The Weird Part 160

I don't know what I was expecting-Middle Earth, or Jupiter, or Tuscany, or what. But I could never in a million years have guessed the truth. I pulled my head out.

"It's the vacant lot behind the public library," I said.

I think that even then, that very day, we knew the portal was screwed up. It was only later, after it was obvious, that Gretchen and I started saying out loud the strange things we noticed on the family trip downtown. For one thing, the books we got at the library-obviously that's the first place we went-weren't quite right. The plots were all convoluted and the paper felt funny. The bus lines were not the way we remembered, with our usual bus, the 54, called the 24, and the local transit authority color scheme changed to crimson and ochre. Several restaurants had different names, and the one guy we b.u.mped into whom we knew-my old college pal Andy-recoiled in apparent horror when he saw us. It was just, you know, off.

But the really creepy thing was what Chester said that night as we were tucking him in to bed-and how I miss those days now, when Chester was still practically a baby and needed us to hug and kiss him goodnight. He just started laughing there in the dark, and Gretchen said what is it, honey, and he said that guy with the dog head.

Dog head? we asked him.

Yeah, that guy, remember him? He walked past us on the sidewalk. He didn't have a regular head, he had a dog head.

Well, you know, Chester always said crazy nonsense in those days. He does today, too, of course, but that's different-back then it was cute and funny. So we convinced ourselves he was kidding. But later, when we remembered that-h.e.l.l, we got chills. It's funny, everything from there on in would only get weirder, but it's that dog head, Chester remembering the dog head, that freaks me out. I guess the things that scare you are the things that are almost normal.

Tell me about it.

Anyway, that first time, everything went off more or less without a hitch. After the library we walked in the park, went out for dinner, enjoyed the summer weather. Then we went back to the vacant lot, found the portal, and went home. It's rather hard to see the return portal when you're not looking for it; the s.h.i.+mmering is fainter and of course there's no set of stone steps leading up to it or anything. Anybody watching would just have seen us disappearing one by one. In an old Disney live-action movie (you know, like Flubber or Witch Mountain) there would be a hobo peering at us from the gutter, and then, when we were gone, looking askance at his bottle of moons.h.i.+ne and resolvedly tossing it over his shoulder.

So that night, we felt fine. We all felt fine. We felt pretty great, in fact; it had been an exciting day. Gretchen and I didn't get it on, it was that time of the month; but we snuggled a lot. We decided to make it a weekend tradition, at least on nice days-get up, read the paper, get dressed, then out to the portal for a little adventure.

Because by the third time it was obvious that it would be an adventure; the portal wasn't permanently tied to the vacant lot downtown. I don't know if this was usual or what. But I pictured it flapping in the currents of s.p.a.ce and time, sort of like a windsock, stuck fast at one end and whipping randomly around at the other. I still have no idea why it dropped us off so close to home (or apparently so close to home) that first time-I suppose it was still trying to be normal. Like an old guy in denial about the onset of dementia.

The second time we went through, we thought we were in old-time England, on some heath or something-in fact, after I put my head in to check, I sent Gretchen back to the house to fill a basket with bread and fruit and the like, for a picnic. The weather was fine, and we were standing in a landscape of rolling gra.s.sy hills, little blue meandering creeks, and drifting white puffy clouds. We could see farms and villages in every direction, but no cities, no cars or planes or smog. We hiked down into the nearest village and got a bit of a shock-n.o.body was around, no people, or animals for that matter-the place was abandoned. And we all got the strong feeling that the whole world was abandoned, too-that we were the only living creatures in it. I mean, there weren't even any bugs. We went home after an hour and a half and ate our picnic back in the clearing.

The third time we went through, we ended up in this crazy city-honestly, it was too much. Guys selling stuff, people zipping around in hovercars, drunks staggering in the streets, cats and dogs and these weirdly intelligent looking animals that were sort of like deer but striped and half as large. Everybody wore hats-the men seemed to favor these rakish modified witch-hat things with a floppy brim, and women wore a kind of collapsed cylinder, like a souffle. n.o.body seemed to notice us, they were busy, busy, busy. And the streets! None of them was straight. It was like a loud, crowded, spaghetti maze, and for about half an hour we were terrified that we'd gotten lost and would never find the portal again, which miraculously had opened into the only uninhabited dark alley in the whole town. Chester demanded a witch hat, but the only place we found that sold them didn't take our money, and we didn't speak the language anyway, which was this whacked-out squirrel chatter. Oh, yeah, and everybody had a big jutting chin. I mean everybody. When we finally got home that night the four of us got into a laughing fit about the chins-I don't know what it was, they just struck us as wildly hilarious.

Annoying as that trip was, I have to admit now that it was the best time we ever had together, as a family I mean. Even when we were freaked out, we were all on the same page-we were a team. I suppose it's perfectly normal for this to change, I mean, the kids have to strike out on their own someday, right? They have to develop their own interests and their own way of doing things, or else they'd never leave, G.o.d forbid. But I miss that time. And just like every other a.s.shole who fails to appreciate what he's got while he still has it, all I ever did was complain.

I'm thinking here of the fourth trip through the portal. When I stuck my head through for a peek, all I saw was fog and all I heard was clanking, and I pictured some kind of waterfront, you know, with the moored boats b.u.mping up against each other and maybe a nice seafood place tucked in among the warehouses and such. I guess I'd gotten kind of reckless. I led the family through and after about fifteen seconds I realized that the fog was a h.e.l.l of a lot thicker than I thought it was, and that it kind of stung the eyes and nose, and that the clanking was far too regular and far too deep and loud to be the result of some gentle ocean swell.

In fact, we had ended up in h.e.l.l-a world of giant robots, acrid smoke, windowless buildings and glowing toxic waste piles. We should have turned right around and gone back through the portal, but Chester ran ahead, talking to himself about superheroes or something. Gretchen went after him, Luann reached for my hand (maybe for the last time ever? But please, I don't want to go there), and before you knew it we had no idea where we were. The fog thickened, if anything. It took Luann and me half an hour just to find Gretchen and Chester, and two hours more to find the portal (and this only by random groping-it would have been easy to miss it entirely). By this time we were all trembling and crying-well, I wasn't crying, but I was sure close-and nearly paralyzed with fear from a series of close calls with these enormous, filthy, fast-moving machines that looked like elongated forklifts and, in one instance, a kind of chirping metal tree on wheels. When I felt my arm tingle I nearly c.r.a.pped myself with relief. We piled through the portal and back into a summer evening in the yard, and were disturbed to discover a small robot that had inadvertently pa.s.sed through along with us, a kind of four-slice toaster type thing on spindly anodized bird legs. In the coming weeks it would rust with unnatural speed, twitching all the while, until it was nothing but a gritty orange stain on the ground. Maybe I'm remembering this wrong-you know, piling all our misfortunes together in one place in my mind-but I believe it was in the coming days that the kids began to change, or rather to settle into what we thought (hoped) were temporary patterns of unsavory behavior. Chester's muttered monologuing, which for a long time we thought was singing, or an effort to memorize something, took on a new intensity-his face would turn red, spittle would gather at the corners of his mouth, and when we interrupted him he would gaze at us with hatred, some residual emotion from his violent fantasy world. As for Luann, the phone began ringing a lot more often, and she would disappear with the receiver into private corners of the house to whisper secrets to her friends.

Eventually, of course, the friends turned into boys. Gretchen bought her some makeup, and the tight jeans and tee s.h.i.+rts she craved-because what are you going to do, make the kid wear hoop dresses and bonnets? And Chester-well, Gretchen's parents bought him the video game for his birthday, and that was the end of that. Whatever demons were battling in his mind all day long found expression through his thumbs-it became the only thing that gave the poor kid any comfort. Eventually we would come to realize that Luann was turning into, forgive me, something of a s.l.u.t, and that Chester had lost what few social graces we'd managed to teach him. Today his face is riddled with zits, he wanders off from the school grounds two or three times a week, and he still gets skidmarks in his tighty whities. And Luann-we bought her a used car in exchange for a promise to drive Chester where he wanted to go, but she gave him a ride maybe once-it was to, G.o.d knows why, the sheet metal fabricating place down behind the supermarket-and left him there for four hours while she got it on with some punk from the west side.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. You'd think we would have quit the portal entirely after the robot fog incident, but then you're probably mistaking us for intelligent people. Instead we went back now and again, just to see what the portal was up to. Sometimes I went by myself. I suspect Gretchen was doing the same-she'd be missing for a couple of hours then would come back flushed and covered with burrs, claiming to have been down on the recreation path, jogging. I don't think the kids went alone-but then where did Chester get that weird knife?

In any event, what we saw in there became increasingly disturbing. Crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating. We generally wouldn't spend more than a few minutes wherever we ended up. The portal, in its decline into senility, seemed to have developed an independent streak, a mind of its own. It was...giving us things. Things it thought we wanted. It showed us a world full of money, or something that looked kind of like money, but felt as though it was made of...flesh. We saw a world that looked like ours, except thinner, everything thinner, the buildings and people and trucks and cars, and from the expression of horror on Gretchen's face, I could tell where that one was coming from. And there was the one place where all the creatures great and small appeared to have the red hair, thick ankles, and perky little b.o.o.bs of the new administrative a.s.sistant at my office. Gretchen didn't talk to me for days after that, but it certainly did put me off the new a.s.sistant.

And so before the summer was over, we gave up. The kids were too busy indulging their new selves, and quit playing make-believe out in the woods. And Gretchen and I were lost in our private worlds of self-disgust and conjugal disharmony. By Christmas we'd forgotten about the portal, and the clearing began to fill in. We did what people do: we heaved our grim corporeal selves through life.

I checked back there a couple of times over the next few years-you know, just to see if everything looked all right. Needless to say, last time I checked, it didn't-the humming was getting pretty loud, and the s.h.i.+mmering oval was all lopsided, with a sort of hernia in the lower left corner, which was actually drooping down far enough to touch the ground. When I poked a stick through the opening, there was a pop and a spark and a cloud of smoke, and the portal seemed to emit a kind of hacking cough, followed by the scent of ozone and rot. When I returned to the house and told Gretchen what I'd seen, she didn't seem to care. And so I decided not to care, either. Like I said before, there were more important things to worry about.

Just a few weeks ago, though, I started hearing strange noises at night. "Didya hear that?" I'd say out loud, and if I was in bed with Gretchen (as opposed to on the sofa) she would rise up out of half-sleep to tell me no, it was just a dream. But it wasn't. It was a little like a coyote's yip, but deeper, more elongated. And sometimes there would be a screech of metal on metal, or a kind of random ticking; and if I got up and looked out the window, sometimes I thought I could see a strange glow coming from the woods.

And now, even in the daytime, there's a funny odor hanging around the yard. It's springtime, and Gretchen says it's just the smell of nature waking up. But I don't think so. Is springtime supposed to smell like motor oil and dog p.i.s.s in the morning? To be perfectly honest, I'm beginning to be afraid of what our irresponsibility, our helplessness, has wrought. I mean, we bought this place. We own it, just like we own all our other problems. I try to talk to Gretchen about it, but she doesn't want to hear it. "I'm on a different track right now," she says. "I can't be distracted from my healing." Can you tell she's been in therapy all winter? I want to throttle the shrink when she talks like this. Meanwhile, I have no idea where our daughter is half the time, and I haven't gone up to Chester's room in three weeks. I can hear him up there, muttering; I can hear the bed squeak as he acts out his violent fantasies; I hear the menacing orchestral strings and explosions and tortured screams that emanate from his favorite games.

Problems don't just go away, you know? Problems get bigger and bigger and before you know it they're bigger than you are, and it's too late to fix them. Some days, when I've gotten a decent night's sleep and have had a few cups of coffee, I think sure, I'll just get on the phone, start calling people up and asking for help. A school guidance counselor, a marriage therapist, a pediatrician, a witch or shaman or wizard or physicist or whoever in the h.e.l.l might know what to do about the portal, or even have the b.a.l.l.s to walk down that path and see what's become of the clearing.

But on other days, days like today, when I'm too d.a.m.ned tired even to reach for the phone, the only emotion I can summon up is longing-longing for a time when the world was miraculous, when I couldn't wait to get up in the morning and start living. I mean, the magic has to come from someplace, right? It's out there, bestowing itself on somebody else's wife, somebody else's kids, somebody else's life. All I want is to get just a little of it back. Is that so much to ask?

Saving the Gleeful Horse.

K. J. Bishop.

K. J. Bishop (1972) is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy magazine, and Subterranean magazine. Most infamously, her novella 'Maldoror Abroad' appeared in Alb.u.m Zutique; the story riffed on the original Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by Isidore Lucien Duca.s.se under the pen name 'Comte de Lautreamont'. Her tale 'Saving the Gleeful Horse' (2010) shares affinities with Decadent modes of writing, including the Alfred Kubin excerpt that opened The Weird.

Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature a rare, marvellous creature at that to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this a.s.sa.s.sination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces from yard-wall to yard-wall and their eyes s.h.i.+ne darkly as they beat the animal, which has done nothing to them, with wooden sticks and swords, until holes open in its body and the prizes caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters rain down into their hands.

I am Molimus. I live under the bridge where the day-boats go from wet and wooden Bracklow to the foot of the sweeping stone stair going up the hill to Firmitas and the military school.

I am called Molimus the Great by some here in Bracklow, in recognition of my height and strength. My s.h.i.+rt is made of four men's s.h.i.+rts sewn together, and an eight-pound cheese wheel fits in the palm of my hand. By profession I trade in flotsam, which I catch under the bridge in these great hands of mine and sell at the Pauper's Forum up by s.h.i.+ndy Estate.

Because of this occupation, which keeps me under the bridge watching the water from morning until late at night, I oftentimes see the dead animals. If the husks are not burnt, people toss them into the river. I see them on holidays, especially, when the slaughtered numbers are high, but they are killed all year round.

To look at them! Never did dreams supply such a zoo of little spotted and striped horses and chequered gazelles, sky-blue lions, dawn-pink bears, gallant golden beetles, chivalrous silver anteaters! I have even seen elephants amongst them, and star-shaped beasts that must have come from the carved waves of the sea before they were captured and hung up to be put to death.

To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water sometimes so much that I think the tears of Molimus could turn the river salty.

I can't even salvage them for trading. The bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost. The husks are as diaphanous as cellophane, and any part submerged below the water dissolves like bread in soup.

I had never thought to see a live one that wasn't already hanging in a yard, soon to die. But that is what happened. It was an October night, a while after sundown, when the day-boats were back at their moorings and the water was full of the dark medicinal colour of an overcast sky. I saw the head of a little horse, banded in red, blue, white and gold like the flag of some merry knight, tossing on the river waves another dead victim of a party, I a.s.sumed, until I came to see the striped legs that were churning the water.

Despite his predicament there was nothing frightful about his looks, as I saw when his head turned towards me. Far from showing panic, he gave me a game sort of grin and rolled his eye as if to say, 'It's the world! What can you do?'

It was a simple thing to reach out and carry him into my little hut of boards and bark, where I wrapped him in a blanket and set him in front of the oil stove to get dry and warm.

I had saved a life and that life therefore became my responsibility. I did all I could to nurse the little striped horse, who I named the Gleeful Horse, but I could see my efforts coming to nothing. He was as full of holes as a sieve and his legs were twisted. I bound his wounds with clean rags and tried to feed him, but he had no appet.i.te, despite his steady good cheer.

It became clear to me that I would have to take the bus out to Barrage Cross to get help from near there. I went in the early morning and carried the Gleeful Horse in a string bag. He seemed to enjoy the sight of the green market gardens of s.h.i.+ndy Back through the windows of the bus, and as we drove through the chalk hills that roll away behind the gardens his fiddle-shaped nostrils and his round hindquarters twitched, as if in his own mind he was galloping about out there on the world's green gra.s.s.

From the Barrage Cross shops I walked out of the village, into the trees, and down the little grey weedy paths through the birch and buck-thorn, going by the way that leads to the Garth of the Aorist: where trunk and branch turn, by and rumly by, into pillar and vault, and the path pa.s.ses into the shade of stone arcades forming a four-sided cloister around a garth choked high with enormous brambles.

As you must, I walked around the cloister with the sun a certain number of times, then against the sun another number, then with the sun again, so that the brambles withdrew underground, all the th.o.r.n.y bundles coming apart and slithering below in one rush as if a giant in the earth had them on a rope (the effect on the eye is striking). After this, where all was a wild saw-toothed muddle just a moment or two ago, in another moment the lawn of trefoil and clover grew, which grows no matter the season as dainty a green spread as you could wish for a picnic or a wedding. Upon the gra.s.s, as settled as a hen in the middle of the sweet-smelling lawn, there appeared the dwelling that appears: a round, rose-bosomed hut of dry-stone, having a chimney at the rear and one doorless doorway at the front, facing the coming visitor across the green court.

Entering this shelter, half house, half dovecote, as it were, with the Gleeful Horse in the string bag under my arm, I tugged my cap to the White Ma'at, the last Ma'at.

Whoever first painted the omen-card where she is shown as a figure seated with legs crosswise in front of a painted hearth must have seen her, or been advised by someone who had; at any rate, I have never found her arranged other than in this way when I come to her house.

The White Ma'at: a woman, or a woman-shaped thing, built in a long and heavy way, with a tall forehead like a white wall and a knotty blue vein labouring up it. What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular, wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic. What she doesn't see through her milky cataracts would fit in a baby's sock.

She already knows about the Gleeful Horse.

'That is a treasure animal,' she says, even before I've finished pulling him out of the bag. He has no fear of her; he gives even the White Ma'at his qualmless grin. Nor does he mind that she doesn't grin back. When she taps on his bandaged belly with a sharp knuckle he only rolls his eye and winks at me. He makes no fuss even when the Ma'at prises his mouth open and squints inside. Her parsnip-white fingers find something under his tongue. A toy a plastic ring with a false emerald. She shows it to me and puts it back.

'When all their treasure is gone, they die,' she says simply.

My poor horse, having to hang onto that uncomfortable lump. I suppose that if he swallowed it, it might fall out one of the holes in his side when the bandages I put on come loose, as they not infrequently do.

I take him from the White Ma'at and sit with him in my lap, expecting her to offer me a healing charm or a recipe for physick. But instead, she tells me: 'You mustn't blame the children. They don't see that this is a living thing, Molimus.'

'They do see,' I say in reply, uncomfortably, for it isn't really safe to argue with the White Ma'at. 'And they enjoy turning it into a dead thing.'

'Molimus,' she starts, and I know she is going to defend them, and I can't fathom why 'Molimus, you have a foot in both worlds. And in one world this animal has life, and you see it, and I see it, but in the other world it has no life, it is a thing. You see more than most persons, true, but that's d.a.m.ning with faint praise. Your eyes have a picture of cruelty on the inside. You see that picture clearly, and because of it, see other things unclearly.'

I think of what I might say and choose silence. When I think of how that picture came to be there on the inside of my eyes, I am certain beyond any possibility of error that children know what is alive, and moreover that they are disposed to do harm with this knowledge. I'm surprised that the Ma'at doesn't know.

But in any case, I don't see what this has to do with my horse and his needs.

Then, rare for her, she asks a question: 'Why do you want to save that thing?'

I feel like answering that I didn't come all this way to talk to a town matron with ordinary vulgar ideas. I wish I could hide the thought, but she says, 'What do I care about your dull thoughts, Molimus?' Her hands fall at her sides after she speaks. The unstrung gesture is not one that should belong to her. She isn't like herself at all today, so that I dare to ask: 'Is anything wrong, Ma'at?'

There's nothing to like about the distracted way she pinches at the folds of her clothing, as if the white wool were full of seeds and burrs, nor the way her jaw goes around like a cow's chewing cud. Thankfully, both motions cease and she retires her hands to her sides again they look better hanging than twitching.

There's no reason why the Ma'at shouldn't be tired, of course. She was old a long time ago, and her life has certainly had its ups and downs. But it's too much to believe that she is actually infirm in either body or mind. Or that she is changing. The world changes. The White Ma'at doesn't.

'The White Ma'at doesn't,' she echoes me aloud. I can't tell whether she is agreeing or mocking me.

I try to think of nothing, while her eyes move back and forth under the cataracts, probably following the movements of figures she sees in her head.

It comes to me that she would surely have dismissed me by now if she didn't have any magic for the Gleeful Horse. So perhaps she wants to bargain, after all, and has a peculiar way of saying so today.

The White Ma'at is a great one for bargaining. When she was young, as they tell it in Bracklow and s.h.i.+ndy, she lost a battle that she shouldn't have lost. Rather than blame herself she blamed her armies and cursed those of her loyal men who were left alive. She cast a spell that pushed them into the chalk hills like raisins in a pudding, so that they all died in the white dark.

After that she slept, and was captured whilst asleep. She was to have been hung and burnt, but she escaped by means of a bargain with Prince November himself. That's why she never leaves her house in the midst of the cloister. Prince November keeps her there. He knows she'd escape from him forever if he let her wander even as far as to the paths in the birch wood, never mind to the bus stop at Barrage Cross. Gossip says he drinks knowledge from the vein on her forehead at night and uses it for his business in the world.

The White Ma'at says she doesn't care about my dull thoughts. But if I had some thoughts that glimmered a little? Perhaps she wants payment or part-payment in that coin. She is getting fretful, it may be, like a bored child, sick of her boxed-in life, and wants to hear a wonder-tale. I would rather believe that than believe she has changed, or is changing.

But how to give wonder to a creature like her?

'Well, White Ma'at,' I begin at last, 'as for why I want to save him, it's like this...'

From the seed of the name I gave him there grows a tale of happiness and delight that was lost to the world even before the long-ago age when the Ma'ats ruled from their halls where s.h.i.+ndy Estate is now. The gist is that my Gleeful Horse will bring this happiness back to us.

Or the beginning of the tale grows, anyway, issuing from me like a run of notes from a whistle. I use my best words words and devices of speech I have heard during my life and remembered for their decorative and n.o.ble effects but have never had occasion to use aloud.

My efforts sound very handsome to me so handsome that they even sound truthful.

But before I am much past the beginning, the White Ma'at snaps 'Enough!' so sharply that I jump. In the glare of her cataracts, my story lies dead. If it had been a treasure animal it would have been not beaten with wooden weapons but dispatched in an instant with one swing of a real sword.

I want to cry out that this is not a game. It's all I can do to bite my tongue. I can't make myself not think of putting my huge hands around the neck of the White-Ma'at and shutting her throat for her. Of course, if I tried something so mad, she might drum me into the ground like the biggest raisin of all. I feel sick, not for my sake but for the sake of my horse, whose winking eye shows how little he understands.

But the White Ma'at only twitches her lips, as if she were amused at last.

'Let's not tell the end of the story,' she says, and her voice is calm. And she, then: 'You must fill that sorry thing with treasures again, Molimus.' I don't like her calling him a sorry thing. But I hearken to what she tells me, now that she is speaking about the Gleeful Horse.

'You don't know at all why you want to save it. But I know on your behalf. The future will work through you, Molimus. Who would have imagined that? Replenish his treasures you have your work, Molimus the Great. Replenish them abundantly.'

'And how shall I do that?' I ask gruffly. Her insults and sneering tone have rubbed me up the wrong way, and I can't hide it but I think she was telling the truth that she doesn't care about my thoughts, even if they're disrespectful. 'Should I buy caramels and trinkets and feed them to him?'

'No,' she answers to my words. 'The world inside him is yet another world. You can't see it, Molimus. These things, these nothings that fall out of a treasure animal, are altogether different when they're inside him. In the world inside him, they are more like stars. It is elements starlike pieces of this sort that you must gather and feed to him. He has one left, as you saw. One is not enough.'

I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits there with us. The Ma'at sounds more like herself again, but I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame. I can't say whether this is the reasonable compunction that belongs properly to the healthy conscience of a man, or an imaginative, fanciful shame. Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor, where its stones of pure false red blink sleepily in the weak sun that has placed one foot through the opening in the wall.

The White Ma'at picks it up and makes it vanish between her fingers like a street magician doing a coin trick.

'Was that a starlike piece?' I ask.

She says no, it wasn't, but it was something I should feel better for having got out of me.

And waits, until I ask where I should find them.

Within every living thing is a starlike piece. Those within human beings are bright, and those within children are the brightest of all. As people age, the starlike parts grow dim as though with distance, except in the cases of certain geniuses and half-wits. At first I didn't understand how children can be so cruel and their starlike parts so bright, but the White Ma'at, who told me these things when she gave me the Wine of Smoke, said that she knew nothing of stars being kind, only of their being powerful.

She asked me three times if I really wished to drink the Wine of Smoke.

The Wine of Smoke was acquired by her, hundreds of years ago, from a man who combined the talents of wizard and vintner, who had come to the Garth of the Aorist to bargain with her. She intended to use it to escape from the confinement that Prince November had forced on her. But even after drinking a draft and becoming smoke, she found that she still could not penetrate past the cloister. The White Ma'at spent more than a century in sorcerous meditation of the most strenuous kind to turn her body back to flesh.

For someone who is not a sorcerer there is no such possibility of return. And the gift of death is lost. If one who had drunk the Wine of Smoke were captured and, for example, shut within a bottle and the bottle sent deep into the earth, he would be stuck in that bind until the end of time. This, said the White Ma'at, is the penalty I should expect to suffer if I ever break our agreement.

As if I would ever break it for all is well with the Gleeful Horse. He greets me leaping and grinning when I return home in the early mornings. Even before I get back, I hear him whinny merrily when he smells me coming through the fog on the river.

I think he has forgotten that he was ever hurt. There's no rancour or fear in him, nothing timorous or furtive. He breathes in the starry motes they look like sun-kissed thistledown through his fiddle-shaped nostrils. He capers all around the bridge and the docks, rolling his eyes and winking, brave as a flag, friend to cats and dogs, and that is as it should be. I only wish I could pet him; but in the afternoons I lead him by my scent to s.h.i.+ndy Park, and the old ladies who feed the ducks there make a great fuss of him.

The starlike pieces don't last very long this being because they aren't his own, the White Ma'at taught me so I must keep putting them inside him, as she told me to do. For each one that I give to him, I must take another to give to her.

Over in Firmitas they shut all their gilded and vermilion windows at night, and in Bracklow and s.h.i.+ndy they hang up charms next to fireplaces. On both sides of the river they talk in whispers about the smoke that sticks to the life of children and pulls it away. The ones the smoke touches sicken and die quickly. Before they die they change, becoming like wax paper figures. You could light candles in them and they would be child-shaped lanterns. Because they become hollow, like treasure animals, the sick ones are euphemistically called Treasure Children.

Bracklow wonders where Molimus the Great has gone, but I'm still around, in the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts, and in the engine smoke of the day boats ferrying the folk who work as maids and porters in Firmitas. I believe I know what the White Ma'at does with her share of the starlike pieces, for I've seen Prince November in his tin-s.h.i.+ngled carriage out on the chalk hills more than once, with his retinue in dun and black, driving toward the birch wood. He and she have come to a new agreement, I think, whereby she is paying off her debts.

The vein on her forehead has become a lode of white gold: often swollen, but sometimes flat, so that the gossip about Prince November drinking from her has gained more currency amongst those who go to see her. But not so many do these days. Unthinkable as it is, she has changed. She is nearly always queer now. I never know whether she will be distracted or depressed or silly when I come with the lovely motes for her to inhale. She wears the ring I coughed up, and when she's in her whimsical mood she steals admiring looks at it, as if it were a real ruby on her finger.

I would not have believed it possible, but since the emptying sickness has been in the world the old game of murdering treasure animals has fallen out of favour. Ball games and swap cards are popular now, and pageant games.

In the pageants, a character called Grinning Horse has for some time been a playground hero. He is the one who saves children by breathing in the smoke before it can reach them. He is also the one who, by the laws of the games, is the bold opponent of a certain Prince No-Never, and his old nurse, the Wheat Mate, and defeats them (as he defeats policemen, schoolmasters, and other vile enemies often in rough and b.l.o.o.d.y ways, children being what they are). For months, I could make no pretence to having an explanation for this, but eventually I began to hear things. It seems that the Treasure Children themselves started the invention of Grinning Horse, Prince No-Never and the Wheat Mate. If what I have heard is true, the Treasure Children dream of these characters after the smoke visits them, and they say the smoke gives them the dreams in exchange for their lives. The dreams, and the part played by the smoke, they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing effect of the illness, and the accounts are reinforced by others who fall sick.

I remember the White Ma'at's words concerning the future, and how my never-finished tale of the Gleeful Horse sounded true when I tried to tell it.

So perhaps it will all be just as I imagined.