Vampires: The Recent Undead Part 41

In the end, the conquering of the Fellows.h.i.+p bombers was almost anticlimactic. There were only seven conspirators below the Fellows.h.i.+p headquarters. Of those, two had been too close to their own handiwork and had been injured by flying debris from the Pyramid. Only three men resisted with any determination, and Taffy, who got to the group seconds before Dahlia, had subdued the largest of these with no trouble at all by kicking him in the ribs. Jonathan and Roscoe took care of the others.

Rather than herd their hostages back to Cappelini's, Dahlia decided to surface at the closest access point. Lakeisha used her cell phone to call the two vampires guarding that spot, their signal to alert the police that there were prisoners to deliver.

Instead of feeling triumphant, Dahlia found herself doubtful. Surely there should have been more Fellows.h.i.+p people in hiding?

"Wait!" she called at the first flight of stairs. She turned. Taffy, right behind her, was carrying the man whose ribs she'd broken. He was groaning, the noise irritating her. To make sure a rib didn't puncture the human's lung, Taffy was carrying the man in front of her. Dahlia looked into his unshaven face.

"What's your name?" she asked, and the man began to recite some members.h.i.+p number the Fellows.h.i.+p had allotted him.

"That's even more irritating than the pain noises," she said. "Shut up, a.s.shole."

He cut himself off in mid-number.

The practical Lakeisha extracted a wallet from his pants. "This particular a.s.shole is named Nick DeLeo."

"Ever talked to a vampire before, Nick?"

"I don't deal with h.e.l.l sp.a.w.n," the man said.

"I was not sp.a.w.ned by h.e.l.l. I met with something much older than myself in Crete, more years ago than you can imagine. I will still be here when your children are dust, if anyone deigns to breed with you." That seemed doubtful to Dahlia. "Where are the others?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you that," he said. It was hard for him to look formidable when a woman was carrying him, and he gave up the attempt when Dahlia came even closer. He flinched.

"Yes," Dahlia said with some satisfaction. "I'm truly frightening. You can hardly imagine the pain I'll cause you, if you don't tell me what I want to know."

"Don't tell him, Ni-aaargh!" A scream effectively ended another hostage's exhortation.

"Oh, Roscoe, is he hurt?" Dahlia asked with patently false concern.

"Hard to lend his buddy moral support with a broken jaw," Roscoe said. "Oops."

Dahlia smiled down at Nick. "I have ripped people apart with my bare hands. And I enjoyed it, too."

Nick believed Dahlia. "The others have gone to get the firefighters who fished the vamps out of the Pyramid," he said. "It's easier to get the firefighters; they're not armed. Three of us are going to each station around here that responded. They're going to shoot until their weapons are empty except for one bullet, and then they'll kill themselves. Holy martyrs to the cause."

"That's a terrible plan," Lakeisha said. "You think this will discourage people from helping vampires? Make them want to join your stupid Fellows.h.i.+p? The slaughter of public servants?"

"We have a new goal," Dahlia said. "We deposit these losers with the police. We go to the places they're going to attack. They have a head start on us, so let's be quick."

Up the stairs they swarmed, to be met by media galore. The police knew a good photo op, too. As soon as possible, Dahlia and her nest mates faded away into the shadows. The others had their own a.s.signments, but Dahlia herself ran full tilt toward the corner of Almond and Lincoln.

Four of the Pyramid conspirators were converging on the Thirty-four Company.

At least the big doors were shut. The firefighters inside were cooking, sleeping, playing video games-until the first rifle shot whistled through the upstairs window, missing one of their drivers by a hair. Then shots were pouring into the station from all directions. There was screaming and cursing and panic.

Until, one by one, the rifles stopped firing.

The newspaper photographers would have liked to take a picture of the four Fellows.h.i.+p members piled in a heap on the concrete in front of the station with Dahlia standing on top of them. But Dahlia was too clever for that. Instead, the next day's paper had a wonderful picture of tiny Dahlia in her black leather jumpsuit in the center of a huddle of firefighters, hoisted up on the shoulder of Captain Ted Fortescue.

Any tendency the fire company might have to rhapsodize sentimentally over Dahlia's one-woman ant.i.terrorist action was dampened when they got a good look at the broken bones and b.l.o.o.d.y injuries the five foot nothing vampire had inflicted-though all four gunmen were alive, at least for a while.

The newspapers were happy with their pictures, the firefighters were happy to be alive and mostly uninjured, the Fellows.h.i.+p fanatics were secretly glad to be out of the tunnels and to antic.i.p.ate reiterating their inane credo at their trials, Cedric was happy that his vampires had obeyed his direction, and the vampires felt they had at least made a beginning on their revenge for the Pyramid bombing.

Happiest of all was Melponeus the half demon, because he and Dahlia celebrated the victory until Melponeus had to crawl back to his demon brethren with weak knees and a silly grin.

As for Dahlia, she developed a strange new habit. She felt she had established a relations.h.i.+p with the men and women of Company Number Thirty-four.

She began to drop in from time to time. By her third visit, the humans were matter-of-fact about her presence. Ted Fortescue absentmindedly offered her some chili instead of the Red Stuff they'd started keeping at the back of the refrigerator.

When the city council of Rhodes voted to give Dahlia a special commendation for her defense of the firehouse, everyone from the Thirty-four Company attended.

"I feel like they're my pets," Dahlia confided to Taffy.

Taffy wisely hid her smile.

And when one of the shooters was released on a technicality, and every firefighter in the Thirty-four sounded off about it while Dahlia was there learning how to play Grand Theft Auto, none of the firefighters were surprised when the shooter vanished twenty-four hours later.

"Dahlia's like, our mascot," said one firefighter to Ted Fortescue.

"She'll be around a lot longer than we are," Ted Fortescue said. "Especially if you ever say anything like that where she can hear you."

But no one was foolish enough for that.

The Belated Burial.

Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Caitlin R. Kiernan has published eight novels, including Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. She is a prolific author of short fiction, and her stories have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Sh.o.r.es; Alabaster; To Charles Fort, With Love; A is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Since 2004, she has also published the monthly ezine, Sirenia Digest, which features her erotica. Kiernan is currently working on her next novel, The Wolf Who Cried Girl. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner Kathryn and two cats. Kiernan has written several stories that deal with vampires in a nontraditional way. (She also wrote a vampire novel, The Five of Cups, which she has described as an "overly-ambitious jumble of competing ideas and subplots, trying to unite vampirism, the grail myth, the tarot, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the Arthuriad into a single, coherent storyline." An early effort, Kiernan later allowed it to be published only in a limited edition.) Her "Ode to Edvard Munch," a story about immortality and time, is a notable example of her recent short fiction that might be termed vampiric. Originally published in Sirenia Digest #6, May 2006, it has already been republished in vampire anthologies in 2008 and 2009. I recommend it, but instead chose "The Belated Burial." It is unique, both in perspective and subject matter-although if you are well acquainted with the author's work you've already met Miss Josephine and visited the yellow house on Benefit Street in Providence mentioned here.

Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things . . .

-Edgar Allan Poe.

Brylee did object to the casket, and also to the hole in the frozen earth. She did object, in a hesitant, deferential sort of way. But, as they say, her protestations fell upon deaf ears, even though Miss Josephine fully acknowledged that none of it was necessary.

"It will do you good," the vampire said, and, too, she said, "One day you'll understand, when you are older." And, she added, "There is far too little respect for tradition these days." Brylee came near to begging, at the end, but she's not a stupid girl, and she knew that, likely as not, begging would only annoy the vampire and make the whole affair that much more unpleasant.

Being buried when one is fully conscious and keenly aware of the confines of her narrow house and the stink of cemetery soil, these things are terrible, but, as she has learned, there is always something incalculably worse than the very worst thing that she can imagine. Miss Josephine has had centuries to perfect the stepwise procession from Paradise to Purgatory to the lowest levels of an infinitely descending h.e.l.l, and she wears her ac.u.men and expertise where it may be seen by all, and especially where it may be seen by her lovers (whether they are living, dead, or somewhere in between). So, yes, Brylee objected, but only the halfhearted, token objection permitted by her station. And then she did as she was bidden. She dressed in the funerary gown from one of her mistress's steamer trunks, the dress, all indecent, immaculate white lace and silk taffeta; it smells of cedar and moth b.a.l.l.s. Amid the palest chrysanthemums and lilies, baby's breath and albino roses, she lay down in the black-lacquered casket, which is hardly more than a simple pine box, and she did not move. She did not make a sound. Not breathing was, of course, the simplest part. Miss Josephine laid a heavy gold coin on each of her eyelids before the mourners began to arrive, that she would have something to give the ferryman.

"She was so young," one of the vampires said, the one named Addie Goodwin.

"Your sorrow must be inconsolable," said another, the man whom they all call simply Signor Garzarek, who came all the way from New York for the mock-somber ceremony in the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street.

"It was an easy death," Miss Josephine told him, struggling to hold back tears her atrophied ducts could never actually manufacture. "She went in her sleep, the poor dear." And there was the sound of weeping, so Brylee knew that not all the mourners gathered by Miss Josephine were dead. An antique gramophone played "Be Thou My Vision" again and again and again, and there was a eulogy, delivered by an unfamiliar, stuttering voice. And then, before the lid was finally placed on the black casket and nailed firmly down, Miss Josephine laid a single red rose across Brylee's folded hands. The vampire leaned close, and she whispered, "You are exquisite, my dear. You are superb. Sleep tight."

When the casket was lifted off its marble pedestal by the pallbearers, Brylee fought back a sudden wave of panic that threatened to get the better of her. She came very near to screaming, and that would have ruined everything. That would have undone all her mistress' painstaking theater and pretense, and only the knowledge that there is always something worse kept her silent as she was carried out to the waiting hea.r.s.e.

No harm can come to me, she reminded herself again and again and again. I am dead, and what harm can possibly come from these silly games. I am dead almost a month now, and the grave can surely hold no horror for me anymore. "One night and one day," her mistress had promised, "and not an hour longer. You can do that, sweetheart. The time will fly by, you'll see." Brylee had not been told to which cemetery she would be delivered, so it might be the Old North Burial Ground in Providence, or some place as far away as Westerly, or even Stonington Cemetery in Connecticut. The hea.r.s.e ride was longer than she expected, but maybe it circled blocks and doubled back, so maybe it didn't go very far at all from the yellow house on Benefit Street. She lay still with the gold coins on her eyes and the rose gripped now in her hands, and the words to "Be Thou My Vision" repeating again and again behind her eyelids, which Miss Josephine had sewn shut for the occasion, just in case. Be Thou my battle s.h.i.+eld, Sword for the fight; Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight; Thou my soul's Shelter, Thou my high Tower: Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power. Neither death nor undeath had done very much to shatter Brylee's atheistic convictions, so these words held within them no possible comfort. They seemed, at best, a cruel, mocking chorus, childish taunts she would carry with her down into the cold dirt. Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise, Thou mine Inheritance, now and always: Thou and Thou only, first in my heart, High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art. "You are fortunate," Miss Josephine told her when Brylee made the aforementioned objections. "When it was my time to go into the ground, I was wrapped in only a cotton winding cloth, with a little myrrh and frankincense, then buried beneath a dozen feet of Egyptian sand. I was forbidden to rise for a full month, and could always hear the jackals and vultures close at hand, pawing and pecking for a sc.r.a.p of carrion. There was a sandstorm, and a dozen feet became almost a hundred overnight. And when my time below had pa.s.sed, no one came for me. I was left to dig myself free." Which is to say, again, that the most appalling situation can always become so much more appalling, and the lesson has not been lost on Brylee.

She suffered the ride to the unknown cemetery in perfect silence. She made no utterance as the pine casket was lowered into the waiting grave, nor when the raw wound in the January landscape was filled in again by men with shovels and the more efficient bucket of a noisy, chugging skid loader. She was silent as silent ever dared to be, while the earth rained loudly down upon the lid of her casket. But she did flinch, and her sharp teeth pierced her lower lip, half expecting the lid to collapse at any moment, splintered by the weight of all that dirt (though she knew well enough there are steel reinforcements to prevent such a mishap). In the darkness, she grew almost as taut as any genuine corpse bound by the shackles of rigor mortis, and she tasted her own blood. Or, rather, the stolen blood that she pretended was her own. In the hour of twilight, before the funeral service, when she was still half awake at best, Miss Josephine had brought a gift to her. "Because it is such a special day," the vampire said, then gently laid the banquet on the bed next to Brylee. The girl's hair was almost the same color as the black-lacquered casket, and Miss Josephine had only taken the smallest sip from her, just enough that she wouldn't struggle and ruin Brylee's last meal before the grave.

"It's very kind of you," she told her mistress and pantomimed a grateful smile, though, in truth she was much too nervous to be very hungry; she would not be so impolite as to say so. "Do you know her name," Brylee asked. Miss Josephine made a sour sort of face, and asked her what possible difference a name would make, one way or the other. Brylee did not ask the question a second time. Instead, her tongue flicked across the wound that had already been made in the girl's throat. Brylee's incisors and eye teeth made a wider insult of Miss Josephine's kiss, parting skin and fascia, the protective sheets of platysma and sternocleidomastoid muscle, to reveal the pulsing ecstasy of the carotid artery. She'd paid close attention to the anatomy lessons that she'd been sent down to the Hounds to learn, and she knew well enough to avoid the less-healthful, deoxygenated blood of the jugular. And for a short time, to Brylee's surprise, the joy of the nameless girl's fading life rus.h.i.+ng into her was enough to take her mind off everything that was to come.

When she was finished, when the heart had ceased pumping and little remained but a pale husk, Miss Josephine made her sit up, and she cleaned Brylee's blood-smeared face with a black silk handkerchief imported from France more than a hundred years before. Then her mistress kissed her, licking the last few stains from her face, and they lay together for a time, with the dead girl's body growing cold between them. Miss Josephine's delicate hands wandered lazily across Brylee's body, the vampire's fingernails dancing like animated shards of gla.s.s; she spoke of other funerals, other burials, and she spoke of resurrection, too. "There is not a surrender to the clay," she said, "without a concomitant rebirth. We do not lie down, but that we rise when our sleep is done." And these were pretty words, to be sure, as were the prayers she muttered to forgotten deities while her sharp fingers strayed and wandered and found their way inside Brylee.

But when the last clod of frozen soil has been shoved rudely back into place, and she can no longer discern the noise of either men or their machines, when all that has pa.s.sed in the preceding few hours dissolves into a seemingly timeless present, the beauty of words is overthrown. Here there is a growing silence, and an absence of light that she knows would not be the least bit lessened if st.i.tches did not prevent the opening of her eyelids. This is the truth lurking in back of all the ceremony. This is the simple and inviolable negation of the tomb. Brylee laughs very softly, for no ears but her own, and then she whispers, more quietly still, "Out-out are the lights-out all! And over each quivering form, the curtain, a funeral pall, comes down with the rush of a storm . . . " But she trails off, leaving the stanza unfinished. It would be a grand joke, if uttered by Miss Josephine, or Signor Garzarek, but from Brylee's lips, in this box and in this hole, the words tumble senselessly back upon themselves. She stops before they choke her. They lie like ashes and mold upon her tongue. And so she is quiet, and very, very still, because she has been a.s.sured it will be only one night and one day before the hour of her exhumation. She can do that much, surely, and when it is over and she's once again safe in the arms of her mistress, even the suggestion that her current situation held some minor species of dread will seem patently absurd. There is nothing here to fear, and even the bitter cold is not a hards.h.i.+p to one such as herself. She is safe inside her sh.e.l.l, and has but to wait, and waiting is the only genuine trial here to be endured. She thinks to speed the end of her interment by busying her mind, because, as Miss Josephine has said, it is only an undisciplined mind that can pose any possible threat while she is below.

Brylee licks her dry lips, and she begins counting backwards from one-hundred thousand, for she can not conceive any more mundane task. With luck, she will bore herself to sleep, and not wake until the men return with their shovels. She says the numbers aloud, laying each one with the same meticulous care a brick mason might go about his work. And in this manner, time pa.s.ses, even if she is not precisely aware of its pa.s.sage. She stops thinking about the underside of the casket's lid, mere inches from her face, and all the weight bearing down upon the wood. She does not dwell on how little unfilled s.p.a.ce there is to her left or her right. It hardly matters that she is unable to sit up, or roll over on her side, or bend her knees, and she does not succ.u.mb to morbid, irrational fears of suffocation. Dead lungs have no need of air. She counts, and counts, and, soon enough, her voice becomes a calming metronome.

"And when you return," Miss Josephine said the night before, "when you are given back to me, delivered from that underworld like Proserpine or, more appropriately, like cruel and wanton Ishtar-when we are so soon reunited, you will never again be called upon to prove yourself. There will only be the long red sea of eternity." And recalling these words, Brylee loses count somewhere after forty-five thousand, and, full in the knowledge of her own recklessness, she listens. Her lips are stilled, and there is no longer the distraction of her voice. There is the sound of the wild January wind, but m.u.f.fled by her tomb into the most indistinct threnody. Here would be the living hammer of her heartbeat, if her heart still beat. If she still lived. Here would be her hitching breath, perhaps. But her body has been rendered all but inert by the ministrations of her ravenous lover. So, the silence is profound, and for some period of time that pa.s.ses without being measured, Brylee lies listening to almost nothing at all.

In this slumberous white month, even the worms and beetles do not stir, and the moles and voles and millipedes are as monstrously serene as the surface of the moon. With no forethought, no intention to do anything of the sort, Brylee raises her right hand, the pads of her fingers brus.h.i.+ng the lid above her, wood sanded almost completely smooth. Having found that barrier, touching it, she immediately withdraws her hand. And then, as she begins to feel the dry folds of that alarm she promised her mistress and promised herself would not overtake her, she hears a new sound. Very far away, at first, or so it seems, and she is reminded of a discarded life, standing on a subway platform station as a train rumbled towards the terminal. Though, whatever thing is the author of this approaching tumult would put any subway train to shame. Over minutes or hours, the distant rumble becomes a not-so-distant boom, as of summer thunder, and, at last, a roar. And it cannot be so very far below her, this pa.s.sing demon, which seems to roll on forever, dragging itself through an unsuspected burrow gnawed in the rotten bedrock below the cemetery. But even now, Brylee does not scream. If she screams, it might hear, and she imagines it moving restlessly, never-sleeping, a labyrinthine circuit running from one graveyard to the next in, listening for anything that is, by some accident, not yet dead. In times past, it must have been more often sated than in this faultless age of embalming. She squeezes her eyes shut as tightly as she may (though the st.i.tches forbid any chance of them opening), and remembers something Miss Josephine said when they lay together in bed with the devoured girl's cadaver in between. Brylee was lost in the bliss that follows feeding, and the bliss of her mistress's hands upon her, upon her and within her. "Perhaps, down there, you will even be so fortunate as to hear his coming and going about his incessant, immemorial rounds," and in the haze of pleasure she'd not thought to ask the ident.i.ty of this possible august visitor, a name nor any other manner of appellation. Around her pine box, the world shudders, and all the prayers she offers up in the all-but-endless pandemonium are shameless, bald-faced lies. But, it pa.s.ses her by, this innominate leviathan, and either she was unnoticed or nothing it desired. Or, possibly, Brylee was only meant to bear blind witness to its coming and going. No offering trussed up pretty and left helpless within an inverted altar. Some time that she can only mark as later, the ground around and below her is silent and still again, and whatever came so awfully near would seem only a dream, if she did not, by heretofore unsuspected instincts, know otherwise. Brylee lies in the black-lacquered casket, and she is silent, and she is still, and she waits, permitting no thoughts now but her mistress's beloved face and recollections of wide and star-dappled skies stretched out forever above them.

Twilight States.

Albert Cowdrey.

Albert E. Cowdrey was born and grew up in New Orleans, and became a historian after going through the academic mill at Tulane and Johns Hopkins. He served in the army, wrote a historical novel which did not feed him, and found work that did in the Department of Defense as a writer of official history. Most of his professional life was spent in the Northeast; he lived in Baltimore, in Annapolis, and for the last fifteen years of his employed life in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., writing for the army's Center of Military History. After retirement he returned to New Orleans, only to be uprooted again by Hurricane Katrina, and today lives in Natchez, Mississippi, a town of conspicuous oddity and charm that has served him as the background of several stories. "Twilight States," a story in which he offers a completely different idea of what a vampire might be, is set, however in New Orleans.

As a writer of imaginative fiction, he has produced one recent novel, Crux, and fifty or so stories that have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His varied output has been reprinted in English-British English, that is-and in German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hebrew, and Chinese. He has received awards from both the American Historical a.s.sociation and the World Fantasy Convention. A loner by choice or by DNA (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference) he lives with a border collie named Lagniappe, a Creole word meaning something you get for nothing. Of the two, she is much the cleverer-that's in the nature of the breed.

A dusty shop window, a darkening street outside. Streetlights winking on at three o'clock. A summer storm brewing. Milton's reflection-dim, bent, somehow older than his fifty-two years-stared at him through backward lettering that said Sun & Moon Metaphysical Books.

He sighed and flipped the pages of his desk calendar. June 1979 was drawing to an end. Could he afford to close for the day? A customer might yet be driven in by the threat of rain. . . .

As if summoned, the doorbell jangled and a fat old man carrying a furled umbrella erupted into the shop. He strode to a bookcase, browsed for a moment, then s.n.a.t.c.hed down a faded red volume.

"Why d'you stock a fool like Montague Summers?" he boomed.

"Because he s-sells," Milton answered.

Why the stutter? He hadn't stuttered for years. Decades, maybe. Then he knew why: he'd heard that voice before.

"A superst.i.tious Jesuit who thought vampires were real," the intruder was grumbling. "I'm a scientist myself . . . Somebody told me you stock old science fiction."

Milton took a deep breath. "Like Weird Tales, Astounding, Arcana?"

"That's it. Arcana."

He drew out a ring of keys and unlocked a cabinet. "You're a collector?"

"No. I read for pleasure. And professional interest."

Milton explained that Arcana lasted only twenty issues, from mid-1941 until wartime scarcities of paper and ink shut it down. Yet in its brief lifespan it published everybody-big names, promising unknowns.

"Do you have the January '42 issue?"

Milton took another deep breath and offered a flawless copy in its plastic jacket.

"Of course it's pricey. But very rare."

"I'll take it," said the fat man, paying two hundred dollars for a pulp magazine thirty-seven years old. The check he wrote identified him as Erasmus Bloch, M.D., and gave his address and phone number.

The name too rang a bell. An alarm bell, maybe? Yet this was a customer Milton wanted to keep.

"This issue's got a bit of history attached to it," he said, wrapping the package. "My brother Ned was a World War Two hero-Navy Cross-and he got this Arcana just about the time of Pearl Harbor. He volunteered so quickly that he never had a chance to read it."

Actually, Milton had bought the copy (and a dozen others) at a newsstand on Royal Street. But people liked pricey purchases to come with a legend.

"Your brother," came that loud, abrupt voice. "Is he still alive?"

Instantly Milton's stutter resurfaced. "No. He was m-murdered. After the war. T-terribly."

Even Bloch seemed to realize he'd put a heavy thumb on an old wound. He touched Milton's bony shoulder with a hand like a flipper.

"This copy will be treasured," he said.

An instant later, the bell jangled, his umbrella deployed with a snap, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Milton folded his arms tight against his concave chest. How could you? He silently berated himself How could you say so much to a stranger? Worse yet, to somebody who may not be a stranger at all?

By now the French Quarter was adrift in rain. Gutters spouted like whales and ankle-deep water washed the streets clean of tourists. No more customers today.

Milton locked the shop and climbed a circular staircase to his living quarters on the second floor. At the top he paused, wheezing. The hall was deep in shadow and rain streamed down the only window. Four closed doors stood in a row: his parents' bedroom, Ned's, his own, and the bath. Something scratched at Ned's door with a sound like a wire brush.

"It's all right;' said Milton. "Don't you be worried. I'm not."

In his room he took off his shoes, stretched out on the bed, and flicked on an old bra.s.s lamp. Erasmus, Erasmus. Odd name. Now where-?

In search of an elusive memory, his eyes traveled over the yellow walls, the scarred plaster, the heavy purple furniture, the wall clock missing its pendulum. But no memory came.

Rain drummed on the balcony and rattled the wooden shutters. Gradually Milton's breathing became regular, and sleep fell on him like a coverlet.

He began to dream. Ralph O'Meagan, aged ten, lay in bed listening to his mother curse his father. She was out of the hospital again, and as usual the drying-out treatment hadn't worked for long. She was drinking, and the drunker she got the more she tried to fight with her silent husband, and the more he ignored her the sorrier she felt for herself and the more she drank.

Ralph suffered from nightmares and his parents allowed him to keep a nightlight burning. He lay on his side staring at the wall, at the scars and b.u.mps in the old yellow plaster. "Why don't you SAY something?" He concentrated, doing magic, knowing that when his eyes grew tired the wall would seem to move. "You miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"