredible things seemed to be adding themselves to the real horrors of the situation, just as they do in dreams. There seemed to be something stirring in the place — something that wasn't Prior. No — nor Prior's shadow, either. That was black and sprawled big across the arched roof. This was white, and very small and thin. But it stirred, it grew — now it was no longer just a line of white, but a long, narrow, white wedge and it showed between the coffin on the shelf opposite him and that coffin's lid.

And still Prior stood very still looking down on his prey. All emotion but a dull wonder was now dead in Desmond's weakened senses. In dreams if one called out, one awoke — but he could not call out. Perhaps if one moved But before he could bring his enfeebled will to the decision of movement — something else moved. The black lid of the coffin opposite rose slowly — and then suddenly fell, clattering and echoing, and from the coffin rose a form, horribly white and shrouded, and fell on Prior and rolled with him on the floor of the vault in a silent, whirling struggle. The last thing Desmond heard before he fainted in good earnest was the scream Prior uttered as he turned at the crash and saw the white-shrouded body leaping towards him.

"It's all right," he heard next. And Verney was bending over him with brandy. "You're quite safe. He's tied up and locked in the laboratory. No. That's all right, too." For Desmond's eyes had turned towards the lidless coffin. "That was only me. It was the only way I could think of, to save you. Can you walk now? Let me help you, so. I've opened the grating. Come."

Desmond blinked in the sunlight he had never thought to see again. Here he was, back in his wicker chair. He looked at the sundial on the house. The whole thing had taken less than fifty minutes.

"Tell me," said he. And Verney told him in short sentences with pauses between.

"I tried to warn you," he said, "you remember, in the window. I really believed in his experiments at first — and — he'd found out something about me — and not told. It was when I was very young. God knows I've paid for it. And when you came I'd only just found out what really had happened to the other chaps. That beast Lopez let it out when he was drunk. Inhuman brute! And I had a row with Prior that first night, and he promised me he wouldn't touch you. And then he did."

"You might have told me."

"You were in a nice state to be told anything, weren't you? He promised me he'd send you off as soon as you were well enough. And he had been good to me. But when I heard him begin about the grating and the key I knew — so I just got a sheet and"

"But why didn't you come out before?"

"I didn't dare. He could have tackled me easily if he had known what he was tackling. He kept moving about. It had to be done suddenly. I counted on just that moment of weakness when he really thought a dead body had come to life to defend you. Now I'm going to harness the horse and drive you to the police station at Crittenden. And they'll send and lock him up. Everyone knew he was as mad as a hatter, but somebody had to be nearly killed before anyone would lock him up. The law's like that, you know."

"But you — the police — won't they"

"It's quite safe," said Verney, dully. "Nobody knows but the old man, and now nobody will believe anything he says. No, he never posted your letters, of course, and he never wrote to your friend, and he put off the Psychical man. No, I can't find Lopez; he must know that something's up. He's bolted."

But he had not. They found him, stubbornly dumb, but moaning a little, crouched against the locked grating of the vault when they came, a prudent half-dozen of them, to take the old man away from the Haunted House. The master was dumb as the man. He would not speak. He has never spoken since.

Turkish Delight

Roberta Lannes

Roberta Lannes and her husband recently moved house to the idyllic suburban countryside of Santa Clarita, California, where she teaches high school fine and digital art, and advises the art, origami and underground writers' clubs. Somewhere in there, she also finds time to write, produce CD covers, and work in the garden.

Her recent appearances as a writer have included the anthologies Dark Terrors 5 , White of the Moon and Presence du Fantastique., while she also collaborated on a round-robin story with Elizabeth Massie, J.S. Russell and Brian Hodge on Ellen Datlow's Event Horizon web site. She was interviewed in the French magazine Tenebres and contributed an essay about Stephen King, while her first collection of horror stories , The Mirror of Nighty has been published by Silver Salamander Press .

" Traditional vampire stories only intrigue me in one way," reveals the author, "that being the seduction. Nowadays, even that has been superseded by the impulsive, compulsive vampire of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dracula 2000 who attack, drink and run. I wanted to write something more subtle, more about the vampires we meet in our everyday lives. Those that take something vital to ourselves against our will, yet by seduction or manipulation are far more real and frightening than the bloodsuckers.

" In the following tale, Andrew has something of value to himself and to those whose lives are empty of that which keeps us delighted and full of wonder. I liken Andrew to a Turkish Delight — merely a chocolate sweet without its prized aromatic, succulent rose jelly inside. And so a vampire story was born "

The walk home from school took Andrew up Long Row to Green Street where he lived with his mother and Aunt Molly. Two doors down from Andrew's house was an old nailer's cottage. Tourists sometimes stopped to look into its dusty windows and see the old tools and furnishings of the eighteenth-century nail maker's shop. It had little historical interest to tourists, what with the famous mill in the same town, but once in a while someone other than the schoolchildren who'd learned of it in school stopped by.

Today, as Andrew trudged up the cobbled road, he saw an unfamiliar old man and a boy about his own age staring into the cottage window. They had the look of tourists with cameras slung around their necks, small clean backpacks and hiking boots that still looked new, stiff and uncomfortable. When they heard Andrew's footsteps, they turned.

The boy was pretty, Andrew thought, almost like a girl. His dark hair was cut scraggily so that it fell over his eyes and ears in a fashionable way. His eyes were large, round and luminous on his pale face. He didn't smile. The man had small eyes, very light in colour, almost like pale aquamarine quartz, and large fuzzy eyebrows just like Andrew's granddad. He was tall and thin, with a long flat nose and around very thin lips, the skin wrinkled in vertical ravines, reminding Andrew of a cartoon skull.

"Do you live around here, son?" The man spoke as the boy turned his stare back into the cottage. He had an accent. German or Danish. Andrew wasn't good at telling one accent from another unless it was American, Spanish or French.

Andrew frowned at the man and continued walking. It didn't occur to Andrew to walk past his house that day and turn onto another street, but later he would think about how different things would have been if he had. He walked right up to the door, eyes still on the tourists, turned the doorknob, and went in.

"That must be Andy. Guess what your Aunt Molly made?" The air was full of the aroma of butter, flour and currants.

"You made scones, Auntie, I could smell them outside." Andrew set down his book bag and took off his blazer and cap.

"Go up and change your clothes, Andy, then come down and have one before they cool down."

There wasn't much better than warm Molly scones and a cup of cocoa. He hurried upstairs and changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. As he put his school shoes on the chair by the window, he looked down at the nailer's cottage. The old man had stepped away from the building into the street and was staring right up at Andrew's window. At Andrew. He thought of the scones, the hot cocoa, of his aunt waiting downstairs, but somehow he found the stranger's curious stare compelling. Then the man smiled. His teeth were very straight, large and white. Like Chiclets, Andrew thought, like dice without the dots.

"What's taking you, Andy? The scones are cooling!"

His aunt was at his door, her greying yellow apron smeared with the by-products of baking. He spun around, startled.

"Oh, Auntie, I didn't hear you coming up the stairs."

"What's out there so interesting you reckon it's worth more than a warm scone or two?" She came up beside him and looked out the window. Andrew looked as well. Nothing. No one was there, the street was deserted.

"I saw some tourists looking in the cottage and the old one tried to talk to me."

"You didn't speak with him, did you? You know what your mum says. One doesn't speak to strangers, look what happened to Wally Burdock and Gwen Shafford . They talked to strangers and both of them ended up d-e-a-d, dead."

Well, Andrew thought, that wasn't quite true. Wally, who was seventeen and in trouble with local thugs all the time, was beaten with a bat until he had terrible brain damage and his folks let the hospital take him off life support, then he died. And Gwen was raped by her stepbrother and went crazy. She was in some asylum or hospital somewhere. Still, he knew what his mum meant. She'd stopped to talk with a stranger once and the next tiling she knew after three weeks of romance, bingo, bango, no more stranger. Andrew was the result of that fiasco.

"I know. I know. I gave a good frown and came right in." He sniffed at the air. "I must have smelled them scones anyway, cause nothing ever stops me from coming in when you're baking."

His aunt grinned. "Well, then, let's have one, and I'll make you a cup of cocoa. It's getting cold outside."

Andrew followed her down the narrow stairs to the tiny kitchen. He sat down to wait. Aunt Molly had her set ways of doing things, and there would be no impatient grabbing or rushing her. She busied herself with canisters, spoons and a pan of milk.

"Tell me what you did today."

"Maths. We worked on problems. Lucky for me they're really easy."

"They are; well then, give me one and see if I can do it. It's been thirty years since I did any maths, but I'm still pretty smart for an old lady."

"You're not old, Auntie. Mum is older than you and she's still young. She says so all the time." His mouth watered at the smell of the cocoa stirred in the hot milk. His aunt set the cup before him, then went to the counter for a scone. He watched as she broke open the dusty cream-coloured mass and steam rolled out into the warm kitchen.

"Give me a problem, then, Andy. See if I can do it." She sat across from him, eager for his usual reaction to her scones.

A bit annoyed at having to speak when he wanted to eat, he licked his lips and stared at his scone. "All right, Auntie. If a train travels at 50 mph, and it took the train four hours and ten minutes to get from London to Newcastle, what is the distance from London to Newcastle?"

"Oh, my, that is a tough one. Let me think" She scratched her head and wrinkled her mouth in concentration. "Do you know the answer?"

Andrew nodded. "Do you?" He bit into the scone. It was almost too good. He swooned.

"Well, 218 miles give or take few miles. Yes?"

"It's got a decimal figure in it, but you're close. That's really good, Auntie."

They heard a key in the lock. "That'll be your mum. We should ask her to solve one of your problems."

Andrew's mother came in with her arms full of groceries. "Come help."

"Mum, my scone's getting cold."

His aunt put her hands on his shoulders. "You stay here, Andy, I'll get them."

He grinned up at his aunt then took a sip of the cocoa. She always made it a bit too rich, just the way he liked it.

While his mum and aunt put away groceries, Andrew thought about the pretty boy and old man he'd seen. He wondered why the man had spoken to him, why the boy seemed so sad. Why would he want to know if Andrew lived nearby? What could he have wanted?

"There was just an accident at the triangle. I heard in Safeway. Young boy crossing with his granddad got hit by a lorry."

Andrew spun around in his chair. "Just now?"

"Just a few minutes ago. Didn't you hear the siren? I was going to go have a look, but I have frozen puddings in my bags. What, you think you know who it might have been?"

"May I go look? Please? I might know him. I might."

His mother looked to his aunt and back to him. His aunt was the lenient one, over-feeding and over-loving him, while his mother was bitter and restrictive. His aunt gave his mum a pleading look. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

"Finish the scone and cocoa, then you and your Aunt Molly can go take a look while I start supper."

"Me? You want me to go with him. Bernadette, I look like I've been in all day cleaning, which I have. Can't he go on his own?"

"It's almost dark."

"Please, Mum, I just want to take a look. I won't stay. Really, I promise."

"You'll wear a coat?"

"Yeah, yeah, I will. Promise."

"Go, then, but don't dawdle."

Andrew grabbed the unfinished scone and ran upstairs to get a jacket. He knew it was the pretty boy. Just knew. It could be any one of the boys he knew, but there was more of a reason for a stranger to be hit. The triangle confused tourists. They often got caught out in the traffic. He hoped that the boy wasn't hurt too badly.

He shouted goodbye to his mum and aunt as he raced out the front door. He ran down Green Street to Bridge Street until he reached the triangle. There were two police cars and a casualty van. The crowd was large and traffic backed up Bridge Street as far as he could see in both directions. Frank Delaney rushed over when he saw Andrew at the edge of the crowd.

"Did you see it happen?" Frank shivered in just a football jersey.

"You mean the accident. No, my mum just told me about it. She heard about it in Safeway. Did you see?"

"No, dammit. I was doing my report for Ol' Noddy Bennett. Who d'you think it was?"

Andrew rose up on his toes as the attendants lifted the stretcher into the van. The body was entirely covered by a sheet. "Dunno. He's dead. Can't see his face." His throat was tight and his eyes burned to cry.

As he surveyed the crowd, Andrew saw the old man with a police officer, his bony hand over his face, hiding his tears, shaking his head. When he took his hand away from his face to get a handkerchief, he turned to look right at Andrew, as if he knew the boy was there. His eyes lingered on him until Andrew felt his stomach clench. Then the old man turned back to the police officer and blew his nose.

"I hate missing all the blood and guts," Frank complained. "Bet it's someone from school. Probably that big baby, Tim Broadbank. His mum won't let him cross the street without holding her hand still . He's a year ahead of us, you know."

"Tim? No. Don't think so. I saw a boy with his granddad an hour ago up by my house. They were standing at the nailer's cottage. The granddad is right over there with the police crying his bloody eyes out. It had to be his grandson."

"D'you know them?" Frank rubbed his hands together.

Andrew shook his head. "Tourists. They had the look."

"Just think. You go on a trip with your granddad and end up going home in a coffin. That's a sodding awful vacation if I ever heard"

Andrew couldn't take his eyes off the old man. Frank went on talking but he didn't really hear. The old man didn't look at him again, but Andrew watched for his eyes to wash over him again. He shivered.

" so they stuck these big pins in his eyes."

"Pins?" He turned to see Frank going on. "Hey, Frank, I had better get on. Supper'll be ready and my mum wasn't happy to let me come out here as it is."

"Yeah, well, all right. If I find anything out, I'll tell you Monday. See you."

"Right, see you." He gave the old man one more lingering glance, then walked away. Just as Andrew turned up Green Street thinking of his supper, the old man searched the crowd.

Andrew's legs felt leaden as he trudged up his street. He wanted to go to the old man, comfort him. Even as he felt it, he knew it was unreasonable. He didn't know this stranger about who everything seemed suspiciously odd. As he reached his door, he wondered if he had just spoken to the old man, kept them a few minutes more, the boy might not have been killed.

The next morning, Andrew grabbed up the Belper News from the doorstep. He was certain there would be a report of the accident. Not much qualified as news in town. This was frontpage stuff. And there it was.

Visitor Accident

By Rosalie Bishop

A man and his ten-year-old ward, travelling through England, stopped in Belper on their way to Matlock Baths. At approximately 5.00 p.m., they were crossing at the triangle near the Mill Park when a lorry, on its way to Derby, hit the boy who was killed on impact. The two visitors were unfamiliar with the traffic patterns in that area and the boy stepped out in front of the lorry. The driver was not at fault in this tragic accident. The boy's guardian plans to return to his native Turkey within the week. Local families have rallied to give the man a place to stay and meals until his plane departs from Heathrow on Thursday. Anyone interested in giving aid or expressing sympathies can contact Elizabeth Horner at the Methodist Chapel.

Andrew was now more curious than before. Turkey . He'd never much thought about people living there, though he'd heard of it in geography. What he did know was that he loved Turkish delight. The rosy jelly centre with the yummy chocolate all around made him think of the occasional bouts of happiness his mother had, when she bought them a bag of sweets, always with some Turkish delight for Andrew. Did Turkish delight originate in Turkey? Was the jelly part Turkish or the chocolate or both? For once, he couldn't wait for Monday. He'd go straight to the school library after class.

The library was a small room that had once been a supply cabinet and coat room. Books lined every wall and two half-sized bookcases divided the room. Paintings done by the infants covered the wall over the librarian's desk. Andrew loved the smell of the books and the ancient oiled tables where students could read. The library was empty except for Miss Eklund, a woman the kids called the Swede. She was in her fifties, wore her hair clipped short, had funny little hairs on her chin and smelled of men's aftershave. The Swede was actually a wrestler, and Miss Eklund had a stocky build like a man, hence the moniker. She let the girls get away with murder and slapped the back of boys' heads if they spoke.

He had a book on Turkey when Frank appeared around the corner. He grabbed at Andrew's sleeve to see the book. He scanned it then looked over at Miss Eklund who was deep into stamping loan cards.

"Hey, you get in trouble when you got in Friday?"

"Naw. You?"

"Hell, no. Nobody comes home until late at my house. My dad goes straight to the pub from work and my mum well, she's with her friends a lot. Nick's living with his girlfriend in Sheffield now, so it's just me."

"Did you see anything after I left?"

Frank took the book on Turkey from Andrew's hand. "Hey, did you know that the old guy is from Turkey? I was standing there while this lady was asking him about the kid."

Andrew put the book under his arm. "Yeah? Really? What'd you hear? I read the newspaper but it doesn't say much."

"He was staying at the Hollingshead Hotel. The kid wasn't his grandson, but a friend of the family. He was taking the kid to the baths because he had some kind of illness. Leukaemia or something. Hell, the baths don't do anything and anybody who knows something knows that. It's just a tourist attraction. A joke, really."

"Wow. I saw the kid. He looked sad or sick. Weak like. Maybe he was going to die anyway." Andrew watched Frank's face grow more animated.

"Or maybe the old guy pushed the kid in front of the lorry to make sure he didn't suffer. Hey, that would be sinister, like when"

Miss Eklund drifted over to the boys. "You two want to make conversation, do it outside. This is a library. We don't converse in the library."

Frank winked at Andrew and fled. Andrew checked the book out to take home.

Frank wasn't in school the next day. Andrew wanted to share his discoveries about Turkey with him, not that it was the kind of thing Frank would have wanted to know. Turkey was right near Russia. It had the Black Sea on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. The country had its own language, called Turkish. He hadn't gone far enough in the book to learn if Turkish delight came from Turkey, though. He also read that they had bad earthquakes there. Maybe Frank would find all the deaths that came from their earthquakes interesting. That was the kind of thing he found fascinating. On his way home, he stopped by Frank's. Mrs Delaney answered the door.

"Is Frank at home?"

Her face screwed up and she leaned over to put her nose about an inch from Andrew's. She stank of brandy. "Well, now, he's supposed to be with you, Mr Andrew Crawford, so I should be asking you just that thing. He told me he was going to meet you on the tarmac and you were both going to the church to see about helping that old man."

"To the church" Andrew tried to recall which church that might be. "Well, I must've got it wrong, Mrs Delaney. I thought we were meeting here. I'd better get on to the church then, hadn't I?" He smiled sheepishly.

"You two aren't cooking something up together, are you?"

"No, Mrs Delaney. We honestly want to make the man feel better. His kid was about our age and we just thought"

"How nice. You had better get going, Andrew. It'll be dark soon." She shut the door before he could reply.

Why hadn't Frank told him he was going to the church? And which church? He couldn't recall. He walked down to the Catholic church which was closest and looked for someone to help him. A washerwoman told him the old man was staying with a family up by Strutts School. The Methodist chapel was where they were coordinating aid for the Turkish man. He thanked the woman and started off in the direction of Strutts. It occurred to him that his Aunt Molly would be sick with worry if he didn't stop home first. But then he risked being told he couldn't go at all.

It was a long walk down to Strutts. The only way to get there before dark would be to take a bus. He checked for change in his pocket and raced to the bus stop where a bus had just pulled up. It was the number 14 that stopped right across from the Methodist chapel at the bus station. Just his luck.

Though the bus was crowded, he got a seat by the window behind the driver. He watched the people walking determinedly up and down the streets, the cars moving ever so slowly in the traffic of the A6. Another bus crawled along going in the opposite direction. They were across from each other at one point. Andrew stared into the other bus, scanning the faces. He stopped at the old man, the one he had seen by the cottage. He was sitting with his arm around another boy, smiling his dicey smile, and listening to the boy's animated chatter. Andrew felt a flurry of butterflies in his belly before he really looked at the boy, knowing anyway that it was Frank Delaney.

Andrew spun in his seat, hands to the windows, and shouted Frank's name. "Frank, Frank. Oh, no" The bus driver asked Andrew to quiet down, but Andrew had already gone silent. He kept his eyes on the bus as it ambled on in the other direction. He wasn't certain, but he thought that for a second the old man looked right at him.

He got off at King Street and walked back up towards home. When he told his mum and auntie what was going on, they would understand why he was late. He hoped so. Nothing else had gone right that day.

"It's none of your business what that Frank Delaney does with his life, Andy. If he wants to run off with the Queen, he can, but you have your own life to live."

His mother started on him before dinner and it was now his bedtime. His auntie had listened carefully and said, "What a shame." But when his mum got home, Molly retold Andrew's story with unusual histrionics. She used expressions like "kidnapped" and "paedophile", working his mum into a frantic state.

"And if he was kidnapped, all the better then that you keep away from that boy. Frank finds trouble where there isn't any, isn't that right, Molly?"

Aunt Molly was wringing her hands and nodding. "At least the authorities know who he is and where he's staying. That old man isn't going to get far."

Andrew's mum made moaning noises in her throat. "Let's call the police. It can't hurt. If it's innocent, then we'll just feel like fools, but if Frank was kidnapped, they'll be glad of our call."

As his mum and auntie got on the telephone, Andrew sneaked out the back door. He had to get over to Frank's. The bus had been going in the direction of his house. It could all have been innocent. Couldn't it?

This time, when Mrs Delaney answered the door, a strange man barked from upstairs to get back to him. She looked dishevelled in her bathrobe and her face flushed in the light of the foyer.

"What's it now? You get it wrong again? Were you supposed to meet up at school then?"

"You mean Frank's not here?"

She shuddered at his anxious tone. "No, Frank is not here. What is going on, Andrew Crawford?"

Andrew looked down at his feet. "I think he's gone off with someone. I saw him on the bus with the old man whose ward was killed at the triangle last week. I thought maybe they were coming here."

Though she looked a bit panicked, Mrs Delaney held her robe shut at her throat and said, "Frankie does as he pleases. He's tough enough to take care of himself. I'll worry if he don't come home for days. He's like his brother that way." The man's voice came from upstairs again, more insistent this time. Mrs Delaney lowered her voice to Andrew. "Don't you worry, Andrew Crawford. Frankie's all right. Go home." Then she shut the door on him, again.

He ran home, hoping his mum and auntie were consumed by the police and hadn't noticed he'd gone, but there they were, in the street, a police van pulled up to the house, two coppers talking to them.

"Where the hell did you go, you stupid, stupid boy?" His mother grabbed his arm and yanked him into the house. "You knew you'd scare me to death, didn't you?" She was slapping at him. He kept his arms up as she flailed. "How dare you!"

His Aunt Molly came in with the police officers and shouted for her sister to stop. One of the police officers grabbed at his mum. His Aunt Molly swept him into her arms.

"Mrs, it's no good hitting the boy. Stop. Relax. We'll talk to him."

"Bernadette, go upstairs and wash your face in cold water. I'll talk with Andy and the police. Go on."

His mum ripped herself from the policeman's grasp and growled, foam at the corners of her mouth. "You'll do no such thing. He's my son. I'll deal with him."

The constable shook his head. "Mrs, do as your sister says. You take this into your own hands, you'll be leaving with us ."

Andrew tried not to cry, but he couldn't stop himself. He was more afraid than he was sad, but tears came anyway.

"Look what you've done, Bernadette. Andrew's in tears. Go upstairs. Go, now."

His mother stomped upstairs, but he knew she wouldn't wash her face or anything else. She'd stew in her rage until she couldn't stand it any longer and come hit him again. His auntie tried to stop it, but she didn't have any place else to live, so she turned away when she failed. Andrew felt sorry for her, thankful that at least she tried.

One of the police officers sat down beside Andrew and asked him a hundred questions. Or so it seemed. It was past his bedtime and he was beginning to fall asleep. When the man decided he had enough information, he told Andrew they were going to go by the Delaneys' house. Then the constable asked if Andrew felt safe enough to stay in his house. That they had somewhere else he could stay.

"It'll be all right. She gets upset easily. But she always cools down. Besides, I have my auntie." Aunt Molly grinned from across the room.

"Okay, then. But you call us if things get heated again. Don't be afraid." The police officer looked to Aunt Molly then back to Andrew. "We'll let you know what our investigation turns up."

"Yes, please," Andrew managed. His eyelids sagging, body limp.

Last thing he heard was his auntie opening the blanket chest to get him an extra bit of warmth.

When Andrew woke, he knew half the day had gone. Though it was grey out, he could tell by the angle of the light in his room. His mum was off at work, surely, and his auntie was probably cleaning someone's house, since it was Wednesday. He dressed in his school clothes and went down to the kitchen. His auntie was sitting at the table having lunch.

"Ah, well, look who finally got himself up. Did you sleep all right?"

"Yes, Aunt Molly. I don't remember going up to bed, though. Is Mum all right?"

"One of those nice policemen carried you up. You fell asleep before they reached the door, and I knew I'd never get you up those stairs alone."

"Is Mum okay?"

"What do you care? She beats you terribly and wails into the night about how awful you are to make her worry. She doesn't deserve you, Andy. She was too young to have a child alone in the first place. It should have been me. I'm a better mum to you than she is." She stopped, looking away from Andrew. "I'm sorry. I know you love your mum. Sometimes, I can't help myself. The truth slips out. Forgive me."

"I love you too, Aunt Molly. Don't be mad at Mum. She's unhappy."

His auntie smirked at him. "She and all the rest of us miserable old women."

"You're not old."

She looked Andrew over. "You think you can go to school now?"

He looked at the clock over the sink. It was nearly noon. "Four more classes after midday. Yeah. I'm okay, now. Are you cleaning today?"

Aunt Molly set a sack on the table. "Here's a sandwich, then. There's a note inside, but I'll telephone the school and let them know you're on your way. And yes, not a day goes by I don't have a house to clean. I got a cancellation today, that's all."

"Thanks, Auntie. You're the best!"

"Oh!" Andrew stopped at the door as his auntie spoke. "Your friend Frank is fine. You'll see him in school, I'd wager."

"Thanks!" Andrew closed the door too hard, but he hardly heard it. He ran to school, anxious to learn what had happened to Frank.

He caught up with Frank on his way to class. When he saw Andrew, his friend frowned.

"What? You mad at me?"

"You pissed off my mum, you stupid idiot. She told me to get lost after school cause she was entertaining her friends; so I told her I was meeting you at the church. She just guessed we was going to visit that old guy. You really ruined it for me. When the police showed up, she got even angrier. Don't you get it? Can't you be cool?"

Andrew was speechless. Wouldn't Frank have done the same for him if he'd seen Andrew on the bus with the old man? Wouldn't Frank have suspected something was up with the old man being friendly to another boy right after his ward died?

Frank walked off. Nothing bad had happened to Frank, and that was good, but couldn't he see that Andrew's concern was heartfelt and real? Couldn't he understand that? He hadn't meant to make Mrs Delaney angry. Andrew did his best not to cry. He hung his head and shoulders as he went to class.

He was listless the rest of his day in school. He questioned everything from the moment he saw the old man at the nailer's cottage with his ward. Were all the strange things he saw and felt just his imagination? Didn't it seem odd that the old man stayed around Belper after the accident? That he seemed happy and chatty on the bus with Frank? It was creepy. Very creepy.

All the way home, Andrew kept his head down, watching his feet as he went. When he got there, his mother was remote, ashamed of her behaviour, but unable or refusing to apologize and make it up to Andrew. His auntie was quiet, on edge that she'd set off her sister. He felt very alone.

Up in his room, after he did his homework, Andrew sat in his window staring down at the nailer's cottage. Growing up, he often sat there, wondering what the street looked like 200 years before when the nailer was busy making his nails and the smoke from his furnace curled upwards, meeting the clouds. Were mothers and their sons walking by telling their boys about how their fathers worked in the building trade, and needed the nails? How the nailer had no competition, therefore had a grand house up on the hill near the Lutheran church? Did the sons grow up wanting to be a nailer and have grand houses?

Was one of those boys the great-great-granddad to his own father, whom he'd never met? What did his father do now? Was he a builder, a sales clerk, or a doctor? His mother told Andrew little about him. Aunt Molly, well, she had told him all he knew now.

"Don't you dare tell your mum I've told you about him. She'd have a fit. You still want to know?"

"Yes, Auntie. Please." He was about six, or maybe he'd been five.

"Well, his name was William, but your mum called him Will. She didn't know when she met him that he was married, but he turned out to be the husband of a very wealthy woman on Jersey. Her parents were very very rich and they all lived in a palace of a house. Of course, Will told your mum he was miserable, no one in his wife's family respected him and expected that he continue the family business, which had him on the road five days a week. He'd once loved his wife a lot, but she wouldn't have children because it would ruin her figure. She was evidently very vain.

"Your mum was far prettier ten years ago than she is now, and Will fell deeply and quickly in love with her. I believe that. Your mum was cautious, only then because she knew he travelled a lot and she wanted someone closer. He did what he could to stay close to Belper for almost a month, but then his wife's family got suspicious and he disappeared. He wrote to me once. I was married to your Uncle Phillip, then. He asked me to tell Bernadette that he would never forget her. That she'd made him happier than he'd ever known, but he was married. He explained his entire situation to me, but I thought it best that it all remain a mystery. I told your mum I thought he was probably married and a cad and to leave it at that. A month later, she realized that you were on your way.

"She was extremely hurt by Will abandoning her. When your Uncle Phillip died suddenly and left me with huge debts, your mum and I found we needed each other too much to dwell on any one betrayal or loss. We agreed that you would be the one thing that made up for it all. And you have. One day, when you're all grown up, we'll see if we can find your father."

Andrew thought about that every time his mother beat him.

It was with his father that she was truly angry. But he could never say that. That would betray his auntie's confidence. And that confidence had given him all there was of his father. It was too precious to let go.

The next day, it rained. The class stayed inside instead of going out to the playground. Frank did not attempt to talk to Andrew, nor did he acknowledge Andrew when he tried to speak with him. One of the girls who fancied Andrew, thrilled by the fact that there was no one to take Andrew away, flirted with him, completely embarrassing him. Andrew's fleeting attempts at attracting attention, praying someone would save him, went unseen. When she told him she'd like to be his girlfriend, he mumbled something about his mother not allowing him to have girlfriends and bolted.

At the bottom of Green Street he saw the tall, thin figure of a man, his face covered by an umbrella, standing across from his home. Andrew knew it was the old man even before he turned to look at him. He continued to walk up the street, then stopped a few feet away, suddenly taken by a thought.

Perhaps this was his granddad. He had found out that his son had sired a child and was looking for Andrew everywhere. Maybe, the boy with him had been his brother! What if his father had fled his unhappy marriage and moved to Turkey? And that was why the old man was friendly with Frank? To find out if he was the lost child he'd been looking for! Why hadn't he thought of this before?

The old man stepped close to Andrew. "Do you live around here?"

"Yes, there." Andrew pointed across the way. "You asked me that before, but then I didn't know it was you."

"You know who I am, then?" The stranger smiled, pleased.

"My father's father?" Andrew's heart was beating so fast, soaring with desperate hope.

"Yes!" The old man put his hand over his mouth. "My grandson! It is you!"

"Granddad?"

"Yes! It is I. What do they call you ?" He looked away a moment, which to Andrew felt like an eternity. "Andy, isn't it?"

"Yes, Granddad. Andy."

"I've come to take you home." The old man's face held such warmth and benevolence. Andrew was about to burst with joy.

"To my father?"

He nodded. "To your father. He will be so pleased to see you. The whole family will."

"I have a whole family? Oh, Granddad. Really?"

"Yes, I'll tell you all about them. But the aeroplane leaves from Heathrow tomorrow. We will have to leave now if we are going to make it. I have a hotel room near Paddington."

"But Mum. Auntie Molly." The lights were on in the kitchen and he knew his auntie was busy with supper.

"They've had you for ten years. It's time your father gets to know you, yes?"

The flicker of fear, the moment of hesitation melted into decision. He would go where a real family awaited him. The unknown, for which his mum and auntie had long prepared him to meet with trepidation and reluctance, was suddenly a welcome place.

"Yes, all right. But my clothes? I've got my school blazer and"

"There is a suitcase full of clothes for you in the hotel. Have you ever been to London before?"

"Granddad, I've never even been in a taxi!"

"Then a taxi we shall take to Derby. Then a first-class coach on the train just for you."

"I'll need a passport. Won't I need papers or something? On television, when they"

"Yes! Yes, my son. You'll have all of that. I have taken care of everything." The old man squeezed Andrew's shoulder, grinning down at Andrew. "Everything."

Andrew grinned back. "Is my family rich then, Granddad?"

"We are an old and wealthy family, my son."

"Yes, Auntie told me. You don't mind if she told me, do you? She's kept the secret from Mum all these years."

"Of course not. When you write to your mother and aunt, once you are settled, it will no longer be a secret. You can relax and be free."

Suddenly, Andrew realized that it was no longer raining and a taxi waited at the bottom of the street. It was dark, the streets glistened, his life was ahead of him and he was going to his father's home!

Of course, there was no father waiting, though there was a rich family on a huge estate in Turkey. Granddad told Andrew once he was on the aeroplane, strapped into a seat in first class 33,000 feet up in the air, that he would one day help him find his father. For now though, there was an ancient and revered family waiting just for him in a home far grander than anything he could imagine, where he would never feel lonely again.

Andrew realized then, too late, that the words his mum and auntie had bantered about that evening two days ago, "kidnapped" and "paedophile" now related to him. He told Granddad this, but the old man denied it. Andrew had been chosen . He was special. No one would ever touch him in that way; he was a sacred vessel. Everything the old man said was full of vagaries and obfuscations. Andrew couldn't get a straight answer. The long limousine ride lulled Andrew into a series of naps, each time waking him into the nightmare. They finally slowed as they came to a towering wall of pale bricks covered with climbing vines. Two men without shirts on and fabric wrapped around their heads pulled on the iron gate in the wall until it was open wide enough for the limousine.

When Andrew saw the great mansion, he still hoped that his father really was inside and that Granddad had just been playing around with him. Within were many other boys and girls, some near his age, some younger and older. They spoke many languages and dressed in white, from neck to toes. They wandered about freely, but they all seemed sad like the boy who'd died on the triangle, their eyes empty.

Granddad sat on the chair beside the large bed that would be Andrew's. Andrew changed into a white shirt and trousers and white sandals. Granddad watched, but was not curious. His stare was benign. Disinterested.

Andrew shivered, though the room was warm. "Why did you choose me? You had Frank Delaney."

"Yes, the boy who came to me. Frank was his name?" Granddad looked out the window to the bleak, rust and grey sunset, musing. "Frank. A hard boy. Old in his soul. He lacked the most important attribute. The essence for which we travel the world. The pure emanation. It was you all the while, Andrew. The moment I saw you, I knew ."

Andrew felt emboldened by pride in having been chosen. No one had really noticed Andrew before, at least not to pick him out from all the others. And never before Frank Delaney. Perhaps this gave him power. He could survive this!

"What happened to him? The boy you were with. Did you kill him?"

Granddad laughed dryly. "Oh, no. Why would I have done that? He was a great loss." The old man got up and went to the window. "No, I didn't kill him, but I was at fault in a way. I was to bring him here in full essence, but I was too hungry. I took from him and could not stop myself. He was exhausted from my feeding, not watching where he was going. I was deeply upset by his passing. My tears were real. Once he was gone, there was nothing for me to do but wait for you."

"Do you even know if I have a father somewhere?" Andrew was scared, angry, and hopeful all at once.

"Oh, yes. I'd know it if you had lost him. Boys like you, growing up with over-protective single mothers, absent fathers, sometimes grow into angry, hard young men. Just as Frank will, though his father is in the house. Then it is too late. These boys meet the 'old man', as they inevitably call him, and hate him. Not you, young Andrew. You have kept the hope, a rich part of the essence. You will be prized." The granddad walked to him and placed his hands on his shoulders. "But you must retain your essence until you meet the mistress, so I will leave you. I've said too much already."

"I don't understand any of this. Don't go. Please. I don't want to be alone in here." He began to cry.

"I don't dare stay, young Andrew. I'd be too tempted. You are my penance, my find to make up for the losses I was so foolishly unable to protect from myself." The old man saw the fear in Andrew, his confusion. "You are not a prisoner, son. Look around. Meet some of the others." He went to the door. "Are you hungry?"

Andrew nodded, though he was more afraid than hungry. His stomach was a tight fist in his belly.

"There is more food than you can dream of downstairs. Go find the dining-room. Make friends. See all the toys and books and games available around the grounds. One day soon, you will wonder why you ever thought to leave." He waited a moment. "You are thinking you'd like to leave, aren't you?"

Again, Andrew nodded. There were no other thoughts in his head.

"And you're thinking of your mother, your aunt. What will become of them without you?"

Andrew looked away, his eyes aching, his face wet with tears.

"Soon you will not care. Find comfort in the knowledge that you will have no cares, and that you will be treasured far more than you ever were in that dingy mill town of yours."

Granddad left. Andrew found himself at the balcony with dry heaves, no food in his gut. He cried, wept until he ached all over. Then he crawled on to the bed and stared up at the canopy of gilded silk. He longed for the smells of home. The wet stone, moss, the musty cellar, a crackling fire of hickory and oak, and Aunt Molly's scones. Here, the dry air smelled of dust and peat, cinnamon and sage.

It was dark when the door opened and an old woman entered. She went to the bedside and sat down, stroking Andrew's hair. In the darkness, he whispered, "Mum?"

"I will be your mother, your father, your God, my son. And you will be my greatest joy. Lie still, remember all that has been your life, and feel the joy and pleasure that innocence brings. I will not cause you pain, or touch you. In turn, your fear will pass, your cares and longings will lessen."

Andrew tried to sit up. Her hand went softly to his chest. "No, Andrew. Trust me. This will be like a dream. Lie still."

He obeyed. The woman had a quality even more compelling than the granddad. Her eyes shone in the dark, the same pale blue, her pupils sharp pinpoints floating in the centre. She smelled of cedar wood and orange blossoms, though it was more like distant smoke from a smouldering fire than emanating from her. She put her hands over him, as if warming them on the heat that rose from him. He closed his eyes and the dream came.

Nightmares, really. First, he saw his mother, young and naive, silly and carefree. She went to the pub to drink ale with her girlfriends, until a tall, handsome man came in and broke up the girls. He cornered Bernadette and filled her full of flattery. She kissed the man she hardly knew and let him paw her right there in the pub. His hand went under her skirt and she was wet with desire.

The man walked her to his car and proceeded to take her. They were like two naked organisms, undulating and folding into and out of each other. After he was done with her, he told her he loved her. She didn't believe him. She didn't dare. They kissed passionately, he promised he would call on her, and then he dropped her at her parents' flat.

The next night, she found another man, and the next night another. None of them ever called for her, and none of them was around when she found herself pregnant. So, she began sleeping with her sister's husband Phillip, who had always fancied her more than the plain Molly. She claimed Phillip was the father. He killed himself rather than face the shame, and Molly. Poor Molly.

Phillip had mortgaged the house to the limit, had gambling debts and expense accounts for presents to the lovely young Bernadette that were begging payment. Molly lost the house, destitute, on the dole, but when her sister came crawling for help with the brat, Molly swallowed her pride and went to live with Bernadette in their parents' house. In the end, Molly thought, the baby boy could not have been Phillip's. The timing was off by almost three months. Phillip had just been another one of Bernadette's fools.

Then there was poor Aunt Molly; stealing from the people she cleaned house for, taking a ring here, a watch there. Nothing they could prove Molly had taken, things they could have easily misplaced. In the dream, Andrew saw her standing at her wardrobe, a box of booty in her arms, thinking of the life she'd have when she hocked it all and bought herself a flat of her own. Her antipathies for her bitter sister were evident in her wish that all that was Bernadette's turn to dross. That Andrew was more her child than Bernadette's and one day she would tell Andrew the truth. That his mother was a whore, not a secretary at Babington Hospital. She laughed then, deeply, loudly, without remorse.

The nightmare ended. The woman swooned, sated, as he awoke. He looked up to her. She had an aura of light around her that twinkled and pulsed. She sat down on the chair beside the bed and wept. Andrew sat up. In his mind, he thought to go to her, comfort her. She sobbed on. But he could not seem to muster the concern to move. He watched her until she went quiet.

"What happened to you? Why do I feel like this?"

She seemed to wake from a reverie, and then fixed him with her bright eyes. "He did not tell you?"

"The granddad? No, he just talked about essence and treasures. Was it me made you cry?"

The old woman rose up, took a few steps away. She thought a moment about what she might say, then said nothing. She opened the door.

"Please," Andrew said flatly.

"Oh, what's the harm." She returned to the bed. "You will know as soon as you talk with the other children." She sat down, leaned against the bedpost. "My son, do you see some of the uglier truths of your life now? Do you feel the sorrow in that truth?" She waited but Andrew remained impassive, silent. "I have lifted the veil of ignorance you have relied on all of your ten years. Do you not feel different for the weight of your innocence now gone into me?"

Andrew looked within. It was as dark and wet as the night the granddad had taken him, but there was no glistening.

"You are unlucky in that you are mine. I will always weep at your loss and the sweetness of my fullness. It confuses. In time, you will no longer be confused. You will just be ." She laughed dryly, as the granddad had. "And to think that some of the silly human race rather reveres that state being . They call it 'enlightenment' and spend a lifetime seeking to attain it." She rose again, chuckling, went to the door and smiled a smile like dice without dots. "Until tomorrow."

When the door shut behind her, Andrew looked at his hands, felt his face. They were the same as always. He had not changed, really. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would look and see if they had a library with any books on Turkey. He hadn't finished the one he'd left behind. Somewhere.

Venus Rising on Water

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee was born in London and lives on Britain's Sussex Weald with her husband, writer John Kaiine, and two cats. She began writing at the age of nine and worked variously as a library assistant, shop assistant, filing clerk and waitress before having three children's books published in the early 1970s.

When DAW Books released her novel The Birthgrave in 1975, and thereafter twenty-six other titles, she became a full-time writer. To date she has published more than seventy books and nearly 200 short stories. Her novels include Sabella, or The Blood Stone, The Blood of Roses, and the "Blood Opera" sequence (Dark Dance, Personal Darkness and Darkness, I ), while her short fiction is available in collections such as Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer and the 1986 Arkham House retrospective , Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and she has won two World Fantasy Awards for short fiction and the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death's Master.

Four of her plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio, and she has scripted two episodes of the cult BBC TV series Blakes 7, including the 1980 space vampire story, "Sarcophagus" .

"So far I've written seven novels about vampires," reveals the author, "or types of vampire, and quite a lot of short stories of various lengths. Vampirism, to me, is one of those themes where somehow another idea or twist is always making itself known to me. The subject seems limitless, perhaps because the vampire seems somehow to have woven itself among the human psyche.

" 'Venus Rising on Water' came initially from a fascination with Venice, which may be seen in futurist, distorted form, in the venue. Ironically, the name Venus has since become my name for Venice in the cycle of books I'm currently writing for Overlook in America, of which only the last may at all be classed as science fiction. But this story is SF: it's about the clash between the future and the past — although the denouement, however odd or apparently fortuitous, demonstrates the hold everyday real life can get on the strangest matters ."

Like long hair, the weeds grew down the façades of the city, over ornate shutters and leaden doors, into the pale green silk of the lagoon. Ten hundred ancient mansions crumbled. Sometimes a flight of birds was exhaled from their crowded mass, or a thread of smoke was drawn up into the sky. Day long a mist bloomed on the water, out of which distant towers rose like snakes of deadly gold. Once in every month a boat passed, carving the lagoon that had seemed thickened beyond movement. Far less often, here and there, a shutter cracked open and the weed hair broke, a stream of plaster fell like a blue ray. Then, some faint face peered out, probably eclipsed by a mask. It was a place of veils. Visitors were occasional. They examined the decaying mosaics, loitered in the caves of arches, hunted phantoms through marble tunnels. And under the streets they took photographs: one bald flash scouring a century off the catacombs and sewers, the lacework coffins, the handful of albino rats perched up on them, caught in a second like ghosts of white hearts, mute, with waiting eyes.

The dawn star shone in the lagoon on a tail of jagged silver. The sun rose. There was an unsuitable noise — the boat was coming.

"There," said the girl on the deck of the boat, "stop there, please."

The boat sidled to a pavement and stood on the water, trembling and murmuring. The girl left it with a clumsy gracefulness, and poised at the edge of the city with her single bag, cheerful and undaunted before the lonely cliffs of masonry, and all time's indifference.

She was small, about twenty-five, with ornately short fair hair, clad in old-fashioned jeans and a shirt. Her skin was fresh, her eyes bright with intelligent foolishness. She looked about, and upward. Her interest clearly centred on a particular house, which overhung the water like a face above a mirror, its eyes closed.

Presently the boat pulled away and went off across the lagoon, and only the girl and the silence remained.

She picked up her bag and walked along the pavement to an archway with a shut, leaden door. Here she knocked boldly, as if too stupid to understand the new silence must not yet be tampered with.

Her knocking sent hard blobs of sound careering round the vault of greenish crystal space that was the city's morning. They seemed to strike peeling walls and stone pilasters five miles off. From the house itself came no response, not even the vague sense of something stirring like a serpent in sleep.

"Now this is too bad," said the girl to the silence, upbraiding it mildly. "They told me a caretaker would be here, in time for the boat."

She left her bag (subconscious acknowledgment of the emptiness and indifference) by the gate, and walked along under the leaning face of the house. From here she saw the floors of the balconies of flowered iron; she listened for a sudden snap of shutters. But only the water lapped under the pavement, component of silence. This house was called the Palace of the Planet. The girl knew all about it, and what she did not know she had come here to discover. She was writing a long essay that was necessary to her career of scholastic journalism. She was not afraid.

In the façade of the Palace of the Planet was another door, plated with green bronze. The weed had not choked it, and over its top leaned a marble woman with bare breasts and a dove in her hands. The girl reached out and rapped with a bronze knocker shaped like a fist. The house gave off a sound that after all succeeded in astonishing her. It must be a hollow shell, unfurnished, half its walls fallen

These old cities were museums now, kept for their history, made available on request to anyone not many who wished to view. They had their dwellers also, but in scarcity. Destitutes and eccentrics lived in them, monitored by the state. The girl, whose name was Jonquil Hare, had seen the register of this place. In all, there were 174 names, some queried, where once had teemed thousands, crushing each other in the ambition to survive.

The hollow howling of her knock faded in the house. Jonquil said, "I'm coming in. I am ." And marched back to her bag beneath the leaden gate. She surveyed the gate, and the knotted weed which had come down on it. Jonquil Hare tried the weed. It resisted her strongly. She took up her bag, in which there was nothing breakable, seasoned traveller as she was, and flung it over the arch. She took the weed in her small strong hands and hauled herself up in her clumsy, graceful way, up to the arch, and sat there, looking in at a morning-twilight garden of shrubs that had not been pruned in a hundred years, and trees that became each other. A blue fountain shone dimly. Jonquil smiled upon it, and swung herself over in the weed and slithered down, into the environ of the house.

By midday, Jonquil had gone busily over most of the Palace of the Planet. Its geography was fixed in her head, but partly, confusedly for she liked the effect of a puzzle of rooms and corridors. Within the lower portion of the house a large hall gave on to a large enclosed inner courtyard, that in turn led to the garden. Above, chambers of the first storey would have opened on to the court, but their doors were sealed by the blue-green weed, which had smothered the court itself and so turned it into a strange undersea grotto where columns protruded like yellow coral. Above the lower floor, two long staircases drew up into apparently uncountable annexes and cells, and to a great salon with tarnished mirrors, also broken like spiderweb. The salon had tall windows that stared through their blind shutters at the lagoon.

There were carvings everywhere; lacking light, she did not study them now. And, as suspected, there was very little furniture a pair of desks with hollow drawers, spindly chairs, a divan in rotted ivory silk. In one oblong room was a bed-frame with vast tapering pillars like idle rockets. Cobwebby draperies shimmered from the canopy in a draught, while patches of bled emerald sunlight hovered on the floor.

Jonquil succeeded in opening a shutter in the salon. A block of afternoon fell in. Next door, in the adjacent chamber, she set up her inflatable mattress, her battery lamp and heater, some candles she had brought illegally in a padded tube. Sitting on her unrolled mat in the subaqueous light of a shuttered window which refused to give, she ate from her pack of food snacks and drank cola. Then she arranged some books and note-pads, pens and pencils, a magnifier, camera and unit, and a miniature recorder on the unfolded table.

She spoke to the room, as from the start she had spoken consecutively to the house. "Well, here we are."

But she was restless. The caretaker must be due to arrive, and until this necessary procedure had taken place, interruption hung over her. Of course, the caretaker would enable Jonquil to gain possession of the house secrets, the holostetic displays of furnishings and earlier life that might have been indigenous here, the hidden walks and rooms that undoubtedly lay inside the walls.

Jonquil was tired. She had risen at 3:00 a.m. for the boat after an evening of hospitable farewells. She lay down on her inflatable bed with the pillow under her neck. Through half-closed eyes she saw the room breathing with pastel motes of sun, and heard the rustle of weed at the shutter.

She dreamed of climbing a staircase which, dreaming, seemed new to her. At the foot of the stair a marble pillar supported a globe of some aquamarine material, covered by small configurations of alien land-masses, isolate in seas. The globe was a whimsical and inaccurate eighteenth-century rendition of the planet Venus, to which the house was mysteriously affiliated. As she climbed the stairs, random sprinklings of light came and went. Jonquil sensed that someone was ascending with her, step for step, not on the actual stair, but inside the peeling wall at her left side. Near the top of the stair (which was lost in darkness) an arched window had been let into the wall, milky and unclear and further obscured by some drops of waxen stained glass. As she came level with the window, Jonquil glanced sidelong at it. A shadowy figure appeared, on the far side of the pane, perhaps a woman, but hardly to be seen.

Jonquil started awake at the sound of the caretaker's serviceable shoes clumping into the house.

The caretaker was a woman. She did not offer her name, and no explanation for her late arrival. She had brought the house manual, and advised Jonquil on how to operate the triggers in its panel — visions flickered annoyingly over the rooms and were gone. A large box contained facsimiles of things pertaining to the house and its history. Jonquil had seen most of these already.

"There are the upper rooms, the attics. Here's the master key."

The woman showed Jonquil a hidden stair that probed these upper reaches of the house. It was not the stairway from the dream, but narrow and winding as the steps of a bell-tower. There were no other concealed chambers.

"If there's anything else you find you require, you must go out to the booth in the square. Here is the code to give the machine."

The caretaker was middle-aged, stout and uncharming. She seemed not to know the house at all, only everything about it, and glanced around her disapprovingly. Doubtless she lived in one of the contemporary golden towers across the lagoon, which, in the lingering powder of mist, passed for something older and more strange that they were not.

"Who came here last?" asked Jonquil. "Did anyone?"

"There was a visitor in the spring of the last Centenary Year. He stayed only one day, to study the plaster, I believe."

Jonquil smiled, pleased and smug that the house was virtually all her own, for the city's last centenary had been twenty years ago, nearly her lifetime.

She was glad when the caretaker left, and the silence of the house did not occur to Jonquil as she went murmuring from room to room, able now to operate the shutters, bring in light and examine the carvings in corners, on cornices. Most of them showed earlier defacement, as expected. She switched on, too, scenes from the manual, of costumed, dining and conversing figures amid huge pieces of furniture and swags of brocade. No idea of ghosts was suggested by these holostets. Jonquil reserved a candlelit masked ball for a later more fitting hour.

The greenish amber of afternoon slid into the plate of water. A chemical rose flooded the sky, like colour processing for a photograph. Venus, the evening star, was visible beyond the garden.

Jonquil climbed up the bell-tower steps to the attics.

The key turned easily in an upper door. But the attics disappointed. They were high and dark — her flashlight penetrated like a sword — webbed with the woven dust, and thick with damp, and a sour cloacal smell that turned the stomach of the mind. Otherwise, there was an almost emptiness. From beams hung unidentified shreds. On one wall a tapestry on a frame, indecipherable, presumably not thought good enough for renovation. Jonquil moved reluctantly through the obscured space, telling it it was in a poor state, commiserating with it, until she came against a chest of cold black wood.

"Now what are you?" Jonquil enquired of the chest.

It was long and low, its lid carved over with a design that had begun to crumble Curious fruits in a wreath.

The shape of the chest reminded her of something. She peered at the fruits. Were they elongate lemons, pomegranates? Perhaps they were meant to be Venusian fruits. The astrologer Johanus, who had lived in the Palace of the Planet, had played over the house his obsession and ignorance with, and of, Venus. He had claimed in his treatise closely to have studied the surface of the planet through his own telescope. There was an atmosphere of clouds, parting slowly; beneath, an underlake landscape, cratered and mountained, upon limitless waters. "The mirror of Venus is her sea," Johanus wrote. And he had painted her, but his daubs were lost, like most of his writing, reputedly burned. He had haunted the house alive, an old wild man, watching for star-rise, muttering. He had died in the charity hospital, penniless and mad. His servants had destroyed his work, frightened of it, and vandalized the decorations of the house.

Jonquil tried to raise the lid of the chest. It would not come up.

"Are you locked?"

But there was no lock. The lid was stuck or merely awkward.

"I shall come back," said Jonquil.

She had herself concocted an essay on the astrologer, but rather as a good little girl writes once a year to her senile grandfather. She appreciated his involvement — that, but for him, none of this would be — but he did not interest her. It was the house which did that. There was a switch on the manual that would conjure acted reconstructions of the astrologer's life, even to the final days, and to the rampage of the vandals. But Jonquil did not bother with this record. It was to her as if the house had adorned itself, using the man only as an instrument. His paintings and notes were subsidiary, and she had not troubled much over their disappearance.

"Yes, I'll be back with a wrench, and you'd just better have something in there worth looking at," said Jonquil to the chest. Doubtless it was vacant.

Night on the lagoon, in the city. The towers in the distance offered no lights, being constructed to conceal them. In two far-off spots, a pale glow crept from a window to the water. The silence of night was not like the silence of day.

Jonquil sang as the travel-cook prepared her steak, and, drinking a glass of reconstituted wine, going out into the salon, she switched on the masked ball.

At once the room was over 200 years younger. It was drenched in gilt, and candle-flames stood like flowers of golden diamond on their stems of wax, while the ceiling revealed dolphins and doves who escorted a goddess over a sea in a ship that was a shell. The windows were open to a revised night hung with diamante lamps, to a lagoon of black ink where bright boats were passing to the sound of mandolins. The salon purred and thrummed with voices. It was impossible to decipher a word, yet laughter broke through, and clear notes of the music. No one danced as yet. Perhaps they never would, for they were creatures from another world indeed, every one clad in gold and silver, ebony and glacial white, with jewels on them like water-drops tossed up by a wave. They had no faces. Their heads were those of plumed herons and horned deer, black velvet cats and lions of the sun and moon lynxes, angels, demons, mer-things from out of the lagoon, and scarabs from the hollows of time. They moved and promenaded, paused with teardrops of glass holding bloodlike wine, fluttered their fans of peacocks and palm leaves.

Jonquil stayed at the edge of the salon. She could have walked straight through them, through their holostetic actors' bodies and their prop garments of silk, steel and chrysoprase, but she preferred to stay in the doorway, drinking her own wine, adapting her little song to the tune of the mandolins.

After the astrologer had gone, others had come, and passed, in the house. The rich lady, and the prince, with their masks and balls, suppers and recitals.

The travel-cook chimed, and Jonquil switched off 200 elegantly acting persons, 1,000 faked gems and lights, and went to eat her steak.

She wrote with her free hand: Much too pretty. Tomorrow I must photograph the proper carvings . And said this over aloud.

Jonquil dreamed she was in the attic. There was a vague light, perhaps the moon coming in at cracks in the shutters, or the dying walls. Below, a noise went on, the holostetic masked ball which she had forgotten to switch off. Jonquil looked at the chest of black wood. She had realized she did not have to open it herself. Downstairs, in the salon, an ormolu clock struck midnight, the hour of unmasking. There was a little click. In the revealing darkness, the lid of the chest began to lift. Jonquil knew what it had reminded her of. A shadow sat upright in the coffin of the chest. It had a slender but indefinite form, and yet it turned its head and Jonquil saw the two eyes looking at her, only the eyeballs gleaming, in two crescents, in the dark.

The lid fell over with a crash.

Jonquil woke up sitting on her inflatable bed, with her hands at her throat, her eyes raised toward the ceiling.

"A dream," announced Jonquil.

She turned on her battery lamp, and the small room appeared. There was no sound in the house. Beyond the closed door the salon rested. "Silly," said Jonquil.

She lay and read a book having nothing to do with the Palace of the Planet, until she fell asleep with the light on.

The square was a terrifying ruin. Hidden by the frontage of the city, it was nearly inconceivable. Upper storeys had collapsed on to the paving, only the skeletons of architecture remained, with occasionally a statue, some of them shining green and vegetable (the dissolution of gold) piercing through. The paving was broken up, marked by the slough of birds. Here the booth arose, unable to decay.

"There's a chest in the attics. It won't open," Jonquil accused the receiver. "The manual lists it. It says, one sable-wood jester chest."

The reply came. "This is why you are unable to open it. A jester chest was just that, a deceiving or joke object, often solid. There is nothing inside."

"No," said Jonquil, "some jester chests do open. And this isn't solid."

"I am afraid you are wrong. The chest has been investigated, and contains nothing, neither is there any means to open it."

"An X-ray doesn't always show" began Jonquil. But the machine had disconnected. "I won't have this," said Jonquil.

Three birds blew over the square. Beneath in the sewers, the colony of voiceless rats, white as moonlight, ran noiselessly under her feet. But she would not shudder. Jonquil strutted back to the house through alleys of black rot where windows were suspended like lingering cards of ice. Smashed glass lay underfoot. The awful smell of the sea was in the alleys, for the sea came in and in. It had drowned the city in psychic reality, and already lay far over the heads of all the buildings, calm, oily and still, reflecting the sun and the stars.

Jonquil got into the house by the gate-door the manual had made accessible, crossing the garden where the blue fountain was a girl crowned with myrtle. Jonquil went straight up over the floors to the attic stair, and climbed that. The attic door was ajar, as she believed she had left it. "Here I am," said Jonquil. The morning light was much stronger in the attics and she did not need her torch. She found the chest and bent over it.

"You've got a secret. Maybe you're only warped shut, that would be the damp up here There may be a lining that could baffle the X-ray."

She tried the wrench, specifically designed not to inflict any injury. But it slipped and slithered and did no good. Jonquil knelt down and began to feel all over the chest, searching for some spring or other mechanism. She was caressing the chest, going so cautiously and delicately over it. Its likeness to a coffin was very evident, but bones would have been seen. "Giving me dreams," she said. Something moved against her finger. It was very slight. It was as if the chest had wriggled under her tickling and testing like a sleeping child. Jonquil put back her hand — she had flinched, and reprimanded herself. At her touch the movement came again. She heard the clarity of the click she had heard before in the dream. And before she could stop herself, she jumped up, and stepped backwards, one, two, three, until the wall stopped her.

The lid of the chest was coming up, gliding over, and slipping down without any noise but a mild slap. Nothing sat up in the chest. But Jonquil saw the edge of something lying there in it, in the shadow of it.

"Yes, it is," she said, and went forward. She leaned on the chest, familiarly now. Everything was explained, even the psycho-kinetic activity of the dream. "A painting."

Jonquil Hare leaned on the chest and stared in. Presently she took hold of the elaborate and gilded frame, and got the picture angled upward a short way, so it too leaned on the chest.

The painting was probably three centuries old. She could tell that from the pigments and disposition of the oils, but not from the artist. The artist was unknown. In size it was an upright oblong, about fifteen metres by one metre in width.

The work was a full-length portrait, rather well executed and proportioned, lacking only any vestige of life, or animation. It might have been the masterly likeness of a handsome doll — this was how the artist had given away his amateur status.

She looked like a woman of about Jonquil's age, which given the period meant of course that she would have been far younger, eighteen or nineteen years. Her skin was pale, and had a curious tint, as did in fact the entire scene, perhaps due to some corrosion of the paint but even so it had not gone to the usual brown and mud tones, but rather to a sort of yellowish blue. Therefore the colour scheme of clothing and hair might be misleading, for the long loose tresses were yellowish blonde, and the dress bluish grey. Like the hair, the dress was loose, a robe of a kind. And yet, naturally, both hair and robe were draped in a particular manner that dated them, as surely as if their owner had been gowned and coiffured at the apex of that day's fashion. She was slender but looked strong. There was no plumpness to her chin and throat, her hands were narrow. An unusually masculine woman, more suitable to Jonquil's century, where the sexes often blended, slim and lightly muscular — the woman in the painting was also like this. Her face was impervious, its eyes black. She was not beautiful or alluring. It was a flat animal face, tempered like the moon by its own chill light, and lacking sight or true expression because the artist had not understood how to intercept them.

Behind the woman was a vista that Jonquil took at first for the lagoon. But then she saw that between the fog-bank of blued-yellow cloud and the bluish-greenish water, a range of pocked and fissured mountains lurched like an unearthly aqueduct. It was the landscape of Johanus's Venus. The artist of the picture was the mad astrologer who had invested the house.

How could it be that the authorities had missed this find?

"My," said Jonquil to the painting. She was excited. What would this not be worth in tokens of fame?

She pulled on the painting again, more carefully than before. It was light for its size. She could manage it. She paused a moment, close to the woman on the canvas. The canvas was strange, the texture of it under the paint — but in those days three centuries before, they had sometimes used odd materials. Even some chemical or experimental potion could have been mixed with the paint, to give it now its uncanny tinge.

A name was written in a scroll at the bottom of the picture. Jonquil took it for a signature. But it was not the astrologer's name, though near enough it indicated some link. Johnina .

"Jo- nine -ah," said Jonquil, "we are going for a short walk, down to where I can take a proper look at you."

With enormous care now, she drew the picture of Johnina out of the attics, and down the narrow stair towards the salon.

Jonquil was at the masked ball. In her hand was a fan of long white feathers caught in a claw of zircons, her costume was of white satin streaked with silver veins, and her face was masked like a white-furred cat. She knew her hair was too short for the day and age, and this worried her by its inappropriateness. No one spoke to her, but all around they chattered to each other (incomprehensibly), and their curled powdered hair poured out of their masks like milk boiling over. Jonquil observed everything acutely, the man daintily taking snuff (an addict), the woman in the dress striped black and ivory peering through her ruby eyeglass. Out on the lagoon, the gleaming boats went by, trailing red roses in the water.

Jonquil was aware that no one took any notice of her, had anything to do with her, and she was peevish, because they must have invited her. Who was she supposed to be? A duke's daughter, or his mistress? Should she not be married at her age, and have borne children? She would have to pretend.

There was a man with rings on every finger, and beyond him a chequered mandolin player, and beyond him, a woman stood in a grey gown different from the rest. Her mask covered all her face, it was the countenance of a globe, perhaps the moon, in silver, and about it hair like pale tarnished fleece, too long as Jonquil's was too short, was falling to her pelvis over the bodice of the gown.

A group of actors — yes, they were only acting, it was not real — intervened. The woman was hidden for a moment, and when the group had passed, she was gone.

She was an actress, too, which was why Jonquil had thought something about her recognizable.

Jonquil became annoyed that she should be here, among actors, for acting was nothing to do with her. She turned briskly, and went towards the door of the chamber that led off from the salon. Inside, the area was dark, yet everything there was visible, and Jonquil was surprised to see a huge bed-frame from another room dominating the space. Surely Jonquil's professional impedimenta had been put here, and the inflatable sleeping couch she travelled with? As for this bed, she had seen it elsewhere, and it had been naked then, but now it was dressed. Silk curtains hung from the pillars, and a mattress, pillows, sheets and embroidered coverlet were on it. Rather than the pristine appearance of a model furnishing, the bed had a slightly rumpled, tumbled look, as if Jonquil had indeed used it. Jonquil closed the door of the room firmly on the ball outside, and all sound of it at once ceased.

To her relief, she found that she was actually undressed and in the thin shirt that was her night garment. She went to the bed, resigned, and got into it. She lay back on the pillows. The bed was wonderfully comfortable, lushly undisciplined.

Johanus's house was so silent — noiseless. Jonquil lay and listened to the total absence of sound, which was like a pressure, as if she had floated down beneath the sea. Her bones were coral, and pearls her eyes Fish might swim in through the slats of a shutter, across the water of the air. But before that happened, the door would open again.

The door opened.

The doorway was lit with moonlight, and the salon beyond it, for the masked ball had gone. Only the woman with the silver planet face remained, and she came over the threshold. Behind her, in lunar twilight, Jonquil saw the lagoon lying across the salon, and the walls had evaporated, leaving a misty shore, and mountains that were tunnelled through. The bed itself was adrift on water, and bobbed gently, but Johnina crossed without difficulty.

Her silver mask was incised, like the carvings in the house corners, the globes that were the planet Venus. The mask reflected in the water. Two silver discs, separated, drawing nearer.

Jonquil said sternly, "I must wake up."

And she dived upward from the bed, and tore through layers of cloud or water and came out into the actual room, rolling on the inflatable couch.

"I'm not frightened," stated Jonquil. "Why should I be?"

She turned on her battery lamp and angled the light to fall across the painting of Johnina, which she had leaned against the wall.

"What are you trying to tell me now? In the morning I'm going to call them up about you. Don't you want to be famous?"

The painting had no resonance. It looked poorly in the harsh glare of the lamp, a stilted figure and crackpot scenery, the brushwork disordered. The canvas was so smooth.

"Go to sleep," said Jonquil to Johnina, and shut off the light as if to be sensible with a tiresome child.

In the true dark, which had no moon, the silence of the house crept closer. Dispassionately, Jonquil visualized old Johanus padding about the floors in his broken soft shoes. He thought he had seen the surface of the planet Venus. He had painted the planet as an allegory that was a woman, just like the puns of Venus the goddess in marble over the door, and on the ceiling of the salon.

Jonquil began to see Johanus in his study, among the alchemical muddle, the primeval alchemical chaos from which all perfect creation evolved. But she regarded him offhandedly, the dust and grime and spillages, the blackened skulls and lembics growing moss.

Johanus wrote on parchment with a goose quill.

He wrote in Latin also, and although she had learned Latin in order to pursue her study, this was too idiosyncratic, too much of its era, for her to follow. Then the words began to sound, and she grasped them. Bored, Jonquil attended. She did not recall switching on this holostet, could not think why she had decided to play it.

"So, on the forty-third night, after an hour of watching, the cloud parted, and there was before me the face of the planet. I saw great seas, or one greater sea, with small masses of land, pitted like debased silver. And the mountains I saw. And all this in a yellow glow from the cloud"

Jonquil wondered why she did not stop the holostet. She was not interested in this. But she could not remember where the manual was.

"For seven nights I applied myself to my telescope, and on each night, the clouds of the planet sensuously parted, allowing me a view of her bareness."

Jonquil thought she would have to leave the bed in order to switch off the manual. But the bed, with its tall draped posts, was warm and comfortable.

"On the eighth night it came to me. Even as I watched, I was watched in my turn. Some creature was there, some unseen intelligence, which, sensing my appraisal, reached out to seize me. I do not know how such a thing is possible. Where I see only a miniature of that world, it sees me exactly, where and what I am, every atom. At once I removed myself, left my perusal, and shut up the instrument. But I believe I was too late. Somehow it has come to me, here, in the world of men. It is with me, although I cannot hear it or behold it. It is the invisible air, it is the silence of the night. What shall I do?"

The holostet of Johanus was no longer operating. Jonquil lay in the four-poster bed in the room that led from the salon. The door was shut. Someone was in the room with her, beside the bed. Jonquil turned her head on the pillow, without hurry, to see.

A hand was stroking back her short hair; it was very pleasant; she was a cat that was being caressed. Jonquil smiled lazily. It was like the first day of the holidays, and her mother was standing by her bed, and they would talk. But no, not her mother. It was the wonderful-looking woman she had seen — where was that, now? Perhaps in the city, an eccentric who lived there, out walking in the turquoise of dusk or funeral orchid of dawning, when the star was on the lagoon. Very tall, a developed, lithe body, graceful, with the blue wrap tied loosely, and the amazing hair, so thick and blonde, falling over it, over her shoulders and the firm cupped line of the breasts, the flat belly, and into the mermaid V of the thighs.

"Hello," said Jonquil. And the woman gave the faintest shake of her lion's head in its mane. Jonquil was not to speak. They did not need words. But the woman smiled, too. It was such a sensational smile. So effortless, stimulating and calming. The dark, dark eyes rested on Jonquil with a tenderness that was also cruel. Jonquil had seen this look in the eyes of others, and a frisson of eagerness went over her, and she was ashamed; it was too soon to expect — but the woman was leaning over her now, the marvel of face blurred and the mane of hair trickling over Jonquil's skin. The mouth kissed, gently and unhesitatingly. "Oh, yes," said Jonquil, without any words.

The woman, who was called Johnina, was lying on her. She was heavy, her weight crushed and pinned, and Jonquil was helpless. It was the most desired thing, to be helpless like this, unable even to lift her own hands, as if she had no strength at all. And Johnina's hands were on her breasts somehow, between their two adhering bodies, finding out Jonquil's shape with slow smooth spirallings. And softly, without anything crude or urgent, the sea-blue thigh of Johnina rubbed against Jonquil until she ached and melted. She shut her eyes and could think only of the sweet unhurried journey of her body, of the hands that guided and stroked, and the mermaid tail that bore her up, and the sound of the sea in her ears. Johnina kissed and kissed, and Jonquil Hare felt herself dissolving into Johnina, into her body, and she could not even cry out. And then Jonquil was spread-eagled out into a tidal orgasm, where with every wave some further part of her was washed away. And when there was nothing left, she woke up in the pitch-black void of the silence, with something hard and cold, clammy, but nearly weightless, lying on her, an oblong in a gilded frame, the painting which had dropped over on top of her and covered her from breast to ankle.

She flung it off and it clattered down. She clutched at her body, thinking to discover herself clotted with a sort of glue or slime, but there was nothing like that.

She was weak and dizzy and her heart drummed noisily, so she could not hear the silence any more.

"Let me speak to the house caretaker," snapped Jonquil at the obtuse machine. Outside the booth, the ruin of the great square seemed to sway on the wind, which was violent, ruffling the lagoon in flounces, whirling small scraps of coloured substances that might have been paper, rags, or skin.

"The caretaker is not available. However, your request has been noted."

"But this picture is an important find — and I want it removed, today , to a place of safety."

The machine had disconnected.

Jonquil stood in the booth, as if inside a spacesuit, and watched the alien atmosphere of the city swirling with bits and colours.

"Don't be a fool," said Jonquil. She left the booth and cowered before the wind, which was not like any breeze felt in civilized places. "It's an old painting. A bad old painting. So, you're lonely, you had a dream. Get back to work."

Jonquil worked. She photographed all the carvings she had decided were relevant or unusually bizarre — Venus the goddess riding the crescent moon, a serpent coiled about a planet that maybe was simply an orb. She put these into the developer and later drew them out and arranged them in her room beside the salon. (She had already moved the painting of Johnina into the salon — she felt tired, and it seemed heavier than before — left it with its face to the wall, propped under the mirrors. It was now about twenty-five metres from her inflatable bed, and well outside the door.)

She went over the house again, measuring and recording comments. She opened shutters and regarded the once hivelike cliffs of the city, and the waters on the other side. The wind settled and a mist condensed. By mid-afternoon the towers of modernity were quite gone.

"The light always has a green tinge — blue and yellow mixed. When the sky pinkens at dawn or sunset the water is bottle green, an apothecary's bottle. And purple for the prose," Jonquil added.

In two hours it would be dusk, and then night.

This was ridiculous. She had to face up to herself, that she was nervous and apprehensive. But there was nothing to be afraid of, or even to look forward to.

She still felt depressed, exhausted, so she took some more vitamins. Something she had eaten, probably, before leaving for the city, had caught up with her. And that might even account for the dream. The dreams.

She did not go up into the attics. She spent some time out of doors, in the grotto of the courtyard, and in the garden, which the manual showed her with paved paths and carven box hedges, orange trees, and the fountain playing. She did not watch this holostet long. Her imagination was working too, and too hard, and she might start to see Johnina in a blue-grey gown going about between the trees.

What, anyway, was Johnina? Doubtless Jonquil's unconscious had based the Johanus part of the dream on scraps of the astrologer's writings she had seen, and that she had consciously forgotten. Johanus presumably believed some alien intelligence from the planet he observed had made use of the channel of his awareness. For him it was female (interesting women then were always witches, demons; he would be bound to think in that way) and when she suborned him, in his old man's obsession, he painted her approximately to a woman — just as he had approximated his vision of the planet to something identifiable, the pastorale of a cool hell. And he gave his demoness a name birthed out of his own, a strange daughter.

Jonquil did not recollect, try as she would, reading anything so curious about Johanus, but she must have done.

He then concealed the painting of his malign inamorata in the trick chest, to protect it from the destructive fears of the servants.

Only another hour, and the sky would infuse like pale tea and rose petals. The sun would go, the star would visit the garden. Darkness.

"You're not as tough as you thought," said Jonquil. She disapproved of herself. "All right. We'll sit this one out. Stay awake tonight. And tomorrow I'll get hold of that damn caretaker lady if I have to swim there."

As soon as it was sunset, Jonquil went back to her chosen room. She had to pass through the salon, and had an urge to go up to the picture, turn it round, and scrutinize it. But that was stupid. She had seen all there was to see. She shut her inner door on the salon with a bang. Now she was separate from all the house.

She lit her lamp, and, pulling out her candles, lit those too. She primed the travel-cook for a special meal, chicken with a lemon sauce, creamed potatoes, and as the wing of night unfolded over the lagoon she closed the shutter and switched on a music tape. She sat drinking wine and writing up that day's notes on the house. After all, she had done almost all that was needed. Might she not see if she could leave tomorrow? To hire transport before the month was up and the regular boat arrived would be expensive, but then, she could get to work the quicker perhaps, away from the house She had meant to explore the city, of course, but it was in fact less romantic than dejecting, and potentially dangerous. She might run into one of the insane inhabitants, and then what?

Jonquil thought, acutely visualizing the nocturnal mass of the city. No one was alive in it, surely. The few lights, the occasional smokes and whispers, were inaugurated by machines, to deceive. There were the birds, and their subterranean counterpart, the rats. Only she alone, Jonquil Hare, was here this night between masonry and water. She alone, and one other.

" Don't be silly," said Jonquil.

How loud her voice sounded, now the music had come to an end. The silence was gigantic, a fifth dimension.

It seemed wrong to put on another tape. The silence should not be angered. Let it lie, move quietly, and do not speak at all.

Johanus wrote quickly, as if he might be interrupted; his goose pen snapped, and he seized another ready cut. He spoke the words aloud as he wrote them, although his lips were closed.

"For days, and for nights when I could not sleep, I was aware of the presence of my invader. I told myself it was my fancy, but I could not be rid of the sensation of it. I listened for the sounds of breathing, I looked for a shadow — there were none of these. I felt no touch, and when I dozed fitfully in the dark, waking suddenly, no beast crouched on my breast. Yet, it was with me, it breathed, it brushed by me, it touched me without hands, and watched me with its unseen eyes.

"So passed five days and four nights. And on the evening of the fifth day, even as the silver planet stood above the garden, it grew bold, knowing by now it had little to fear from me in my terror, and took on a shape.

"Yes, it took on a sort of shape, but if this is its reality I cannot know, or only some semblance, all it can encompass here, or deigns to assume.

"It hung across the window, and faintly through it the light of dusk was ebbing. A membraneous thing, like a sail. It did not move, no pulse of life seemed in it, and yet it lived. I shut the door on it, but later I returned. In the candle's light I saw it had fallen, or lowered itself, to my table. It had kept its soft sheen of blue. I touched it, I could not help myself, and it had the texture of velum — that is, of skin. It lay before me, the length of the table, and under it dimly I could discern the outline of my books, my dish of powders, and other things. I cannot describe my state. My terror had sunk into a sort of blinded wonderment. I do not know how great a while I stood and looked at it, but at length I heard the girl with my food, and I went out and locked up the room again. What would it do while I was gone? Would it perhaps vanish again?

"That night I slept, stupefied, and in the morning opened my eyes and there the thing hung, above me, inside the canopy of the very bed. How long had it been there, watching me with its invisible organs of sight? Of course, its method had been simple: it had slid under the doors of my house — my house so long dressed for it, and named for its planet in the common vernacular.

"What now must I do? What is required of me? For clearly I shall become its slave. It seems to me I am supposed to be able to give it a more usual form, some camouflage, so that if may pass with men, but how is that possible? How render such a thing ordinary, and attractive?

"The means came to me in my sleep. Perhaps the being has influenced my brain. There is one sure way. It has noticed my canvases. Now I am to stretch this skin upon a frame, and put paint to it. What shall I figure there? No doubt, I shall be guided in what I do, as it has led me to the idea.

"I must obscure my actions from my servants. They are already ill at ease, and the man was very threatening this morning; he is a ruffian and capable of anything — it will be wise to destroy these papers, when all else is done."

Jonquil turned from Johanus, and saw a group of friends she had not communicated with in three years, gliding over the lagoon in a white boat. They waved and shouted, and Jonquil knew she had been rescued, she would escape, but running towards the boat she heard a metallic crash, and jumped inadvertently up out of the dream into the room, where her candles were burning low, fluttering, and the air quivered like a disturbed pond. The silence had been agitated after all. There had been some noise, like the noise in the dream which woke her.

She sat bolt upright in the lock of fear. She had never felt fear in this way in her life. She had meant to stay awake, but the meal, the wine

And the dream of Johanus — absurd.

Outside, in the mirrored night-time salon, there came a sharp screeching scrape .

Jonquil's mind shrieked, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. Don't be a fool. Listen ! She listened. The silence. Had she imagined

The noise came again, harsher and more absolute.

It was like the abrasion of a rusty chain dragged along the marble floor.

And again

Jonquil sprang up. In her life, where she had never before known such fear, the credo had been that fear, confronted, proved to be less than it had seemed. Always the maxim held true. It was this brain-washing of accredited experience which sent her to the door of the room, and caused her to dash it wide and to stare outwards.

The guttering glim of the candles, so apposite to the house, gave a half-presence to the salon. But mostly it was black, thick and composite, black, watery and uncertain on the ruined faces of the mirrors. And out of this blackness came a low flicker of motion, catching the candlelight along its edge. And this motion made the sound she had heard and now heard again. Jonquil did not believe what she saw. She did not believe it. No. This was still the dream, and she must, she must wake up.

The picture of Johnina, painted by the astrologer on a piece of membraneous bluish alien skin, had fallen over in its frame, and now the framed skin pulled itself along the floor, and, catching the light, Jonquil saw the little formless excrescences of the face-down canvas, little bluish-yellow paws, hauling the assemblage forward, the big balanced oblong shape with its rim of gilt vaguely shining. Machine-like, primeval, a mutated tortoise. It pulled itself on, and as the frame scraped along the floor it screamed, towards Jonquil in the doorway.

Jonquil slammed shut the door. She turned and caught up things — the inflatable bed, the table — and stuffed them up against the doorway. And the mechanical tortoise screamed twice more and struck against the door, and the door shook.

Jonquil turned round and round in her trap as the thing outside thudded back and forth and her flimsy barricade trembled and tottered. There was no other exit but the window. She got it open and ran on to the balcony, which creaked and dipped. The weed was there, the blue-green Venus weed which choked the whole city. Jonquil threw herself off into it. As she did so, the door of the room gave way.

She was half climbing, half rebounding and falling down the wall of the house. Everywhere was darkness, and below the sucking of the water at the pavement.

As she struggled in the ropes of weed, tangled, clawing, a shape reared up in the window above her.

Jonquil cried out. The painting was in the window. But something comically macabre had happened. In rearing, it had caught at an angle between the uprights of the shutters. It was stuck, could not move out or in.

Jonquil hung in the weed, staring up at Johnina in her frame of gilt and wood and plaster and night. How soulless she looked, how without life.

And then a convulsion went over the picture. Like a blue amoeba touched by venom it writhed and wrinkled. It tore itself free of the golden frame. It billowed out, still held by a few filaments and threads, like a sail, a veil, the belly of something swollen with the hunger of centuries

And Jonquil fought, and dropped the last two metres from the weed, landing on the pavement hard, in the box of darkness that was the city.

She was not dreaming, but it was like a dream. It seemed to her she saw herself running. The engine of her heart drove her forward. She did not know where or through what she ran. There was no moon, there were no lights. A kind of luminescence filmed over the atmosphere, and constructions loomed suddenly at her, an arch, a flight of steps, a platform, a severed wall. She fell, and got up and ran on.

And behind her, that came. That which had ripped itself from an oblong of gilding. It had taken to the air. It flew through the city, between the pillars and under the porticos, along the ribbed arteries carrying night. It rolled and unrolled as it came, with a faint soft snapping. And then it sailed, wide open, catching some helpful draught, a huge pale bat.

Weed rushed over Jonquil and she thought the thing which had been called Johnina had settled on her lightly, coaxingly, and she screamed. The city filled with her scream like an empty gourd with water.

There were no lights, no figures huddled at smouldering fires, no guards or watchmen, no villains, no one here to save her, no one even to be the witness of what must come, when her young heart finally failed, her legs buckled, when the sailing softness came down and covered her, stroking and devouring, caressing and eating — its tongues and fingers and the whole porous mouth that it was to drink her away and away.

Jonquil ran. She ran over streets that were cratered as if by meteorites, through vaulted passages, beside the still waters of night and death. It occurred to her (her stunned and now almost witless brain) to plunge into the lagoon, to swim towards the unseen towers. But on the face of the mirror, gentleness would drift down on her, and in the morning mist, not even a ripple

The paving tipped. Jonquil stumbled, ran, downwards now, hopeless and mindless, her heart burning a hole in her side. Down and down, cracked tiles spinning off from her feet, down into some underground place that must be a prison for her, perhaps a catacomb, to stagger among filigree coffins, where the water puddled like glass on the floor, no way out, down into despair, and yet, mockingly, there was more light. More light to see what she did not want to see. It was the phosphorus of the death already there, the mummies in their narrow homes. Yes, she saw the water pools now, as she splashed through them, she saw the peculiar shelves and cubbies, the stone statue of a saint barnacled by the sea-rot the water brought into a creature from another world. And she saw the wall also that rose peremptory before her, the dead-end that would end in death, and for which she had been waiting, to which she had run, and where now she collapsed, her body useless, run out.

She dropped against the wall, and, in the coffin-light, turned and looked back. And through the descending vault, a pale blue shadow floated, innocent and faithful, coming down to her like a kiss.

I don't believe this, Jonquil would have said, but now she did. And anyway she had no breath, no breath even to scream again or cry. She could only watch, could not take her eyes off the coming of the feaster. It had singled her out, allowed her to bring it from the chest. With others it had been more reticent, hiding itself. Perhaps it had eaten of Johanus, too, before he had been forced to secure it against the witch-hunting servants. Or maybe Johanus had not been to its taste. How ravenous it was, and how controlled was its need.

It alighted five metres from her, from Jonquil, as she lay against the death-end wall. She saw it down an aisle of coffins. Touching the water on the floor, it rolled together, and furled open, and skimmed over the surface on to the stone.

She was fascinated now. She wanted it to reach her. She wanted it to be over. She dug her hands into the dirt and a yellow bone crumbled under her fingers.

The painting of Johnina was crawling ably along the aisle. There was no impediment, no heavy frame to drag with it.

Sweat slipped into Jonquil's eyes and for a moment she saw a blue woman with ivory hair walking slowly between the coffins, but there was something catching at her robe, and she hesitated, to try to pluck the material away.

Jonquil blinked. She saw a second movement, behind the limpid roll of the Venus skin. A flicker, like a white handkerchief. And then another.

Something darted, and it was on the painting, on top of it, and then it flashed and was gone. And then two other white darts sewed through the blueness of the shadow, bundling it up into an ungainly lump, and two more, gathering and kneading.

The painting had vanished. It was buried under a pure white jostling. And there began to be a thin high note on the air, like a whistling in the ear, without any emotion or language. Ten white rats of the catacombs had settled on the painting, and with their teeth and busy paws they held it still and rent it in pieces, and they ate it. They ate the painted image of the Venus Johnina, and her background of mountains and sea, they ate the living shrieking membrane of the flesh. Their hunger too had been long unappeased.

Jonquil lay by the wall, watching, until the last crumb and shred had disappeared into dainty needled mouths. It did not take more than two or three minutes. Then there was only a space, nothing on it, no rats, no other thing.

"Get up," Jonquil said. There was a low singing in her head, but no other noise. She stood in stages, and went back along the aisle of dead. She was very cold, feeble and sluggish. She thought she felt old. She walked through the water pools. She had a dreadful intimation that everything had changed, that she would never be the same, that nothing ever would, that survival had sent her into an unknown and fearful world.

A rat sat on a coffin overseeing her departure, digesting in its belly blueness and alien dreams. The walls went on crumbling particle by particle. Silence flowed over the city like the approaching sea.

Year Zero

Gemma Files

Born in London, England, Gemma Files has been a Canadian citizen since the age of two. She has a BAA in Magazine Journalism and has spent the past eight years writing freelance film criticism for a popular local news and culture review in Toronto.

Her first professional sale was "Mouthful of Pins" to Don Hutchison's anthology Northern Frights 2. Since then her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Grue, Transversions, Palace Corbie, Selective Spectres, Demon Sex, Northern Frights 5 and Queer Fear. Her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the 1999 Best Short Story from the International Horror Writers' Guild and was reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Eleven and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection. Four of her stories have been adapted for the anthology TV series The Hunger.

"Vampires, as all my non-horror-friendly pals so often sneer, are a dead-end concept," explains Files: "the same tropes repeated without variation, over and over dirty little sex fantasies masquerading as good, clean fear. But it only requires a few nights' cursory research to realize that even the oldest stories posit as many different types of vampires as there are different types of people for them to feed on (and not all of them drink blood, either).

" I think of vampires, therefore, as the dark literature world's equivalent of the Rhorsach blot. If you're limited, your idea of what vampires are or could be will be similarly limited. And if you're not "

About the following story, the author reveals: "When I was a kid, I remember being wonderfully impressed by the TV adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellen and Jane Seymour; of course, given my perverse nature and interests, I found myself identifying far more heavily with the embattled Agent Chauvelin and his fellow Revolutionaries than with that rather vicious fop Sir Percy. At any rate, it started me off on a life-long French Revolution kick that cross-bred perfectly with my equally life-long vampire fetish: blood, decapitation, a general violent upheaval of the natural order ooh, yeah, baby. And since 'walking corpses who suck blood' has always seemed like a pretty good description of any given aristocracy to me, I guess this particular story could be read as nothing deeper than my chance to elaborate on that metaphor a tad — not to mention have quite a bit of good (albeit messy) fun doing so ."

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood. I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live. Ezekiel 6:16

At the very height of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: new calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder; wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee. A failed actor named Fabre d'Eglantine drew up the plans. He stretched each seven-day week to a ten-day decade, and recarved the months into a verdant litany of rural images: fruit and flowers, wind and rain. The guillotine's red flash, masked in a mist of blistering, lobster-baked heat.

The first year of this process was to be known as Year Zero. Everything that happened next would be counted from then on. And all that had happened before would be, very simply

gone.

Then: Paris, 1793. Thermidor, Year Three, just before the end of the Terror

"Oh, la, Citizen. How you do blush."

I must wake up. Jean-Guy Sansterre thinks, slow and lax — the words losing shape even as he forms them, like water dripping through an open mental hand, fingers splayed and helpless. Rouse myself. Act. Fight

But feeling, instead, how his whole body settles inexorably into some arcane variety of sleep limbs loose and heavy, head lolling back on dark red satin upholstery. Falling spine-first into the close, dim interior of the Chevalier du Prendegrace's coach, a languorous haze of drawn velvet curtains against which Jean-Guy lies helpless as some micro-organism trapped beneath the fringed, softly sloping convex lens of a partially lidded eye.

Outside, in the near distance, one can still hear the constant growl and retch of the Widow, the National Razor, the legendary Machine split the air from the Place de la revolution — that excellent device patented by dapper Doctor Guillotin, to cure for ever the pains and ills of headaches, hangovers, insomnia. The repetitive thud of body on board, head in basket. The jeers and jibes of the tricoteuses knitting under the gallows steps, their Phrygian caps nodding in time with the tread of the executioner's ritual path; self-elected keepers of the public conscience, these grim hags who have outlived their former oppressors again and again. These howling crowds of sansculottes , the trouserless ones, all crying in unison for yet more injurious freedom, still more", ever more: a great, sanguinary river with neither source nor tide, let loose to flood the city streets with visible vengeance

"Do you know what complex bodily mechanisms lie behind the workings of a simple blush, Citizen Sansterre?"

That slow voice, emerging — vaporous and languid as an audible curl of smoke — from the red half-darkness of the coach. Continuing, gently:

"I have made a sometime study of such matters; strictly amateur in nature, of course, yet as thorough an enquiry as my poor resources may afford me."

In the chevalier's coach, Jean-Guy feels himself bend and blur like melting waxwork beneath the weight of his own hypnotized exhaustion; fall open on every level, like his own strong but useless arms, his nerveless, cord-cut legs

"The blush spreads as the blood rises, showing itself most markedly at the skin's sheerest points — a map of veins, eminently traceable. Almost readable."

So imperative, this urge to fly, to fight. And so, utterly

impossible.

"See, here and there, where landmarks evince themselves: those knots of veins and arteries, delicately entwined, which wreathe the undersides of your wrists. Two more great vessels, hidden at the tongue's root. A long, humped one, outlining the shaft of that other boneless organ whose proper name we may not quote in mixed company."

Sitting. Sprawling, limp. And thinking:

I must

"And that, stirring now? In that same — unmentionable — area?"

must wake

"Blood as well, my friend. Blood, which as the old adage goes — will always tell."

But: This is all a dream, Jean-Guy reminds himself, momentarily surprised by his own coherence. I have somehow fallen asleep on duty, which is bad, though hardly unforgivable — and because I did so while thinking on the ci-devant Chevalier du Prendegrace, that traitor Dumouriez's master, I have spun out this strange fantasy.

For Prendegrace cannot be here, after all; he will have fled before Jean-Guy's agentSj like any other hunted lordling. And, knowing this

Knowing this. I will wake soon, and fulfil the mission set me by the Committee for Public Safety: catch Dumouriez, air out this nest of silken vipers. And all will be as I remember.

At the same time, meanwhile, the chevalier (or his phantom — for can he really actually be there, dream or no?) smiles down at Jean-Guy through the gathering crimson shade, all sharp — and tender — amusement. A slight, lithe figure, dressed likewise all in red, his hereditary elegance undercut by a distressingly plebian thread of more than usually poor hygiene: lurid velvet coat topped by an immaculately tied but obviously dingy cravat; silken stockings, offhandedly worn and faded, above the buckled shoes with their neat cork heels. Dark rims to his longish fingernails: dirt, or something else, so long dried it's turned black.

His too-white skin has a stink, faintly charnel. Acrid in Jean-Guy's acquiescent, narrowed nostrils.

"You carry a surplus of blood, Citizen, by the skin-map's evidence," the chevalier seems to say, gently. "And thus might, if only in the name of politeness, consider willing some small portion of that overflowing store to me."

"Can't you ever speak clearly, you damnable aristo?" Jean-Guy demands, hoarsely.

And: "Perhaps not," comes the murmuring reply. "Though, now I think on it I cannot say I've ever tried."

Bending down, dipping his sleek, powdered head, this living ghost of an exterminated generation; licking his thin white lips while Jean-Guy lies still beneath him, boneless, helpless. So soft, all over — in every place

— but one.

So: Now, 1815. Paris again, late September — an old calendar for a brand-new empire — in the Row of the Armed Man, near dusk

where the Giradoux family's lawyer meets Jean-Guy, key in hand, by the door of what was once Edouard Dumouriez's house.

Over the decade since Jean-Guy last walked this part of Paris, Napoleon's civil engineers have straightened out most of the overhanging tangle of back alleys into a many-spoked wheel of pleasant, tree-lined boulevards and well-paved if bleakly functional streets. The Row of the Armed Man, however, still looks much the same as always: a narrow path of cracked flagstones held together with gravel and mortar, stinking of discarded offal and dried urine, bounded on either side by crooked doorways or smoke-darkened signs reading Butcher, Candle-maker, Notary Public. And in the midst of it all, Dumouriez's house, towering shadowy and slant above the rest: three shaky floors' worth of rooms left empty, in a city where unoccupied living space is fought over like a franc left lying in the mud.

"The rabble do avoid it," the lawyer agrees, readily. Adding, with a facile little shrug: "Rumour brands the place as haunted."

And the unspoken addendum to said addendum, familiar as though Jean-Guy had formed the statement himself —

Though I, of course, do not ascribe to the same theory being, as I am, a rational man living in this rational and enlightened state of Nouvelle France, an age without kings, without tyrants

With Jean-Guy adding, mentally, in return: For we were all such reasonable men, once upon a time. And the Revolution, our lovely daughter, sprung full-blown from that same reason a bare-breasted Athena clawing her way up to daylight, through the bloody ruin of Zeus' shattered skull .

The Giradoux lawyer wears a suit of black velvet, sober yet festive, and carries a small satin mask; his hair has been pulled back and powdered in the "antique fashion" of twelve scant years past. And at his throat, partially hidden in the fold of his cloak's collar, Jean-Guy can glimpse the sharp red edge of a scarlet satin ribbon knotted — oh, so very neatly — just beneath his jugular vein.

"I see you've come dressed for some amusement, M'sieu."

The lawyer colours slightly, as if caught unaware in some dubious action.

"Merely a social engagement," he replies. "A Bal des Morts . You've heard the term?"

"Not that I recall."

"Where the dead go to dance, M'sieu Sansterre."

Ah, indeed.

Back home in Martinique, where Jean-Guy has kept himself carefully hidden these ten years past and more, the "Thermidorean reaction" which attended news of the Terror's end — Jacobin arch-fiend Maximilien Robespierre first shot, then guillotined; his Committee for Public Safety disbanded; slavery reinstated, and all things thus restored to their natural rank and place — soon gave rise to a brief but intense period of public celebration on those vividly coloured shores. There was dancing to all hours, Free Black and Creole French alike, with everything fashionable done temporarily à la victime — a thin white shift or cravat-less blouse, suitable for making a sacrifice of oneself on the patriotic altar in style; the hair swept up, exposing the neck for maximum accessibility; a ribbon tied where the good Widow, were she still on hand to do so, might be expected to leave her red and silent, horizontal kiss

At the Bal des Morts , participants' dance-cards were filled according to their own left-over notoriety; for who in their family might have actually gone to good Doctor Guillotin's Machine, or who their family might have had a hand in sending there. Aping executed and executioners alike, they dressed as corpses and preened like resurrected royalty, bobbing and spinning in a sluggish stream of old blood — trash caught in frenzied motion against the gutter's grate, at the end of a hard night's deluge.

The roll-call of the tumbrils: aristocrats, collaborators, traitors and Tyrannists, even the merely argumentative or simply ignorant one poor woman calling her children in to dinner, only to find herself arrested on suspicion of sedition because her son's name happened to be (like that of the deposed king) Louis. And in the opposing camp, Jean-Guy's fellow Revolutionaries: Girondists, Extremists, Dantonists, Jacobins, patriots of all possible stamps and stripes, many of whom, by the end of it all, had already begun to fall under fatal suspicion themselves.

And these, then, their inheritors and imitators, these remnants wrapped in party-going silk, spending their nights laying a thin skin of politeness, even enjoyment, over the unhealed temporal wounds of la Mere France .

Jean-Guy met the girl who would become his late wife at such an affair, and paid her bride-price a few scant weeks later. Chloe, her name had been. An apricot-coloured little thing, sweet-natured and shy, her eyes almost blue; far less obviously du sang negre than he himself, even under the most — direct — scrutiny.

And it is only now, with her so long dead, that he can finally admit it was this difference of tone, rather than any true heart's affection, which was the primary motive of their union.

He glances down at a puddle near his boot, briefly considering how his own reflection sketches itself on the water's dim skin: a dark man in a dark frock-coat — older now, though no paler. Beneath his high, stiff silk hat, his light brown hair has been cropped almost to the skull to mask its obvious kink; under the hat-brim's shade, his French father's straight nose and hazel eyes seem awkwardly offset by the unexpected tint of his slave-born mother's teak-inflected complexion. His mixed-race parentage is writ large in every part of him, for those who care enough to look for it: the tell-tale detritus of colonization, met and matched in flesh and bone. His skin still faintly scarred, as it were, by the rucked sheets of their marriage-bed.

Not that any money ever changed hands to legalize that relationship, Jean-Guy thinks. Maman having been old Sansterre's property, at the time.

This is a tiring line of thought to maintain, however — not to mention over-familiar. And there will be much to be done, before the Paris sun rises again.

"I wish you the joy of your bal , M'sieu," Jean-Guy tells the lawyer. "And so, if it please you — my key?"

Proffering his palm and smiling, pleasantly. To which the lawyer replies, colouring again

"Certainly, M'sieu." and hands it over. Adding, as Jean-Guy mounts the steps behind him:

"But you may find very little as you remember it, from those days when M'sieu Dumouriez had the top floor."

Jean-Guy pauses at the building's door, favouring the lawyer with one brief, backwards glance. And returns —

"That, one may only hope M'sieu."

1793

Jean-Guy wakes to twilight, to an empty street; that angry crowd which formerly assembled to rock and prison the Chevalier du Prendegrace's escaping coach apparently having passed on to some further, more distant business. He lies sprawled on a pile of trash behind the butcher's back door, head abuzz and stomach lurching; though whether the nausea in question results from his own physical weakness, the smell of the half-rotten mess of bones beneath him or the sound of the flies that cluster on their partially denuded surface, he truly cannot tell. But he wakes, also, to the voice of his best spy — the well-named La Hire — telling him he must open his eyes, lurch upright, rouse himself at last

"May the goddess of reason herself strike me dead if we didn't think you lost for ever, Citizen — murdered, maybe, or even arrested. Like all the other committee members."

Much the same advice Jean-Guy remembers giving himself, not all so very long ago. Back when he lay enveloped in that dark red closeness between those drawn velvet curtains, caught and prone under the stale air's weight in the damnably soft, firm grip of the chevalier's upholstery.

But: "Citizen Sansterre!" A slap across the jaw, jerking his too-heavy head sharply to the left. "Are you tranced? I said, we couldn't find you."

Well you've found me now , though. Haven't you

Citizen?

The chevalier's murmuring voice, reduced to an echo in Jean-Guy's blood. His hidden stare, red-glass-masked, coming and going like heat lightning's horizon-flash behind Jean-Guy's aching eyes.

He shakes his head, still reeling from the sting of La Hire's hand. Forces himself to form words, repeating:

" the committee."

"Gone, Citizen. Scattered to the winds."

"Citizen Robespierre?"

"Arrested, shot, jaw held on with a bandage. He'll kiss the Widow tomorrow — as will we, if we don't fly this stinking city with the devil's own haste."

Gaining a weak grip upon La Hire's arm, Jean-Guy uses it to lever himself — shakily — upwards. His mouth feels swollen, lips and gums raw-abraded; new blood fresh and sticky at one corner, cud of old blood sour between his back teeth, at the painful root of his tongue. More blood pulls free as he rises, unsticking the left panel of his half-opened shirt from the nub of one nipple; as he takes a step forward, yet more blood still is found gluing him fast to his own breeches, stiff and brown, in that —

unmentionable area

And on one wrist, a light, crescent-shaped wound, bruised and inflamed, pink with half-healed infection. A painfully raised testimony to dream-dim memory: the chevalier's rough little tongue pressed hard, cold as a dead cat's, against the thin skin above the uppermost vein.

I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.

Jean-Guy passes a hand across his brow, coughing, then brings it away wet — and red. Squints down, and finds himself inspecting a palm-full of blood-tinged sweat.

"Dumouriez," he asks La Hire, with difficulty. "Taken also?"

"Hours ago."

"Show me to his room."

And now, a momentary disclaimer: let it be here stated, with as much clarity as possible, that Jean-Guy had never — hitherto — given much credence to those old wives' tales which held that aristos glutted their delicate hungers at the mob's expense, keeping themselves literally fat with infusions of carnal misery and poor men's meat. Pure rhetoric, surely; folk-tales turned metaphor, as quoted in Camille Desmoulins's incendiary pamphlets: "Church and nobility — vampires. Observe the colour of their faces, and the pallor of your own."

Not that the Chevalier du Prendgrace's face, so imperfectly recalled, had borne even the slightest hint of colourhealthy, or otherwise.

Not long after his return to Martinique, Jean-Guy had held some brief discourse with an English doctor named Gabriel Keynes, a man famous for spending the last ten years of his own life trying to identify the causes of (and potential cures for) that swampy bronze plague known as yellow fever. Bolstered by a bottle or two of good claret and Keynes's personal promise of the most complete discretion, Jean-Guy had unfolded to him the whole, distressing story of his encounter with the chevalier: shown him the mark on his wrist, the marks

elsewhere.

Those enduring wounds which, even now, would — on occasion — break open and bleed anew, as though at some unrecognizable signal; the invisible passage of their maker, perhaps, through the cracks between known and unknown areas of their mutual world's unwritten map?

As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two — such as I, and such as

he

"What y'have here, Monsewer Sansterre," Keynes observed, touching the blister's surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache, "is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. 'Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: from the Latin haematomane , or 'drinker of blood'."

There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes — even upon Jean-Guy's home island — whose very genus was labelled after the common term for those legendary undead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anticoagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: a mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong — and even increase — the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:

"But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man , even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is — no doubt — long accustomed to the consumption of blood."

Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.

And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez's former apartment, past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust

Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun-smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.

On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.

Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793

a bloodstained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.

Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it — struck stupidly dumb with pure shock — while La Hire recounted the details his long day's sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the committee's spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he'd held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand, which he'd then raised, still smiling

and used, sharp edge turned inward — even as they screamed at him to halt — to cut his own throat.

Under the stain's splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further — right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the revolutionary river's flood; before the chevalier's coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez's suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire's frantic flight to Calais, and beyond — back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation master on Old Sansterre's lands till the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.

Or Jean-Guy's — necessarily limited — version of it, at any rate.

Then, once more, 1793. Five o'clock on that long-gone "August" day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man's ruined roofs, dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night's rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today's tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez's house, refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty "citizens' hotel") as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.

Jean-Guy to La Hire: "This Prendegrace — who is he?"

"A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest."

"Yes, to be sure; but besides."

La Hire shrugs. "Does it matter?"

Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats — men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates — have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace's reputation as "one of their own", they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez's promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape; the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.

"The sewers," La Hire suggests. "They served us well enough during the old days, dodging royalist scum through the Cordeliers' quarter"

Jean-Guy scoffs. "A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?"

"It's possible."

"So the accused Church used to claim, concerning Christ's resurrection."

A guffaw. "Ah, but there's no need to be so bitter about that , Citizen. Is there? Since they've already paid so well, after all — those fat-arsed priests — for spreading such pernicious lies."

And: Ah, yes, Jean-Guy remembers thinking, as he nods in smiling agreement. Paid in full, on the Widow's lap just like the king and his Austrian whore, before them.

Across the street, meanwhile, a far less elevated lady of ill-repute comes edging up through the row proper, having apparently just failed to drum up any significant business amongst the crowds that line the Widow's bridal path. Spotting them both, she hikes her skirt to show Jean-Guy first the hem of her scarlet petticoat, then the similarly red-dyed tangle of hair at her crotch. La Hire glances over, draws a toothless grin, and snickers in reply; Jean-Guy affects to ignore her, and receives a rude gesture for his politesse . Determined to avoid the embarrassment of letting his own sudden spurt of anger show, he looks away, eyes flicking back towards the attic's windows

Where he sees, framed between its moth-worn curtains, another woman's face appear: a porcelain-smooth girl's mask peering out from the darkness behind the cracked glass, grub-pale in the shadows of this supposedly unoccupied apartment. It hangs there, pale and empty as a wax head from Citizen Curtuis's museum — that studio where images of decapitated friend and foe to France alike are modelled from casts taken by his "niece" Marie, the Grosholtz girl, who will one day abandon Curtuis to the mob he serves and marry another man for passage to England. Where she will set up her own museum, exhibiting the results of her skills under the fresh new name of Madame Tussaud.

That white face. Those dim-hued eyes. Features once contemptuously regal, now possessed of nothing but a dull and uncomplaining patience. The same wide stare which will meet Jean-Guy's, after the raid, from atop the grisly burden of Dumouriez's overcrowded pallet. That proud aristo, limbs flopped carelessly askew, her nude skin dappledlike that of every one of her fellow victims

(like Jean-Guy's own brow now, in 1815, as he studies that invisible point on the wall where the stain of Dumouriez's escape once hung, dripping)

with bloody sweat.

His "old complaint", he called it, during that brief evening's consultation with Doctor Keynes. A cyclic, tidal flux, regular as breath, unwelcome as nightmare, constantly calling and recalling a blush, or more, to his unwilling skin.

And he wonders, Jean-Guy, just as he wondered then: why look at all? Why bother to hide herself, if only to brave the curtain periodically and offer her unmistakable face to the hostile street outside?

But

"You aristos," he remembers muttering while the chevalier listened, courteously expressionless. "All, so arrogant."

"Yes, Citizen."

"Like that girl. The one"

"At Dumouriez's window? Oh, no doubt."

"But how" Struggling manfully against his growing lassitude, determined to place the reference in context: "How could you know ?"

And the chevalier, giving his version of La Hire's shrug, all sleek muscle under fine scarlet velvet.

"But I simply do , Citizen Sansterre."

Adding, in a whisper — a hum? That same hum, so close and quiet against the down of Jean-Guy's paralyzed cheek, which seems to vibrate through every secret part of him at once whenever the blood still kept sequestered beneath his copper-ruddy mixed-race flesh begins to flow

For who do you think it was who told her to look out, in the first place?

In Martinique — with money and time at his disposal, and a safe distance put between himself and that Satanic, red-lined coach — Jean-Guy had eventually begun to make certain discreet enquiries into the long and secretive history of the family Prendegrace. Thus employed, he soon amassed a wealth of previously hidden information: facts impossible to locate during the Revolution, or even before.

Like picking at a half-healed scab, pain and relief in equal measure; and since, beyond obviously, he would never be fully healed, what did it matter just what Jean-Guy's enquiries managed to uncover?

Chevalier Joffroi d'Iver, first of his line, won his nobility on crusade under Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for services rendered during the massacre at Acre. An old story: reluctant to lose the glory of having captured 300 infidels in battle — though aware that retaining them would prevent any further advancement towards his true prize, the holy city of Jerusalem — the hot-blooded Plantagenet ordered each and every one of them decapitated on the spot. So scaffolds were built, burial pits dug, and heads and bodies sent tumbling in either direction for three whole days, while swords of d'Iver and his companions swung ceaselessly, and a stream of fresh victims slipped in turn on the filth their predecessors had left behind.

And after their task was done, eye-witnesses record, these good Christian knights filled the pits with Greek fire, leaving the bodies to burn, as they rode away.

Much as, during your own famous Days of September , a familiar voice seems to murmur at Jean-Guy's ear, 378 of those prisoners awaiting trial at the Conciergerie were set upon by an angry horde of good patriots like yourself, and hacked limb from limb in the street .

Eyes closed, Jean-Guy recalls a gaggle of women running by red-handed, reeling drunk — with clusters of ears adorning their open, fichu-less bodices. Fellow citizens clapping and cheering from the drawn-up benches as a man wrings the Princess de Lamballe's still-beating heart dry over a goblet, then takes a long swig of the result, toasting the health of the Revolution in pale aristo blood. All those guiding lights of liberty: ugly Georges Danton, passionate Camille Desmoulins

Maximilien Robespierre himself, in his Incorruptible's coat of sea-green silk, nearsighted cat's eyes narrowed against the world through spectacles with smoked-glass lenses; the kind one might wear, even today, to protect oneself while observing an eclipse.

La Famille Prend-de-grace, moving to block out the sun; a barren new planet, passing restless through a dark new sky. And their arms, taken at the same time an axe argent et gules , over a carrion field, gules seulement .

A bloodstained weapon, suspended — with no visible means of support — above a field red with severed heads.

We could not have been more suited to each other, you and I. Could we

— Citizen?

1793

Blood and filth, and the distant rumble of passing carts; the hot mist turns to sizzling rain, as new waves of stench eddy and shift around them. Dumouriez rounds the corner into the Row of the Armed Man, and La Hire and Jean-Guy exchange a telling glance: the plan of attack, as previously determined. La Hire will take the back way, past where the prostitute lurks, while Jean-Guy waits under a convenient awning — to keep his powder dry — until he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol. They give Dumouriez a few minutes' lead, then rise as one.

Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia.

Their motto: nus souvienz le tous . "We remember everything."

Their hereditary post at court: attendant on the king's bedchamber, a function discontinued some time during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.

The rumour: that during the massacre of Saint Barthelme's Night, one — usually unnamed — Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX's honour with a handful of Protestant flesh.

Prendegrace. "Those who have received God's grace."

Receive.