“Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears!”
(They were all of them fond of quotations...)
  

Chapter Twenty-Two
“Snarked”

  
Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again
The five unmistakable marks
By which you may know, wheresoever you go,
The warranted genuine Snarks.

1. Trope

"Watch its hands."

The woman in the green gown glides toward the broad wide steps that lead up from the gardens, laughing up at the man who accompanies her. Her eyes match perfectly the poison hue of her dress, her hair is a dark cloud, but Norbert, watching from the shadows beneath the trees that line the esplanade, can see nothing special about her hands.

He has been ill, terribly ill, and while this is by no means the first time he has been out after his long confinement, nor the second, nor even the tenth—it has been, in fact, nearly a year now since he first rose from his bed, and he has finally begun hunting on his own, although he is clumsy still, and slow, his weakness all too often causing the quarry more distress than he would wish—nonetheless, he is still newly enough emerged that everything seems foreign and unfamiliar to him, the colors subtly wrong, the sounds muted and strangely off-key. Each century has its own smell, just as people and places do, and Norbert has not yet been abroad long enough in this one to have stopped noticing its odor. It strikes him with every breath: shades of old wood and beeswax and lye, and something else as well, something he cannot put a name to but which he already knows is going to haunt him, will for the rest of his existence bring this era inexorably to mind every time its faint olfactory echo wafts past, borne on the air from some distant and unknown source.

"They’re nothing but animals, really," Etienne tells him. "And like all animals, they favor the sinister hand. The smarter of them will try to conceal it. But they never can, not completely. Not for any length of time. Not if you pay attention. So remember: watch the hands."

Norbert nods again and watches its hands and breathes in the night air, taking an uncommon pleasure for the moment simply in being out of doors and on the mend on a mild summer’s evening, and also in the fact that although this is England, where they have come to escape the troubles of home, nonetheless it is miraculously neither cold nor raining. He is still very weak, but he can move and speak and think, and if the lamps illuminating the Gardens are hurting his eyes a little, if even the gentle breeze of this balmy evening is enough to make him shiver, all the same he is enjoying this: the shouts and cries of the vulgar City amusements echoing beneath the trees, and the couples strolling arm in arm down the dark avenues; and the uncommon beauty of this woman in the green gown—the woman Etienne has claimed is not really a woman at all.

She is lovely, though, whatever she is, Norbert thinks and then, noting the lost and stricken expression on her companion’s face, adds: and ruthless. Customs have changed in the past ninety-some-odd years, of course, and Norbert is still finding it difficult at times to read people without Reading them—they move differently now, and there are new meanings behind the motions—but he is pleased to discover that things have not changed so much that he cannot see what is happening here: the vocabulary of flirtation may have undergone some profound phonetic shifts during his long illness, but the ineluctable grammar of seduction remains unchanged. She has only been in the Gardens for a short time, but already she has recognized many people she knows—old friends, no doubt, she has called them, or perhaps cousins—and it is driving her companion to distraction. Now she has spotted another one; she raises her hand in greeting to him, and watching her at work, Norbert cannot help but smile faintly to himself.

"Did you catch that?" Etienne asks him, suddenly.

"What?"

"You’re distracted, and you’ve stopped paying attention. They can do that to us, make no mistake about it. You aren’t even its target, and you’re distracted. Didn’t I try to warn you about that? Haven’t you been listening? Do I really need to tell you a third time? Watch its hands."

Norbert feels a brief spasm of resentment at his tone: it is very strange for him to be taking instruction in this way, at his age and from someone who is, after all, so much younger than he. But the world has changed a great deal in the near-century during which he lay screaming and weeping and struggling against his restraints—he has never heard of these Manitou before, for example, in spite of Etienne’s insistence that they are ancient beyond all measure—and there is much that he has had to relearn as well over the past year, as his sanity has slowly emerged from its long dark eclipse by the blazing and merciless sun. And he is in no position anyway to object to anything that Etienne might ever wish to say to him, or even to do to him, not after ninety-odd years of attentive care, not after consideration far exceeding any conceivable call of duty or affection. So he merely nods and tries to pay attention to its hands.

The woman Etienne claims is not a woman laughs at something one of her companions has said and raises one hand to her throat, toying delicately with the stones that glitter there and reflect the light from the thousand lamps of the Gardens. It is a charming gesture, a perfect gesture—but Norbert catches his breath because this time, he has managed to spot it. Although it is her right hand she has raised to her necklace, he noticed the way that a moment before, her left arm twitched slightly, instinctively, in a kind of involuntary spasm, like the unconscious tension in the arm of a man contemplating reaching for his weapon. Very slowly, Norbert smiles.

"Yes, you caught it that time, didn’t you? That’s just the sort of thing you want to look for. It’s usually not that hard to spot: most of the time that left hand will get at least half of the way to wherever it wants to be going before the creature remembers that it’s supposed to use the other one. This one’s very good, I’ll grant it that. But even the best of them always make that slip."

"There are people," Norbert points out, "who favor the sinister hand. If it’s passing as someone who already—"

"Well, in that case, you can’t go by the hands, can you? That’s obvious enough. But there are other things to look for. Grace, for instance."

"Grace?" Norbert thinks at first that he has misheard him; he is distracted, but not now by the Manitou. He is wondering whether he will ever regain any memory of the years of his illness or whether they will remain forever a stubborn and inaccessible blank, known only through the summaries of others, a strange intermission in the drama of his life. He is wondering why it should be that while he has lost so many years to this amnesia, the moments directly before his memory fails in the face of the awful blinding light must remain so terribly, so inescapably clear. He is remembering the feel of the bright sunlight, and himself thinking even through his terror that he might just be all right after all, he might be fine, if only he can avoid looking upon its face...

"There are other things that favor the sinister hand," he says now, and shivers. "Servants of the Dark," he whispers, barely audibly, because it really isn’t a good idea to talk about them out loud. "They also tend to favor the sinister hand," he says, hearing once more the mocking laughter and feeling the strong hands, forcing his head up to face the sun. There is a long pause, and he knows even without looking that Etienne is staring at him, concerned, and this is a humiliating enough notion that he remains facing forward, trying to concentrate on the Manitou.

"Yes," Etienne agrees, at length. "They do. But they don’t bother to try to hide it. Do you want to learn how to recognize the Manitou or not? Pay attention, Norbert. Grace. That’s something else you want to look for."

The creature in the green gown lays one hand delicately on the balcony—and this time, Norbert finds the slight flinch in the wrong hand so obvious that he wonders how on earth he could have kept missing it before—and says something to the man beside her—and from his expression, Norbert feels convinced that whatever she has just said, it was certainly very clever but perhaps not altogether kind—and even through all of the layers of clothing people seem to be wearing in this day and age, he can see how fluidly her body moves, and he nods.

"Grace," he repeats.

"They find it difficult to shed that. They don’t feign clumsiness very well. When they do try it, they usually overdo it—knock things over, or trip over their own feet—and even while they’re doing all that, they still manage to look graceful."

"It’s intrinsic to their nature? That grace?"

"Perhaps. Or possibly they just can’t stand to make themselves look bad. They’re vain, Norbert. They like to be admired. And that’s a third thing. They almost always take an attractive form. They don’t like ugliness, and they don’t like age. They don’t like poverty or filth or disease. They can take the form of someone poxy or hideous if they absolutely have to, but they’d much rather not. And when they do, for some reason, masquerade as something unattractive? That’s when they’re the easiest to spot. Because they can’t bring themselves to do it properly. They’ll dress too well, or move too well, or just look too good."

"What is it doing?" Norbert asks, watching it. "Hunting?" And then, as a more sinister possibility suggests itself: "Looking for a...mate?"

"They don’t hunt. Not in any traditional sense of the word. And they certainly don’t mate," Etienne tells him, and chuckles. "No matter what that young fool over there may think he’s being promised. They don’t eat; they don’t drink; they don’t sleep; they don’t age; they don’t die. They don’t even feel pain, not the way we do. They may look human, but there’s nothing human about them. What is it doing? God knows. If I were forced to hazard a guess, I’d say that it’s just entertaining itself."

"I see what you mean about the forms they choose. This one certainly chose an attractive form."

"Yes? Do you think so? I wasn’t aware that you still had those appetites. And really, Norbert, is that woman so very handsome, do you think? Is she really?"

Norbert does not answer.

"The power of attraction," Etienne whispers to him. "That’s what they have. And that’s what makes them dangerous. They can do it to you. You don’t want to forget that. Ever. Fortunately, they don’t usually bother us. And you won’t bother them, not if you know what’s good for you. They don’t like being interfered with, and they can be vindictive with people who get in their way. That’s why you need to learn to spot them."

The Manitou is sweeping up the stair now, her companion in train, and as they both watch her ascend, Etienne adds, unexpectedly: "It’s a monster, and it’s dangerous, but all the same, it is, isn’t it? Beautiful. So very beautiful."

There is a sudden burst of noise, and some cheering off in the distance; the fireworks have begun on the other side of the Gardens, and even though he knows how the colors and the light will hurt his eyes, Norbert turns to look to the sky over the river, marveling at what they have learned to do with pyrotechnics. Some young thing—addled, it would seem, with too much drink or perhaps simply too much excitement—is screaming "Oh, Rodney, I don’t believe it! I do not believe it!" over and over again, as the couples who have been strolling down the dark lanes of the Vauxhall gardens now begin to run towards the river, eager not to miss the fireworks, and suddenly Norbert thinks that he just might cry, something he has not done—discounting, of course, the weeping that he has been told he indulged in while he was so ill—in far more years than he cares to remember. He closes his eyes, swallowing, and he must look as if he’s about to faint, because Etienne takes hold of his arm and says: "Let’s go home."

Norbert nods and turns back, and that is when he sees the Manitou, who has paused at the top of the stair. It stands poised in the doorway, gazing out over the gardens, at the lights and the noise and the crowds, with calm and untroubled eyes, and as Norbert watches, it suddenly starts and shakes itself, as if it has just remembered something.

It turns its head and looks directly at the two of them. Norbert feels Etienne’s hand tighten painfully on his arm.

The Manitou smiles slightly and nods, graciously, to them both, and then it turns and disappears over the threshold.

"I’d been wondering if it knew we were watching it," Etienne whispers.

Norbert stares at the top of the stair for a long time, and he is not quite sure exactly what he is about to say, what it is he wants to say, until he hears the words that come out of his mouth.

"How do you kill it?"

•

2. Story

"Hey," Dave exclaimed, walking into the hospital room and dropping the morning paper on the bedside table. "You don’t look too bad this morning."

"Yes," Cecil said. "You may come in, Dave. Thank you for asking permission."

"The door was open."

"It’s a hospital, Dave. The doors are always left open. They leave them that way on purpose. It’s standard technique when you want to break a prisoner’s will. What is that, the Star-Tribune?"

"Yeah." Dave squinted, evaluating Cecil’s aura. He actually was looking a lot better this morning. Those ugly red flashes had subsided, and he didn’t have too much of the nasty greenish-yellow tinge either. Dave still wasn’t quite sure what that stuff was, but people in this country seemed to have a lot of it, and Cecil even more than most. The edges of his aura were very blurry, which probably meant that he had just been given his medication, but he didn’t look like he was about to fall asleep, so that was all to the good: it had occurred to Dave that this conversation might actually be improved, all things considered, if Cecil were to be a little doped up when he got here.

"No, seriously," he said. "You look tons better than you did last night."

"Yeah, I feel better," Cecil agreed. His voice was just as blurred as his aura. Definitely just had his pills, Dave thought. "I actually got some sleep last night. First time in ages that I’ve been able to get a decent night’s sleep."

Leave it to Cecil, Dave thought with some amazement, to be able to sleep last night, of all nights.

"I had the weirdest dreams, too," he continued, somewhat vaguely. "All sorts of dreams."

On second thought, Dave wondered if perhaps Cecil weren’t just a little too doped up.

"In one of them," Cecil continued, still in that dreamy voice, "there was this tree. It had all of this crap tied to the branches—ribbons, and pieces of fabric, and even some plastic bags, for some reason—and...I don’t know. It was strange. It reminded me of something, but I’m not sure what."

Dave stared at him, then burst into laughter.

Serves you right, he thought. What did the old man tell you? ‘If they want to send you an omen badly enough,’ he had said, ‘they send you an omen, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.’ You should have believed him, when he told you that.

"What?" Cecil snapped irritably.

Dave forced himself back under control.

"Sorry," he said. "It’s kind of a long story. A private joke." Cecil was eying him suspiciously. "A joke on me," he assured him. "Not on you. Don’t worry about it."

"Must have been a pretty good joke," muttered Cecil.

"No," said Dave cheerily. "It was a funny joke, yeah. But I don’t think it was a good one."

The omen is a sign, he told himself. You’ve got to do this: you’ve been putting it off for far too long. But where was he to begin? With the Albanian? The Soulless One? The English Professor? Or should he start off with...

"I’ve been thinking," Cecil said, "about Jill Mankevich."

Well, that decides it, Dave thought. Mankevich, then. Mankevich it is.

"Yeah? You know, actually, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the Mankevicheses," Dave began, and then stopped, flustered, because he wasn’t really at all sure that had been right. He was pretty sure it shouldn’t have had that many syllables. "The Mankeviz," he tried again, and shook his head. "The Mankevich bodies," he said firmly. "Cecil, Jill Mankevich’s blood type is AB positive."

"Universal recipient," Cecil murmured.

"What?"

"Nothing. Go on. So we finally found her records?"

"Yeah. And we found her parents, too. They were on holiday in Spain. They’re coming in this morning to make a positive ID, but we’re pretty sure at this point that the girl in the coma is the real Jill Mankevich."

"Will the real Jill Mankevich please stand up," Cecil muttered hollowly, then moved in a strange way that Dave only realized several seconds later had probably been an attempt to shake his head. "Never mind. So other one is still a Jane Doe?"

"Yeah. And Cecil." Dave took a deep breath. "Cecil, I was really hoping that it would be the other way around."

Cecil stared at him.

"Well, yeah," he said cautiously. "Okay. I guess I can see what you mean. Unidentified bodies can be kind of a pain in the ass, but you know, at least they don’t have families. You don’t get grieving mothers calling you up on the phone demanding to know why you haven’t found the killer yet. And besides," he added. "Mankevich is in a coma. The other girl is dead. I don’t mean to sound callous here, you know, but Jill Mankevich can get far better medical care than Jane Doe ever will, so it’s probably just as well that she’s the one who’s still in some condition to benefit from it."

"Yeah, okay," Dave said. "But look. Twins share the same blood type, right?"

"Uh-huh. And so do clones. We’ve been through all this before, Dave."

"Cecil," Dave said, and took another deep breath. "The Ancient Ones don’t," he said. "Not always."

"The which?" Cecil asked flatly.

"The..." Dave sighed. "Okay, listen. I’m going to tell you a story now, okay, Cecil? ‘Cause I don’t think that anyone’s ever told you this story—I’m not sure why, because it’s a really important story, especially for someone in your line of work, but—"

"Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"This story doesn’t have anything to do, by any chance, with Big Mountain, does it?"

"Well..."

"Because, you know, I really have heard all that I care to hear about the time that you—"

"Oh!" Dave laughed. "Oh, no, Cecil. This isn’t a story about me. At least, I sure hope it isn’t. And Big Mountain is in it, but it isn’t really—"

"Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"Why don’t you just tell me the fucking story?"

"Okay," Dave agreed, and settled back comfortably in his chair. "Now this happened," he began, "back when my grandfather’s grandfather was a—"

"Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"Does this story come in an abridged version?"

Dave sighed.

How did these people ever come to rule the world? he wondered.

"Okay," he said. "The abridged version. This story is about a brave hunter. And one day, when he’s out hunting..." He paused, considering. "Well, maybe I’d better just say a deer. Let’s just call it a deer. Okay, he’s out hunting deer. That’s what he does; he’s a—"

"A deer hunter."

"Yeah."

"Does anyone play Russian roulette in this story, Dave?"

"Hunting is playing Russian roulette, Cecil," Dave told him. "That’s what this story’s about. Just let me finish. One day he’s out hunting, and he catches sight of the most beautiful, the most flawless deer he’s ever seen." He waited, expecting another interruption, but Cecil merely said:

"Go on."

"He chases it for days upon days upon—"

"A long time."

"Yeah. A long time. And finally he chases it to the very top of Big Mountain—this is where Big Mountain comes in, Cecil, but it’s not all that important, really, it—"

"Get on with it," said Cecil. He was looking at Dave in a strangely speculative way, as if seeing there something new and unexpected and not altogether pleasant.

"He chases it to the top of Big Mountain, where he finally comes face to face with this beautiful deer he’s been pursuing for so long. But when it turns to face him, he sees that it isn’t really a deer at all, it’s something that you must never look upon, and—"

"Jesus, Dave," Cecil said. He looked as if he were going to throw up. "Oh, Jesus, Dave, you mean the Manitou. You’re talking about the Manitou."

•

  
He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave
Were enough to bewilder a crew
When he cried “Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!”
What on earth was the helmsman to do?

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes,
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes
When a vessel is, so to speak, “snarked.”

3. Exposition

Alastair sipped at the decaf he had ordered to wash away the unpleasant aftertaste of his argument with the Gaunt Man and wondered just what Ajax could possibly have seen or heard or learned or discovered in Herschberg to have made the Dark want him so badly.

"Perhaps," he had suggested to the Gaunt Man, just an hour or so ago. "You might care to explain to me precisely where Runs With Nightmares or Little Green Flash has gone?"

"They’ll be back," the Gaunt Man had hissed.

"Within this century? You assured me that they were reliable."

"Reliable," the Gaunt Man had repeated, in that tone of peculiarly unpleasant relish that he was so good at. "The Manitou are reliable, Chairman. More reliable than you or I, by far. They are reliable," he snarled, "to the end of time."

Alastair wondered, as he so often did when dealing with the Gaunt Man, whether he had actually practiced that tone of voice, and if so, just how many centuries it had taken him to get it right.

"That’s just what worries me," he said cheerfully. "I don’t have until the end of time, and neither do you. You said that you could control them."

"Control," the Gaunt Man sighed, with what almost sounded like pleasure. "Yes. You look to your own traitors, Chairman. I have my ways of dealing with mine."

Alastair believed him, and he wished that he knew what those ways were. It had been the first question, in fact, that he had asked Pokey to answer for him, on the very day that he had attained his current position.

"What hold does the Gaunt Man have over the Manitou?" he had asked, and Pokey had stared back at him with those dead unblinking eyes and answered:

"That was your predecessor’s first question as well." He had paused, then added: "We’re still working on it." And then he had twitched, a gesture Alastair now knew to be Pokey’s attempt at a smile, but which back then had just been inexpressibly disturbing.

Alastair’s predecessor had held his position for over fifty years.

Ever since then, whenever Alastair had found himself baffled or bewildered or simply stymied by anything the Manitou said or did, whenever he tried to get some feedback from Pokey about it, Pokey would twitch and repeat his line: "Still working on it."

Since then, Alastair had learned much about the Manitou. He understood, or thought he did, their deep respect for law and contract, their appreciation for beauty, their hatred of mirrors—now that had been possibly the very worst gaffe he had ever committed, when back in his early days, trying to explain a particularly thorny situation to a group of agents, he had said "I mean, we’re through the looking glass here, people!" and felt the sudden chill in the air, heard the audible gasp from one of the vampires; afterwards Pokey had taken him aside and told him: "You never say that in front of the Manitou. They hate that expression. In fact, don’t mention mirrors at all, if you can help it"—and their unexpected squeamishness, which tended to pop up just when you least expected it.

He had no idea, however, what kept them in thrall to the Gaunt Man (and what was it about the Dark, anyway, that made you start thinking in words like "thrall?"), and this was troubling.

Alastair felt that it was distasteful somehow, this game he was playing with the Gaunt Man over their respective rogues, but it seemed to be working, at least for the time being. And time was precisely what he needed: he was going to have to give Norbert to the Dark sooner or later—that much was obvious—but he was damned if he was going to do so until he found out just what game Norbert was playing, and whose. Why, he wondered, had Norbert murdered a mare unless he were working for the Dark? Shutting down the potential Doorways was what the Dark had been doing for centuries. The Light tried to open them, and the Dark tried to close them. The Light carefully bred its lineages, and then the Dark corrupted them. That was the deadly game that Light and Dark played with one another. But Norbert would never ally himself with the Dark, of that Alastair was certain: his loathing for the Dark was notorious within the Community. And even if he had, why would the Dark then want him dead?

It just doesn’t make sense, thought Alastair, who ought to have paid more attention to the Manitou, who ought to have contemplated more deeply what it might mean to be on the wrong side of the looking glass, and who was very soon to receive news which, while it would not perhaps explain Norbert’s actions, would at least give him something else to think about for a while.

•

  
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.
“If only you’d spoken before!
It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!”

4. Stricture

"A what?" Dave asked.

"A Manitou." Cecil was still staring at him. "A Manitou, Dave. A shape-shifter. A boojum."

"A boojum?"

"They find the hunter dead, right?"

"Yeah."

"Which does beg the question of who’s telling the story and how we get to hear about it. But never mind all that. The deer isn’t really a deer. It’s a shape-shifter masquerading as a deer, and when the hunter sees its true form he dies, because the Snark is a boojum, you see, and in its true form, it’s something that you must never look at. Right?"

"Geez, Cecil," Dave said. "You could have just told me that you’d heard it before."

"I didn’t know it was the same one," Cecil whispered. "Until the end." He closed his eyes.

"What did you say you called them?"

"Manitou. We call them Manitou. At least here in Minnesota we do."

"Cecil!" Dave laughed, delighted. This was going to be so much easier than he had expected! "Cecil! I didn’t know you knew about stuff like this. Why didn’t you ever say anything about it before?"

"Because," Cecil told him. "People think you’re crazy if you talk about things like this. Most people think that the Manitou are like vampires, you know, or werewolves. Or the tooth fairy. Just stories. Not real."

Just stories? Dave thought. Well, okay, so maybe this wasn’t going to be so easy after all.

"So these...what did you call them?"

"Manitou, Dave. For God’s sake, what did you call them? ‘Ancient Ones?’ I gotta tell you, that is so lame. Manitou. We get them here, living so far north. But then, yours probably don’t come from the north, do they?"

"Ours come from the sea," Dave said. He was feeling very cranky all of a sudden.

"Yeah? Change shape, can hypnotize you, nothing kills them, left-handed, and vain as all hell?"

"Sound like the same guys."

"Yeah. I’m pretty sure we’ve got at least one of those running around this town. Maybe more. They like it here."

Dave bit back something snide, and shifted angrily in his seat.

"I’ve got kind of an idea," Cecil continued, "that they like college towns in general. Young people are probably more susceptible to...what the hell is wrong with you?"

Dave, who had just been thinking that it might be nice to rebreak Cecil’s nose for him, blinked, then realized just why he was so grumpy and started to laugh.

"Are you all right?" Cecil asked him, dubiously.

"I’m fine," Dave giggled. "It’s just...Cecil, man, you’re playing my side of the conversation. Do you realize that?"

"What?" Cecil thought about this for a moment, then slowly smiled. "Well, come on, Dave," he said apologetically. "You think it’s fun, being me all the time? It’s hell, Dave, it really is. You can let me be you just this once, can’t you? I mean, be a sport, for Christ’s sake—you get to be you all the time."

"I don’t believe it," Dave said. "We just started talking about your whatsamacallies—yeah, all right, Manitou, Cecil, I’ve got it—and we’re already having this conversation? You aren’t one of them, are you?"

Cecil seemed to consider this for a moment, then smiled.

"Nah," he said. "And I guess Mankevich isn’t either. I did actually think of that, but you know, she’s—"

"Dead."

"Yeah. And ours can’t be dead."

"Yeah. Ours neither."

"And the other one’s in a coma. And ours don’t hang around being in comas either. They get too bored."

"Yeah. Ours too."

"Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"Can we just take it as read that these are the same things now?"

"Yeah," Dave agreed. "Okay."

"I think there must have been one in the room the night she died, though," Cecil said. "Or rather, the night she was sent into a coma. That night in O’Henry. I could have sworn that I smelled one there that night."

"You what?" Dave stared at him. "You can smell them?"

"Yeah. They give off a smell kind of like ozone. What—oh, ozone? That’s the stuff you smell after lightning."

"Oh. Okay."

"I thought maybe it was Hoover at the time. But now I’m leaning towards Youngjack."

Dave shifted uneasily in his chair. He’s right, he thought. It really isn’t any fun being Cecil.

"Cecil," he said cautiously. "I kind of remember you spending most of that evening—I mean, until the wall disappeared and you broke your neck, anyways—saying everything you could think of to really piss off President Hoover."

"Yeah."

"Cecil. You told him that he had brains made from shit."

"Yeah."

"But that’s what pisses them off the most, Cecil. They hate being called stupid. Didn’t you know that?"

"Yeah. That’s why I said it. I wanted to see if he’d do something." He paused, then added: "I did think, you know, when I fell? Before I realized that the wall had disappeared, it did occur to me that maybe he’d pushed me out the window."

"Cecil!" Dave laughed helplessly and shook his head. "Cecil, you lunatic! They don’t have to push you, man! They just want you to jump, and you jump! I thought you said that you knew these stories. Don’t you remember the one about the shaman who outwits the Anc...the Manitou?"

"I guess that one must have just slipped my mind," Cecil murmured. "He outwits it? How?"

"Well, sometimes he wins a riddle game with it, and sometimes he tricks it into accepting a task that can’t be accomplished."

"Why would it do a thing like that?"

"‘Cause it’s vain, Cecil, and it likes to brag. Okay? And when it can’t answer the riddle, or when it can’t complete the task, it forfeits, and then it has to give up the ability to change shape."

"Why doesn’t it just eat the shaman and go on its way?"

Dave stared at him. These people, he thought, really do not know anything.

"Because it doesn’t have a form," he explained, very patiently. "Things that don’t have form are always bound by law. Didn’t you know that?"

"I’m me again, aren’t I?" Cecil said gloomily. "I knew this was going to happen."

"So the shape-shifter serves the shaman for many years..."

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why does it serve him?"

"Because it can’t change shape, and that means that it can be hurt. And they’re cowards, Cecil."

"Oh." Cecil thought. "I’m liking this story a lot better than the one about the hunter."

"Uh-huh. It always ends with the shifter escaping and wreaking horrible, terrible vengeance on the shaman who imprisoned it."

"Oh."

"The moral of the story," Dave explained helpfully. "Is that you don’t fuck with shape-shifters."

"Yeah? No shit. Jesus, Dave, don’t you know any stories with happy endings?"

"Hey," Dave objected. "These stories do end happily. At least, they do if you’re the shape-shifter." He thought. "Why do you think that Youngjack is one of them?"

"Oh, I don’t know," Cecil sighed. "Doesn’t he seem a little...out of place to you? I mean, does he really look like the guy you expect to see running campus security? Does he act like it? Does he dress like it? I guess you haven’t really been here long enough to know," he added kindly. "But he really doesn’t, Dave. He doesn’t at all. But, you know, they’re like that. They don’t like to be badly-dressed, or ugly, or fat."

"Yours don’t like to be fat?" Dave asked, astonished, and rubbed his belly complacently.

"No," Cecil said firmly. "They don’t."

"Oh, yeah, right," Dave sighed. "I keep forgetting about that. Cecil," he said, looking strangely over at him. "Youngjack’s resigned his post. He’s left town. And I don’t know what the deal is there, but I kind of get the idea that maybe the Sheriff ran him out of town. No one will tell me what’s going on with that, but he’s gone."

"What?" Cecil stared at him, and then at the phone. "Dave, the phone’s about to ring. It’s Sheriff Little Bear for you."

"Thanks." Dave reached for the telephone, then remembered that you were supposed to wait for it to ring first and sat, fidgeting.

"Are you sure—" he began, and it rang.

"Jesus Christ, Harrison!" Sheriff Little Bear screamed. "Where the fuck have you been?"

"It’s my day off," Dave objected.

"You don’t get a day off today. I need you down here. Now. We have such a situation here, you would not fucking believe it. If I thought you could drag Graves out of bed without him puking all over himself, I’d tell you to bring him along too. And if you see any small children on your way over here? Deputize them. I mean it, we have a serious situation here."

"I’ll be right there," Dave said.

Well, damn, he thought, as he ran down the hospital steps. I never did get around to telling Cecil about the Albanian.

•

  
Each thought he was thinking of nothing but “Snark”
And the glorious work of the day
And each tried to pretend that he did not remark
That the other was going that way.

5. Mirrors

Jesus, what a mess, Acting Security Chief Flannery thought, watching the protesters march back and forth across the common. How did they always manage to get organized so quickly? It was only 10:00, but already the activists had managed to assemble a small but dedicated group of students to make signs and paint banners and pass out flyers announcing the mass rally to be held at three o’clock that afternoon.

Youngjack picked a great time to skip town, Flannery thought. If I ever see him around here again, I’m gonna kick his ass.

"Where the hell is that idiot Youngjack?" Special Agent Riggs had thought to ask, about half-way through the briefing session they’d held that morning in the Sheriff’s Office, which just went to show you how carefully the Feds had been following events. Youngjack had, after all, only skipped town three days ago.

Flannery wondered whether the FBI realized that they only had four days to take care of all of their testing and whatnot before the students were expecting to go home for Thanksgiving Break. It would be just like them, he thought, not to have considered that. He was pretty sure that he could keep things under control for the next few days, but he didn’t like to think of what it might get like if the students were told that they couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving. For that matter, he didn’t like to think about what the President would be dealing with, once all of these kids’ rich parents started demanding to know why their children weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving. He wondered if the FBI had thought of that. Perhaps he should mention it to them...but, no. No, not a chance. That, he decided firmly, was just going to have to be Someone Else’s Problem.

"Oh, great, just what I need," Riggs had snapped, when the situation had been explained to her. "A brevetted rent-a-cop in charge of things. Beautiful. Well, what’s your name again? Finnegan? Look, Finnegan, you think you understand the situation here, or should I have Doctor Drasil go over it one more time for you?"

"Yeah, I guess we can just about manage to keep the kids from burning the place down," Flannery had said, shrugging, and Riggs had glared, but he could have sworn that the Drasil woman had grinned at him.

"Well, I certainly hope so, Finnegan," Riggs had told him "And see if your guys can keep from falling out any windows in the next couple of days, okay?"

What a bitch that woman is, Flannery thought, without the slightest trace of rancor. His arm was itching where they had taken his blood, and it worried him a little, and he wondered if they could tell—no, no, of course they couldn’t, what was he thinking?—and yet, all the same, when they did their tests, what if they knew somehow, what if all that stuff you heard sometimes about Men In Black and Area 51 was true after all, and what if, in addition to running their tests for this drug or contaminant or whatever it was that they thought might be in the water, they were running other tests as well, since they had the blood samples anyway, just to check?

You should be worrying about Matilda, Flannery told himself. And about the monsters from the north. Not about Men In Black, for God’s sake.

The police, he guessed, had kept the ballistics report on the Feinstein killing under wraps to help them weed out fake confessions or something, but Youngjack had been given a copy. Flannery had been trying to be conscientious, looking over all of the paperwork for the recent disasters that had plagued Herschberg and trying to pretend that he was not hopelessly underqualified for this job, and that had been when he had come across it, the ballistics report. Flannery didn’t pretend to be a ballistics expert, and he hadn’t understood half of what was in the report. But the fact that the bullets had been silver? That he could understand. That he could understand all too well.

Oh God, she’s a biter, he’d thought. She must have bit him. And now someone’s gunning for us. What the hell am I going to do?

He knew what he was supposed to do. Sheila had made that perfectly clear to him, all those thirty-some-odd years before.

"You don’t want to bite anyone," she had told him. "Ever. But if you do happen to have an...an accident? If you pass it on? You have to follow them. You have to watch them. You have to make sure that they don’t bloodlust. One moon won’t do it, either: sometimes it takes a few changes before it comes over people. You have to watch them for at least three months. And if it turns out that they do bite? If you’ve made a biter?" And that was when she had given him the three silver bullets, carefully wrapped in a piece of black velvet. "It’s the only way, Mike," she’d told him. "I would have done it for you, if I’d had to. It’s a kindness, really."

A kindness, Flannery thought. He didn’t, he couldn’t believe that Matilda was a biter. If she had bit Albert Feinstein, it must have been an accident. Accidents did sometimes happen. He’d been a wolf for nearly thirty-five years now, and he’d never bit anyone in his life. Until Matilda.

If only she hadn’t hit his arthritic hip. He had been tired from a particularly hard day at work, and logy from the rabbit he’d just eaten and the three beers he’d had earlier that night, before the change had come, and he had curled up comfortably under the dark hemlock trees in the Arb, enjoying the smells and sounds of the night, and he must have dozed off there for a minute, because the next thing he knew, his head was up and his teeth bared and he heard a girl shriek, and then he was off, running like hell just as fast as he could to get away from them. She must have tripped right over me, he'd thought, panting, and then had stopped, lowering himself belly to the ground, to listen. "Shit," a girl’s voice said, "what was that, a dog?" and "it bit me," said another girl’s voice, and "shit, are you bleeding?" someone else said, and "Jesus, that scared the hell out of me!"

He hadn’t really thought that he had bit her, at the time. He certainly didn't think he could have broken the skin. But he must have, because the next month he had seen her in the Arb, reveling in the strangeness and the beauty and the pleasure of her new identity. He had followed her, just like Sheila had told him to, but she had never seemed to be a biter. If she had bit Feinstein, it must have been that first night of her first change, the night before he had found her; and who could blame her, on her first time out? It didn’t mean, surely, that she bloodlusted. She had probably just been frightened.

But what if she has a taste for it now? he thought, and shivered. What if she grows to like it?

And even if she didn’t, they had the monsters to worry about, the demons from the north. Sheila had warned him about them, too. They had eyes everywhere, and they watched for signs: for sightings and for bites on the night of the full moon. If they grew to suspect, they would come in the night. They could read minds, and they could control them, as well. There was no escaping them, once you had caught their notice. If they thought that you were young enough, pliable enough to suit their purposes, then they took you, carried you off somewhere far up north where they did things to you to turn you into their slave. And if they didn’t think that you were malleable enough for that, then they simply killed you.

Flannery had been a wolf for thirty-five years this February. He somehow suspected that he would fall into the latter category.

Oh, what am I going to do? Across the common, past the rapidly swelling numbers of protesting students, he caught sight of a middle-aged couple, a man and a woman, walking towards the Herschberg Inn. They were carrying luggage, looked like they had just arrived from out of town. Something about them struck Flannery as odd, but he wasn’t sure what, and then it struck him. Wait a minute, he thought. How did they get past the roadblocks? Even as he was thinking this, however, it occurred to him that there was something else that was strange about the couple, something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, some...smell?—no, that was silly—but in some indefinable way, they reminded him of his erstwhile boss, Youngjack.

"Hey," O’Halloran said, sidling up to him and breaking his train of thought.

"Hey," said Flannery.

"What a mess," O’Halloran said.

"Yeah." Bill was looking bad, had been all this past week, like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep or something. Divorce could do that to a man, Flannery guessed. Especially at Bill’s age.

"You get tested?" asked O’Halloran.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah. I feel okay, though. I mean, I don’t feel like I’m doped up or anything," said O’Halloran, who was thinking: Mike, though, now—Mike looks doped up. He looks bad. He’s been looking pretty bad all this week, actually, like he hasn’t been getting enough sleep or something. Promotion could do that to a man, O’Halloran guessed. Especially at Mike’s age.

"Yeah," said Flannery. "Me neither."

•

6. Muse

Claudia Teck stood before the window of the Herschberg Inn’s Presidential Suite (so named because Calvin Coolidge had apparently once stayed there) and gazed out over the commons below. Her hairdresser and general factotum, Florence, hung up the phone and approached her cautiously, trembling a little.

"That was President Hoover," she said, tremulously.

"Didn’t he cause the Great Depression?" asked Claudia.

"What? Oh, no. The President of the University Hoover. He...he sends his apologies."

"Accepted," Claudia said flatly.

"No. I...Ms Teck. He wishes to extend his apologies for the fact that the...the...the Universityhasbeenforcedtocancelyourbrunch," Florence gasped. "Due to, um, the current crisis. On the campus. The water, you know," she added, as if this were an explanation.

Claudia stared out the window and said nothing.

"Ms Teck?"

"Have the police ever called back about the pie incident?"

"No, Ms Teck."

"And now they’ve cancelled my brunch."

"Yes. They need the hall in the Student Union. For the blood testing. I am so sorry," Florence suddenly blurted. "Ms Teck, I am so very sorry."

"Yes," said Claudia.

Really, thought Florence, she’s taking this all very well.

"That woman staying next door…" she began.

"Lily Mankevich?" Claudia started suddenly, and turned to look at Florence, who took a nervous step backwards. "What about her?"

"She seemed very nice."

"Yes." Claudia returned her gaze to the window. "She asked if I would read to her daughter. Her daughter’s in the hospital. She’s in a coma. She’ll probably never wake up."

"Oh, no." Florence’s eyes filled with tears. "Oh, how terrible."

"Yes."

Claudia Teck looked out over Herschberg, The Most Important Place In The World, where she had finally made her triumphant return, and remembered a time in her life when she had actually loved poetry.

Teck’s detractors—Brittany Clairmont, for example, who had frequently amused her friends with long-winded ranting monologues on the subject of Claudia Teck and her so-called poetry—would doubtless have scoffed at the notion that this woman could ever have had any genuine affection for the art form she had so perverted. They would, however, have been wrong, tragically wrong. There had been a time when Claudia Teck had loved poetry. Poetry might well have been, in fact, the only thing that she had ever truly loved in all her life.

Claudia Teck had always known that she was destined for greatness. She could not explain how she had known this, precisely, nor how she knew that her conviction was not merely the usual delusion of the adolescent—the conviction that everyone entertains until age and cynicism and experience beat it out of them in that process that we like to call "maturity"—but something else, something infinitely more profound, and more real.

And because the one trait which she felt set her apart from others, the one thing in which she knew that she excelled, was her sensitivity, it had been clear to her that her destiny must be, specifically, to be a great poet.

Claudia was sensitive. She was literate. She had a fine ear for language. She was thoughtful and verbal and diligent. She had every quality needed to be a great poet, in fact, except for one: the ability to write great poems.

She could, however, write good poems, and while this was clearly not good enough—not for someone destined for greatness—at the age of eighteen, she had believed that she would improve, with time. And so it was that every evening during her freshman year at Herschberg University, she was to be found sitting at a small table down in the basement of Saki dormitory, working on her poetry.

Claudia had loved the basement of Saki dormitory, which was always steamy and warm, and filled with the soft blanket radiator hiss of the boiler, and which smelled inexplicably of mothballs. There was a small table hidden away in a corner down there, a table with only one chair, and as far as she could tell, she was the only person who had ever noticed it. No one ever seemed to come down here at all except to use the vending machines, which added their own pleasant hum to the womb-like white noise of the basement. Every evening, then, she would sit and write, pausing to cover her notebook with her hand when she heard footsteps go past, listening for the noise of the vending machine, and then for the footsteps receding, continuing to write only once she was sure that she was once more alone.

It was on Thursdays that the young man would come to restock the pop machine.

He had long shaggy dark hair and pale skin and soulful eyes, and he looked the way that Claudia imagined the Romantic poets must have looked, except for his hands, which were calloused and thick in a way that no poet’s hands should surely ever be. The cans of pop came in a large cardboard pallet which he would carry hefted up on one shoulder, his neck bent to the side in a way that always reminded Claudia of those African women one saw on TV, bringing home jugs of water on the tops of their heads: not that it really looked anything like that, actually, but there was that same sense of balance, and of grace, and of self-possession.

It was the third week she watched him that he first recognized her.

"Always here, huh?" he said.

"I’m a poet," she told him.

"Really?" He had looked at her then, for the first time, with interest, and her heart had leapt. "I’m no good at that sort of stuff," he’d said. "Poetry. I wish I was. ‘Cause if I was, you know what I’d write a poem about? You know the way that the bulbs always come up really early in the spring, and you’re always kind of afraid that the frost is going to come and kill them? You’re happy to see them, but you also sort of wish that they’d stayed under the ground a little while longer, just in case? And then you don’t really know if you want to be happy or sad to see them there, and you aren’t sure which way is more fair to them? You know that? And then you think: well, it doesn’t matter, because bulbs never really die, they just come up the next year if they’re not going to come up this year, so why are you so worried about it? And then you think that maybe it worries you so much because you aren’t a bulb, and people are different than bulbs, or maybe not so very different, you know? If I wrote poetry," he had concluded, closing the machine again and locking it with one of the keys from the giant ring of them he wore at his slender hip. "That’s what I’d write a poem about."

And so she had.

Her creative writing teacher had called her into his office specifically to talk to her about what she had written. It was published in the literary arts magazine. It was a good poem. But it was not a great poem.

"If I were a poet," he had said, the next Thursday. "I’d write a poem about the way that light reflects on the outside of a jar. You know, it’s kind of like a gazing globe, like people have in their gardens? It shows you everything, but it doesn’t show you anything without the stuff that’s in the jar getting in the way?"

"If I were a poet," he told her. "I would write a poem about onions. You know how you peel an onion, and you peel layer after layer after layer, but in the end, if you keep on doing that, there’s nothing left?"

"If I were a poet," he said. "I would write a poem about how when you look out of a window, there’s always that reflection of yourself there too. And about how the darker it gets outside, the more you can see of your reflection, but the less what’s on the other side of the glass."

"If I were a poet..." he would say, and she would write, and write, and write. And they were good poems, yes, they were very good. But they were not good enough.

"You look kind of tired today, Claudia," he had told her, one day in January.

"I’m blocked," she said dully. "It’s not enough. I can never get it good enough."

"That’s gotta be frustrating," he said sympathetically, but just that once, she thought that she saw something different in his eyes, a cold and distant amusement, or perhaps a kind of hunger. "Sort of like a door that’s stuck and won’t open? You push and you pull, because you aren’t even sure which way it’s supposed to go, but you just can’t get it unstuck either way?"

"What?" she asked irritably, but also breathlessly, because he was standing much closer to her than he ever had before.

"You know," he said. "Like a mirror. You look into it, and you worry that maybe it goes both ways? Like a doorway? You worry that the thing in the mirror might be looking right back at you, and that maybe it really isn’t liking very much the way that you’re looking at it?"

"What?"

"If I were to write a poem," he had whispered, turning her face so that she was staring into his eyes. "If only, if only I could be the poet for once, instead of always having to be the poem. What I’d write? Would be this."

She was never able to remember exactly what he said. But she ran to her room, that much she could remember, she had run back to her room sobbing, and she had gone straight to the bookshelf, and she had taken down her books of poetry, all of them, and she had begun to shred them, one after another after another, grunting with the effort of tearing entire volumes and sobbing broken jagged sobs and ripping her fingers on the sharp edges of the pages.

To hell with you, John Donne! (Our two souls therefore, which are one...) Bite me, John Keats! (And this is why I sojourn here, / Alone and palely loitering...) Matthew Arnold, you one poem wonder—the sea is calm tonight, is it? Well, bully for the sea! Millay, my sister? Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust, you Sapphic twat! And you, Billy Yeats? Oh, you, Billy Yeats? Take this terrible beauty and pass by, Horseman! To hell with the lot of you! You wrote because you had to? Well, fine. I will write because I can. I will give them all, all of the loutish piggish denizens of this stinking world exactly the poetry they so richly deserve. And they will love it. They will gobble it down and they will beg for more. Because it’s what suits them, all right. And even more to the point, it is what I am suited for.

And throwing herself down on her bed, tears pouring down her face, she had written the first line of the poem that would catapult her to stardom.

"Alone," she had written. "On my bed," she had written. "A bunny." And she would never know exactly why, out of all of the saccharine images in the world, she should have struck upon that one, any more than Brittany Clairmont has ever understood precisely what it is about Claudia Teck, out of all of the bad poets in the world, that should so particularly rouse her venom and her ire.

"My daughter’s favorite of your poems," Lily Mankevich had told Claudia Teck that morning in the hallway of the Herschberg Inn, "is one that I believe you wrote while you were still a student here."

"Really?" Claudia had been bored with this conversation—it was one that she had repeated many times in her celebrity career—but she understood that her popularity depended in large part upon her reputation as a kind, a gentle, a sensitive person, and so she had smiled encouragingly at the older woman. "Which one would that be?"

"I’m afraid I can’t remember the title," Lily Mankevich had said. "It had something to do with...doorways, I think? And with mirrors. About their...reciprocity, I believe?" She had laughed apologetically. "I’m so very stupid about remembering these things."

"I’m afraid," Claudia had gasped, stepping back a pace, "that I really can’t think of which poem she might have meant. I’m terribly sorry."

"No?" The Mankevich woman had tilted her head to one side, and for just a moment, Claudia thought she saw something familiar about her. Something cold, and amused. "Well. Perhaps When I Was Young......And Soft Things, then? I know my daughter loved that poem. She was very, is very fond. Of bunnies."

"I would be delighted to read to Jill, Lily, but I’m afraid that right now, if you will excuse me…"

"Oh, yes." Jill’s mother had smiled faintly. "You’re excused."

“…her?”

Claudia shook herself. "What?"

"I beg your pardon, Ms Teck," said Florence. "I was just wondering if you are going to read to her. To that girl in the hospital."

"I suppose so," said Claudia dully. She stared out at the Herschberg campus, and she thought:

I hate poetry.

•

  
“You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care—
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—”

7. Plot

He was sitting on the hospital bed, stunned and confused still by the course of the morning’s events, the stitches they had put in his side and his leg aching, when he saw them passing by his door: a handsome woman, her dark hair streaked with white, and a balding man with a pudgy nose. His knees jerked convulsively upwards, knocking the tray on which they had fed him breakfast askew, and he clutched the sheet up to his chest.

They nearly passed him by, but at the last moment something alerted the woman, who stopped and peered curiously into the room.

"Youngjack," she said, staring.

The man, who had moved on, now returned to stand in the doorway as well, staring at him with an equally blank and startled gaze.

"Forgive me," Youngjack said. "I am in no condition to receive you."

"It is hurt," the woman commented to her companion.

"I was trampled," he explained. "By horses."

"Horses?"

"Yes."

"It is eating," the man said, with an expression of disgust.

"It is hungry," snapped Youngjack.

The woman walked into the room, approaching his bed. He flinched.

"It fears us?" she asked.

"You may," Youngjack told her, "feel free to address me directly. I am in the room."

"Forgive me." She smiled sadly. "How is it with you, Youngjack?"

"How does it look? Last night I slept under a log. This morning, I was trampled by horses."

"Will you recover?" asked the man.

"Yes. The hospital won’t even keep me here the night. They say they need the bed." He took a deep breath. "Bear a message for me, Manitou. To the Gaunt Man."

"Youngjack..." the woman began, shaking her head.

"A simple message. It isn’t much to ask. Please."

"It begs." The man stared at him. "It begs?"

"It begs. It pleads. Do this for me. By the Law of Kinship."

"Kinship?" The man smiled faintly. "Are we kin still, Youngjack?"

"You know that we are."

"You’re beginning to settle," the woman told him.

"I don’t need you," Youngjack said. "To tell me that."

The woman touched his face.

"Release me from Law, Youngjack," she said. "And I will end this for you. If you like. It will be very quick. I give you my word."

"No," Youngjack said, and trembled slightly. "No."

"As you wish."

"Tell us your message," said the man.

•

  
In the matter of Treason the pig would appear
To have aided, but scarcely abetted:
While the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,
If you grant the plea ‘never indebted.’

8. Perspective

He is glad that Norbert didn’t think to ask him how he had known that the two people he drove to the airfield in August were Manitou. The vampires, he knows, can rarely recognize them. The Wolves, however, nearly always can, and Gary recognizes on some level that this is because they are kin, not perhaps as close kin as he is to Norbert—or, to put it another way, as close kin as Norbert is to his prey—but kin nonetheless; and whenever he sees one of them masquerading as a person, or as a creature, or as an animal, something in his heart leaps and he feels honored to have seen.

The Manitou are far older, of course, and stronger, wilder and more untamed—particularly more untamed than Gary, who is just about as domesticated as a Wolf can get, who received the gift of lycanthropy by injection, and who has always regretted this fact. He would, he sometimes thinks, prefer to have been bitten, prefer to have been chased, panting with terror and wild with the desire to escape, before finally submitting to the weight of the beast on his back, bringing him down, and to the terrible pressure of its rending jaws.

It worries him sometimes, this notion: he wonders what it says about him that he should feel this way; he wonders if perhaps he might not be just a trifle...bent.

He shakes his head to free himself of this line of thought and fills out the deposit slip for that lecture he gave last month at Yale. Because he realizes that he is invited to campuses as a popular speaker and not as a scientist, he tends to keep his talks simple, sticking to baby science: puppies for dummies, as he sometimes thinks of it. He knows that the students are not there to hear him speak anyway; they are there to see the slides, to gaze longingly at the wild tundra and its fauna, to imagine, if only for a short while, a world untainted by the hand of man. They really ought to invite the photographer, he thinks, and fills out his deposit slip nonetheless, payment for his thoroughly irrelevant talk on the symbiosis between predator and prey. It is the topic he always chooses, a crowd-pleaser, popular with the students in large part, he thinks, because it is something that they already know and can therefore feel free to ignore.

Gary knows that the Manitou are said to serve the Gaunt Man, and he has heard people say that they are of the Dark. And he is not fond of the Dark, whose members, he feels, would not only like to see him dead—which he would be willing to forgive—but would also like to see him dead for no other reason than that he himself does not wish it—which is not something that he is willing to forgive. He knows that the Manitou are disliked, and feared, and mistrusted, and also that they are very often desired. He, however, feels none of these things. He feels for the Manitou very little, in fact, except for a simple and heartfelt wish that they continue to be nothing either more or less than what they are.

He has spent a bad morning, Gary has, still jumping at every creak and noise outside his window, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. He knows that he is vulnerable: the Dark could send a zzygyx (and indeed, this thought makes touching the computer an effort of will for him), or a shadow, or a wight, or any of a number of nameless boogies and dreads to harass or haunt or kill him. And yet, throughout all this long morning, it has never once occurred to him to fear the arrival of the Manitou.

Gary opens his second paycheck, this one from a corporation whose funds, he knows, are channeled through Albania, and then—as he has for the past thirty-seven years of his life—writes out a check to the Sierra Club for precisely the same amount.

He is, in fact, correct not to fear the Manitou. He is safe from them. But he will never know why.

•

9. Theme

You can’t, Norbert thinks, remembering what Etienne told him, all those years ago. You can’t kill the Manitou. Nothing kills the Manitou.

He fiddles with his drink—the same one that he has been fidgeting with for several hours now—and he stares into the mirror behind the bar, taking an obscure comfort, as always, in the sight of his own reflection staring back out at him.

He keeps his eyes on the mirror and he watches the other patrons of the bar, watching for their hands, always their hands, and he frightens himself in this way over and over and over again—because he will keep forgetting that the mirror always reverses that which it reflects.

•

   
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equator
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry; and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!”

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”

Epilogue: The Bellman’s Map

(The post-modern disquisition on Chapter Twenty-two shall be here left to the imagination of the reader. It should not, however, we feel, be too difficult to imagine. There must be much commentary on the gender of the Manitou, of course, and grandiloquent dissertation on the distinction between the observer and the observed. There must be a civil but nonetheless vicious attack on the notion that All Is One, which must naturally be followed by an equally vicious counter-attack on the notion that All Is Not One. John Henry Tyler would put in an appearance, we imagine, but this time as the antagonist of the tale, and the woman in Auden’s In Schrafft’s might be revealed to be, from her own perspective, the narrator of Charles Simic’s A Partial Explanation. The Tarot card often referred to as The World might appear, with particular emphasis given to the gender of its central figure; and it must naturally be pointed out that this card is also known as Key Twenty-Two. Self-mockery must be evident, particularly in regard to the "conventional signs" of the piece, and a good deal of mockery of our fellow writers as well—for this chapter is, we will remind you, entitled "Snarked." Most of all, the habit of referring to ourselves in the first person plural would be held to the most severe scrutiny.)

(But all of this, I am sure, you can manage just fine on your own.)

•

shantih shantih shantih
What I tell you three times is true.

•

•