Act III: Deus Ex Arcadia
(“Various Envies. All of Them Sad.”)

Chris stomped through the woods at the edge of campus, taking the shortcut to Hiawatha Towers, crushing dead leaves and branches underfoot as his trenchcoat lashed against his calves. Ever since his realization that the trees could not touch him, his panic had gradually subsided, to be replaced by a sense of calm, of confidence, even of serenity. He was no longer allowing the screams and moans and snarls of the night to frighten him. He passed by a great oak, its gnarled branches clenched like skeletal fists against the sky, and barely even flinched. He came to a dead tree lying across his path and stepped over it without a moment's hesitation.

They really can't touch me, he thought. It had taken him a long time to steel himself to step over the dead tree before—the image of something reaching out from underneath the trunk to grab at his ankle had been almost impossibly vivid—but now he was over it. He was beginning to understand. All that they had, these creatures of the Dark, was fear. That was really all that they could do. If you could overcome your fear, they were powerless against you. Chris felt rather embarrassed, actually, that it had taken him twenty years to come to this revelation.

"I will fear no evil," he said, as he passed a great oak tree, its gnarled branches clenched like skeletal fists against the sky. "I will fear no evil." He came to a dead tree lying across his path and stepped over it without a moment's hesitation.

He had stopped running. Running was a fear response. That was something else that it had taken him far too long to realize. Running made your body think that it was frightened, and what was more, it attracted their attention. Walking, now, though, walking was the way to go. Walking calmly, coolly, past the great oak tree, its gnarled branches clenched like skeletal fists against the sky, over the dead tree lying across your path. Even if time was of the essence, you would still get there faster if you walked calmly, slowly, past the great oak, over the dead tree in your path...

Chris frowned slightly. Did it usually take him this long to get to Hiawatha Towers by way of the woods behind the trailer park? He didn't think so. Oh well, he must be nearly there now, because there, right ahead of him, was the great oak tree, its gnarled branches clenched like skeletal fists against the—

For God's sake, would you please pay attention!?

Chris stopped. Yes, ahead of him was the oak tree. Its gnarled branches clenched like...yes. And after he'd passed that, he would step over the fallen tree. As he had done many times already tonight. As he had done...

"How many times?" Chris whispered to himself, his eyes wide. "Oh no, how many times?" He stared at the forest floor and saw his own path, curving suggestively away through the underbrush. In places he had worn it down to bare earth. He caught his breath and looked at his watch.

It was four thirty in the morning.

He had been walking around in circles for over an hour.

Chris moaned in despair as all around him, the trees bust into peals of hollow laughter.

Touch you? they hissed at him. We don't need to touch you, you little fool! You think that you're a match for us? You? Boy, the blood runs so thin in you that they couldn't even find you; you weren't even a blip on their radar; he looked right at you when he came here, and all that he saw was what you are: a horny little undergraduate with delusions of grandeur. There's only one thing you're good for, you pathetic weakling, and you hardly even serve for that anymore; you're shooting blanks half the time as it is. You think that you can match your strength with us? This is what the Light has come to, has it? Touch you? Now why would we want to do that, when you're so amusing just as you are?

Chris cowered under the snarling chorus, barely registering the words, gagging at the malice in the voices. He drew his athame and clutched it, trying to remember what it was for, then clapped his hands over his ears, gasping. Out of the corner of his eye, he sighted motion, a figure gliding from the shadows behind him. He whirled around, whimpering, barely even aware that he had thrust his knife out desperately before him.

"Get back," he croaked.

The figure froze, one hand curled around a sapling. He stared wildly into the darkness.

Oh gods, he thought. It has no face. It's something without a face.

"Get back!" he repeated, raising his knife. "I abjure thee. With heaven in this fateful hour—"

"Are you going to attack me with that thing, Christian?" the figure asked him sadly. "Slit my throat, perhaps? Cut off the hand that offends thee?"

Chris gasped and stared.

"Brittany?"

Well...maybe, some paranoid part of his mind murmured to him. Maybe. Or maybe just something that sounds like her. Be careful.

He shivered and clutched his knife harder, feeling it slip in his sweaty palm.

"You don't have a face," he told her, but it came out as something like a whine. "Brittany, I can't see your face."

"Jesus," Brittany muttered. She stepped further out from under the tree. Her face was still thrown in shadow, but Chris thought that he could just see a glint of light reflecting off of her glasses. "Don't say that, Christian," she said, and now she sounded frightened. "Don't tell me that, please. And don't...you really shouldn't wave sharp objects around like that, you know. Really, you shouldn't. It just isn't safe. Especially not that sharp object. Not now."

Chris glanced nervously down at his knife. He had never been able to fathom how Brittany knew half the things she sometimes seemed to know. He swallowed.

"Brittany," he told her, "I was looking for you! You have to come with me. To the Arb. Now. Please. It's important."

Brittany slowly shook her head. "Oh, no, Christian. Not the Arb. Not tonight."

"But you have to!" he cried. "Everything depends on it! And we're running out of time..." He stepped towards her, and she shrank back, inhaling sharply. Chris stopped and glanced down again at his knife.

"Oh," he said. "Sorry." He bent to slip it back into his boot. Brittany had always had a phobia about bladed weapons. "Sorry," he told her again. "I forgot."

"You abjured me," she said blankly. "You..." she shook her head, then laughed shakily. "Really, Christian! Surely you meant to say adjure, didn't you? Adjure? To command, to ward off? To abjure, my dear, is to renounce an oath. And that isn't really what you meant, is it?"

She stumbled forward, and Chris could see that she was dressed in her bedclothes. She looked exhausted and dirty and disheveled; she was missing one of her slippers, and she clutched her left arm to her chest as if she'd sprained her wrist.

"Running out of time?" she said. "On a night like this? There's all the time in the world, my dear. There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet..."

He stared at her. "Are you all right?"

"Time for you and time for me, and time for yet a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions..." She giggled shrilly. "It had to be Prufrock, didn't it, Christian? Tonight of all nights, you had to read me Prufrock."

"Brittany, what are you doing out here?"

"Me? Oh, nothing much. Just walking around. Going to and fro in the world, don't you know. Walking up and down in it. Reigning in purgatory, with the trivial and the quotidian. You know, the usual. Nothing of any importance. Nothing of any importance at all."

"You shouldn't," Chris told her earnestly. "Not tonight, Brittany. You shouldn't be out here tonight. It's dangerous."

"Dangerous?" She laughed again, shaking her head. "Oh, Christian, you are blind. And I do like you." She slid slowly down the trunk of her tree to sit at its base, leaning back against it and giving every impression of planning to stay there forever.

"No," he objected feebly. "No, please, Brittany, you have to come with me. You have to. There isn't any time. And the trees..."

He looked around, but the trees had fallen silent now. They were barely even waving anymore.

"They stopped," he said. "They stopped when you showed up."

"Did they?" she muttered, then laughed wildly. "Right! Of course they did. ‘The trees and I have an understanding.' Oh God, I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten about your evil trees." She giggled helplessly, shrilly.

Chris eyed her with some concern. Brittany was in one of her moods, all right. She got like this sometimes. Privately, Chris always thought of them as ‘Brittany's nervous spells.'

Well, of course she's nervous, he told himself. Out on a night like this? She may be head-blind, but this is hardly a normal evening. Even someone as insensitive as Brittany must be feeling something on a night like this. And this isn't the sort of thing she's used to dealing with. She's freaked. So humor her. Cheer her up. You know how to do that.

"What are you doing out here tonight, anyway?" she was asking him now, her magnified eyes glittering coldly at him. "Looking for someone else to recite your poetry to?"

Chris smiled and swept his hat off his head, bowing to her.

"I have forgot much, Cynara," he cried dramatically. "Gone with the wind..."

Brittany groaned and banged her head against the tree.

"Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put they pale, lost lilies out of mind..."

"Pale lost lilies," she repeated, snorting.

"But I was desolate, and sick of an old passion..."

"‘Yea, all the time, because the dance was long,'" Brittany finished for him, rolling her eyes. "‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.' God, Christian, your taste in poetry..." She shook her head in disgust, but Chris could see the beginnings of a smile forming at the corners of her mouth. "But of course. Dowson. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. Why on earth not? Only two hours ago I was Prufrock, and now I'm supposed to be the good nymph Cynara?"

"But what else would you be?" Chris asked her. "Here, among your trees, with your hair in disarray? ‘When the feast is finished and the lamps expire,'" he declaimed. "‘Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine.'"

"God, Christian." Brittany stared at him, looking pale and frightened in the dim light. "Shut up."

Chris stepped back a pace, taken aback by the edge of panic that he thought he heard in her voice.

"Well, okay, Brittany," he told her gently. "Forget Dowson then, if you hate him so much. Not Cynara, and not Prufrock either. What, then? You tell me."

"Shall I tell you? What I am tonight?" Brittany considered the question. "I…" she said slowly. "‘I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing. That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies. All of them sad.'"

Chris stared at her.

"You've got me, Brittany," he said finally. "I don't know that one. Are you sure that you're all right? You haven't hurt yourself, have you?"

"Yes." She closed her eyes. "I have. Self-denial always hurts. If it doesn't hurt, then you aren't doing it right. But then, you wouldn't really know anything about that, would you?" She shook her head. "Don't worry about me," she said. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure? You’re…when you first...I wasn't even sure if I recognized you. Before, I mean. Until you called me by my name. My full name. You're the only one who ever calls me that."

"It suits you," Brittany told him harshly. "‘Behold the crucifix: what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence, hanging on a tree.'"

Chris winced. "I do know that one," he said cautiously. "That's Anton LeVey."

"The other was Auden. In Praise of Limestone. You should read more of the moderns, Christian. They're good for you. Clean. Crisp. Cold. Precise. Not like that sloppy Victorian tripe you love so much. In Praise of Limestone. I'll lend it you sometime. You'll like it." She smiled at him. "You're rather like limestone yourself, really, aren't you? Soft. Malleable. Weak."

"Brittany..."

"No. No, for God's sake, forget that. Don't mind me, Christian. I have nothing against limestone. It's rather a nice way to be, really, isn't it? One does get tired of hard things after a while. And I do have an eye for weakness. Or so I've been told." She tilted her head, looking at him.

"‘Dear,'" she recited softly. "‘I know nothing of either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.'"

She held out her hand to him.

"All right," she said. "Why don't you show me what's so terribly important in the Arb?"

Chris took her hand and pulled her to her feet, then shivered, dropping her hand, staring at her.

"But I'm warning you right now," she said. "I am not running. I will not run."

"Brittany, your hand is freezing."

"Yes, I know," she sighed. "It doesn't matter." She strolled leisurely towards the road, stepping over the dead tree in the path without the slightest hesitation. Chris followed, nearly dancing circles around her in his impatience. He stared nervously ahead of him as they walked, half-expecting the dead tree to reappear in their path, the oak tree to loom ahead, but instead they emerged by the side of the road. From behind them, Chris thought that he heard snarls of thwarted malice and frustrated rage.

"Oh, Christian," Brittany sighed, ducking nonchalantly under the outstretched talons of a darkly muttering tree branch. "Isn't it a beautiful night?"

He stared at her, aghast.

"It's a horrible night, Brittany."

"No. Come on." She stopped walking and turned to see him standing still, frozen before the branch. She smiled strangely, then came back to lift it up for him. He ducked quickly under it, shuddering. "Be nice to me," she said. "I'm going to the Arb with you, aren't I? And you know how much I hate the Arb. So humor me. Tell me that there is something that you find attractive about this evening. There must be something. Say that it has a...a sort of seductive appeal, or a kind of Miltonic grandeur, or for God's sake, even a ‘certain je ne sais qua.' Anything."

Chris looked around at the skeletal trees, muttering darkly at their passing. He heard the faint screams off in the distance, and smelled something too, something cold and harsh on the air, something like the smell of ozone. He thought hard, shivering as the bitter wind sliced through his trenchcoat.

"Well," he said, at length. "At least it isn't snowing."

They made their way towards the Arboretum, inbred and trembling as a pair of pet chihuahuas, too absorbed even to notice Mark and Stephanie walking the other way to the hospital.

"Black helicopters!" somebody screamed, and Stephanie stopped, shivering. Mark put his arm around her comfortingly.

"Boy," he said. "Friday nights in Herschberg, huh?" She smiled tentatively at him and they walked on, the shades of the night taking no more notice of them than they did of the squirrels in the trees overhead.

•

Brittany eyed the front entrance to the Herschberg Arboretum with profound distaste. She hated the way that Christian always wanted to drag her off to this wretched place. Worst of all was the way that he got all… clingy when they came here together, particularly when they passed certain places: the twin oak trees flanking the back gate, the lovely dark grove beneath the hill, the smaller of the two lakes. All of the places, in fact, that she liked. The front gate was not usually one of those places, but now he was at it again, staring at the tree branches waving before the entrance in dismay and reaching for her hand.

"They won't let us in," he whispered, and clung to her. She shook him off, hating the feel of his warm flesh.

"Don't be stupid," she snapped. "You were the one who wanted to come here. I thought it was supposed to be important." She stomped crossly across the threshold, ducking under the branches, then turned to look at him. He was shivering violently in his trenchcoat. She shook her head, sighed, and returned to fetch him.

"You know," she told him reprovingly, taking his hand and leading him past the gate. "You wouldn't feel so cold all the time if you ever thought to dress appropriately." She dropped his hand again, then wiped her own against the hem of her half-buttoned housecoat in a gesture of unconscious disgust. He stared at her, opened his mouth, then shook his head.

"Come on," he said, and set off down the path towards the birch grove. She sighed, following.

"A trenchcoat is not sufficient. You ought to get yourself a down jacket. You'd look adorable, Christian, really you would. Just like a little Michelin man."

"Sshhhh." He stopped and gestured to a large flat rock. "Sit down," he whispered.

"And maybe a hat with a little pom-pom on top," she added, sitting. "When in Minnesota, you know, my dear..."

"Sshhhh." He placed his hands admonishingly on her shoulders, standing behind her. Brittany felt a sudden stab of apprehension.

"You aren't sacrificing me to anything here, are you, Christian?" she asked him.

"Sshhhh," he hissed. "It's coming."

Brittany sighed and leaned back, feeling the cold stone leach the heat from her body and wondering why in hell he was the one shivering. She squinted suspiciously into the birches, but saw nothing there, except for perhaps a faint glimmer, but no sooner had she glimpsed it than it was gone.

"Oh, for God's sake, Christian," she snapped. "Aren't we done here yet? It's got to be five in the—" Something rustled in the undergrowth, and he clutched her shoulders. She stared ahead of her, but there was nothing there.

"Oh," he breathed behind her, so softly that she could barely hear him. "Oh."

His hands trembled on her. She shrugged her shoulders irritably, and when that didn't work, reached up to push his hands off of her, but he misunderstood and took them in his own.

"What?" She squinted again, but there was nothing there, of course. Going to the Arb with Christian was always like this.

"You can't see it?" he whispered, voice tinged with disbelief and with awe.

"There's nothing there to see, Christian. This is absurd." Brittany pulled her hands away from him and dropped them back into her lap, which was for some reason now very warm. Her left hand gave a sudden throb of pain, and she winced, flexing it tentatively. She was starting to feel slightly ill. Behind her, Christian was backing slowly away.

"This is enough," she declared firmly. "I'm not feeling well. I'm going home."

"No. Brittany." He sounded as if he wanted to yell, but was unwilling to raise his voice above the tiniest of whispers; the result was a kind of whinnying gasp. "To the reservoir, now. Please. Please. We'll be done then. Please."

"Don't grovel, Christian. God. This is so stupid. Fine. Fine, I'll go to the reservoir. But then I really am going home. I'm really not feeling well. I think I've got a migraine coming on." She launched herself off of the rock, stumbled over one of those invisible things that always tripped you when you went walking in the woods, barely caught herself, and began stomping towards the path that led to the Res.

"Aren't you coming?" Brittany snapped, and turned around. Chris was staring at a spot about two feet from her. He looked as if he were going to faint. He nodded dumbly, then turned his eyes to meet hers.

"You really can't see it?" he asked her again. "Not at all?"

Brittany rolled her eyes and whirled back around, ignoring him. As she turned, she thought she caught a glimpse of something again, just a glimmer, a flash of white...but then it was gone. Her hand ached miserably, and her stomach rolled; for a moment, she thought she might throw up.

"Can we just get this over with already?" she asked, and continued down the path. After a few steps, she could hear him, following quite a distance behind her, and was there another set of footsteps as well? Right beside her? She thought that perhaps there was.

Eliot again, she thought sickly. She had Eliot on the brain tonight. The Waste Land this time. Who is the third who walks always beside you? she thought, as she strode stiffly towards the reservoir. When I count, there are only you and I together...

The still water of Herschberg's reservoir spread out before them, visible mainly as a vast expanse of blackness past the last few trees at the Arboretum's edge. On a warm night, there would be students here: drinking, probably, as they stared out over the lake's placid surface; star-gazing, perhaps, if the night were clear; smoking, usually, and by no means always tobacco. And kissing, inevitably kissing. Brittany made it her practice to avoid this spot like the plague. A trickle of sweat oozed down her forehead; she swiped at it with the back of her wrist, then frowned.

"Christian," she called, hearing him coming up behind her. "Does it feel...warm to you here?"

"It always does," he whispered. "Here."

It did feel warm. Hot, actually: humid, sultry, and somewhere she could swear that she could even hear the crickets, screaming their summer death song...

Brittany gagged suddenly. She stumbled backwards, away from the water's edge

No, she thought wildly. Not crickets. There can't be. In November?

"Oh, I don't like this place," she muttered in a small, frightened voice. "I don't like this. This is a horrible place. This is...Christian?" She was aware of the panic in her voice and hated it, but she couldn't seem to shut it off. "Christian!" she called, backing rapidly away from the shoreline, somehow unwilling to turn her back on the blank and faceless surface of the lake. "I don't like it here!" She backed right into him, and very nearly screamed. He grabbed her as she stumbled, helped her to steady herself. Her glasses slid down her sweat-oiled nose.

"Don't be afraid," he whispered, choking. "It's all right."

Over the frames of her glasses as they slid, Brittany thought she saw a shape, big, surprisingly big, gleaming ghostly in the darkness, bent down over the surface of the water as if to drink. It raised its head to look at her, and she slammed her hand hard against her face, shoving her glasses back up her nose, closing her eyes, feeling faint and stupid in the summer heat. Her hand was screaming now, screaming just like the crickets, and her head throbbed. She moaned and bent over, dry-heaving convulsively. Alcohol and sedatives, she thought. Oh, stupid move.

"Please let it not be too late," Chris was whispering behind her. He sounded as if he might be crying. The brush around them rustled, and a wave of heat passed over them. "Oh, please, let it not be too late..."

Brittany gagged one last time, then straightened, shuddering, feeling the perspiration cool on her back. It was getting colder again now, the heat was fading; suddenly she felt chilled. She glanced at the surface of the reservoir, broken now by ripples, shivered, turned towards Christian. He was trembling, eyes closed, tears running down his face.

"Thank you," he whispered. "Oh, thank you."

She stared at him.

"Sit down, for God's sake," she said gruffly, and then promptly took her own advice, plopping herself unceremoniously down onto a fallen log. She listened for crickets, but heard none. The pain in her hand was subsiding, and the bark of the tree felt comfortingly cold under her fingertips. She closed her eyes in relief, feeling her dizziness pass, only vaguely conscious of Christian moving, coming to sit down beside her.

"You couldn't see it at all, Brittany?" he asked her, sounding heart-broken. "Not at all?"

"No," she said firmly, and breathed in a huge lungful of the clean pure winter air. She felt his eyes on her and glanced over to him. He was staring at her with something approaching awe.

"I wasn't sure," he whispered. "I didn't know who I would find. But the instant I thought of you, I thought that maybe..."

She closed her eyes again, seeing once more in her mind that ghostly shape. What the hell had that been? The Great White Mule? She was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to burst into hysterical laughter.

"...I knew it, really," he was babbling now, beside her. "I knew it the instant I thought of you. It just made sense somehow..."

She shook her head. The way that it had bent over the water. And when it had raised its head to look at her...

"...because you're the only one, Brittany. The only person I know who..."

Its horn. Its single, spiraling horn.

Her eyes flew open.

"What?" she shrieked, turning to Christian in horror. "What did you say, Christian? What did you just call me?"

"Pure," he whispered, and stared at her. "Absolutely pure."

Brittany stared right back at him. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth, shook her head. And then, snarling wordlessly, she drew back her arm and slapped him, just as hard as she could manage, with all of the strength of her good left hand.

•

Roberta "Bobbi" Roberts gazed listlessly at the unfinished English paper rolled into her typewriter, and then at the assignment lying beside it on her kitchen table.

Albert Feinstein would have recognized the mimeograph, might even perhaps have felt some sympathy for her plight. He, however, had at least been granted an extension. Bobbi had not. In a matter of hours, her essay would be a full week overdue.

She glanced once more at the pile of books beside the typewriter, her eyes red and swollen, then sighed. Clutching ineffectually at her bathrobe, which she had now outgrown so completely that it would no longer fasten around her chest, she shuffled across the kitchen to the counter, where a paperback book lay face down, spine broken, pages splayed to hold her place. Bobbi picked it up and glanced at the page, and then at the clock, which pronounced the time to be nearly five o'clock. She shuddered and slammed the book down again, with an expression of weary distaste.

"Drink Your Way To Weight Loss!" the cover of the paperback exhorted.

Bobbi thought that she would be happy never to drink another glass of tap water for as long as she lived.

She opened the cabinet door above the counter and grabbed one of the many mismatched glasses that she and her housemate Alison had bought at a yard sale in September. This one was an ugly shade of amber, tapering slightly at the base. They had been so pleased when they had brought the glasses home, she and Alison, stacking them in the cupboard together, giggling at how wonderfully ugly they all were. Proud to be stocking a cupboard, even if it was with mismatched glasses, to be finally out of the dorms, living off-campus, in an actual house, just like honest to God people. Hauling couches home from garage sales in the crisp autumn, talking about maybe planting a garden in the spring. It all seemed so hollow now. Childish. Nothing but playing house. They had thought that they were so grown-up, but they hadn't been at all, really. Not the way they were now.

Childhood, Bobbi thought, remembering the first line of a poem. Is the Kingdom where nobody dies.

She filled the glass at the sink, wondering as she always did whether it wouldn't make more sense to grab eight glasses from the cabinet and just fill them all at once and have done with it. But she couldn't stand the image, somehow: herself, standing at the kitchen counter, staring down eight pints of water in eight mismatched but equally ugly glasses. And she couldn't help imagining what Alison would think if she came in to find her like that. God, that fat slob, is what Alison would think. She can't even drink water without being a pig about it.

Bobbi shook her head irritably. No, that wasn't fair. Alison would never really think something like that. Well, not consciously, anyway. But she would think it deep down inside. Thin people always did. They pretended that they didn't, but you could always tell. You could notice them, noticing you: what you ate, how much you ate, when and where and why you ate. They noticed because on some fundamental level, they all really did believe that it was your fault. That you could do something about it, if only you wanted to badly enough, if only you were willing to try hard enough.

Alison had left her bookbag lying next to the door when she had come in last night. Bobbi now glared at it—or rather, at the button which was clipped onto it—with a snarl of pure hatred. She gulped down her water, took a deep breath, and then refilled it at the sink.

Oh, why are you even bothering? she asked herself. What does it matter? What did it ever matter? He never once even looked at you. Not in two whole years, not once. And even if you do lose the weight, so what? It's too late now. You'll never love anyone else. Not the way you loved Albert.

She started in on her second pint—or glass, rather. She guessed that on some level she knew that these glasses weren't really full pints, that she was cheating on the diet plan. Alison was right about her after all. She was weak, and she did lack willpower. Well, fuck it. She'd like to see Alison drink eight pints of water every six hours. She'd explode if she tried it.

But Albert could have, she thought, and wondered once more, as she had every night for the past week, how anyone could have done it. Could have crept up behind him and seen him from the back, seen that rigid uncompromising posture, the disdainful tilt of his head, and not have read in those signs what a rare integrity he had, what awesome powers of discrimination. Or perhaps have seen, but still not cared, cared little enough, in fact, to pump two bullets into that back and shut down those merciless powers of observation forever.

Bobbi emptied her glass and held it under the tap, watching it refill, already feeling as if she were sloshing and inwardly groaning at the thought of the six more glasses she still had to go.

No one saw that in him, though, she thought. No one but me. That stupid cunt Jill certainly didn't. All she loved him for was everything that he wasn't. Everything that he despised. And she never would have done for him what I did. No one else would have. No one but me. Because I'm the only one who ever really loved him, the only one. But he never even looked my way.

She gagged down her third glass of water, cursing the accident of genetics that had brought her to this state, blissfully unaware that there were, in fact, far worse things that one could inherit from ones mother than a propensity to obesity, or from ones father than a sensitivity to drugs so severe that even caffeine and nicotine, the Fat Girl's Friends, were strictly off-limits. Had anyone tried to convince Bobbi of such a thing, she would have laughed right in their scrawny little face. She filled her glass again and stared out the window, listening to the pre-dawn birds begin their song, crying and choking on her morning water and waiting for the light of day…

…the same light which would fall gently on Janis Joplin, curled asleep and alone in her giant Saki double, thinking even as she slept that the room had an oddly familiar smell, something that reminded her obscurely somehow of Utah, and of disinfectant, and of nasty little elves…

…the same light that would shine weakly through the sliding glass doors as Norbert Ajax followed the Mankeviches, causing him to stop dead in his tracks, sigh expansively, and then make his way to the dark and smoky airport lounge, where he would spend the next eight hours nursing a Wall Street Journal and trying to ignore the alcoholics gulping their drinks all around him, responding with a kind of helpless sympathy to their hunger and their need…

…the same light which would greet Iggy Drasil, as she gazed blearily out of her window, refusing the stewardess' offer of morning coffee or tea…

…the same light which fell on Special Agent Riggs, greeting the National Guardsman with a barely-concealed smile of triumph on her face, her dark hair blowing dramatically in the wind from the propeller blades, blissfully unaware that in only a few more hours, she was going to receive the shock of her life…

…the same light which filtered through the windows of the ICU waiting room, where Stephanie had finally fallen asleep on Mark's shoulder…

…the same light in which Alison blinked when she finally stumbled down the stairs at seven o'clock that morning, only to find her housemate Bobbi still standing over the sink, tears running down her face, staring out the window just as she had every morning since Albert's death and crying in the watery patch of sunlight which stretched past her onto her still-unfinished English assignment.

"‘That Force am I'," read the part of the assignment on which the light fell. "‘That Wills forever Evil / Yet Does forever Good.' Discuss."

The light fell on Bobbi's English assignment and then down, onto the floor and across the room, illuminating Alison's favorite of the many buttons she had pinned to her bookbag.

What the button said was:

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The morning light fell everywhere in Herschberg, as its student body roused itself and, as a single entity, stumbled to the showers, there to scrub the last traces of nightmare out of its collective hair and comfort itself in the soothing spray of the water.

The clean, pure, and ("yes, I can!") uncontaminated water.

The water that falls on everyone, eventually—just as the morning light always does, if only you wait long enough.

It falls on the just and the unjust alike.

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