•

Forty minutes after she had burst into tears, her initial wails having subsided first to weak sobs and now to sniffles punctuated by the occasional ragged gasp, Janis sat up in Chris' bed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. It was the first time in her life, so far as she knew, that she had cried like that, and although her throat was now raw and sore, and her eyes swollen, she felt immeasurably better.

So that's why people do that, she thought. You feel better when you're finished. Right. Got it.

Not, it occurred to her, that she really was finished. She had kind of an idea that when she got back to her room and saw Jill's stuff all gone, she was probably going to have to do it all over again. But she guessed that was okay. It was probably normal. Natural. Human. She just hoped that when it did happen, she wouldn't have to deal with people knocking on the door, wanting to make sure she was all right, or God forbid, to comfort her. She didn't think she'd be able to stand that.

Come to think of it, it was a little weird, wasn't it, that no one on Chris' hall had been by to check on her, blubbering the way she had been? Not that she minded, exactly, but still. You would think that someone would have shown some concern.

Insensitive little fucks, thought Janis, oblivious to the screams and moans erupting all around her or to the terror that had gripped the rest of the campus, and lit a cigarette. She choked on the smoke, coughed, and stubbed it out irritably. Yeah. Definitely a cold on the way. All that crying had made her thirsty, too, so she sniffed experimentally at the unfinished drink on Chris' nightstand. Something harsh and citrusy and alcoholic, all of which sounded just dandy to Janis; she downed it in one gulp, then grimaced. Ugh. Warm gin. Well, that answered that question, anyway. Janis only knew one person who favored gin drinks in November. At least that meant that wherever Chris was, he probably wasn't out somewhere getting laid. She didn't think that even Chris would fuck Brittany.

Janis blinked and sat up suddenly, glancing over to the desk, thinking back.

Huh, she thought. That's weird.

She hadn't really been surprised to see no pictures of Chris among the photos on his desk. They had all undoubtedly made it into his album. Janis had seen Chris' photo album: it was a monument to narcissism. But where had Brittany been?

She shuffled back to the desk, trying to imagine what in God's name someone who never even left the house out of drag could possibly have worn to a costume party. She'd have to have really outdone herself, Janis thought. Someone as competitive as Brittany? She'd have to have gone as...as a dragon or something. Something really elaborate. Either that, or done an Albert and refused to dress up at all. But somehow Janis couldn't really see Brittany taking that route. It was too obviously lame, too much like giving up.

She looked down at the photo of Jill and Lori and smiled, wondering if she were going to start crying again. Nope. Not yet. She laid it to one side. She'd ask Chris when he got home if she could keep that one. She had no pictures of Jill at all, and she thought she'd like to have one.

Jill had been camera shy, but Brittany sure as hell wasn't. So where was she? Janis was certain that Chris would have taken at least one picture of her. He had of all his other friends. Not to mention all of the film he had used on Stephanie, whom she didn't even think Chris had known last year. Not that it mattered: Chris always had an eye for beauty, and for drama, and for sartorial splendor; and Stephanie in that costume had embodied all three.

Not for the first time, Janis found herself wondering if Chris and Stephanie had ever slept together. Or if they would, some time in the future. And if so, how Mark would feel about that, if he ever found out about it.

Completely unaware of the thin mean smile which crossed her face at this thought, Janis scanned the photographs, looking for elaborate costumes. None of them seemed to contain a Brittany. Once more she passed the unexpectedly handsome Jens, the demure Evelyn, the supremely self-confident Stephanie, and it occurred to her to wonder whether she would even recognize Brittany without her glasses on. She wasn't, she realized, entirely sure what Brittany actually looked like.

She knew, of course, that she wasn't attractive. She supposed that everyone knew that, really. Although you never really thought of her as unattractive either, just as weird-looking, freakish, almost cartoon-like, with those big Coke-bottle-lens glasses and the drag-like outfits, and the extravagantly exaggerated mannerisms.

But of course, Janis thought. That's the entire point of it. That's why she makes herself so preposterous. It isn't costume; it's camouflage. It's designed to distract you, to keep you from ever really looking at her. Because she's vain, Brittany is. She's even vainer than Chris, in her own way. And nobody but me ever seems to realize that about her. Even Stephanie, who hates her—or at least who should, if she doesn't. Even Mark, who takes such pride in his ability to see through her. Even he doesn't really appreciate the depths of her vanity. But I do. I do.

She flipped through the photographs with a growing sense of futility. She couldn't have missed the Wodehouse Formal, she thought desperately. Nobody misses the Wodehouse Formal. But even as she told herself this, she thought that Brittany probably had. And she thought that she knew why.

Because she is vain, Janis thought. And because she always has to win. If she can't win, then she won't play: that's just the way she is. And a costume party is a no-win situation for someone like Brittany, because she isn't attractive, and even without the camera, a costume party is all about image. It's about how you look dressed as someone else, in an environment in which everyone is dressed as someone else. There can be no camouflage at a costume party. And those aren't terms on which Brittany can compete. She isn't pretty enough, and she isn't creative enough, and she doesn't have the right sort of charisma. And also (Janis mentally amended, with the brutal instinct of one born to wealth), she doesn't really have as much money as she likes people to think she has, either. With any one of those things—with good looks, or with personal magnetism, or with either the talent or the financial resources to come up with a truly spectacular costume—she could have put up a showing. But Brittany doesn't have any of those things, so she refused to try. She knew she couldn't win, so she wouldn't even play. She never even went to the Formal at all.

Oh, you're just making that up, Janis told herself, but she didn't really think that she was. She thought that Brittany had probably told everyone that she had a migraine, just like she always did whenever she wanted to get out of something, and then just stayed home and read a book or something.

Oh well, she thought, without a trace of sympathy. That's Brittany.

Janis sighed and began sorting the photos into piles. Chris really had taken a lot of pictures of Stephanie. Here was yet another one; she thought it had probably been taken quite late in the evening. People in the background looked drunk, and the lounge seemed to have become smoky and hot. Some guy in the distance had taken off his shirt, and his friends were writing on his chest in magic marker. In the foreground, Evelyn had removed her wimple; beneath it, her hair was bright pink. The two-person horse costume, which must have been horribly hot to wear, had been unceremoniously dumped on a couch, and Sister Prudence's face was shiny with sweat. Only Stephanie seemed cold: she had borrowed the black net shawl from Susan's vampire costume and was huddled beneath it, shivering.

No. Janis shook her head, annoyed with herself for having once more allowed the camera to trick her. That wasn't a shiver, but a hunch; Stephanie had not felt cold, but self-conscious; she was huddled under Susan's shawl not for warmth, but to cover her cleavage. The stupid camera couldn't even tell the difference between cold and embarrassment. But Sister Prudence evidently could: she was looking sidelong at Stephanie, observing her discomfiture with an unpleasantly knowing smirk—

Janis breathed in sharply and held the picture up to the light.

Brittany had gone to the Wodehouse Formal after all.

No, she thought. No, that can't be her! That's someone much older. And Brittany isn't really that ugly, is she?

But she knew that sickle-shaped smile, knew it all too well. And hadn't she always known, really, that underneath those glasses, Brittany was pretty haggard-looking? Janis didn't really think that all of Brittany's migraines were feigned. Maybe not by half.

But still, Janis told herself, examining the woman in the picture critically, taking in the piggy nose, the tiny eyes sunk deep and surrounded by dark circles, the strangely lopsided features, the protruding ears (you never see Brittany's ears, she realized), the blotchy complexion sheened unpleasantly with sweat. Still. That can't be her. Brittany would never allow herself to be seen like that. She's...God, she's naked.

Again, though, as soon as Janis thought this, she realized that she knew better. She flicked rapidly through the photographs, knowing already what she was going to find.

There were no pictures of Brittany. She was in many of them, but always at the periphery, hovering in the background, at the edges, often only half in frame. In none of them was she speaking to anyone Janis knew.

None of them recognized her, she thought numbly. Just like I very nearly didn't. She did tell them all that she had a headache, I'll bet. And then she went home and changed and made her way to the Wode House. And spent the whole night laughing at them all, because none of them could see her. She even insinuated herself into as many of Chris' pictures as she could, just to amuse herself. Because Brittany doesn't just like to win; she always has to prove herself smarter than everyone else. That's what she likes, and that's what she needs, and she'll risk just about anything to get it. Even exposure. Because no matter what the cost, even to herself, Brittany always has to win.

Janis stared at the pictures, thinking: did I say that she wasn't creative? She's a perfect Sister Prudence. Brittany wins again. Brittany always wins.

Well...almost always, she amended then. Almost always. She looked down at the photograph of Stephanie and smiled. You really shouldn't have found poor Stephie so very amusing, though, she told Brittany silently. You really shouldn't have. Because the camera caught you. And in that moment, friend, you gave yourself away.

And although there was no one there to see it, and although Janis herself would have hotly denied it had anyone pointed it out to her, the cold and malicious half-smile on her face as she looked down at the photograph was the exact mirror image of Brittany's own.

•

Brittany Clairmont traipsed through the cold night of November the twenty-first with nary a care in the world.

She had managed to lose one of her bunny slippers somewhere, and a button had popped off of her housecoat. Her hair was slipping from its pins to hang lank and tangled around her face. Her hat was falling off, and her glasses were askew. She did not so much as notice.

She had never felt so rapturously happy in all her life.

Even the lights of the trailer park, humming ominously through the trees at the edge of campus, had no power over her good mood tonight, although ordinarily she hated the accident of geography that forced her to walk past them every day on her way to and from campus. Unlike Evelyn, Brittany had actually grown up in trailers. And she was damned if she was ever going to live in one again. In fact, if she could help it, she was never going to leave the state of Minnesota, where you could tell people that your name was, of all things, Brittany Clairmont, and receive in response neither a smirk nor a snigger, nor even a sympathetically knowing look. Minnesota, where people were so fantastically naive that some of them even assumed that a name like that meant that you came from money! Wonderful Minnesota, swollen with émigrés from what Brittany's aunt had always referred to as "Jew York," émigrés Brittany guessed must have their own class insecurities to contend with, as they seemed to be aware of only one species of WASP. Blessed, blessed Herschberg Minnesota, where natives and incomers alike, God rest their naive little souls, couldn't tell the difference between white trash and the D.A.R.

Brittany ripped her hat off her head and threw it up in the air like Mary Tyler Moore, giggling and giving thanks to Minnesota. And to her scholarship, with its ample—astonishingly ample, to her way of thinking—stipend. And to the elocution tapes on which she had squandered her strange and sullen adolescence.

I am rich, she thought happily. And I am feared. And I am out, out, out of Tennessee!

It had not been, on the whole, the best place to grow up precocious. Or weird and ugly. Or ambitious. Or, for that matter, left-handed. News of the separation of Church and State hadn't quite made it yet to Brittany's school, where not only were left-handed desks or scissors nowhere in evidence, but where the teachers' response to seeing a girl hold the pencil in the wrong hand had inevitably been to rap her knuckles sharply with a ruler and tell her: "That's the Devil's hand, Brittany."

The fingers on Brittany's left hand suddenly throbbed, then went as cold as ice, and her smile faltered as the vision once more flashed into her mind, the same vision that had been troubling her ever since the Ides of November. Her hand, splayed on a cold marble slab, pressed flat by the weight of her body leaning against it. Her other hand, the weak and useless right one, fumbling clumsily with that stupid dagger of Christian's—Subcaliber, or whatever he secretly called it to himself—gripping it shakily, raising it up, bringing it down. The remarkable ease with which it sliced through bone and flesh and sinew, like a hot knife through butter.

Brittany winced and clutched her hand protectively, out of habit, then blinked, astonished. It just wasn't bothering her tonight. The vision had been as clear and vivid as always, but this time, miraculously, it hadn't really disturbed her. It was as if it had been somehow stripped of all of its emotional content: Ho, hum—cutting my fingers off again, big deal. She just didn't care. She laughed in startled amazement.

It can't bother you tonight, she told herself. Nothing can bother you tonight. Tonight, you are invincible. Tonight, you are a God. Tonight, you can face anything.

Even the dreams? she asked herself, wondering even as she did so why she was pushing the envelope like this.

Yes, she answered herself firmly. Even the dreams. They can't hurt you tonight, so you may as well remember them. Even that one you never think about. The bad dream. The murder dream. The vampire dream. Especially that one. Because that's what really got you started off on those visions, you know. You do know that, don't you?

Yes. Brittany guessed that she did know that. The visions hadn't started with Jill's purported murder at all, but with the dream. The dream she had the night before Jill had been sent into the coma, on the Eve of the Ides of November. The dream she had decided not to remember, had refused to remember.

But tonight, somehow, she thought that maybe she could.

•

Strangely, it had not started out as a nightmare at all—strange, that is, because at the start of the dream she had been waiting to have her throat slit like a pig. Not, one would think, at all an auspicious beginning. And yet, in the weird logic of dreams, the fact of her impending murder had not been a bad thing at all, had on the contrary been a very, very good thing, and her waiting had even been tinged with anxiety that it might not take place after all, that her would-be murderer might change his mind. She had waited to feel the cold metal on her throat, holding herself very still, barely even daring to breathe, keeping her eyes closed...

...and she keeps them closed, even as he gently raises her head by the chin, tilting it to one side. She doesn't dare open them, not this late in the game, afraid of what he might see there, of what she might inadvertently show him, should he think to look into her eyes. She keeps them closed and she waits, because from here on out it is all up to him. Brittany doesn't understand precisely why this should be so, but in the way of dreams she knows it instinctively: that it is of absolutely vital importance that her murderer act of his own free will.

Even though it is what she has been sitting here waiting for, the blow, when it finally does come, still manages to take her by surprise. She hadn't expected him to do it quite like that, she supposes, not to cut her so deeply, the blade slicing through muscle and tissue and vessel, and even catching briefly on her collarbone in its descent before he lets it fall to the floor. She chokes, her mouth filling with blood, and in spite of herself her hands fly instinctively up towards her throat, but he seizes her by the upper arms and pins them firmly to her sides, pushing her backwards onto the bed.

She opens her eyes as she falls, again more out of instinct than intent, and in the brief moment that she sees his face, Brittany is certain that her murderer is someone she knows. She could swear that she has seen him somewhere before, could surely recognize him, if only his face were not obscured by the blood—her blood, spraying now from her severed arteries—and if it were not transfigured by an expression of astonished ecstasy so rapturous that he looks as if he just might swoon. Still, if she only had a second more to think about it...but that brief glimpse is all she gets before her shoulders hit the edge of the mattress and her head lolls off the side of the bed, eyes rolling back in her skull like a cow in an abattoir. She can hear the soft, rain-like spatter of her blood on the wall behind the bed before he clamps his mouth over her throat, intercepting the arterial spray, gulping.

Done, she thinks, with a sense of relieved triumph, and then there is nothing left to do but wait, to wait for him to finish with her, to wait and to listen to her own breath gurgling in her throat and to the sound of him. Swallowing.

Weirdly enough, that had been the good part of the dream.

The bad part had come...

...later, her blood no longer spraying but pumping now, rhythmically, in time with his frantic swallows, and she is bored. It is boring, this waiting, and so she allows her attention to wander outwards, in search of something with which to amuse herself. She reaches out with her mind to the panting creature slobbering over her, only to find there...nothing. Nothing. And again, while Brittany doesn't understand exactly how she should know this, she comprehends instantly that this means that something has gone wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.

And that had been when the dream had started to turn bad.

Opening her eyes then, struggling to raise her head, and finding that she is already so weak, too weak. And this is not right either, this weakness: this should not be happening. Pushing against him then, willing him off of her, but he barely even reacts, other than to shift his weight slightly, pinning her legs so that she cannot kick. Is it possible, she wonders, that he knew? Was he warned? Has he done this to her somehow?

Beginning to panic then, unable to shift his weight, groping wildly about with her free and outflung hand for something, anything, to use against him. The nubble of the cheap carpeting, grazing her fingertips. The blade of the knife, just barely within reach. She grabs it, then just as quickly drops it, registering the way it slices effortlessly through her flesh just in time to let go before it amputates her fingers altogether. She held it for no time at all, and yet it has nearly sliced off her fingers...and then, suddenly, with a thrill of sick horror, she realizes what it must be that he has used on her. That she gave him to use on her.

And that had been when the dream had become really bad.

Fighting him now in earnest, thrashing in a mad panic, but knowing even as she does so that it is far too late. Not even entirely certain whether the body's motions are those she wills, or merely involuntary convulsions. Death throes. He pulls her in closer to him, as he must now, because her blood is barely even pumping anymore; it pulses sluggishly, in a weak counterpoint to her staggering, shuddering heart, and suddenly she knows the fear that her people have not felt in seven hundred years. The fear of death.

Oh, but wait, Brittany thinks with the last shred of her own self-awareness. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on, now! What is…what the hell am I supposed to be here, anyway?—but this is such a weak thought, really, and it is quickly swept away by the terror as she realizes that she is going to die here, really die. She tries to speak then, to talk to him and explain somehow—or, no, no, she knows that she can't explain, precisely, but maybe she can come up with something, reason with him, perhaps, or possibly even beg him, yes, plead with him, plead for her life—but her lips move soundlessly, uselessly, forming silent words above the hissing of her severed larynx.

(Brittany herself, her own vocal apparatus in superb working order, had at this point begun to scream and sob and beg so hysterically in her sleep that Jack Bitsumi, in the apartment next door, had let out a grunt of exasperation and rolled over in bed.

"What is wrong with that girl?" he grumbled. Beside him, Lisa Morowitz mumbled a vague assent and pulled her pillow hard over her head.)

She wants him to look her in the eyes now, prays that he might, that he might see something in there, something that might move him to pause or to pity, but she can't even see very well herself any more: her vision is receding rapidly behind a red and pulsing haze. But perhaps he does look after all, or perhaps it is merely the feeble twitching of her limbs that alerts him, for now he draws back, pulls her upright into a sitting position, supporting her nervelessly lolling head in one hand. She stares blindly into the haze, trying to make eye contact, trying to clear her vision, trying to force her lips to shape words.

He moans. And then he pulls her head back by the hair, ripping her open even further for him, nuzzling his filthy mouth deep into her death wound to suck out the last of her. She feels her heart give one final limping shudder... And then stop.

("Jesus Christ!" Jack complained, sitting upright with an irritable lurch because there was just no way in hell he was ever going to get to sleep with all this racket going on, and wondering why in God's name he kept opting to spend the night here, with this unsympathetic woman in her crappy apartment with all of her psychopathic neighbors. Why did he keep doing this? He had no idea. Except perhaps that he just hadn't liked to be alone very much lately. Not these past few weeks. Not at all.

"Do they have to do this every night?" he moaned. "Both of them?"

"Welcome to Hiawatha Towers," Lisa told him, her voice muffled by the pillow she held tightly over her ears. "Venue of Brit & The Brit—the vaudeville act from hell. One performance each night. Admission free with every tenancy."

"Vampires!" screamed the Mad Brit, right on cue.)

For one brief instant, then, there is hope as the first drool of blood gushes back into her, and she feels her heart lurch back into life, her lungs heave and gasp for air. He's not really going to do this, she thinks, with a kind of dull astonishment, but she so wants to believe that he might, and she thinks: yes, oh please yes, my blood, my life, please.... but there is no more. Just as she knew, really, that there wouldn't be. Perhaps he has convinced himself otherwise, but she has known for some time now that he would renege. That he had always meant to renege. Because it has not escaped her notice that not once, not even at the height of his passion, has he used his teeth on her. This has always been intended to look like simple murder.

("Vampires!" Brittany screamed right back at the Mad Brit.

"Oh, I don't believe this," Jack muttered. "What is it, contagious with them?"

"Usually," Lisa sighed. And if my neighbors annoy you so goddamn much, Jack, she thought, then why don't you sleep at your own place for a change?)

Too weak to move now, her half-opened eyes staring sightlessly into the red haze, a buzzing in her ears. Only vaguely aware of his touch as he props her gently against the wall, brushes a strand of hair out of her blinded eyes, wipes the blood from her mouth. The buzzing becoming one with the haze into which everything now, even thought itself, is mercifully receding: warm, ruddy...and almost lost in it, the last thing she ever hears—his voice, tinged with what sounds like genuine regret.

"Sorry," he whispers.

("You WHAT?!" Brittany shrieked at the top of her lungs, so loudly that Mrs. Hansen clear across the building sat bolt upright in her bed, blinking. "Sorry? You say that you're sorry? You're SORRY??!!"

"Vampires!" the Mad Brit screamed, as if in response.

"I don't believe this," Jack repeated. "How can you live with this?" No, he really didn't like to be alone these days. It was when he was alone that those...thoughts he had been having about Lisa's strangely solemn young graduate student seemed to prey the most heavily on his mind. Being with other people helped, somehow. Or had. Until tonight. And oh God, he hoped that Lisa hadn't the slightest idea what he had been thinking earlier this evening, what had been in his mind, when he had asked her if she would turn over, if he could take her from behind.

"Mmmmmbh," Lisa mumbled, thinking: Not all of us have tenure, Jack. And no one's chaining you to my bed. Get the hell out if you don't like it. He was spending every goddamned night here lately, and it was beginning to get on her nerves. Still, at least he'd managed a certain degree of...ardor tonight. She hadn't realized that Bitsumi knew that anything other than the missionary position was even possible. Maybe he'd been reading a manual or something. Whatever, it made a nice change from his usual lackluster performance. She'd even almost not had to fake it this time. Almost.

Oh, you are in so much trouble here, Jack thought, reaching for his glasses because at this point there was really no point in trying to get back to sleep. You're getting obsessed, and that isn't healthy, especially not in a man your age. For God's sake, he's a student. A boy. You're almost old enough to be his father. The way that you've been thinking about him—it's just one step removed from pederasty. It's filthy. It's perverted. It's nasty and sick and wrong. For God's sake, think of your position. Think of your reputation. And besides, you're straight, remember? Straight.

"Lisa?" he whispered, thinking: please be awake. Please don't leave me here alone with my thoughts. With my very bad thoughts. Please. "Lisa," he whispered. "Are you awake?"

Lisa was, but pretended she wasn't. If Jack had to all but move in with her, she was thinking, then the very least he could do was to shut up and let her get some sleep. And she wouldn't mind being taken out to dinner more often either. Maybe then some time they could invite along that nice student again. The one who sometimes helped Jack grade his exams. Shelby, her name was. Shelby, of the extraordinary eyes...)

...while next door, Brittany had awakened with a start, her last scream of furious indignation dying in her throat, and clutched first at her neck and then at her cold and throbbing fingers, breathing hard, staring into the darkness, and cursing to the fieriest reaches of hell that Limey bastard upstairs, who had spent the entire past week screaming about vampires in his sleep.

And then, for the longest time, she had lain awake, listening to the creaks and groans and shuffles of her neighbors. Her lousy neighbors. Her loud-mouthed, noisy, inconsiderate neighbors. Who never let her get any sleep.

•

Remembering now, Brittany stood stock-still in her single bunny slipper, lips pressed tightly together in an expression of fastidious distaste.

That had really not been the sort of dream she cared for. Not at all. Murder nightmares were never pleasant, of course, but she had found that one particularly repellent somehow. All of that blood, all of that writhing around on the bed. The way he had moaned at her. And the slurping...

She shook herself.

Forget it, she thought. You can just forget it again now, if you like. And you see? Remembering it wasn't all that bad really, was it? No. It was not. Nothing can hurt you tonight. So don't worry about it.

But then, when two days later—

Forget it, she told herself again, more firmly this time. Don't worry about that, either. Besides, Graves said that it was her right hand that had the nearly severed fingers, that corpse in Saki dormitory, remember? Not her left hand, but her right.

It was your right hand in the dream, too, though, a voice told her. Think.

Brittany thought, forcing herself to remember where the bed had been, where its edge. She had reached out with her good hand—

She groped experimentally in the air.

—which in the dream had been her right hand. Because in the dream, she had been right-handed. Like Jill.

No, Brittany told herself. Don't even go there. Don't be a fool. Think. If it had really happened that way, just think of the mess. Who do you think cleaned up the room, the little elves? You had your throat slit in that dream; it sprayed like a hose; you even heard it splattering on the wall. And no matter how quickly he was (and she shuddered) drinking, some of it must have got on the mattress. Or on the bedclothes. You surely don't think that he could have cleaned all that up himself, do you? Replaced the mattress, perhaps? And then topped the evening off with a spot of repainting? Without anyone noticing? And even if he had been miraculously able to do all of that, surely the police would have noticed. They had ways of finding out that sort of thing. And besides, are you really going to start believing in vampires now? No. You are not. So don't even start out in the direction you're headed. You may have had a bit of prescience, but Jill did not send you her death in a dream.

Brittany let her breath out, hard. She had really not liked that last idea. Of Jill sending out her dying thoughts—and to her, of all people. Frankly, she could think of far worthier recipients.

She shook herself again, then looked down at her left hand.

It was her right hand, she told it. Okay? It wasn't the corpse's left hand, and it wasn't the left hand in the dream, either. So knock it off.

It had, of course, been the cleanliness of Jill and Janis' room that had caused Brittany, on the day after Jill's body had been found there, to laugh wildly, in a kind of hysterical relief, and comment to all of her stunned friends that at least it had been a tidy murder. She would not soon forget the expressions on their faces when she had said that. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Not on a night like this.

And besides, the murder hadn't been entirely without its high points, now, had it? Learning, for example, that Mark, when he had found the body, had run screaming through the halls of Saki dormitory. Hysterical. Shrieking. Like a woman. Good old Mark, with his swim team and his pretty girlfriends and his aura of normalcy. Sane Mark. Jock Mark. Mark Who Condescended To Hang With The Geeks. One of them, after all, just as she had always suspected. Just as weak and neurotic and useless as the rest of them.

Brittany's smile returned tentatively, as she remembered that day in the dining hall when, wondering whether Mark had read the papers, whether he knew that the corpse he had found had been dead for hours by the time he had stumbled across it, she had turned to Matilda and whispered, just loud enough that he might overhear: "You don't suppose that she could have been still alive, do you? That he might have done something?" Rolling her eyes conspiratorially. "If only he hadn't panicked like that?"

And how she had known then that he hadn't been reading the papers. That exquisitely sick look on his face. Bullseye, Mark, she had thought. Got your number, sweetheart.

Remembering this, Brittany's smile returned in full force, her good mood completely restored. She skipped merrily along the side of the art building, leaving her hat behind. In the woods to her left, the trees were waving wildly, madly, their leafless branches groping like skeletal hands as the darkness shimmered and pulsated all around them. She watched them for a time, happy that their leaves had fallen, admiring their angles, lean and architectural against the darkness. She took a deep breath of the bitterly cold air and relished the way that it seemed to scour her lungs, just as it had scoured the trees clean of leaves, just as all the world seemed scoured tonight: purified, refined, blasted of all of its mess and filth, leaving behind only this beauty, this unspeakable beauty, the beauty that always lay beneath, clean and cold, stark and impersonal. The bones of the world.

Brittany waved cheerfully at the trees, laughing as she fancied that they waved right back at her, and pirouetted wildly around the corner of the art building. She spun herself around a turn, then stopped dead, staring. She let out an incoherent cry of pure delight.

She was standing in the center of the art building's small courtyard, next to the fountain which was only turned on in the spring, for commencement. The rest of the year it stood empty, its cracked basin exposed, a victim of budget cuts and harsh Midwestern winters. Tonight, though, someone had filled it and turned it on. Jets of water sparkled in the air, reflecting the lights from the campus, forming a cascade of jeweled motion.

"Oh!" Brittany cried, and clapped her hands together. Before she could think twice about it, she had clambered over the low wall surrounding the fountain, and had gone so far as to put one foot into the freezing water before the voice of sobriety caught her short.

You'd better not do that, it told her. That's a really bad idea. It's late November, and it's freezing out here. You aren't just tripping, which would be bad enough, you're also still drunk from all of those Tom Collinses you had. I know that seems like days ago, but it wasn't. It was just a couple of hours ago. The water's attractive, I know, but you can't go wading in it, not in this weather and not in your condition. You'll get hypothermia.

"Ooooh," Brittany whined like a wheedling toddler, but she pulled her leg back out of the water and hopped down from the ledge. Her sodden bunny slipper slopped wetly on the flagstones.

It was cold out here, she realized as her lower leg went numb in the air. Very cold. It was good, the cold. If only it would snow.

Brittany looked hopefully to the heavens, but there was no sign of snow. Maybe it just needed some help. She began to dance in a circle around the fountain, tossing handfuls of her hairpins sparkling into the water and singing in a camped-up trilling soprano:

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful! But the fount-tain's so delightful! And since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it—"

"—fuck OFF!" a voice screamed from somewhere on the other side of the building. "...babies I WANT! I LOVE killing babies! I like to EAT them, okay? So BITE me, dead boy!"

"Well!" Brittany exclaimed, and giggled. Who on earth was that? she wondered, and then it struck her.

She didn't know who that had been.

And what was more, she didn't care.

She stopped and listened, gaping in a wild surmise.

She heard...virtually nothing.

No students, yammering on about their pathetic lives, fighting, bitching, whining, fucking. No professors, squabbling over tenure, gossiping about their colleagues. No locals, muttering their resentment, arguing over their unpaid bills. Nothing. Nada. Nyet. And that girl, the one who had been yelling something about eating babies, who had she been and what had she meant by her comment? Brittany had no idea. It just wasn't her concern.

"It's not my concern," she repeated ecstatically.

This wasn't something that usually happened to her when she was tripping (and really, she had been suspecting for some time now that this wasn't a flashback at all, but no matter). This wasn't something that ever happened to her, period. This was...oh, but who cared, why question it, when it seemed that for once in her life the entire chaotic stinking cesspool of a world had finally rolled over in its grave and shut up, leaving behind only this beauty, this unspeakable beauty, the bones of the world...

Brittany let out a cry of grateful rapture, squeezed her eyes tightly shut, hugged her arms to her chest, and spun around and around and around in circles, never wanting this evening ever to end.

"It would be nice if it could always be this way," a voice agreed pleasantly. "Wouldn't it. Brittany."

She stopped mid-whirl, then staggered, dizzy, turning to face the voice.

The Faceless Man stood there, dressed as he always was in her dreams (the ones you don't remember, she reminded herself sternly), in his bowler hat and his elegantly-tailored suit, slouching nonchalantly against no support that she could see, examining his perfectly manicured nails. As always, she almost thought that she recognized him from somewhere.

It didn't matter. Not tonight.

"You've expanded your repertoire, darling," she told him, smiling tightly. "First dreams, now flashbacks. Should I expect to see your face on the silver screen some day soon, I wonder? Oh, but no. No, of course not." She let out a peal of laughter. "Do forgive me. What a terrible blunder."

She turned from him, heart pounding, but there he was once more in front of her, still slouching in that insouciant pose. Her smile faltered slightly. She turned again, but there he still was, always just a few paces in front of her. The third time she turned from him only to see him again before her, she sighed in exasperation.

"Sir!" she objected primly. "You have me at a disadvantage, sir!"

"Indeed?" He laughed, a beautiful laugh, silvery, delicate, cool. "Then let us allow the roof to serve as an introduction." He waved, gesturing to the heavens, and in spite of herself, Brittany looked up. Above, overhead, the stars. Millions of them, brighter than she had ever seen them before, wheeling, whirling, spinning, falling. She gasped, giddy, her breath taken away.

"Out tonight, Brittany," he said as she stared upwards, rapt with wonder. "Tonight of all nights, when every student in Herschberg who is not made of stone trembles and cowers beneath the bed, I find you here. Dancing. Do we really require introductions, you and I?"

Brittany tore her gaze from the heavens. Her smile flickered uncertainly, then died.

"Please leave me alone," she muttered and shuffled away from him, her sneaker squelching within her soaked bunny slipper. He didn't reappear in front of her, not this time, but as she crossed the threshold of the courtyard, it all came back, all of it, the whole rotten stinking world. Someone thrashing through the woods at the edge of campus. Someone else, near the library, blubbering in terror. A dog, barking hoarsely in the trailer park. "Shaddap!" a man yelled at it, just like the Woman With the Big Hair was yelling at her common-law husband in Hiawatha Towers—an argument, something about money—just as the Mad Brit was yelling something about helicopters, just as the woman by the side of the road was yelling something, and everywhere lights humming, water groaning through rusted pipes, traffic rumbling along the road, a plane overhead, clocks ticking—some even twice a minute (click clunk, click clunk)—and people, everywhere people: talking, acting, moving, breathing, thinking...

Brittany bent over double and clapped her hands over her ears, knowing even as she did so that the woman yelling by the side of the road was doing exactly the same thing, as was the student crying near the library, and staggered back into the courtyard, struggling to force it all back into perspective.

"It's grown worse, hasn't it?" the Faceless Man observed. "Much worse. Brittany, why won't you allow us to help you?"

"I don't need your help," she gasped, hands still covering her ears. She concentrated, filtering. Near things near. Far things far. And no clocks. No lights, no water, no breathing, and certainly no thinking. No one could hear that.

Gasping with effort, she raised her eyes to the fountain, but it was empty now: she could see its cracked cement basin, littered with her hairpins, and could feel that her foot was bone-dry within her shoe. Slowly, all too slowly, the noises began to fall into place. She straightened and, wincing, tentatively removed her hands from her ears.

"It will drive you mad, you know," the Faceless Man told her conversationally. "Eventually. It did your mother."

"Don't you talk about my mother!" Brittany cried, furious, and would have said more, but now a voice wafted from across the woods as if borne by the wind, strangely and hauntingly familiar, striking her dumb.

"Pleaseallowmetohavemybaby..." the voice sang in a quavering and miserable little voice, and Brittany paled.

"Jill?" she gasped.

"No, Brittany. Not Jill."

She stood very still, frozen, listening, struggling to separate out one softly-held conversation from all of the other noises of the night.

"Now, Evelyn..." the other voice said, and Brittany remembered the yelling she had heard earlier. She couldn't believe that she hadn't recognized that voice before. Evelyn. Stephanie's roommate. That horrid loud-mouthed punk creature. Brittany tried to avoid Evelyn as a general rule, but when she absolutely had to deal with her, she always endeavored to be very polite. This was because she rather got the impression that if she weren't, Evelyn might actually hit her. And Brittany was very much afraid of being hit. She blinked, listening carefully. Evelyn was pregnant?

She turned to look at the man with no face, brow furrowed, eyes shrewd and curious behind her glasses.

"Now what could creatures like you," she mused, "possibly want with a child of Evelyn's?"

"With all of your talents," the Faceless Man said. "Can't you tell me?" But Brittany barely heard him. She was listening to the voices beyond the wood, the blood draining from her face. She groped blindly behind her for the ledge of the fountain and finding it, sat down heavily, eyes wide.

"Why, Brittany," the Faceless Man purred. "Whatever could be the matter?"

"You..." she stammered. "You..." And then a sudden laugh of pure astonishment.

Oh my God, she thought. She's going to go for it. She's really going to—

She cried out and covered her ears, ducking her head, cringing away from the noises to come. Seconds later, there they were: brakes and horn and tires. And almost lost in the rest of the cacophony, the unmistakable thud of impact. She bent over her knees, feeling sick, and swallowed hard as from the woods all around there rose a snarl of frustration and rage.

Sweet Jesus, Brittany thought, and pressed her forehead hard against her knees. She could hear the truck driver slamming his way out of his vehicle, cursing mightily, and then the way that his swearing changed when he saw what had happened. He suddenly sounded much younger. Young and scared.

"You do have good instincts," the Faceless Man commented, seemingly unperturbed. "You saw that coming a long way off. Long before he did, certainly. But you aren't using those talents for anything, Brittany, and that's just such a waste."

The truck driver was punching up his radio now, calling for an ambulance. Brittany shook her head. She couldn't have survived that, certainly. Not if she'd gone under the wheels. But then, it hadn't really sounded as if she'd gone under the wheels, and besides...but this thought was driven from her mind by the new sound, now wafting over from the roadside. Evelyn herself. Crying. Moaning in pain.

Brittany shuddered and tried to find something else to listen to, anything at all, but her attention was drawn helplessly back to the road accident. Just as it had been last week to her neighbor Graves, twitching above her balcony, before she had taken her pills. Just as it had been again when she had spoken with him in the hospital, sweating through his morphine, hoping that she wouldn't notice. As if there were any way not to notice. Not when it was so...so compelling.

She made a soft noise in the back of her throat, listening.

"Ah, yes," the Faceless Man said quietly. "Pain." From the sound of his voice, Brittany thought that he must be sitting next to her now on the ledge. "There's really nothing else quite like it, is there? It drowns out everything else for you. It's just about the only thing that can, anymore."

That wasn't quite it, actually. It didn't drown things out. It was more like a magnet, drawing her attention, pulling at her, tugging at her. Calling to her. Inviting her. Nonetheless, she nodded.

"Yes," she agreed, almost gratefully.

"Yes," he repeated, and paused. "But we both know there's a bit more to it than that. Don't we. Brittany."

She jumped and opened her eyes.

"I don't know what you mean," she said nervously and began patting at the pockets of her housecoat.

"Oh, I think that you do. You left them at home, child. On your bedside table. It's all right, Brittany. I don't mind what you are. There's no need to blunt your pleasure with drugs on my account."

"I don't know what you're talking about." They weren't in her housecoat. She tried her bathrobe, searching deep within its fuzzy pockets, but all that she found there was lint and a furred cough drop from last winter. She eyed the cough drop for a moment, then shook her head and tossed it aside.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, my dear. We all have our little pleasures. You didn't cause her suffering, you know, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to ease it. So there's no reason in the world why you shouldn't enjoy it, now that it presents itself. Why deny yourself?" He sniggered. "No one else around here does. She certainly didn't, did she, the little slut?"

"God," Brittany muttered, finally giving up on her search and sitting back. "Faint already, will you? Come on. Just pass out."

"Just look at this campus!" The Faceless Man gestured expansively. "Students everywhere, rutting like weasels. Thrusting, sweating, slobbering...they aren't ashamed of themselves. So why on earth should you be? There are people who love shoes, Brittany. Did you know that? There are people who fuck sheep. They have magazines. They have newsletters. They swap photos. What you are is actually terribly common, my dear—much as I know how you do hate that word. You might as well accept it."

Evelyn was pleading now, or praying, Brittany couldn't quite tell which. Not that it mattered. She closed her eyes again, inhaling deeply. She thought that perhaps she could hear the ambulance on its way, sirens, a long way off. Thank God, she thought weakly. Thank God. Although really, she wasn't altogether certain that she really wanted the ambulance to get there anymore. At least...not quite yet. The Faceless Man leaned in close to her, and she could feel the waves of cold radiating off of him, like heat off a summer pavement.

"You can't do anything to help her," he whispered, close to her ear. "But I can. To send her into unconsciousness? That's trivial, Brittany, for someone like me. I'll do it, if you like. All you need do is say the word."

She sat, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Listening. Breathing it in.

"No," he said, after a long moment. "No, I didn't think so, somehow. Drink then, my dear. And enjoy."

"No." Brittany shook herself like a dog leaving water. "No, God. Help her. Poor Evelyn. If you really can, then please help her. Please."

He shrugged. "As you wish."

They sat, side by side, listening to her moans subside to silence, to the sound of the ambulance approaching. Brittany was trembling violently, hugging herself there on the ledge.

"Poor Evelyn," she whispered to herself, over and over, like a mantra. "Poor Evelyn. Poor Evelyn."

"Yes, yes, yes," the Faceless Man snapped irritably. "Poor dear little Evvie. It's hardly convincing, my dear. You enjoyed her while you could, didn't you? The ambulance would have been there in a minute anyway. As you very well realized."

Brittany's eyes flew open. She gazed wildly at him, then jumped up off the ledge.

"Just get the fuck away from me," she hissed, and strode stiffly away. He reappeared before her, laughing.

"What a charming little hypocrite you are!" he exclaimed.

"I said, git away!" She lurched towards him as if to shoulder him out of her path, expecting him to dissipate, but instead he leapt backwards with an almost effeminate grace.

"Ooooh," he tittered. "Careful, now. Your Tennessee is showing. Darling."

Brittany opened her mouth, then closed it with a snap, swiveled on one foot, and returned to the fountain. Deliberately, she stepped over the ledge into the empty basin and began collecting her hairpins, one at a time, cramming them hard into the pockets of her housecoat.

"Have you the slightest idea how pathetic you are?" asked the Faceless Man, from somewhere behind her. "Sniping at your friends over the dinner table, indulging yourself in your petty cruelties? You can't possibly find that sort of thing truly satisfying, not with your tastes. And yet the instant that something you might genuinely enjoy comes along, you run shrieking to your medicine cabinet, desperate to dull your senses and deny yourself your pleasures. If you exhibited any genuine self-restraint, my dear, then that might at least be worthy of some respect, but as it is—it's just sad, Brittany. It's insincere. It's cowardly. It isn't even honest."

Brittany paused, stooping for her last hair pin. Slowly she straightened, turned to face him, the color high in her cheeks. She took a deep breath.

"My pleasures, as you call them," she spat. "Are my own. And I will moderate them as I see fit. I don't recall asking for your advice. And really, darling! You dare lecture me on the virtues of self-restraint? My God, you people could take a lesson from me on that particular subject! Or I suppose you're going to tell me that you wanted little Evvie to squash herself beneath a truck?"

"No one could have anticipated the girl's suicidal tendencies," he told her coldly.

"Are you out of your minds?" Brittany laughed scornfully. "Evelyn? My dear, that girl is awesomely self-destructive. I barely even know her, and I could have told you as much. She's a thrill-seeker, a scrapper. Last week, she cold-cocked a cop. If you lot hadn't come along, she probably would have thrown herself into traffic one day anyway, just for the sheer exhilaration of the thing! What on earth could possibly have led you to believe that just because she squealed a little when you twisted her arm, you were free to keep on twisting? Someone like that?"

She stepped out of the fountain, staring at him.

"People like that understand force," she told him harshly. "They respect it. It's how they think. It's how they are. But only according to certain rules. Playground rules. Once you've made them cry Uncle, you help them up and you cut your deal. You do not keep sticking it to them. Not if you want to keep them. But you just couldn't quit, could you? You were enjoying yourselves too much for that. Making fun of her major—and you call me petty? Mocking her religion. And then sticking a contract in her face. What on earth was the point of that? I don't believe for a minute that you really needed it. I think that you just couldn't resist that whiff of brimstone. You couldn't possibly have believed that she'd really sign such a thing, could you? Not after that last jab about mortal sin. But you just couldn't hold yourselves back. Couldn't quit while you were ahead. Couldn't stop twisting. You might as well have just shoved her into the road and had done with it."

She jabbed the last pin savagely into her hair.

"Self-denial," she snapped. "It isn't easy. And it isn't fashionable. Especially not on this campus. But when there's something you truly want, it can be indispensable. I don't pretend to be any good at it myself, but then, what can you expect from me? I'm only human. You aren't. So what came over you? It wasn't just because she was raised Catholic, was it, that you lost your heads like that?"

"Brittany..." the Faceless Man began, but she was peering at him curiously, her eyes narrow and calculating behind her glasses.

"Oh my God, it was, wasn't it?" She snorted. "Oh, my dear! And you call me pathetic? There you are, every advantage in the world, still losing your heads over the poor old tired Whore of Babylon? Darling, that is priceless!" She laughed derisively. The Faceless Man tilted his head to one side, examining her.

"Yes," he said softly. "You do have an eye for weakness. But you know, my dear, there's a rather large beam in that eye."

And drawing back one of his perfectly manicured hands, he slapped the glasses right off her face.

Brittany screamed. She screwed her eyes tightly shut, then threw up her hands to cover them as well, staggering backwards, thrown off balance. She collided with the rim of the fountain and screamed again, stumbling, before she caught herself and stood, hands over her eyes, breathing hard.

"Well!" the Faceless Man exclaimed cheerfully. "That is pathetic! I hadn't realized it had grown that bad."

Brittany trembled, then laughed shakily.

"Yes, well!" she cried shrilly. "That will teach me to assume that you're incorporeal, won't it? It's very mature, darling. Really it is. I'm reminded suddenly of the carefree days of my childhood. What comes next, a noogie?"

There was no reply. She listened, trying to determine where he was, but could hear nothing of him. She shivered.

"You don't breathe," she said, in a rather small voice. "That's...rather frightening. Very frightening, in fact. Are you...are you still there?" There was still no response. "Hello?" she called, on the edge of panic. "Hello? I asked if—"

"I'm here," he said, right in her left ear. She jumped, then whimpered slightly.

"God," she gasped. "Right. Fine. You've proved your point, darling. Congratulations. So come on. Where are they?"

"There's not a thing wrong with your vision, Brittany," he told her, this time in her right ear. She jumped again. "If you want to find your glasses, all you need do is open your eyes. Seek, my dear," he sniggered. "And ye shall find."

Brittany opened her mouth, then sighed. Slowly, deliberately, she dropped to one knee and removed her left hand from her eyes, leaving the other firmly in place. She thought, trying to remember where she had heard the clatter as they had fallen. Then she began skimming the ground with her fingertips, defining careful arcs in ever-widening circles radiating out from where she knelt.

"You've practiced those skills," the Faceless Man observed, now behind her. "That's interesting. And suggestive. Are you planning on going blind one day, Brittany? That would be a terrible pity, my dear. For someone with your appreciation for beauty."

She froze in place for a moment, inhaling, her hand trembling slightly. She pushed it flat against the flagstones until it was steady, then continued in her search, running her fingers lightly over the cold slate.

"Would you look at yourself?" he exclaimed. "Crawling around down there, afraid to so much as open your eyes? It's tragic. Senseless. All the time they wasted on that Caulfield creature, when there you were, just begging for training. They might even have found what they were looking for in you, if only they hadn't been so squeamish about their precious ‘taint.' Who knows what you might have become? But now it's far too late. You're too old, and you're already half mad, and you're too proud even to accept help when it's offered to you."

Brittany ignored him. She shuffled forward a step, starting over from the beginning, ever-widening circles, radiating outward.

"You never used to wear them all the time," the Faceless Man said, watching her. "You're degenerating far more quickly than I'd realized. Those pills aren't even working very well anymore, are they? And you're running out of prescriptions. How old was your mother again, the first time she had to be institutionalized? Twenty-seven, was it? I don't think you're going to last that long, Brittany. Not at this rate."

Her fingers brushed the edge of her glasses. She reached for them, then heard the clatter as he snatched them away from her groping hand. She froze, then sat back on her heels, tilting her face up towards him, placing her left hand back carefully over her eyes.

"You want to blind yourself with these?" he asked her, and she was surprised to hear what sounded like genuine bitterness in his voice. "Fine. Go ahead. What difference could it possibly make? Ask nicely, and I'll give them back to you."

"Please." Brittany smiled bitterly. "Do you want to hear me beg? Is that what you've been waiting for all this time, for my abjection? You think, perhaps, that I'm Evelyn? I'm not. I’m not. I don't have her courage, and I don't have her pride. But I have ten times her imagination, and this frightens me. You frighten me. I'm already on my knees to you, aren't I? What more could you want? Please give me back my glasses. Please."

"Please what?" he snapped.

She gaped, then burst into laughter.

"Oh, you can't be serious!" she cried. "Is that the sort of thing that you like? Is it really? Fine. Please, sir. Please, master. Have mercy on your humble servant." She shook her head. "It's just too comic book, you know, darling. Really it is. Too much for words. But if that's what makes you happy, then by all means. Master, your wretched servant pleads with you. With all humility. Please, my most gracious lord, I beg of you: Please. Give me back my glasses."

Much to her surprise, he laughed.

"That's your humility, is it?" he asked her. "Good heavens, I should hate to hear what your arrogance sounds like! You make a valiant effort to salvage that which you claim not to possess, Brittany. But it doesn't impress me. You haven't a portion of that other girl's courage. You have a thousand times her pride, but what of it? It wouldn't matter. Girl, you do not know the meaning of the word abjection. If that were what I wanted from you, I would take it. It wouldn't even be a challenge, my dear, not with you: your sort always has a taste for both ends of the whip. It's almost tempting, if only to find out what sincerity might sound like coming from those lips. Why do you refuse to look at me with your naked eyes, Brittany? Are you afraid that you might see my face? Perhaps it's time you did."

His hand, cold, very cold, touched her face, and she flinched away, smothering a cry. He chuckled.

"No," he sighed, pulling back away from her. "No, I think that I prefer you as you are. Keep that pride, my dear, as much of it as you think you can handle. I, however, will hold on to these, at least for the time being. Because you know, Brittany, that really wasn't asking nicely."

He stepped back a pace and regarded her. She was shaking oddly and making strange choking noises in the back of her throat.

"You aren't going to be sick now, are you, child?"

She shook her head, choked again, and then erupted into a fit of helpless giggling.

"What is wrong with you?" the Faceless Man snapped.

Brittany screamed with laughter. She rocked back and forth on her heels, convulsed, gasping for air and shrieking mirthlessly into the night.

"Oh." He chuckled. "Oh, yes. I see. Goodness! I really did frighten you, didn't I? My, my, my. You really can't afford to be quite so delicate, you know, my dear. Not when you come dancing with the Dark."

Brittany shook her head wildly, spluttering and snorting, struggling to choke back her laughter. She nearly had it for a moment, then began giggling again.

"Pull yourself together," snapped the Faceless Man. "You're even closer to the edge than I'd thought, aren't you? For heaven's sake, girl, feign sanity if you have none. If I'd realized you were such a nervous sort, I never would have spoken to you in that manner."

"Nervous!" Brittany screamed, gasping for breath. "Oh, nervous. Nervous, yes, very nervous I have been and am..." She trailed off, giggling helplessly.

"Highly strung," he muttered. "Yes. Well. I suppose that's to be expected, after all. You know, my dear," he added, as her giggles subsided. "You've rather aroused my curiosity now, I'm afraid. Just how much can you see these days? I'll tell you what. Satisfy that curiosity, and I will return your glasses. And then you can go home, if you like. I won't follow you. What do you say? Do we have a deal?"

"A deal!" Brittany repeated, and shook her head. "Yes, all right," she told him, after a moment's reflection. "All right. I'll do it. But could you possibly not stand right there in front of me? Please? If I'm going to open my eyes?"

"Oh, come now," the Faceless Man scoffed. "Really. You can't honestly believe that you'll see my face if I choose not to reveal it to you, can you?"

She didn't answer him, but neither did she remove her hands from her eyes.

"You are arrogant," he commented. "But all right. If it will put what's left of your mind at ease, I will stand behind you. Come on, Brittany." His voice came from behind her. "Let's see you justify that arrogance. Not to mention that temperament."

Brittany bit her lip. She removed both hands from her face. She took a deep breath. And she opened her eyes.

Her attention was immediately caught by the way that the texture of the mortar between the flagstones, the swirls and sweeps where the trowel had been, mimicked perfectly the sweep of the branches in the woods at the edge of campus, which in turn reflected the patterns of the grey-blue tones in the concrete of the fountain's rim, flecked with speckles of mica dappling like the curve of the fountain's shape which was blending into her own retinal patterns against the darkness until all borders and boundaries dissolved in the swirl of infinite self-replication...

She shuddered and closed her eyes.

"God," she said. "It has grown worse. Much worse." She opened them again, remembering how this must be done. Never look at the foreground. Stick to the middle distance. Keep your eyes moving. And for God's sake, don't get caught up in the details. Because—

"The Devil's in the details," Brittany murmured, then giggled. Her eyes shifted back and forth restlessly, taking in the waving trees…or no, no, not the trees—the forest. Look at the forest, and not the trees. The forest, then, and the shadows, and the shimmering darkness. Connections glimpsed, patterns recognized, but only sidelong, never directly. It had been a while, but she remembered now. She scanned the night, then sighed longingly.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh. It is a beautiful night. Even more beautiful than I'd realized. It's...oh. Oh."

"Yes," the Faceless Man agreed dryly. "But don't get too caught up in that. I prefer you sane."

"I...yes." She laughed shakily. "Yes. All right. But it is a beautiful night. There are so many of you here. So very many. What are you all doing here?"

"See if you can find out for yourself," he said.

Brittany squinted into the darkness, her eyes flickering back and forth.

"You've come to call..." she began tentatively. "To call them out. All of them. To assess them for... Oh, but it's loud, your call. They all hear it. Not just the ones you've called. Oh," she smiled dreamily, maliciously. "Oh, even dear Elgin, I think, is not sleeping tonight."

"No. That's unfortunate, but it can't be helped. Very few of your people are completely deaf, Brittany."

"Deaf," she repeated musingly. Her eyes darted back and forth. "Deaf," she murmured. "Deaf, blind, darkness. Darkness, night, dreams. Dreams, nightmares—" She caught her breath. "Mares?" she repeated, incredulously. "That's what you call them, the ones you've called? They're mares?" She shook her head. "Well. That's certainly... distasteful, isn't it. Mares. God. Please tell me that I'm not one."

"Can't you see that for yourself?"

"No." She frowned. "No," she repeated, irritated. "I can't. Well. That's annoying. Hold on." She strained, staring into the distance, an expression of fierce concentration on her face.

"I certainly hope that I'm not one," she said, at length. "But I can't tell for sure. And I probably am, because I'm out here, aren't I? And you've called all of your mares out here tonight. But why? Why can't I see that?"

"We didn't—" he began, but she cut him off irritably, almost angrily.

"Don't tell me," she said. "I can do this. Why have you called us? You're looking for something, but what? Whatever it is, you’re not sure that you'll find it tonight. Because we're...long shots? Dark horses. Dark—"

Brittany caught her breath again, then laughed fiercely, triumphantly.

"Dark horses," she said. "But not necessarily dark mares. Because that's what you're looking for. A dark mare. The Dark Mare. Isn't it? Isn't it."

"Yes, Brittany."

"The Dark Mare Shall Be Brought To the Stallion of Light," she stated. "And the Door Shall Open Both Ways. Well." She snorted. "That's certainly enlightening, isn't it? What the hell does that mean? No," she added quickly. "Don't help me. Let me do this."

She stared fiercely into the night, a small and savage smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

"Come on..." she whispered to herself. "Come on..."

"Yes," commented the Faceless Man blandly. "It feels good, doesn't it? Actually using your talents for a change?"

"Yes, of course it does," Brittany snapped crossly. "But spare me your second-rate Mephistopholics for the time being, would you, darling? I am trying to concentrate here."

"But of course." He leaned back, watching her eyes dart back and forth, her face tense with effort. She stared into the darkness for a long, long time, her breathing gradually slowing, deepening. The muscles of her face began to relax. Her eyes slowed, then stopped, then rolled back in her head. He stirred uneasily.

"Brittany?"

She twitched, once, and moaned.

"I think that's enough of that now, dear."

She began humming tunelessly, deep in her throat.

"Brittany!" He shook her by the shoulder, hard. "Enough," he hissed.

Brittany jumped and turned to look at him, her earlier fears apparently forgotten, an expression of deep annoyance on her face.

"But I almost had it," she objected.

"No," he told her. "You didn't. You…" He shook his head, then laughed nervously. "You shouldn't have to try that hard, my dear," he said. "You weren't really going anywhere with that. Not, at least, anywhere that you really wanted to go."

Brittany glared at him, then swiveled back around, turning her back.

"Fine," she said bitterly. "Yes, go ahead. It's your cue, isn't it? Mock my arrogance."

"Your temperament is more likely," he laughed. "Are you really like this with all of your teachers? Good heavens. Calm yourself, my dear. You see a good deal more than I expected. In fact, I wonder..." He tilted his head, appraising her. "I wonder," he said softly, "if you can tell me this."

He leaned in close to her, and she could once more feel him, feel the cold radiating off of him, and feel something else there, too: a kind of terrible eagerness.

"Where is Jill Mankevich's child?"

Brittany shrank from the hunger in his voice.

"Jill's..." she stammered, confused. "I...I…In her womb, I imagine. If that girl in the hospital really is Jill. And if she hasn't miscarried. I don't understand. What…" She turned to look at him, bewildered, staring directly where his eyes would be. Then, suddenly, she laughed.

"Oh," she said, then laughed again. "Oh, darling, you really are using me terribly tonight, aren't you? It's just too naughty of you, my dear. Truly it is. Jill Mankevich's child. You'd be well-rewarded for that little bit of information, wouldn't you? And you know, somehow I don't think that you'd share. Not even the credit. Not with the likes of poor little old me." She tittered.

"Stop that," the Faceless Man snapped. Brittany smiled thinly at him, her eyes still fixed on his face.

"Ooooh. Ambitious, aren't we?" she purred. "And so loyal. Well. To yourself, at any rate. Just can't wait to get the chance to report back on your good friend the Shadow's incompetence. Not very nice, darling. And—oh!" She screamed with laughter. "Oh, my dear, my dear! I am not the only one here with pleasures!"

She didn't even see him raise his hand before the back of it whipped across her face, snapping her head backwards and knocking her off balance. She fell heavily on her hands, crying out, cringing from him.

"I said," he repeated pleasantly. "Don’t. Do not read me. You really do not want to do that, my dear. Or I promise you: you will see my pleasures. Closer to hand than you will like."

"Yes, all right, darling. I had no idea you were so delicate." Brittany lifted herself cautiously from the flagstones, cast him a swift frightened glance, then just as quickly averted her eyes.

"So Jill's one of them too?" she asked him, carefully keeping her gaze turned from his face. "I hadn't realized that. And someone's taken her child. But it couldn't possibly be viable, could it? So what would be the point? Hold on. Let me see if I can find it for you."

She raised her eyes to the darkness and stared, squinting, for a very long time.

"No," she said at length. "No, I'm sorry. I can't see that. I did try. And no," she added, in a tone of deep indignation. "I am not holding out on you! I...Oh, God no, please," she gasped. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to read you, I swear it, that was just so loud, I couldn't help it, but I didn't do it on purpose, honestly I didn’t—"

"Oh, stop babbling," sighed the Faceless Man. "I believe you. You can read me without even trying, but you couldn't find the Mankevich child. And you hadn't even realized that the mother was one of our mares? That's curious. I wonder why that is. You do know now, though, what we wanted with Evelyn's baby?"

"You were probably hoping he was the Anti-Christ," Brittany muttered.

"He? Are you... no. No, I can see that you aren't. I do believe that I begin to glimpse the pattern here. Tell me, Brittany: what do all of our mares have in common?"

He watched her eyes, shifting back and forth, reading the darkness.

"You don't know, do you? And you can't tell what they're for. Can you see the Stallion, at least? He's muddling about out here somewhere. I haven't the slightest idea why. Do you?"

Brittany stared fiercely into the night.

"You don't even know who the Stallion is," he snickered. "Do you?"

"Would you shut up?" she snapped. "I'm trying to concentrate."

"It won't matter. Never mind, Brittany," he told her. "Just forget it. It's all too close to you, isn't it? You can't see any of it. You really are every bit as far-sighted as you pretend to be with these ridiculous things. Here." He tossed her glasses to her. She blinked, hearing them clatter on the flagstones, and looked down at them.

"You may as well put them on again," the Faceless Man told her. "Not that they'll help. Not with your vision problems. Ah, well, I suppose that I'm really not all that impressed after all. And would you get up off your knees?" he snapped. "That can't be comfortable, and there's no need to stay down there on my account. It really isn't the sort of thing that I like, and I'm sick of having to lean over just to look at you."

Brittany flushed. She stumbled to her feet and glared at him, ramming her glasses onto her face.

"Well," she snarled. "I'm sorry to have disappointed you so."

"It isn't your fault, my dear. You did try. But did I say that you had a beam in your eye before? That was an understatement. You could drive a truck through your blind spot, Brittany."

"Oh, yeah?" she sneered. "Well, I still see better than you do, at any rate. And that's just pathetic, given what you are. But then, none of your people can see worth a damn, can they? You can't find Jill's baby. You can't find your Dark Mare. You couldn't even see how to manage poor Evelyn. Or that her child wasn't at all what you were looking for. You couldn't even see that, and it was just as clear as day."

"Was it?"

"Evelyn's child?" Brittany laughed meanly. "Darling, please. That girl is barely even sentient. What could a child of hers be but just one more contribution to world overpopulation? Just another squalling little bundle of misery. More meat for the machine. And with my luck," she added darkly, "she probably would have moved into the apartment next door with it."

"Ah well," he said, and shrugged. "We always knew that she was a long shot. And it's just as well, really. That girl would never have given us her child."

"She would have sold it to you," Brittany said flatly, then sensed his astonishment and smiled.

"Sold it, darling," she repeated. "You know. For money?" She laughed scornfully. "Money, darling. Perhaps you've heard of it. Can be exchanged for goods and services? Oft claimed to be the root of all evil? You can't possibly tell me that you've never encountered the concept before."

"You are mistaken," the Faceless Man said coldly. "That girl would never have sold her child."

"Ooooooh, yes she would have," Brittany replied, "if only you'd approached her the right way. Don't you people ever notice the way that people dress? Maintaining that appearance of contemptuous disregard for moneyed society costs a packet, my dear. Leather isn't cheap, and the price goes up exponentially for every metal spike. You think that Evelyn doesn't like money? She does. She does, but she likes to think that she doesn't, and that's a dangerous combination. But then, surely I don't have to tell you that."

She sat herself down on the ledge, eyes narrowed, gazing thoughtfully off into space.

"And she's also a Roman Catholic who likes to think that she's an atheist," she continued. "And that's an even more dangerous combination. She may not have wanted a child, but she certainly didn't want an abortion. You could have exploited that, and you should have. It would have been a good sight more effective than entertaining yourselves teasing her about mortal sin. For heaven's sake!" She tossed her head irritably. "Can't you even see how the perversity of it would have appealed to someone like Evelyn? ‘Oh,'" Brittany sneered in a nasty falsetto. "‘Oh, look at me. I'm such a punk. I'm such a rebel. I eat babies for breakfast. I even sold my own child, that's how hard and how cynical I am!" She snorted. "But she's not. She isn't hard at all; she's soft as they come and desperate for attention to boot. If you’d really wanted that child for whatever disgusting purpose you've concocted for it, all you really needed to do was to send some decent-looking couple to talk nicely to her for a couple of hours—oh, boo-hoo, how we yearn for a little rugrat of our own—and then wave a big wad of cash under her nose. She would have gone for it."

Brittany shook her head in disgust.

"But nooo," she said, rolling her eyes. "That would have been too easy, wouldn't it? Wouldn't have given the old whip hand enough exercise. Wouldn't have been as much fun as chasing her around the woods. Wouldn't have gratified your pleasures."

"Child..."

"Too bad, darling. Because you would have liked the results if you'd done it my way. You really would have." She smiled dreamily into space. "She would have rationalized it," she told him softly. "Because it would have got her off the Pope's hook, and because frankly, she could think of uses for the money, but she would have known better. Because your people aren't really very good at hiding what they are, are they? Not for any length of time. She would have known better, and she would have done it anyway, and she would never have forgiven herself for it. Not for that. For buckling to force, maybe, but for selling out? Evelyn? Never. Not ever. Twenty years from now, she would still have been waking up in the middle of the night, wondering what she had done. Praying to the God she doesn't even want to believe in to tell her what she had done. And getting no reply. No reply," Brittany repeated, with relish. "It would have destroyed her."

She let out a peal of delicate laughter.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "How I do like Evelyn!"

Brittany sat back on her ledge, smiling. The Faceless Man stood watching her, frozen in place. At length, he stirred.

"No," he told her quietly. "You're right about that, Brittany. We really aren't very good at hiding what we are."

Brittany's smile faltered.

"Not for any length of time," he said.

She blinked, then buried her face in her hands.

"I do like Evelyn," she insisted, in an entirely different tone of voice.

"No, Brittany. You don't. You only like her weakness. And that's not her: it's the least part of her. You don't really like people at all, can't you see that? And they don't like you, either."

"Shut up," Brittany said weakly. "People like me."

"They do not. Why on earth should they? You're vicious and arrogant and unkind. You're one of us, my dear, and people don't like us, you know. Normal people don't. They never have, and they never will. It's just the way things are. If people are sometimes drawn to you, it can only be because you fascinate them, the way a two-headed dog might, or a baby born with no limbs. Which is just what you are. You're a grotesque, Brittany. You're a walking freakshow. Nobody likes you."

"You're wrong." She shook her head, still buried within her hands. "You're wrong," she told him, voice muffled and small. "People do like me. Christian does. Christian likes me."

"Oh, I see." The Faceless Man laughed. "Drawn to him just like all the others, are you? Well. I suppose that's inevitable, given what you are. But does he like you? Does he really?"

He regarded her for a moment, then shrugged.

"Well," he conceded. "Perhaps he does. Perhaps he does at that. That boy is even blinder than you are. Even blinder than you will be, if you keep wearing those ridiculous glasses. But what if he does? You can't possibly imagine that he'll ever do anything about it, can you? The way that you look? And with all that he has to choose from on this campus?" He shook his head sympathetically. "I don't think so, Brittany. Although you're a clever enough girl: I suppose that if you played your cards right, you might get a sympathy fuck out of him some night when he's nothing better to do. And if he's had enough to drink. But only once, I think. Only once. So I'd advise you to make the most of it, my dear, if you ever do manage to get him between the sheets, and if there's much of him to make after the six or seven drinks you'll have to pour down his throat to get him there. Because I really don't think you'll get a second chance. He may be blind, Brittany, but even he is not that blind."

Brittany raised her face from her hands. She opened her mouth soundlessly, then let out a single, astonished laugh.

"My God," she said. "And you call me vicious?" She shook her head. "That was...brutal, darling. Really it was. Admirably so. But you do the boy a grave injustice, you know." She smiled bitterly. "He takes three drinks," she told him. "That's all. Only three."

"Indeed?" The Faceless Man laughed. "Well. I stand corrected. So. Had him already, have you? Oh, no, but of course not. I was forgetting, wasn't I? How stupid of me. Your tastes don't run that way."

She shrugged and looked away.

"No," he mused. "They really don't, do they? I wonder if you have the slightest idea how extremely unusual that is. But in your case, I suppose it's just as well. They got greedy with your line, Brittany. Greedy and impatient. But then," he sniggered. "You are from Appalachia, aren't you? So surely you understand how these things can sometimes happen. You don't have to worry about being a mare, my dear," the Faceless Man told her. "That was your mother. But not everything born of a mare is a horse, you know. Not even a dark one."

Brittany thought about this for a moment.

"If I'm understanding you correctly," she said slowly. "You just called my father an ass. Not that I mind, precisely. It's not as if I ever knew the man. And he must have been one, I suppose, to sleep with someone like my mother. Oh," she cried suddenly. "Why did you have to call me out here tonight? Isn't it enough that you come to me in my dreams? Couldn't you just have let me sleep? I get precious enough sleep as it is, you know that. All of this effort, just to corrupt someone like me? It can't be much of a challenge for you. Doesn't it seem a rather hollow triumph, darling? It would, I think, to me, if I were you."

"Corrupt you?" the Faceless Man repeated, incredulously. "Is that what you think I came here to do? You think that I'm here to...to what? To seduce you? To lure you into some Faustian bargain? Oh, my dear, my dear!"

She stared at him.

"I, corrupt you? How could I do that? How could I possibly? How could anyone? My dear, you are already as corrupt as they come. You're tainted to the marrow, Brittany, don't you realize that by now?" He shook his head and chuckled helplessly. "Corrupt you," he snorted. "Use your head, girl. Who would ever cast me as your Mephistopheles? I can't even prevent you from reading my mind."

"Well, why did you call me out here, then?" she snapped. "I'm not one of your wretched mares, and I couldn't even see anything for you that you couldn't see just as well if not better for yourself. So what good am I to you? What else could you want from me, if not that? You offer me your help, but just what is that help going to cost me?"

"We didn't call you, Brittany," he told her gently. "I tried to tell you that before, but you wouldn't let me. No one called you. You just came. Because you wanted to. Because you belong out here, on a night like this, with us. You're one of us, child. You have been for a very long time. And you know that, really, don't you? Why else would you have tried so hard to see for me before? It wasn't out of affection, and it wasn't out of fear. You aren't even really all that frightened of me, are you? By all rights, you should be.  You should be terrified, but you aren't. Not you, Brittany. Don't you wonder why that is? It isn't courage—you have precious little of that. It's recognition. What help I offer, my dear, I offer as a favor. A favor between colleagues. But why take my word for it? If you doubt me, why not read me? I give you my permission, just this once. Read the truth for yourself."

"No." Brittany stared into her lap and shook her head. "No."

"No. Because there's really no need, is there? And is it so very terrible, after all, what we are? Cruelty is intrinsic to our nature, I can't deny that, but we have finer qualities as well. Compassion, for one. Oh, but of course, you won't believe that," he added bitterly. "You believe us incapable of compassion, don't you? And certainly incapable of pity. Your kind always think that way about the Dark. Naturally you assume that I must have some ulterior motive for wanting to help you. Of course you do. Your people have never understood us, and you never will. I was a fool, I suppose, to expect anything better from you."

"Anything better?" Brittany repeated. "Better! Wonderful. But, no. No, I don't mistake compassion for the opposite of cruelty. How could I? I understand them both a bit too well for that. If cruelty has an antithesis, it certainly isn't compassion. Thoughtlessness, maybe. But then, that isn't really one of your traits, is it?"

"No, child. Not thoughtlessness. That trait belongs to the other side." He sat companionably beside her on the ledge.

"The Dark takes care of its own, Brittany," he told her softly. "Always. No matter what lies you may have heard about us, we do at least take care of our own. Which is, frankly, a good deal more than they can claim. My help costs you nothing. Not a thing. But I can't help you without your consent."

She shook her head and smiled tightly.

"Oh," she told him. "But you're forgetting what I am. What you told me that I was. Because we are smarter than horses, you know, if nothing else. Much smarter. And far more stubborn."

"Yes," the Faceless Man snapped. "And prone to digging in your heels for no good reason whatsoever. And refusing to be led, even out of burning buildings. You do have intellect, child. I can't deny you that. But intellect isn't everything, no matter what you might like to believe. It isn't anything unless it is applied, which yours has not been. Not to your own situation, at any rate."

He stood up, stalked back and forth irritably.

"How long do you really think you'll be able to continue without our help?" he asked her. "Another year? Another two years? If you care nothing for your sanity, Brittany, at least give some thought to your life. At the rate you're going, you'll be lucky to live long enough to need the Thorazine."

Brittany stared at him.

"Are you threatening me?" she asked.

"No, you little fool, I'm trying to help you. You aren't even the slightest bit aware, are you, of just how dangerously distracted you've become? Alcohol on top of sedatives, girl? And right before bedtime? You spoke to me earlier of dangerous combinations: what do you make of that one? If I were you, my dear, I would be grateful that we chose tonight to come to Herschberg. It woke you up, and that's not something you'd be wise to count on in the future, not if you continue to brew yourself those sorts of nightcaps. You can't possibly be unaware of the risks you take, mixing your drugs that way. But you aren't a risk-taker, are you? And you aren't stupid either. And I refuse to believe that you're suicidal—not yet, at any rate. So why don't you tell me, Brittany? What happened?"

"I..." She bit her lip, pale. "Jesus. I wasn't thinking."

"No. Thus speaks the voice of intellect. You weren't thinking. And that doesn't bode well for you, my dear. Not when you rest your hopes on that one ability. But you aren't really capable of thinking very clearly anymore, are you? You've been missing a lot of classes this year. Your grades are slipping. You can't even concentrate half the time. And I suspect that you lose track of just how many of those pills you've swallowed far more often than you realize. You don't eat; you don't sleep; you drink far too much. Your blood pressure is through the roof. You're only twenty years old, child. Twenty years old. You're already beginning to look like someone approaching middle age. You can't keep this up indefinitely. Surely you must know that. Surely you must realize that you can't go on this way."

"Yes," Brittany whispered. "I know that. I do know that."

"Then why not accept help when it's offered? There aren't any strings attached. How could there be? Your strings are already attached, Brittany. They were attached even before you were born. What could you possibly think that you have to lose? Look around you, my dear. Isn't it a beautiful night?"

Brittany gazed around her, at the fountain—now once more burbling behind her—and at the trees, and at the man with no face. She smiled faintly.

"Yes," she agreed. "It is. It's very beautiful, and so are you. But you learn something, you know, when you grow up looking like I do. You learn that looks aren't everything. You can say what you like about my mother: at least she taught me that much. Looks aren't everything. No more than intellect is."

She sighed and looked around her again.

"For one thing," she said, "it doesn't last. Nothing does, but beauty least of all. Just like this night. This beautiful terrible night. It will end, eventually. And when it does, things are bound to look very different to me. They usually do, in the mornings. Because for one thing, this really isn't the sort of thing that I make it my practice to believe in. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to make this a drug reaction. Or a dream. A dream might be better: I'm good at forgetting my dreams. I’ve had years of experience at it. Tomorrow morning, none of this will matter, because I'm going to make it all go away. Because you're wrong about me, you know. Very wrong. I'm not one of you. That may be a part of what I am, but it isn't all of it, no more than Evelyn's weakness is all of her."

"Oh, really?" the Faceless Man sneered. "What are you then, pray tell? Sweet and kind, down deep inside?"

"God, no." Brittany laughed. "Not at all. I'm nothing down deep inside. Don't you see that? I'm just as hollow as can be. You called me a hypocrite before? You had no idea, darling. You have no idea just how hypocritical I can be, or how petty, or how superficial, or how insincere. Don't you think that I'd love to be what you make me out to be? As ugly and as egotistical as I am, to believe myself to be something grand and Miltonic and beautifully, tragically damned? But I'm not. I’m not. I'm too shallow for that. I don't even study things themselves. I only study the names of things. Because do you know what I am, above all else? I am a student, darling. A student of the humanities. That is what I am. I am a liberal arts major, and I have less depth than you and your kind can even begin to imagine."

"Brittany…"

"It doesn't matter," she cut him off. "It doesn't matter. Because I am a hypocrite. And I don't believe in you. I only believe in the trivial and the quotidian. The liberal arts, don't you know, the triv—"

She broke off, staring at him. He inclined his head and shrugged, graciously.

"Of course," she sighed. "How could I not have recognized you? You're a Jules Feiffer illustration. From The Phantom Tollbooth. The Terrible Trivium." She shook her head. "I did tell you that I was good at forgetting my dreams, didn't I? Otherwise I would have recognized you sooner. Because that picture did frighten me, you know, as a child. It gave me nightmares, in fact. Terrible ones."

"I know that, Brittany."

"Yes, of course you do. That's why you take that form when you appear to me, I suppose. That's just the sort of creature you are. But given the sort of creature I am, does it really surprise you that the Terrible Trivium should have frightened me? ‘I am the Terrible Trivium,'" she quoted. "‘Demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort and monster of habit.'" She laughed shakily. "Yes," she said. "That does frighten me. Because that's exactly what I am, isn't it? A monster of habit. And petty tasks and worthless jobs? That is my life. That is what tomorrow will bring. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Even though I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons—"

Brittany laughed wildly.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "Because I do not dare disturb the Universe. And I have not the strength to force the moment to its crisis. All that I do have is just enough hypocrisy to get by. And so I will. I will make you a nightmare and forget you again. I will take my pills and write my papers and...and... and measure out my life in coffee spoons. I will quote poetry. I will snipe at my friends over the dinner table and then go home and try not to listen to my neighbors. Their voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room. Singing, don't you know? Like mermaids. Each to each. Not to me. I do not think that they will sing to me. And I will keep on doing that, just as long as I am able," she concluded bleakly. "Till human voices wake me. And I drown." Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands.

"Child!" the Trivium objected gently. "Child. It doesn't have to be that way."

"It does!" she cried. "It does. Because you can help me, and your help comes free, and all that I have to do is ask. But I can't do that. If you were only cruel..." She looked up at him. "If your cruelty were all that there were to you," she told him. "Then perhaps. Perhaps. Because I can bear your cruelty. I can bear anyone's cruelty. But I cannot bear beneficence. And I cannot bear pity. Your cruelty doesn't bother me, but oh, your compassion!" She shook her head wildly. "No. No. My people may be trash—common, as you've pointed out—just as common as dirt—and inbred to boot—but we don't go around asking for hand-outs. I was raised better than that. There's never been a Clairmont born who'd be caught dead doing that. We're trash all right, but we pay our debts and we serve our time, and what we get, we earn. We don't take no charity. So thank you. Your offer is very kind, I'm sure. But I'll manage on my own, right here in purgatory. With the trivial and the quotidian. For as long as I am able. Because it suits me all right. And far more to the point, it is what I'm suited for."

The Trivium shook his head slowly from side to side.

"You," he told her, "are completely insane. You are monstrous. And you are magnificent, Brittany." He offered her his hand. She took it, allowed him to raise her to her feet.

"If you should ever change your mind..." he said.

"I know," she sighed. "I know." She looked down, to where he still held her hand. Her left hand. He raised it to where his lips ought to have been and she shivered, feeling the chill race up her arm.

"Au revoir, my dear," he told her.

She clutched her arm to her chest, shivering.

"Good night, Trivium," she said.

He bowed, and vanished.

Brittany looked around her, at the fountain, playing in the lights, and at the trees, waving, beckoning to her.

"Sinister," she whispered. "Oh, sinister. The Devil's hand."

Then, suddenly, she laughed.

"Oh, but that is not what I meant at all," she said. "That is not it, at all."

And smiling helplessly, she wandered off into the shadows beneath the trees at the edge of campus, into the darkness of the beautiful night.

•

Janis looked down at her piles of photographs, neatly sorted by subject, the pictures within each pile arranged in chronological order.

There, she thought, and sneezed. She was beginning to think that Chris wasn't going to be coming home tonight at all. Maybe she should just forget about it and go to bed.

The corner of a photo caught her eye, peeking out from underneath a dictionary. She pulled it out, shaking her head at Chris' sloppiness, and froze.

It was no wonder that Chris hadn't wanted this particular picture for his album. It wasn't a flattering one of him. He had been standing very near to the unseen photographer, half-turned towards the camera when the flash had gone off, and he had clearly not expected to be caught on film. He wasn't even looking at the lens but away, distracted by something, mouth half-open as if in speech. His face, blurred with motion and imbued with the ghostly pallor of the extreme foreground, nearly filled the frame. In the merciless light of the flash, he looked tired, haggard, worn. Twice his age.

To the Wodehouse Formal, he had worn a Victorian summer suit and a straw boater.

Janis stared. She swallowed dryly. She shook her head.

"No," she whispered. "Oh, no."

She stood up from the desk, knocking the chair over behind her as she did so, still holding the photo by one corner, as if it were a dead thing, or a lethal weapon. She took a step backwards and tripped over the overturned chair, stumbled, dropped the photograph, moaned.

Then, grabbing her backpack, she ran from the room, not even bothering to close the door behind her.

•

(continued)

•

---