Dog of the Dead

Book One of Ms. Whitaker's Last Year

Delia Marshall Turner

To teachers.

Contents

Chapter One: Winter Holiday

Chapter Two: Three Kings Day

Chapter Three: National Pickle Day

Chapter Four: Winter Solstice

Chapter Five: Inauguration Day

Chapter Six: National Tradesmen Day

Chapter Seven: Labor Day

Chapter Eight: National Thank Your Mail Carrier Day

Chapter Nine: Thanksgiving

Chapter Ten: Advent

Chapter Eleven: National Truckers Day

Chapter Twelve: Assumption Day

Chapter Thirteen: Lost and Found

Chapter Fourteen: Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day

Chapter Fifteen: Resurrection Day

Chapter Sixteen: National Supermarket Employee Day

Chapter Seventeen: Mother’s Day

Chapter Eighteen: Memorial Day

Chapter Nineteen: Ascension Day

Chapter Twenty: Day of the Dead

Chapter Twenty One: Christmas Day

Chapter One: Winter Holiday

Martha Whitaker drove her car up the darkening street, and stopped it in front of the house, not getting out, just sitting, listening to the music on the car radio.

Two houses up, the younger Crawford boy, wearing a Santa hat, was taking great big whacks at the hedges with a stick, sending tiny withered leaves spraying into the air. 'Tis the season, Martha thought, and put her forehead on the steering wheel for a little rest. It was hard to breathe this time of year.

That morning, Zach, the dean of students, had popped into her classroom doorway with a bright smile and a red-and-green bowtie. He said, "Get to the end of the day today! You can do it!" Martha had not flinched. She did not attempt to return the smile, because he had already left to call into the math teacher's doorway next door, and really Zach did mean well, and the students liked him. But her heart had continued pounding until well after the students had started pouring into school, squabbling and handing her the presents their parents had bought and wrapped.

The holiday Middle School faculty party after school had been crowded and determinedly jolly, with the two newest babies being handed from adult to adult and with other, larger toddlers weaving through the crowd at waist level or hanging on their parents' legs.

Everyone talked very loudly. No one spoke to Martha, because they had finished being sympathetic and interested the month before. With the selective memories of overworked teachers, they had already forgotten about her situation. They talked about the parents and the students, about their own lives and their own children, and about their travel plans for winter break.

For the most part, they didn’t mention Tripp Burgoyne at all.

It was all very grown-up.

For nearly an hour, Martha had sat at the end of a couch near the fireplace, holding a drink she would not touch, watching other people talk, trying not to cough, and making a half-smile for appearance's sake. When she had been there a sufficient time, she left.

The teachers kept getting younger and more immortal every year, and they never did talk with Martha much. Maybe they were afraid they would hear bad news. Or maybe they were just afraid she would correct their grammar. After all, English teachers were supposed to be the custodians of the language. Custodian: Wonderful word. A custodian could be a jailor, a janitor, a zookeeper, or someone acting as a parent.

The radio switched to breaking news. A plane crash. She turned the car off in mid-word. She did not wish to hear about plane crashes. Nor about snow forecasts, nor car accidents, nor about anything short of the Angel Gabriel alighting on the Upper School football field to blow the horn for halftime. No, not even that.

People did not listen to the radio any more, she understood from the students. They listened to streaming music. Fine word, “streaming.” It reminded her of waterfalls, and of sunlight. She began to cough, and she couldn’t stop. It hurt quite a bit.

A cold, damp draft passed over her, and an unsettling shift in perception like waking from a dream. She realized she was still sitting in her car on her silent street, on a cold dark night. She took as deep a breath as she could manage and held it, to keep the cough from winning. In a moment, she was going to go inside her house and turn on all the lights. She would adjust the thermostat, hang up her teaching clothes, and take a long shower. Martha was looking forward to some solitude and silence. "I'm entitled to it," she said to the steering wheel, breathing in and feeling the breath tickle and wheeze somewhere deep in her chest. Unfortunately, speaking aloud meant she began to cough again. It had lately become the kind of cough that swallowed time and made the world disappear.

Something tapped on the window next to her.

She jerked upright.

The face peering in at her was that of a boy in a heavy sweater, a boy with a blunt and earnest face, not sharp but wry. He looked familiar. She cranked the window down. "May I help you?" she demanded.

"Are you all right, Ms. Whitaker?" he said.

"Good heavens, yes,” though she very much was not all right. It didn’t do to alarm the children.

He gave her a small smile, unaffected by her severity. "Okay. You want to hang out in your car, it's all right by me."

"I was not, in fact, hanging out. I was just about to go inside. What is it you want?"

His mouth tucked in as if he were keeping words back. He shook his head.

She really should know his name. "Go ahead. The worst I can do is bite your head off."

He smiled again, making his face even more familiar. "I need someone to take care of something for me."

"Could you phrase that in the form of a polite request?" she said sternly, out of habit. He stared at her and then laughed.

"May you please—would you--Just--well, take care of the egg. Keep it warm, until, you know," he said. And giving a half wave while her mouth was still open, he settled his knit scarf higher around his neck and headed down the street. She looked after him, but he didn't turn into any of the driveways, and by the time he hit the end of the lighted part, the faint familiarity had gone away.

None of them ever said "please" when they wanted something. They said, "I need” and went on from there.

How could she have forgotten who he was? Well, students did change so much after they left her. Height, bones, posture, hair, it all changed, and they became someone else. Years later, on commencement day, as lofty seniors, they shook her hand, not sure who she was either. Nor did they care. "As it should be," she said aloud, dismissing the boy from her mind.

Climbing out of the car and wincing, she gathered up the bag of presents her students had dumped on her. The students (or rather their parents) had given her such treasures as a cartoon calendar, three picture frames, a rhinestone-covered box made in the Far East, some very ugly earrings, four gift certificates to bookstores, and a huge red marble apple with her name lettered on it in gold. The parents probably thought her house was decorated in cross-stitch pillows and painted wood plaques with cute bunnies on them.

There was a fat scattering of mail and catalogues just inside the door. She glanced at it all, and then chucked the whole pile into the paper recycling bin. It made a satisfying thump. So much for the world's attempt to get her attention.

Speaking of attention, something important had occurred just before the boy spoke to her, and she could not for the life of her remember what it was.

She wondered if the young man really had said "Take care of the egg." It was horrid not being able to hear well any more. She had always had excellent hearing and eyesight. Always. Until a few years ago. Now, she was never without her glasses, and had taken up the habit of cupping her hand behind her ear. It was just as well. Everything she heard seemed to require biting her tongue.

The ancient cordless phone in the kitchen had VOICE MAIL (1)on the display, and while she was standing with the handset to her ear, she saw something out of the corner of her eye on the big round battered yellow pine table, under the center light.

It was an egg. In the middle of the table. A very large egg. It was decidedly bigger than an ostrich egg. Its surface was smooth and fleshy, as if it were made of glazed candy, and it was speckled, like those pebble candies you could buy in beach stores where they made fudge in the window. It was sitting on one of her printed dish towels, wadded up so it wouldn’t roll.

She still had the handset to her ear, and the voice mail was nagging her, repeating, "Please enter your password, followed by the pound sign." She fumbled at the keypad, and leaned over to examine the egg more closely while she listened.

"I meant to tell you. This friend asked me for a favor?" said the voice mail in the voice of the young man who had tapped on her car window, "He's not like a friend friend, but I felt bad for him, all right? Oh, yeah, and don't open the door," and then the voice went silent, interrupted finally by "End of message."

The back door was locked, and so was the cellar door. None of the windows was open, and the latches were still snug. How had someone gotten into the house and left a large egg on her kitchen table? The Crawford children often tipped things through her mail slot, including broken toys, dead leaves, and (once) a sad and flabby live toad, but they couldn't force something this big through a mail slot.

She touched the egg and snatched her hand back, because it was hot.

Martha regarded the egg over the tops of her glasses and folded her arms, but unlike her students the egg did not straighten itself up or look abashed. She turned around and glared at the phone, and it was equally recalcitrant.

If she called the police, a clean young gentleman from the suburban force, wearing a tidy uniform and looking as if he polished himself all over every morning, would pull up to the front of the house in a cruiser with the lights going round and round and round. Probably Officer Bancroft. He would come in, interview her politely, fill out a form, and try very hard not to hurt her feelings about reporting a break-and-enter egg-laying. He would force himself to be kind, because she was an older woman and therefore not actually a threat. Outside, though, the lights would continue to revolve.

Not that her feelings were easy to hurt any more, but the next day all the neighbors would find some way to catch her on her way out and ask her why the police had been visiting.

It would be worse than the time her mother decided to make pancakes while the aide had been running an errand. Her mother set the kitchen on fire, and the fire engines had come, as if they had nothing better to do than make a spectacle. At least there was a good reason for the fire engines to come. There was never a good reason for the police as far as the neighbors were concerned.

She looked out again, but couldn't see anything in the back yard. In the street out front, she saw Mr. Miklos on one of his eternal walks in the cold and dark, with his hands behind his back and his head down, his baggy clothing making him look even shabbier. She pulled back so he wouldn't catch her eye. Mr. Miklos considered eye contact an invitation to have an extended conversation, and Martha more and more avoided unnecessary conversations. There had been a time when she would stand and talk to him from the porch, but he required too much effort.

No, she said firmly to herself. She would not call the police. No. She would take a shower. She would change her clothes. One had to have a firm hand with oneself, as one did with one's students. Regular maintenance. Good habits.

But when she finished her shower, the egg was still there, and it was still hot.

"What are you?" she said severely, her hand hovering over the shell, and when she spoke the egg quivered and bulged on one side. As if a small foot had kicked.

She grabbed the phone at the other side of the kitchen, staring at the egg, which leaned to one side in its nest now. She retrieved the voice mail again, only half listening.

If a policeman interviewed her, he would ask why she hadn't written down the phone number for the voice mail immediately. He would think her silly. Foolish. He would ask her too why she had rolled her window down to speak to the young man in the street, why she had risked a carjacking of her tired little car. Everyone was so convinced that the world was dangerous, but they always picked such interesting things to be afraid of. If someone tried to steal her car with her in it, she would tell the thief they were welcome and that the emergency brake was a little loose, and she would get out and wave goodbye.

The voice mail had been left half an hour ago, right before she got back in the house, from a number she didn't know. She pressed 1 to call the number, scribbling it down on a sticky note as she did. She got no answer, just a relentless ringing sound.

He had to be a former student who had left it there, the young man outside. Or even a current student, because he was about eighth grade size. Why didn't she remember him? And why was he walking down the center of her street at night in late December when he should be with his family?

There was a loud thwack from outside, and she jumped, but when she peeked between the window curtains, all she saw in the darkness between the houses was the younger Crawford boy, still wearing a Santa hat, winding up and flailing at the leafless forsythia next to her house as if he were sacrificing it to a vengeful god. He did that often, though usually without the hat. Sometimes she would look out the window until she caught his eye, and eventually his spare blank face would tip upwards, his faded blue eyes would catch hers, he would give the bush a couple more blows to show that he didn't care what she thought, and he would go away and beat up someone else's bushes. Everyone had a mission in life and that, apparently, was his. Martha didn't part the window curtains. No more exerting her will on children today. It is vacation, she said sternly to herself, and he is not my responsibility.

She could not remember for sure whether the family next door was still the Crawfords, or whether it was the Millers now.

In the kitchen, the egg had an even more pronounced tilt. She put her hand on it again. The heat had lessened. She went and got her heavy brass magnifying glass from her upright desk, and sat down at the kitchen table to look at it more closely. This egg resembled, if anything, the egg of the Great Auk. It was fat on one end, and almost pointed on the other, with great dark blotches on the blunter end and a grainy texture to the surface. But the egg of the extinct Great Auk was supposed to be hard, white, and dry. This one was distinctly leathery, like that of a turtle or an alligator, and it was mostly a shade of burnt caramel. She leaned over it and sniffed gently. The fragrance was sweet and musky, like honey.

Someone knocked on the front door. She snatched up the clean, ironed tea towel that always hung on the back of the chair and, perhaps unnecessarily, flung it over the egg to hide it.

The only reason anyone would be knocking on her door in early evening on a December Friday was door-to-door canvassing. Probably one of those earnest and persistent young clean-water people. Or, occasionally, someone purporting to be fund-raising for a high school team she had never heard of. Hopefully, a Jehovah's Witness. She enjoyed the Jehovah's Witnesses, who were polite. And they were happy to give her a pamphlet and go away. She peered through the spy-eye in the front door.

No, it was Pam Crawford (or was it Eloise Miller now?), wielding a big smile and a wicker basket with a huge red bow. She stood on the porch while Martha hid behind the door. How very like Pam to think of the generic elderly neighbor, to be sure. How kind. Martha refused to be anyone’s charity.

Pam kept smiling. Finally, she lowered the basket to the porch floor, and stood there a while longer. Pam's two boys were standing staring like cats from their front porch, and waiting for Pam to come back home and take care of them. Martha believed Pam was a most excellent modern mother, a vice president for product placement who kept up a brisk correspondence with her boys' teachers (and her boys) via text message. Martha had not yet taught either of the boys, but she had heard things from the Lower School teachers.

Or maybe this wasn’t Pam. No, it couldn’t be Pam. Pam had moved. Thus, it was Eloise Miller. But Eloise had two girls, didn’t she?

Whichever she was, the woman backed away, her expression as alert as always. She went down the steps backward, too, and backed down Martha’s front path until she reached the road and then went back to her boys and inside the house, which was dark inside. The boys followed her in, and the lights came on.

Martha waited a little longer before she went out to get the basket. It crackled with plastic wrap and was stuffed with hand-labeled jars of home-made soup, bundles of pasta, a pomegranate, a beautifully glazed mug, and clouds of artistic straw.

Was it five years ago or ten that Pam and Bradley Crawford had bought the Dawson house next door? Were the Millers in the house on the other side? It didn’t strictly matter. Though she had grown up here, no one she knew lived in the houses on Martha's street any more. The houses of her childhood were still there, but they had been restored to perfection, fronts for an exuberant and energetic industry of consumer debt, child-wrangling, competitive spending, and fear.

Martha's brother Lawrence had parked a battered Ford Econoline van on the front lawn for nearly a year when he was seventeen, and no one had been embarrassed aside from Martha. Of course, things changed. Things changed. As they should, she thought, and leaned her head against the inside of the front door, standing up with a jerk when she realized what she was doing. She would not let her current situation distract her. Martha believed in getting on with things, facing facts, and ignoring what couldn’t be fixed.

In the kitchen, the egg was no longer tilting. It was lying on its side, and it was definitely cooler. The boy with the muffler, the boy with the unfamiliar cell phone number, had said to keep it warm. All right, then. Martha got down on her knees and dug in the bottom cupboard, emerging with an ancient hot tray, which she plugged into the outlet on the stove. Then she slashed the plastic wrap from Pam's food basket, and dumped its contents into the trash, because she was not, thank you very much, an indigent and helpless old lady who needed to be fed by the neighbors. She lifted the egg into the basket and put it on top of the hot tray.

"Stay," she said to the egg, and thought that it quivered again.

She put some music on in the living room, not Christmas music, and drew the curtains with a rattle of rings against the rod. Then she made some hot tea, stared at the egg for a while, and went to bed.

There was no sense fussing.

She was not one of those people who sat in the staff room and complained. She took care of her classroom and her life, and didn't expect things to be fair. Now that she didn't have to take care of her mother any more, she had thought things would improve. Some might say she should accept that her only direction was downhill from now on. That was nonsense. She had things to do.

She sank into sleep like a freight train, but in the night, she woke and coughed until she was dizzy. She fought it like a warrior, refusing to get up, though her ribs hurt and she couldn't take a full breath without pain. It seemed most inappropriate that she should still be coughing. She quoted Thomas Carlyle to herself on the topic of persistence, and when she could get through the whole quote without coughing, she turned over on her side and went back to sleep.

She liked the quote because of the alliteration, but was not fond of Carlyle, who believed in Great Men. Martha had known too many Great Men in her life, and most of them had started out with someone else’s money and a great many useful connections.

Yes, Martha believed in getting on with things, and now she got on with going back to sleep, finally, because it was Christmas break, starting tomorrow, and absolutely nothing should interfere with Christmas break.

Chapter Two: Three Kings Day

Martha woke bolt upright at 6:30 a.m., which was normal for the first day of vacation. She lay there for a moment trying to remember the name of the struggling student, long graduated, who had been in her dream. This is why teachers have vacations, she thought. So we can detach ourselves from all those connections we form during the year. Her past was a river of student faces, each one different and all of them the same, like that young man from the night before. The night before—something odd had happened? She levered herself out of bed and went downstairs.

The egg was still there.

Her kitchen smelled like dust and nutmeg, probably because the last time her mother had used the hot tray, it was for mulled cider twenty years before, but it also smelled of something else she couldn’t quite pin down. Incense. A sachet. Air freshener. None of which she used.

It was the first day of winter break, however, and Martha did not intend to be derailed from her plans by an egg, however enigmatic. "Eneggmatic," she said and chuckled, the noise sounding strange with no one to hear it any more. No one to demand, in a faint voice, that she explain herself. No one to tell her it wasn’t a very good joke and she should be more dignified than that.

She made a mental note to start talking out loud to herself more often, now that her mother wasn’t there to criticize the habit.

After her bran cereal and coffee, she washed her dishes, put on her painting clothes, and laid the paint tray, the roller, the rags, the brush, the gloves, and the masking tape, all on a spotless tarp in the living room. By noon, she had applied the first coat of sunny lemon yellow. There was a disobedient droplet of paint on her right forearm, but none on her painting clothes, nor on the handle of the roller, and none on the tarp. Martha did not permit mess. There were many things she did not permit.

"Very good," she said and peeled off the gloves. There was a heavy step on the front porch, and she peered carefully past the curtain in the front window: the mailman, right on time.

The mailman, Theodore, was bareheaded as usual. His jacket was open, and as always he wore shorts and knee socks, though he was at least as old as she was and it was cold outside. She suspected him of objecting to clothes on principle. She only knew his name because he signed his thank-you cards that way when she left his Christmas tip taped in an envelope to the door. He had been her mailman forever, and she had never spoken to him. She was sure he would run like a hare if she said a word.

He spent longer than usual sorting through the bundle of envelopes, shifting back and forth in the cold, but finally he inserted the mail through the slot in the door and walked rapidly away.

Martha waited for his little truck to start up again and leave before she went to the door. The mail slot flapped open with a clack and a gust of cold air. Something squeaked in the kitchen. She picked up what Theodore had left and started sorting through. Three of the envelopes were addressed to “Occupant” and two were addressed to “Resident.” None of it was really mail, not any more. No more hand-addressed envelopes in wavering script for her mother, no chatty photocopied Christmas letters from people Martha only faintly remembered from college. Into the recycling, all of it.

She heard another squeak. It didn’t sound like the heater. Her cordless phone didn’t make that noise either. Was it the smoke alarm? She had changed the batteries recently, hadn’t she? She bustled out into the kitchen.

Another squeak, this one louder. No, it was not a smoke alarm. It came from the egg, which looked bigger. Martha took a pair of oven mitts out of a drawer and turned the egg briskly, looking for a way it could emit sound, but it had no mouth hole or speaker grille. It squeaked again as she was handling it.

"You had better not be an ostrich egg," she said to it, and laid it firmly down in its basket again. "I won't put up with ostriches, and you had better understand that right now." Perhaps it was one of those electronic toys like the ones she confiscated from the children. There were a number of those in her top desk drawer, because some of the young folks didn’t come back at the end of the day to retrieve them, having forgotten about them.

The egg squeaked once more, a thin peevish sound. "I am not a pushover," she said severely. "I was not, in fact, born yesterday." The egg decided to keep its own counsel after that.

After she washed up and had a bowl of soup, she tackled the rest of the living room painting. It was beginning to get dark outside when she completed the job. Just as she finished scrubbing out the paint tray, someone knocked on her door, shave-and-a-haircut. It was only Mr. Miklos, her wandering neighbor, the cold wind pouring in around him, flapping his coat, ruffling the bristly brushes of his eyebrows, the setting sun making the sky a smoky orange behind him.

She sighed and opened the door, only because she hadn’t opened it to Pam, and a person couldn’t be a complete recluse.

"Your paper," he said, holding up the Greene County Times, still in its blue plastic wrapper. Mr. Miklos's voice was hoarse and grave, and she could never place his accent. Turkish. Serbian. Hungarian.

"Oh, heavens, I don't want that."

He thrust it at her, and she took it because it wasn't worth arguing with Mr. Miklos. "What do you think of the dark times?" he demanded, lowering his eyebrows at her.

"What do I think of winter? The holidays?"

"The bottom of winter," he said, glancing from one side to the other.

"Certainly cold and dark, but many people find it a charming time."

"Winter solstice. Be careful. Do not let strangers in your house after dark. There are many bad people on dark days," he said.

"Oh, no, I always lock my door," she said firmly. "Mr. Miklos, don’t you think you are being a trifle officious? It is not necessary to look after me."

But he did not go away. "You teach young people?" he demanded. "What do you teach them?"

"English. I've told you that before. Go home, Mr. Miklos."

"You teach them words?"

"Not just words. The English language. Literature. Writing. Poetry," she said, and shook the plastic-wrapped paper at him. She repeated, "It is time to go home, Mr. Miklos."

He snorted. "Words matter," he said and walked back down her brick walk into the gathering darkness, his pants cuffs dragging and his hands clasped behind him. "Only connect!" she thought he shouted as the door closed, though it was mostly unlikely he was quoting E.M. Forster. It could have been "Never forget," for all she knew, which she believed was the motto of the U.S.S. New York. "Semper fi" was the Marines--always faithful. Mr. Miklos probably had not been a sailor or a Marine. She didn't actually need a hearing aid yet. Her problem was that she refused to pay attention to irrelevancy.

"These busybodies have families of their own. They should stop trying to take care of me," she said, peeling the plastic bag off the newspaper, putting the bag in one bin and the paper in the recycling container. The egg jittered in its basket, and she checked the temperature of the hot plate to make sure she wasn't boiling the thing by accident.

Mr. Miklos needed to take care of Mrs. Miklos, who seemed entirely normal if a little frail, and who gave Martha a cheerful wave from her wheelchair when they saw each other. But no, Mr. Miklos stalked the streets year-round, glowering. She believed Mr. Miklos had been a lawyer once, or it could have been an architect. Something professional.

Her students would all be lawyers, financiers, or architects in ten or fifteen years. Or not, since life didn't make sense. They could be someone like Mr. Miklos, for all she knew, wandering the streets. She had a thought of oh, for instance, fourteen-year-old Max Richmond forty years from now, marching the streets with his hands behind his back, his head down, and his cuffs fraying against the pavement. It could happen. Even the children of the wealthy and successful were not immune to the depredations of life. It was surprising how many were dealing with misfortune at home. Estrangement, abuse, sickness, and death. She would not think about that now.

"The living room is finished," she said to the egg. “What are you? Are you a joke of some sort? Is there clockwork inside, and will you go bam and make a loud smell?"

The egg jiggled.

"I will read you some poetry. I generally do that this time of the day when I'm vacation."

The egg did not seem to care one way or another.

She read it Elizabeth Bishop's "Cirque d'Hiver," feeling that a poem about a mechanical toy was appropriate for a mysterious egg. The egg seemed morose, but it didn't wiggle about while she was reading.

A good thing. Young people so often felt the need to comment.

She followed up with Archibald Macleish's "Ars Poetica," because it was a short poem. The egg did not comment. However, it obviously did not like Stevie Smith's "The Singing Cat," and squeaked midway through.

"You are entitled to your opinion, but you will still wait until I have finished," Martha said severely. The egg twittered, and she had to raise her voice and speak more slowly until it realized she was not going to stop. Like her students, it eventually recognized the inevitable. She closed the book with a thump when she finished. "Do you object to the form or the content?" she inquired. The egg was sulking, and she realized she had perhaps been too severe. "Stevie Smith is an acquired taste," she acknowledged, and opened to Kay Ryan's "Turtle," which the egg might have found amusing for all she knew. It didn't say.

Somehow the house seemed crowded and busy with the egg there. She did not read to it any more after that, but instead browsed through her anthology in absorbed silence, had a little light dinner, tidied up after herself, and then wrote in her journal for a while, as she always did.

Someone knocked at the front door.

Martha started to get up, and then sat down again, looking at the clock. Why was someone coming to her door at this time of the evening? She slid her shoes off and padded through the dark front room up to the door in her socks, standing on tiptoe to peer through the spy-hole. A slight older lady, with a fashionable handbag folded under her arm, stood with lips compressed in the yellow porch light. She had an expensive scarf wrapped elegantly around her head. Martha didn't know her, though it was a familiar type, usually the grandmother of a student. She put her hand to the knob and irrelevantly thought of Mr. Miklos and the familiar boy both telling her to keep her door shut. She had already had enough odd encounters for the day, and she did not approve of people dropping in, especially this late.

She would not be “at home," as the Victorians put it. Ms. Whitaker is not at home. She is away. Besides, even the dark and lugubrious Middle School Head wouldn't expect her to have a drop-in grandparent conference at her home. And Martha hadn't written any especially scathing report card comments this time, had she?

She took her hand away from the doorknob, and walked back to the kitchen. Before she sat back down at the round pine table, she pulled all the kitchen window shades down, because she could imagine that type of imperious lady striding righteously around the back of the house (or sending a driver around) to peer in. "This is my vacation," she said to the egg. "I spend the rest of the year surrounded by people who want something from me."

Then she read the egg some Robert Frost, "Bereft," and the egg seemed appreciative. As if to illustrate the poem, the back door rattled in the wind and made her flinch. She kept still. The rattle didn’t repeat itself.

To keep the egg company, she brought her knitting into the kitchen, and they spent a couple of hours in the quiet warmth. At ten, she turned out the lights, gave the egg a distant pat, and went to bed.

She dreamed of being lost in a large, dark cavern with a river running through it and waves crashing, and a boat riding in the black distance.

She awoke from a different, familiar dream. In it, she could not come up with the citation for the important article which supported her master’s thesis, and the angry angels would not let her through the high black gates of the university without it. Behind the bars, her advisor stood and glared at her and began to confer with colleagues, but she couldn't hear what they were saying, because someone's car alarm had begun going off. Dark indistinct flying things swirled away from the honking car, and converged on her like seagulls on a sandwich, squealing and squeaking. They had teeth. Her professors turned and strolled away as the flying creatures sank their teeth into Martha.

She opened her eyes reluctantly, because the dream had murdered sleep. It was 6:00 a.m. and it was dark outside. She could still hear the squeaking, like a broken water pump, so she got out of bed, a grim tiptoeing nemesis in pajamas, to investigate.

It was the egg that was making all the noise. It was now a flushed and lovely mango color. The black blotches on the fat end had turned maroon overnight, and the egg was yammering like a trapped rat or like a hungry baby. That would explain the squeaking in the dream.

"Stop that at once," she said. The egg fell silent. "That kind of behavior is unacceptable.” She turned her back on it. She put the coffee on. Why couldn't her sleeping mind let go of something she didn't want any more when she was awake? "It has been forty years since I left graduate school," she said to the egg, lifting the ancient bubbling coffee percolator off the stove. "I have no patience with my subconscious." The egg made no answer, but at least it was behaving more respectfully.

The living room was finished, so she had begun the holiday well despite events outside her control. Today, the tasks were the routine kind: grocery shopping, cleaning, paying bills, and getting the trash out for tomorrow's pickup. She looked forward to getting it all accomplished without her mother around to make everything difficult. There was absolutely no reason to feel melancholy.

A muted swelling thunder shook the house, as if a giant were holding it by both sides and shaking, and she peered through the drawn curtains. It was the winter wind. The naked dusty-brown branches were swaying gently, and there was a dusting of snow on her silver sedan and on the lawns across the street.

Footprints laced the thin snow on the brick walk and on the porch, tangled as if an entire posse of evangelists had besieged her in the night. One set of footprints wandered over to the right edge of the porch and back. Another struck out from the brick path and went around back, and didn't return.

She looked out the back door. Footprints were out there, too. Dry snow blew across them in the wind, blurring the outlines. She frowned in disapproval. "It was not supposed to snow," she said, as if to the egg. She looked out the back window. Whoever had peered in her back door had struck out through the back yard and across the neighbor's yard as if abandoning friends on the front porch. The trail was clear. There was a broken branch in the middle of the yard, from a tree that didn't grow there. Probably the Crawford children. Periodically, Martha made a neat pile on one side of the lawn with the sticks, balls, and odd trash the boys dropped in her yard. Presumably one day they would grow up and acquire the imagination and empathy necessary to care what neighbors thought, but by then they would have houses of their own and responsibilities, and would be raising their own sticky, disobedient, half-formed offspring.

She opened the front door again and examined the footprints there more closely. One of the visitors had been wearing high heels. An engine started up nearby, and Martha straightened, aware she was in pajamas and slippers in the snow.  Pam Crawford stared ahead, sitting up high in the driver's seat, her pale-eyed boys in the seats behind her and the back crammed to the roof with blankets, bags, and boxes.

“Thank you for the basket! Have a lovely holiday!” called Martha and closed the door, hard.

Pam did not look at her. She backed the car out of the driveway. The car was so big it looked like an ocean liner undocking or a building leaving its foundation in an earthquake. With the grace of a tank, it rumbled out of the driveway into the face of the winter wind, and Pam set off, not glancing back once at Martha.

Most of the Bolton Hills School children, even the only children, arrived at school in cars as big as that, driven to school by tiny mothers who peered fiercely over the tops of the steering wheels while they talked on cell phones. The young folk popped out with their wheeled school-bags, like mice being birthed by a mechanical bear, and trundled into school as their mothers drove away. The families traveled like pods, like rat kings tied together by their tails, like the Portuguese Man o'War, which was not a single animal but a colony.

She put some music on in the living room to drown out the noise of the wind blowing outside, and started in on the upstairs bathroom, thinking from time to time about the footsteps in the snow. They were annoying, like a loose hair or food caught between two teeth.

At least she had not said Pam’s name when she wished her a nice holiday. Just in case it was actually Eloise Miller.

She was scrubbing the grout in the shower when she heard the squeaking noise again. "Disgraceful!" she said, getting to her feet.

Down in the kitchen, she spoke sharply to the yawping egg, and picked it up hot-plate and all, yanking the plug out of the wall. She put the hot-plate firmly down on the floor next to the bathroom radiator, where the egg quieted down and seemed to enjoy watching her clean behind the toilet. Children did enjoy watching adults work. The winter wind continued to romp outside, occasionally making the house tremble and cower.

When she began on the guest bedroom, she left the egg in the hall, because she wasn't sure how it would feel about the vacuum cleaner. Sure enough, when she came back out, it had faded slightly to a cooler yellow and had rolled against the side of the basket away from the door. She shook the hose at it like a battle-axe, and carried the vacuum into her own bedroom. The egg gave a little wail. "You will have to put up with it," she said briskly. "I'm going to change the sheets and put them in the wash, and then I'll vacuum this room and be done for the day. It is a minor sacrifice."

A sudden thunder of wind like a freight train sounded outside, the front door swung slowly open by itself, and a blast of cold air rushed through the house.

She bustled downstairs, closed it firmly, and turned the bolt. "I locked you before," she said to it. The door was obdurately silent in its disobedience. "Groceries now," said Martha, and took the list off the refrigerator. She stood in her parka adjusting her gloves, regarding the egg. She supposed it would be all right by itself. But it was only a yellow egg in a wicker basket, even if it was a noisy one. It was not a child, nor even a house-pet, to hurt itself or the house unsupervised.

Nonetheless, she checked the front door to make sure it was locked when she went out. In the car, she checked her pockets as usual. She put the keys in the ignition, and paused. What was that noise? It sounded like a smoke alarm. She started the car, put it in gear, and then abruptly turned it off and cocked her head.

"Oh, blast. Fiddlesticks," she said, and got out again.

In the study, the egg was shrieking at the top of its nonexistent lungs.

"Stop that!" she said. "Stop it at once."

It didn't.

"I have to go to the grocery store."

The egg emitted a falling screech.

"It's cold outside. You are being illogical."

She could swear it was sobbing.

Chapter Three: National Pickle Day

The egg was as impervious to sense as a toddler, and just as bullheaded. However, it was still small enough to fit into a brand new insulated tartan lunch bag a student had given her the year before. She started the car, staring grimly ahead, and then she stopped at the bottom of the street to loop the seat-belt through the handle of the lunch bag. "An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force," she informed the egg, which had no comment.

She got to the store, took a deep breath, and got out, carrying the bag under her arm.

The parking lot was nearly empty, but Mrs. Somebody-or-Other, the mother of Kirsten Somebody-or-Other whom she had taught two years before, was hoisting bags of mulch into a cart outside. Mrs. Somebody didn't meet Martha's eyes. Parents often didn't acknowledge her after they were finished with eighth grade, especially if it was a youngest child, no matter how much the child loved English and hated everything else about school. It was on to high school, and worrying about college, with eighth grade now officially erased from the map.

The parents were generally afraid of Martha, anyway. She didn’t bother wondering why.

Martha wrestled a shopping cart free and realized too late it had a crooked wheel that rattled and jerked. She shoved it through the automatic doors and blinked in the fluorescent lights. In front of her, already, was Mrs. Somebody, as if the woman had run after her. Mrs. Somebody was a tall woman, and her jaw was strong, but she looked very tired.

“Happy holidays,” Martha said crisply, and made to go around the woman. Mrs. Somebody was undeterred. She stepped in front of Martha and laid a hand on the edge of her cart. Martha smiled warmly and moved the cart forward so that the woman’s hand dropped. There was a sweet smell to her breath, an odor of pickled gherkins or candied yams, or perhaps rum raisin ice cream. Martha slid gently away from a mother who drank enough in the morning to smell of it. “Do enjoy your break," said Martha firmly, wrestling the cart in the general direction of the end of the aisle.

The woman put her hand out to try to keep her there, but Martha pretended she didn't see it and slid away, tucking the insulated bag more firmly under her arm, her heart thumping uncomfortably. Martha and her cart fought with one another in the breakfast foods aisle, and Martha checked off bran cereal and oatmeal.

A silent figure paused at the end of the aisle and then darted away. It wasn’t the mother this time.

The figure reappeared in the juices and dried fruits, and when she reached the crackers, cookies, and pretzel aisle, she recognized who it was: one of the managers. He was following her, scanning the shelves and looking away from her whenever she was facing his direction. She knew him vaguely. He had been there for years, so though she thought of him as a young man, he was probably middle aged now. She tried to catch his eye to glower at him, but he wasn't looking directly at her.

Goodness. This hadn't happened to her for forty years. She was surprised to feel the prickle come over her skin, the flush around her ears, her heart pounding again, as if she were still a twelve-year-old. She plowed past him with the shopping cart and turned into the frozen foods. He loitered at the end of the aisle in his white shirt sleeves and his khaki trousers, staring intently at the cheeses.

He had been acquainted with her all these years, and yet he thought she was a shoplifter. It was ridiculous. Were there any good poems about stealing? Who wrote the poem that started, "Thief of the moon?" All full of "thees" and "thous," but pleasant enough.  She would have to look it up when she got home.

The situation brought back old memories of an uncomfortable, lonely, cranky, stubborn girl not quite twelve who once shoplifted regularly at this very store. After school, Martha would walk through with her school bag under her arm, reading the magazines and surveying the bagged candy. The manager, a woman with dyed teased blond hair whose tag read "Mary Anne," often followed her, or sent one of the bag-boys to follow her, quite rightly, because children were so often thieves, especially nice well-behaved white children like Martha.

Young Martha nevertheless always left the store with something new concealed about her person. Bologna, gingersnaps, chewing gum, bobby pins. Many, many novels from the wire racks next to the magazine aisle. Funny how she could remember all that now, when she couldn't remember the names of her next door neighbors.

The last time she had shoplifted from the store was just after she had turned thirteen. The manager back then had a daughter who hung around the store after school, a freckled girl built wide and hard, and the daughter followed Martha out of the store. "What did you take?" demanded the daughter, a pale tongue passing over the chapped lips. “You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

It had been awful. The girl didn't want to turn Martha in. She wanted to share the crime with Martha, wanted to join, as if it were a social activity. Young Martha was transfixed with fear and fury, because her thieving had been a completely solitary pleasure.

"Nothing!" she said, and swung onto her bike, pedaling furiously away, sweating so hard that the copy of Life folded and stuck up the front of her blouse printed part of its cover picture in reverse on her stomach. She threw it into the trash can out back of her house, took a shower, and didn't go into that store again for nearly twenty years.

She suddenly remembered the poem with “Time, you thief” in it. By Leigh Hunt. That was better. She didn't realize she'd said it aloud until the bag under her arm squeaked. "Classic trochaic meter," she said to the egg, and remembered to pick up eggs, though she felt somehow cannibalistic doing it in present company. But then, chickens would eat a cracked egg, and with relish.

She paused at the meat counter, but none of the neat, antiseptic packages of pink stuff appealed to her. A meat counter should have a butcher behind it with a smeared apron, the Mr. Murphy of her childhood. The meat should not be tidy. It should be most obvious that something had died in order to satisfy human hunger. Something had been sacrificed with a butcher knife, on the altar of the back counter. Meat should be something precious, something rationed. Her students had never seen anything butchered in their lives, so to them there was nothing of life and death represented by a hamburger on a grille. The smoke of their offering was good in the nostrils of the gods, but it didn't mean anything. She realized with a start that she had been staring at the neat pink meat for minutes, like a museum-goer in front of a masterpiece, and she jerked the cart away to finish her shopping.

At the self checkout, the manager who had been stalking her reappeared and stood behind the row of machines, still not looking at her. She methodically swiped her purchases, taking pride in the fact that she could enter the codes for the produce herself, though she had to put her glasses on to squint at the little stickers. She paid, and everything fit into her big string shopping bag. She pushed her shopping cart toward the exit, because she also took pride in putting it where it belonged.

The manager stepped forward and gestured.

Martha looked at him.

He reached out.

Someone standing near the front door turned to look. “Mr. Ray!” she said. It was Anna Ray's father, second marriage, old enough to be Anna's grandfather, always around school chatting up the teachers because he managed his own schedule, and because small, blond, capable Anna was his mission, even if she didn't actually need him. "Mr. Ray," she said. "I am surprised to see you do your own grocery shopping. Surely you have staff."

He wagged his head vaguely.

The manager pointed at Martha’s tartan lunch bag. She settled it more firmly under her arm. The manager took a step closer and put his hand on it. He closed his fingers on it. He pulled.

She held it in a grip like a pit-bull and said, “What do you think you’re doing, young man?

He didn’t answer.

“If you want to look inside, you may look. Behave yourself."

He didn’t let go.

She yanked it away, opened it, showed him the top of the egg, and then tucked the bag back under her arm. He looked at her. "I know very well what you wanted, young man," said Martha. "You thought that a respectable person with a lunch bag under her arm was a common thief."

She swept past him, her cart wobbling and thumping, and past Mr. Ray. The manager followed her. His tag read "Nick" and had a holly leaf taped to it. Mr. Ray was close behind, and Mrs. Somebody-or-Other was standing outside, but Martha shoved the cart into the nested row, swung her string bag aggressively, and thrust her way through the small huddle toward her car.

The egg mewed. They all turned and stared at the bag as she passed, including Mr. Ray, who had already started toward the door.

“Yes, it makes a noise, and no, it’s not actually any of your concern, any of you,” she said tartly under her breath, opened her car door, and slid in, locking her door and glancing at them one more time. Good heavens. They were drifting after her, like curious neighbors wanting to get a closer view of a disaster.

Mr. Ray smiled thinly. Martha had heard young Anna speaking to her father once in a rude manner, and Mr. Ray’s expression had been exactly the same. Martha had a very frank conversation with Anna later on in homeroom, and Anna had agreed that it was not appropriate to talk to one's father in that way, even if he was used to it. On reflection, however, Martha thought perhaps it was a perfectly acceptable way to talk to Mr. Ray, who didn't listen to anything Anna said.

They were probably talking about her.

Martha knew that no one was going to arrest her for shoplifting. They didn’t dare, not since the incident last year with the Bolton Hills students whose parents went to the police station in their expensive cars and raised holy heck. Any prep school child in uniform was in a position to cause a good deal of difficulty. There had been a lawsuit. Martha had, on the whole, approved. She remembered being an adolescent. Either you put all adolescents in jail, or you didn’t imprison any of them, and on the whole she was not a believer in the efficacious effects of incarceration.

However, Martha would have to find another grocery store again, one not so close to school. Not only because of the manager, but because of the parents. Two parents in less than half an hour. That wouldn’t do.

It wasn't a pleasant thought. She'd already given up the local post office, after all. The nearest coffee shop was haunted, not only by parents, but by former students as well. She'd always thought the grocery store was safe--what was it now? She glanced up at the sign and it had a different chain name now--, but she should have known. There was a health food section, and the bakery was cranking out heavy peasant loaves instead of white cake. Half of the eggs in the dairy case were brown and smelled of straw and hen's bottom these days.

"I know an excellent poem! 'Meditations on an Egg!' John Bunyan! I'll have to read you that when we get back," she said to the lunch bag, which was lying on its side looking discouraged, with the seat belt looped again through its handle.

When she got home, the front door of the house had once again blown open.

It was gaping like a shout, straining and shuddering against the siding in the hands of the wind. The doormat had slid to the far side of the porch. The open doorway framed indistinct darkness.

The car idled. Nothing moved on the street but the shaking, swaying trees. There were no other cars beside hers. She pulled forward slowly and then, taking her foot off the brake again, headed around the block.

The door was still open when she pulled up again. "Hmph," said Martha, thrusting her chin forward. The egg shivered and shifted in its bag.

She was sure she had pulled it closed this time. Or had she? There was a visceral memory, the sensation of a tug felt in her shoulder, of the remote contact with the knob through her glove, and the sound of a click when the lock engaged, but what if she hadn't really done it, had only manufactured the memory? It was entirely possible, Martha granted. After all, she promptly forgot the names of the parents when they were no longer necessary. Very few things needed to be remembered, least of all the turning of a handle. But the fact remained that the door was open.

What did people do under these circumstances? They called the police. Pam Crawford would expect her to call the police. "Hmph," she said again, and rejected the idea. Pam Crawford was not here.

She parked the car and, remembering that Pam was away, crossed to old Mrs. Gregory's house, because Mrs. Gregory was one of the few old-timers left on the street. Martha was halfway up on the porch before she noticed there were no marks in the snow in front of the door. Now she remembered seeing Mrs. Gregory and her walker being escorted out to a waiting car by three of the grown children. You could hardly call them children any more, because they were Martha's age. She had gone to school with Meredith, the middle girl, and Meredith had sons the age of some of Martha's colleagues and was a professor with tenure at a university in Missouri, bless her soul.

Martha revolved on Mrs. Gregory's porch, scanning the neighborhood. The Deacon family across the driveway, now they would be home, wouldn't they? But their blue Lexus was nowhere to be seen, and the snow lay pristine between the huge stone vases full of red-ribboned evergreens that framed either side of the garland-swagged entry. The Deacons treated Christmas with the festive ornamentation due a solstice celebration, and went skiing.

She crossed over to another house, the one she thought of as the Norris house, though these days it was home to some people called Morgan, or at least she thought it was Morgan. The white door was adorned with a wreath more appropriate for Thanksgiving, made of bittersweet, tiny tangerine-colored gourds, and tarnished-gold ribbons, and though the berries and twigs quivered when she knocked, no one came to the door, not even when she pressed the lighted doorbell over and over again. Inside, the lights gleamed on all the gilded decorations: the silvery plastic snowflakes, the glittering birds, the golden angels. It looked like a temple to Midas. But it was empty. The “ding-dong” faded and was replaced by an already-familiar shriek coming from the direction of her car.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," she called, but the egg was disconsolate, and doubtless cold, and would not be dissuaded from its terrific fuss, even after she grasped the bag firmly and gave it a little shake.

There was nothing else she could do. She headed through the open door of her own house calling "Hello? Is anyone home?" as if she were dropping in on herself. No one answered, of course.

She headed straight back for the kitchen, wondering if she was going to be struck down from behind and killed. There was no money or jewelry to speak of in the house, though people were killed for trivial reasons all the time. A very good reason for not reading the news. She made a mental note to stop the paper as she patrolled the house, with the egg-bag still under her arm.

The living room, now bright yellow, still stank of paint in the cold air coming from the front door. She took a deep breath, wondering if she still could detect the stink of tobacco and the reek of her mother's illness, but all she could smell was snow and paint. In the fist of the weather, the house shook and seemed fragile, like egg-shells, like plastic wrap.

The door to the cellar was still locked from inside. The latches on the windows were secure.

"Hello?" Still no answer.

The narrow stairs creaked under her feet. The master bedroom, gray and still, had nothing under the single bed but reflections from the windows when she got painfully down to her knees, still clutching the egg. Her mother’s bedroom, with its new patchwork quilt and the blue-and-white curtains, the creases from the plastic packages still crisp, had nothing under the bed, in the closet, or even inside the drawers, because no one slept there any more.

The bathroom likewise smelled of nothing new, and she noticed, as always, that the floor was still stained around the toilet no matter how hard she scrubbed. The linen closet, jammed with folded frayed towels that once had been some discernible color, smelled of old bleach.

The open front door looked very bright and very far away from the top of the stairs, like a portal to another world. It must have blown open on its own. Somehow unsatisfied, she sat down on the stairs, holding the lunch bag roughly cradled as if she were a Madonna and it were a child. Her head hurt, and her vision swam and darkened. She was so very lightheaded. At least she wasn’t coughing any more, despite the torrent of coldness rushing up the stairs.

A shadow came across her doorstep. "Lady?" Rumpled trouser-bottoms, fraying at the hem. "Lady?"

Chapter Four: Winter Solstice

"Mr. Miklos," she said. "Go home. What are you thinking?"

"You have once again forgotten your newspaper," he said, holding it out to her. His crinkly eyes glinted under the thatch of his brows with the indifferent alertness of a hedgehog. The knees of his trousers were dusted with pine needles and dirt.

She shook her head. “You keep giving me a newspaper. I have my own already." He bowed slightly to one side and laid the paper on top of the hall stand, then shifted from foot to foot and put his hands together before him like a museum-goer looking up at the Madonna in a painting. Rejecting the image, she put the lunch bag to one side of her on the stairs.

He said, "It is a day for news. It is winter solstice. The tide of darkness sinks. Days grow brighter. The night will lose its power. But for now, the lost souls grow strong."

"Poppycock," said Martha. "Mr. Miklos, why is my door open? I swear I locked it. Did you see anyone on my porch?"

"Do not be afraid. The forces of night are weak in the day. I keep watch. Content yourself. Read the paper, sing a song, recite a poem, have pleasant conversations. I will guard you until you return."

"Go away, you silly man," she said. "You are making no sense whatsoever, and I can take care of myself."

He blinked at her, his hands still together.

"Excuse me. I have to go get my groceries out of the car."

"Be brave. I will be here," he said gallantly, and accompanied her, where he stood peering around as if for snipers while she pulled her tote bags out of the trunk. When she had everything strung over her arms, he nodded briskly and walked away, scuffing his feet in the last dust of the snow. Martha fumed back up the walk and glared at the recycling bin. Yes. As she thought. There was already a copy of today's Greene County Times in it. Mr. Miklos must have taken the paper from someone else's driveway. Oh, dear. Well, the neighbors were all out of town. Everybody was elsewhere except, apparently, Mr. Miklos. She slammed the second paper on top of the first, and let the lid fall with a thunk.

A plastic box on the shelf over the cellar stairs contained assorted hardware, and she rooted in it until she found an unopened plastic packet of brass hooks and eyes. Screwed into the frame and the door, the hardware made a ritual declaration that this door was, indeed, closed against the outside. It might be fragile, but it was a symbol. A talisman.

Pushkin wrote a poem about a talisman, didn't he? she thought. She would look it up.

Not that the hook would do her any good when she went outside, but maybe she could put a hook-and-eye on the outside, too, and then she would be able to see if someone had undone it.

The egg, in its basket on top of the hot plate, kept her company, gradually growing warmer and regaining its rich banana-strawberry blush.

"Lunch," announced Martha, and bent down to get her stainless-steel soup pan out of the under-sink cupboard.

The handle wasn't where it should be.

She opened the door a little wider, and stared in annoyance.

All the pots she didn't use any more had been pulled out of their neat nested stacks and shoved back willy-nilly. The steaming basket waved its stunted legs in the air instead of sitting inside the colander, and the pasta pot had been left on its side. Her canned-soup pot, the only one she ever really used any more, was in the very back, upside down.

It was not to be abided. It was unacceptable. She refused to take this.

Someone had indeed been in the house while she was out, but the only thing touched was her pot-cupboard, she established after a methodical search.

"Well. I am not going to call the police and tell them someone broke in and rearranged my pots," she told the egg, screwing another hook-and-eye into the frame of the back door. " Old lady school teacher, living by herself, imagining things, misses seeing us since her mother died, wants company, they'd say, now wouldn't they? And I do not want company."

After lunch and the re-arrangement of the pots, she sat in the kitchen reading aloud from a collection of William Butler Yeats poems, starting with "Lake Isle of Innisfree" because it sounded like the very opposite of a December day. She paused after reading "Second Coming," and told the egg, "Yeats believed in cycles. Every two thousand years, there would be calamity and disaster, and a new civilization would emerge. That's why he’s talking about a rough beast slouching to be born. Are you slouching? Are you a rough beast? No, you're smooth."

The egg gave a sort of falsetto grunt, sounding offended. She had begun to believe that it had two modes of communication. One was discomfort, and involved noise, while the other was interest and contentment, and was as silent as true rapture. She read it Tennyson's "The Kraken" as an experiment, and sure enough the egg peeped at her feebly. "Tennyson was very young when he wrote that poem," she said, and went on to Browning and Childe Roland. The light outside was sideways now, though it was still not officially evening. The fronts of the houses opposite glowed as if gilded, and the rhododendron leaves curled in on themselves with chill. Things seemed to be lighter and darker at the same time, as if objects were glowing by themselves.

She rose, shaking off light-headedness and unnecessary concerns, and moved briskly upstairs.

She stripped the beds in the master bedroom and the guest bedroom, and washed the sheets, putting on a boys' choir doing Christmas music, not in honor of the season but because the bell-like voices were so clean and free of foolishness. Then she sat in the kitchen in the fading yellow light, basking like a fire salamander in the warm blaze of clean floors, laundered clothing, a stocked refrigerator, a brass hook-and-eye screwed into the frame of the door, and music she had chosen for herself. It was so empty, so still, so very solitary now, and outside the trees sighed and leaned. By chance when she opened her poetry anthology finally, it fell to Anne Bronte's "The North Wind," and she read aloud about wild wind and gloomy silence to the egg, which squeaked.

"Correct. A ponderous and self-indulgent poem. No need to complain. Everyone has difficult things to bear in their lives. Everyone," she said aloud, and let the book fall to her lap. The sky outside took on a dark blue cast, and she got up to turn the lights on. A thud came from the front porch, and something hammered on the door once, twice, and a third time.

The egg twittered faintly like a sleeping bird, and then began to moan as if she had read it some Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

She peered through the spy-eye in the door. A round-faced man in a UPS uniform stood there with a box under one arm and a clipboard under the other. The uniform was too big for him, and his shirt had been buttoned off-kilter. He reminded her of the manager in the grocery store. Beyond, in the frozen road, his brown truck rumbled. She reached for the hook-and-eye, and then let her hand fall. Who would be sending her packages now?

The door thundered again. The UPS man had kicked it instead of knocking.

"You can just leave it on the porch and go, young man," she said quietly. "I am on vacation. I do not have to answer," but he didn’t hear and he didn’t care. At least, he didn't go anywhere.

No self-respecting delivery person would stand there that long, not in the Christmas season. They all flung their packages and trotted away. She stood silent, like the Listeners in Walter de la Mare's poem. She would not open the door. Some classical author--Horace? Petrarch?--had said something apt about the door of darkness. She would have to look that up, too.

Finally, the UPS man let the box slip from his fingers to land on her mat. He turned, and strode back to his truck. He walked as if his feet hurt. Her regular UPS delivery person was a rumpled, lanky person who sauntered, like a cowboy from the 1950s childhood.

She waited for the truck to go away, but the driver sat for a long while, turned away from her, scribbling on his clipboard. He grew dimmer and dimmer as the dusk set in, until she dared not leave her spy-hole for fear he would see the light as her head went away. Finally, he shoved the gear-knob forward, the truck caught and lurched, and he trundled away. Cautiously, she opened the door and bent down.

The package was not addressed to anyone at all, or at least not that she could make out. The bar code, which doubtless carried information she could not decipher, was smeared and the whole thing was as damp and swollen as if the driver had picked it out of a snow bank.

She carried it to the edge of the porch in the bitter cold to await the investigations of any neighbor who might be expecting a package, then scurried back inside and latched the hook-and-eye again with fingers already numb. "I shall ignore the door for the rest of the evening," she said to the egg, and read it some of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which it appeared to enjoy. She got up at one point and put some cider to warm with a stick of cinnamon. "I have been too long in the company of others," she confided to the egg as the front door creaked in the wind. "I deserve some quiet. This is the first time in years I am unnecessary, and I plan to savor the peace."  Martha licked her thumb, turned a page, and read Prospero's epilogue aloud to the egg. The back porch also creaked, as if someone was out there shifting from foot to foot, but of course she was imagining things.

Yes, she would savor this unexpected break, and put her suspicions out of her mind until they were confirmed, because really there was no use fussing about suppositions.

She flipped back earlier into The Tempest and read about the spirits melting into thin air, and when she finished, she couldn't hear the creaking any more, though she listened with her chin lifted for some time. "I suppose I should be jumping at shadows, shouldn't I? But it's no use being frightened," she said to the egg, and it quivered. The egg gave a shudder and tipped sideways in its basket. No, it was no use either of them being frightened. "Pull yourself together. You can handle this," she said, and the egg quieted, though now it seemed to pulse slightly, as if it had a beating heart.

She did not watch television. Martha had thrown the television out, along with the commode and the walker, after her mother's death. In blissful solitude and silence, therefore, Martha read to the egg until nearly midnight. Finally, with a sigh, she sat back and said to the egg, "Well. That’s that, then. Good night.” The egg mewed. "No, I'm sorry. I need my sleep." She settled it in its basket on the kitchen table, made sure the hot tray was turned on, and decided to leave the overhead light on as a night-light.

Then someone started pounding on the front door as to break in, the digital clock in the microwave flipped to 12:00, and the egg screamed and shook. "Go away!" shouted Martha, starting to her feet, picking up the cordless house phone and clutching it to her breast as if it was a shield. The egg screamed again, even higher.

Then, over the pounding, there was a loud crack, and along the top of the egg was suddenly a long, jagged fissure like a canyon seen from space. The egg was opening. There was a rush of wind from outside, the window glass rattled in all the frames, and the pounding stopped, as if she had awakened once again from her dream before the university gates.

Chapter Five: Inauguration Day

Something pointed and translucent fingered its way through the opening in the egg. It felt about in a way both purposeful and awkward, and then. A pale milky eye appeared, and the crack widened, tearing, as if the occupant were doubled up inside, shoving. A rounded bulge, crowned with wet reddish spikes, appeared between the halves of the egg and pushed outward. A piece of shell tore loose and spun off, landing several feet away on the floor.

The egg panted, a distinct sound, and then two thin fingers splayed out through the crack, and took hold. One whole side of the egg crumbled outward with a ripping noise. The rounded bulge poked out and revealed itself to be the head of a very small furry personage, with a red crest, pale creased skin puckered as from a long bath, large milky blue eyes, and a stubborn mouth.

It stared at Martha, blinking, and she glared back. They did this for a very long time.

Someone tapped briskly at the door, "shave-and-a-haircut," and she automatically rose to get it, remembering only halfway her intention to shun visitors, but when she peered through the door, it was only Mr. Miklos.

He had a tear in the knee of his baggy corduroys, and a scrape on his nose as if he had fallen again. She opened the door to tell him to go away, but he pushed in.

"Your paper," he said. "It continues to have news," and handed her yet another plastic-wrapped Greene County Times, stepping past her and fastening the hook-and-eye behind him as if he lived there.

"Mr. Miklos. It's midnight!" she said, but he was headed into the kitchen, leaving behind an aroma as intense as turned earth in a plowed field. She followed him, flinging the bundled newspaper at the recycling bin and missing. It was an indication of how flustered she was that she did not stop to pick it up and put it in properly.

"Is not what was expected," he was saying when she caught up with him. He and the egg-chick were staring at one another with an identical expression.

"What on earth could you expect? It's not as if the egg had a label on it. Mr. Miklos--did you leave him here? Was it you?"

"No. I do not take action. I only know it is coming. And I expect something bigger," said Mr. Miklos, gesturing widely as if describing a hippopotamus. "More like wolf, perhaps. Like dragon."

"He reminds me of a golden lion tamarin, but bigger." said Martha, and the baby animal, starting at her voice, transferred its goggle-eyed regard to her.

"Too small," said Mr. Miklos obdurately, as if she was arguing with him. The egg-chick, his spiky fur sticking out every which way, bared very small teeth at Mr. Miklos and hissed, sticking out a triangular tongue.

"Too small for what?"

"You teach him English?" demanded Mr. Miklos.

"He's not one of my students, Mr. Miklos. Everyone is not my student. My responsibility in that regard is solely the members of the eighth grade at The Bolton Hills School. Stop being a busybody."

"What is his food?"

"I don't know, and you should be at home. Do go home."

"Nutrition is essential," said Mr. Miklos, as if agreeing with her. "Small persons must eat balanced meals and get regular exercise. I will go now. I keep watch, I remind you. No opening of doors on this night of all nights."

"Get out," she said, closing the door behind him and wishing she had not let him in at all. The hook dangled, swinging back and forth, and she latched it firmly.

In the kitchen, the egg-chick clambered carefully out of his container, testing the surface of the table with the small fingers of one hand before bringing feet out to bear his weight. He tip-toed over to The Tempest and sat on the cover, glaring.

"You are damaging the book," said Martha. The egg-chick sneezed and immediately looked offended, as if she had made the explosion happen. "Bless you," she said automatically, and he extended his paw to her as if she had said something kind. She didn't move. He looked away from her, saw the sugar bowl, reached out to the shiny spoon protruding from it, and gave it a tentative yank.

"Don't touch that."

He grabbed the spoon firmly and yanked again, spraying sugar in a small fountain.

"No, don't do that, I said.” She went to get some paper towels. The creature banged the spoon on the table and watched the sugar grains bounce. She wiped it all up forcefully, and he snarled. She reached into the bowl on the counter and held out an apple to him. He struck the apple angrily with the sugar spoon. She got a knife and sliced the apple into eighths, and offered one of the pieces. The creature raised his spoon as if to smite her as well, but then sniffed, and an expression of surprise spread over his moist little features. "Take it, for goodness' sake. I am not trying to poison you," she said, holding it out.

Grabbing it with the other hand, he licked it intently with the triangular tongue, growing frustrated and dropping the spoon, and jumping in fright at the clatter. "Use your mouth. Chew," said Martha, miming with her own choppers, and he stared at her over the apple slice. She picked up another slice and bit into it to show him, and he immediately started gnawing. She got another paper towel and began wiping him down,  and when he tried to push her away, she gave him another apple slice for the hand he was using to push at her.

He allowed her to groom him for a little while, but when he finished the apple slice he wriggled free and leaped off the table, circling the room briskly and trotting into the living room, where he sniffed delicately at the newly painted walls and sneezed again. She sat on the new couch, which still smelled of the store, and watched him, The Tempest held on her lap. He raced around, fingering the books in the shelves, dancing high on hind legs to bat at the lace at the ends of the cotton curtains, biting the cord of the floor lamp.

"I would not do that," she said, and when he did not respond, "Young man, do not bite electrical cords. They bite back." He peered up at her and flashed his needle-like teeth. "I recommend against it. It will hurt you considerably," she said, and he slowly lowered his head, opening it exaggeratedly as if daring her to do something about it.

"Absolutely not," she said, rising and scooping him up against her convictions. He bit her instead of the cord, and it was surprisingly painful, but she was not letting go. She picked up the wire and waved it at him. "This, my young sir, will kill you if you try to eat it, and it will give me no satisfaction to say I told you so, because you will be a smoking sooty hairy little corpse and will not be around to hear me."

He squeaked and wriggled, but when she put him down, he raced away from the electrical cord. He ran to the bookshelves and stood up to his full height, inserting delicate fingers at the top of a book and pulling until it crashed down on him. He skedaddled to the other side of the room, looking offended.

She picked it up, looking inside. "You young idiot. What a choice. Paradise Lost. You really didn't mean to pick that, did you? Or did you think you were Adam because I gave you that apple? Well, I am no Eve, I assure you, and you are no first man, even if you begin with disobedience. I am not calling you Adam. Or Satan, for that matter. You do not have what it takes to be Evil Incarnate."

He watched her, his small face screwed up in what looked like annoyance.

"I offer you something a little less knotty," she said, going to the bookshelf. "How about The Inferno?" She flipped to the first page of Canto I and began to read, forgetting about him for the moment as she considered with the “midway” of life was, and what straying from the path meant.

There was a small hand on her knee. Although it was perhaps too familiar of him, at least it showed he was willing to compromise, if not surrender. "Sit down with me. I will read it to you," she said, and he followed her over to the couch, shivering, and coiled herself next to her hip obediently.

She read aloud for a very long time, until he fell asleep, a curl of golden fur, as hot against her thigh as if he had been baked in an oven.

"Colin," she said, poking his oblivious flank. "I will call you Colin. It means 'dog' in Hebrew, though you do not look doglike. Colin was one of only three Israelites who lived to see the Promised Land. It is a very dignified name." He stretched out and turned his head upside down against her leg. She scratched the upturned chin with a stiff finger.

"I am not accustomed to having pets. You will not be a pet," she said, starting to rise, but he gave a wail and blinked open reproachful eyes which were no longer milky. They were hazel. "Do not whine." He grabbed at her leg. She stood up to shake him off, and her head swam. Pale shapes passed in front of her eyes like minnows, so she sat down again. For just a minute. After all, she was only accountable to herself, and she was on vacation.

People always said to her a teacher's schedule must be wonderful. They meant the length of the holidays, of course, because they had no conception of a teacher's real schedule. Of waking up before dawn to finish the grading and planning left incomplete the night before, of spending days being interrupted, contradicted, and ignored by thirteen-year-olds who depended upon you to protect them against themselves. Of days of trying to convey a minimum of knowledge to them, of settling for some common sense instead. Of dealing with colleagues as frantic and pressed as you were. Of trundling home with a large bag full of folders and books, and going to sleep at ten with some papers still ungraded.

Oh, she realized, this mood happened every holiday. She wasn’t at the end of her rope. She was just tired, tired to death, and would be ready to start again in January.

And then someone knocked on the door. “Good gracious,” said Martha.

Colin, hot as a new-made brick, drooling with his head upside down and one furry arm spread over her leg as if he owned it, did not move.

Whoever it was kept knocking.

Perhaps someone's car had broken down in the road. It was cold and windy out. Perhaps someone needed her to call for a tow. It was very un-neighborly of her not to go to her door. She finally lifted Colin carefully out of her lap and got up, her head going light again. She peered out.

No one was there. The wind must have been rattling the door.

Colin called from the sofa, a faint mew, and when she sat down again, he clambered back into her lap.

She would just sit for a few more minutes. She fell asleep in a very awkward position, dreaming again of the high gates of the university, the angels frowning down on her from either side, and her advisor walking away from her while the harpies nipped at her skin. "The word 'verb' comes from the Latin verbum, which originally simply meant 'word,' she said, waking up at the sound of "word" that she must have spoken aloud. But then Colin curled into a tighter ball on her lap, she let her head lean back, and she drifted off again.

She awoke to a loud crash from the kitchen, and with a damp stink all down the right side of her sweater. Colin was inside the kitchen cabinet over the sink, peering down with an interested expression at the floor. The box had popped open on impact and there were raisins everywhere.

Being a middle school teacher, she wasted no time in lecturing him, but seized her broom and began cleaning up. He tried to hinder the sweeping, grabbing and biting the broom and kicking it with his hind legs, and when she pried him loose, he followed the bristles around the kitchen, snatching raisins away them and stuffing them into his cheeks. She lifted him up onto the table by his middle, and he squealed and wriggled.

"You will be silent and listen," she said, keeping her hands on him gently, bringing her head down to his level and looking him in the eyes. He hissed and spat out moist bits of floor fluff, working his mouth. "You are not listening. If you want food, I will give it to you, but you do not ever grab or dump. Do you want food?" He was staring at her, his eyes round, his mouth still open. The small heart was beating against her fingers, so hard she was afraid he would explode somehow. She let go of him.

He hunkered down on the table, looking sorry for himself, his fur rumpled. She picked up the broken box of raisins and thumped it on the table, then went to the cupboard and extracted two cereal boxes. She lined them up, edges squared, on the table, plucked a plastic scoop out of the utensil drawer, and measured a scant scoopful of each cereal on the table next to each box, pointing and naming them: "Here are some things you may eat. This is oat cereal and that is high fiber cereal. It is perfectly all right to be hungry, and I apologize if you are upset. However, I am not going to do you the disservice of letting you behave like a hoodlum."

She finished sweeping the floor while the small golden creature huddled glaring at her from the table, and after she emptied the dustpan into the trash, she observed that the pile of Cheerios had grown smaller, so without comment she swept the other pile into her cupped hand and placed it in the garbage.

When the coffee was made and she had changed out of her rank-smelling sweater, they sat and ate a more conventional breakfast together, Colin eating Cheerios from an egg cup with his fingers and Martha, back straight, eating high fiber cereal in a Chinese rice bowl with a spoon. Colin had three servings, the last one with milk, which he did not like but she asked him to tolerate. She gave him a brief lecture on nutrition, hearing her own voice and wondering why she was talking so much. She never even talked that much when she was with her mother, because after all, there wasn't much point, and her mother (when she still spoke) kept insisting that she explain herself.

But when she stopped talking, he chirruped at her, and she cocked her head, examining him.

"Well. What are we going to do about your other bodily needs? You cannot use my sweater as a public convenience. You will not make that mistake again."

He cocked his own head in return, regarding her from under eyebrows like a Scottish parson's.

"I suppose we can get you a sand box such as they use for cats. At least you don't smell as bad as a cat. You can tell people have cats the moment you enter a house. We will go to the pet supply store."

But he wouldn't climb into the lunch bag when she brought it out again, and he refused the offer of a shoe box, climbing up to the top of the bookshelf in the living room and clinging to the back edge with his clawed forepaws, rump aimed at her.

"You will have to stay behind, then," she told him firmly. She stood on a chair and hauled him down. He scrabbled and yipped, though he didn’t bite her again. She locked him in the bathroom. She stood outside in the hall with her arms folded, watching his shadow move back and forth underneath the door while he yelled, and then she set her jaw and went to get her purse.

When she left, she not only closed the front door behind her until she heard it click, but also dug out a seldom-used key from a kitchen drawer and used that as well.

Colin’s shrieks were still audible from the driver's seat.

The pet store was in the big box shopping center and it would only be fifteen minutes. She would be firm, she told herself all the way to the store.

Martha had no pets, because her mother was quite enough, so the pet market was a revelation and a temptation. Armed with a big blue plastic pan, a bag of litter, a collar and leash, a pet carrier, and a knit yellow cat toy. She used the self checkout again, so she wouldn’t have to lie to anyone about her new cat, and she returned to the house.

She had pulled up, turned off the car, and got out with her shopping before she realized something was wrong. A young man was standing on her front porch, holding a briefcase to his chest. He had very short hair, a black tie, and a white, crisply pressed button-down shirt. He gave a tight smile, which did not reach his eyes, and held out a pamphlet.

"Thank you. I am not interested, young man," she said. "And I am busy. Kindly step aside. Go somewhere warm and preach to someone who has nothing better to do." He shrugged, continued smiling, and reached into his briefcase, pulling out a different pamphlet printed in yellow and red. He had a picture of a very tidy family, their hands raised in fervent supplication to some sort of glow outside the picture as if they were entreating a sun god. Holding it forward, he gestured with it at her, his face stern. "I said no. It is beyond comprehension that you would continue when I have made myself clear," she snapped, in a tone that would have made an eighth grader go home and complain to a parent. She never used that tone if she could help it, but there was no alternative here.

Footsteps scraped to her left and she whipped her head around, but it was only Mr. Miklos, walking up the middle of the lane, a black watch cap tilted off-center on his head, and the same old coat. "They weaken in the daylight," Mr. Miklos said.

"Heavens above, Mr. Miklos," she said . "I have no interest in the fragility of his literature."

"Literature? They are calling it literature now? I have heard you need words for that," said Mr. Miklos, shaking his head like a bulldog. "Letters. Spaces. Meaning." The young evangelist, who had been waiting as if nothing they said made sense, turned and leaned down to press open the mail flap with his black-gloved fingers, shoving the pamphlet at it. It wouldn't go through, and he pulled it back, smoothed the crumpled edges, and tried to thread it through again.

"Kindly stop that!" she snapped, and strode forward. Mr. Miklos gathered his loose garments and darted around the other side of the hedge at the visitor like a guard dog. Immediately, the young man ran away from the door, down the steps, and through the other side of the yard, tripping over the broken branches, looking like a crow. Martha pulled the litter box to her chest and stared. The visitor bolted down the street. Mr. Miklos put his hands behind his back and advanced after him at his usual gait.

She realized she was standing there embracing a pet convenience, and collected herself. "No more things through the mail slot. None. I have to throw out enough junk mail as it is," grumbled Martha, opening the door. There were already some twigs inside on the floor, as if the Crawford boys were still home, and she kicked the twigs out over the doorsill, ignoring the furious wails from upstairs until she had tidied everything up. Then she headed up to the bathroom, deliberately, slowly. It didn't do to let children—or small animals—think they could bully you.

"Oh, golly," she said when she opened the bathroom door and saw what had happened.

Chapter Six: National Tradesmen Day

Colin screamed at her from the top of the closet door, and she was too transfixed by what she saw to reprove him.

The bathroom was full of hot wet mist. The mirror over the sink was drooling with moisture. All the taps were turned on full blast, the toilet paper was completely unwound from the roll and in a trampled, soggy maze on the floor, the toilet was running, the shower curtain was ripped from almost all its hooks, and there were ragged scratches in the wall. Colin had spilled all the shampoo, too, and had made tiny shampoo footprints all over the glass of the window. It smelled like an inferno of bath products, like a cataclysm of cleanliness.

"Oh, bother. Oh . . . shucks," she said. And that wasn't good enough. “For Pete’s sake," she finally said, because stronger words were called for.

The cabinet was open and every last pill, tweezer, cotton ball, and brush was floating in the overflowing sink. How could something so small wreak such havoc?

Colin leaped from the top of the bathroom cabinet at her, hit the floor, and slid, leaving soap tracks. "Stop it at once," she said, with a dead-eyed glare. He showed her all his small sharp teeth, and hunkered down. He was blinking rapidly. There must be soap in his eyes. He lowered his head. "That's better," she said, reaching down for him. He bunched up and bounced through her fingers like an oiled spring, and was past her, scrabbling down the stairs.

It was the second time that day she had to clean up after him, and while she was down on her knees scooping up sodden toilet paper, she could hear ominous thumps and scramblings downstairs. There was only a third of a bottle of shampoo left, and from the way her sponge-mop foamed, the rest of it had been smeared over every surface in the room and was doubtless now distributed on the stairs and the first floor, too, all over her scrubbed stairs and all around her newly painted living room. She cleaned grimly, though her knees ached.

Eventually she found him, or at least his rump, sticking out under the coffee table, at the end of a trail of spoons, sugar, cereal, and books. Smelling like a shampoo factory herself, she folded her arms and regarded the table.

She admitted to herself that all this was a little outside her area of expertise. She would have to reconsider her approach. "Colin, come out from under there and listen."

No response.

"You apparently object to being confined. I can understand your motives."

No answer again. She went around to the other side of the coffee table and got down on her knees to look underneath. Two enormous eyes blinked at her, one of them blinking more than the other. "Colin,” she repeated.

He picked up his hindquarters and carefully revolved so that he was facing away from her, aiming his nether regions in her general direction. She sat back on her heels and tried not to laugh, because it was certainly the wrong thing to do at the moment, but a rusty chuckle erupted from her chest against her will. It sounded as if she were crying. There was an offended squeak from under the table, and he stalked out, carrying the knit yellow cat toy from the pet shop in one fist, and left the room. She laughed even harder, until it made her cough. She picked up the nearest fallen book--good heavens, Flaherty's Midnight Disease, how odd, she'd forgotten she had it in her bookshelves--and sat down to read, because that was what she did when she couldn't think of what to do.

Some time later, she wasn't sure when, he returned, and when she looked down, he was curled against her hip, his fur matted with dried shampoo. He was holding the yellow knit toy clasped against his chest and had one finger in his mouth. He was fast asleep. Funny how children could sometimes look older than antiquity when they were asleep, when adults in slumber looked unformed and lumpy, like over-kneaded dough. Her mother always looked like death when she was asleep, her mouth open, her body huddled in on itself, collapsed. Martha refused to think about her mother, and she refused to have kindly thoughts about this little monster either. She would definitely have to take him in hand.

After the nap and before lunch, Martha returned to the battle, refreshed. However, Colin made it clear that a collar was a very bad idea, kicking himself in the face firmly to get it off. A leash was an even worse idea, because it wrapped itself around table legs while someone was running away from it, causing strangulation and wrenched necks. Cat litter was almost as good as raisins for being spread all over the floor, and if you jumped in the litter pan and spun in place, you could make an amusing sort of litter fountain or sand sprinkler. However, the pet carrier, with a guest towel in it, was an excellent playhouse for the yellow knit toy.

Martha refused to be disappointed that her purchases had not worked out. A determined person did not allow herself to be dismayed by small setbacks. She threatened him at one point with the S.P.C.A., but it was an empty threat, and besides, the thought of explaining that Colin had hatched from an egg on her kitchen table kept bringing her to a halt. And it would involve talking with someone. She didn't want to talk with anyone.

As for lunch, canned split pea soup was too salty. Brussels sprouts made the nose try to turn itself inside out. "It is perfectly good food," she said, as he kicked a sprout across the room. However, instant macaroni and cheese tasted wonderful, especially if one first licked the cheese sauce off the pasta carefully, using one's small triangular tongue. Then he trotted upstairs, tail waving. Martha was by now too tired and annoyed to allow her hopes to be raised, but though the litter stayed dry, the toilet had tiny footprints and cereal crumbs on the seat, and the only time she smelled the reek of the morning again was when she put her sweater in the wash. He really was a very bright little person. She began to have hopes that he would come around eventually. Children usually did when Martha was involved. Or rather they learned to indulge her whims.

She had planned to paint some woodwork today, but didn't like to think of open cans of paint and Colin in the same house at the same time. Instead, she went up to the attic and found her old crumbling, stained paperback of The Hobbit and read to him until he went to sleep again. She didn't generally keep the sort of books around that people thought were suitable for young people, she admitted.

When Mr. Miklos tapped on the door once again, Colin raised his head, blinking, and then laid it down again. Martha sighed and got up.

"You forget your paper again," Mr. Miklos said sternly, brandishing it at her like a battle flag, the plastic flapping.

What was this? The fourth time he had stolen someone else’s paper and offered it to her? The fifth? Though she knew she should be kind to the confused man, she lost her temper anyway. "Take it away. I do not wish to remember the paper. I try to forget it every chance I get. Take it for yourself. Take all of them. Build a papier maché piñata from all my papers. Stack them all around your house in piles so no one can see the floor and they have to carry you out in an ambulance and put a dumpster outside your house. I do not want to read the newspaper," she said.

Mr. Miklos did not retract the paper. "It is words, is all. Newspaper is words."

"Pardon?"

"I tell you the newspaper will not hurt you," he said, emphasizing the last words with a thrust of the Times so that she had to take it from him.

"Oh, for heaven's sake. I don't have to read the newspaper if I don't want to, and it is tiresome of you to insist. Leave me my refuge."

"You are afraid of stories?" he said in a dark voice, blinking like a crocodile. She swung the door closed, and watched him through the spy hole to make sure he left. He walked away, treading on his trouser hems. When he went out of the scope of the spy hole, she moved to the front window and peered through the curtains to make sure he really was headed down the street. It was hard to follow him all the way, because the world seemed so dim outside, even though the December sun was shining.

Motion caught her eye. An electric company truck was parked in front of the Norris--no, the Morgan-- house, and an older man in a gray overall, carrying a rectangular case, swung out of the driver's door. The man looked up at the nearest electric pole, then made some notes on a small spiral note pad.

He didn't look like an electrical worker. If anything, he looked like Mr. Ray. A tie peeped up from the collar of his overall.

She crammed Mr. Miklos's newspaper with an extra twist into the stuffed recycling bin, and when a knock came at the door, she looked out. The man in the gray overall put his box under his arm, and held up an ID, which had a face on it. That was all right then.

"Hello. I don't have any problems with my electricity," she said, and started to shut the door, but he put the hand with the ID in the way and put his foot up on the doorsill, shoving. She shoved back, but he kept coming.

"Get out!" she said, "No! Stop!" The man in the gray overall pushed past her into the living room. She snatched at his sleeve, but it dragged through her fingers. She ran out into the cold wind in her bare feet, because that was what one was supposed to do in case of a home invasion, and looked down the road. "Mr. Miklos!" she called, but her ragged neighbor was nowhere to be seen, as if he had melted into the mist.

The only two vehicles were her silver sedan and the electric company truck. No one was home. Nobody at all. This was not right. Not correct. There must be some misunderstanding.

Her house door slammed behind her, there was a squeaking sound, she whirled to look, and the man in gray strode back down her walk with his box clutched to his middle. His knuckle was scraped, and the box was shrieking with muffled rage. It wouldn't do. No, it wouldn't do. She could not fight back. She was certain he was stronger than she was, and Martha believed in being logical. This was not an action movie, where the requirements of entertainment were more important than the laws of physics.

But another wail came from the box, and without further reflection, she darted between the electrical company man and his truck, her arms spread out. He kept going as if he knew she was going to step out of the way at the last minute, which she did. But as he passed her, she grabbed at the box from behind, and wrenched at it with all her strength. It fell down, but she couldn't hold it, because it was heavier than she expected. It fell with a muffled squeal to the street, skidding under her sedan.

The man shoved her, and she fell down very hard on her bottom, the air knocked out of her. For a moment, she wondered if this was it, if she had managed to really break something. People only a little older than Martha could die from a broken hip, couldn’t they?

The pain ebbed. and she could breathe again and could move. The man was down on his knees reaching under the car, so she rolled with an effort to a crouch and grabbed his foot. He kicked her with it and she hit her head on the pavement. She got up, but he shoved her down again, as he went past her with the box. He jumped into his truck, stripped the gears, and drove off with skidding wheels, the truck swinging from side to side as he turned at the end of the street.

She stood up, which took work and both hands. She was shaking, for some reason. She checked her buttons to make sure they were all fastened. How did one report the kidnapping of an imaginary animal to the police? One didn't, did one? One was a middle school English teacher who lived by herself, and who hadn't even had the foresight to memorize a license plate. One was one of those people one didn't like to read about in the papers, who was victimized by uncaring strangers who forced their way into a pathetic little house and took everything.

It seemed even worse that she was now quite sure the man had indeed been Mr. Ray.

Chapter Seven: Labor Day

Something grabbed her ankle and yanked. She gave a little cry and froze as it wormed its way up her leg, under her shirt, and all the way to her neck. A single hazel eye peered at her from below the top button.

"Oh, wonderful boy! How did you escape? Did the box break? Did you make a run for it? You wonderful boy! You brave, brave, brave boy," Martha said, over and over as she went into the house, closing the door, turning to make sure it was closed, latching the hook into the eye, carrying him to the back door and checking that, checking the basement door, and then standing in the middle of the living room holding the tiny animal to her tightly. Her hands were trembling. How interesting.

She had been babbling at him like someone's besotted grandmother. She should wash her mouth out with soap.

Apparently people wanted Colin, and they were coming into her house to get him. They wanted the little animal badly enough to force their way in, and they weren’t lingering outside in the snow in high heels any more.

She found her shoes and put them on and gathered up her purse, a poetry anthology, The Hobbit, and the house keys, pulled the front door firmly shut, and locked the deadbolt. She got into her sedan with Colin still shivering inside her blouse, because he wouldn't let go.Not knowing where she was going, she pulled away.

She had a half tank of gas. She was not entirely unprepared. She was, technically, at leisure right now. "When you come down to it, is there anyone in that house who needs me to be there?" she said. Colin dug his snout into her neck and snuffled. "I can't tell you it's all right, because it isn't, but I am here and we will do our best," Martha told him. She never lied to children. It made for some awkward conversations with parents sometimes, but she didn’t see the point in lying. Children knew when you were doing it, and they figured you were hiding something much worse that they really should be frightened about.

There were few cars out, and the sky was overcast now, as if it was going to snow again. Seeing a parking space as she passed the coffee shop, she pulled in and parked before she had properly thought things through, but coffee sounded like a good idea in general. With Colin a huge lump in the front of her blouse like a misplaced colostomy bag or a concealed oxygen tank, she strode inside. The line was as long as ever, and the young people behind the counter all had that reference-librarian expression they got when business was brisk, as if they were waiting for your requests to make sense.

The end of the line was next to one of the round tables. At that table, a tall, knife-faced young man in a dark shirt was leaning toward a nymph half his size, an annoyed-looking girl in expensive thin clothing and no winter coat. The boy was looking down his long serious nose at her, like a picture she'd once seen in a children's book of a dragon regarding a child, and she was staring back up at him with the dark eyes and pale face of a Medusa.

Martha hastily turned her back on the couple. The boy's name was, his name was--a nickname, Anton. Anton, short for a name that was not Anthony. It was one of those family names. It had been some time since she had taught him. He had, by eighth grade, already achieved the sepulchral and cynical gloom of a depressed and elderly classics professor. Anton hovered. He loomed. He was contrary, opinionated, and lonely, and in eighth grade he had spent much of his recess arguing with her at her desk while she was trying to get some grading done. She remembered him too well.

The girl had one of those nicknames that sounded like parodies, and if she had not been popular, it would have attracted bullying. Muffy, perhaps, or Boophie. No, Seffie. Seffie was also short for something.

Colin chirred at her, showing his head. She put her finger to her lips, and in answer he freed one hand and put a tiny finger to his own lips. She nodded, and he ducked down again. He was intelligent for an imaginary animal, but then mythological creatures were the most likely to show brilliance. The Sphinx, after all, knew all those inconvenient riddles, and the centaur Chiron was tutor to Achilles. What did Achilles learn from Chiron? Did the Greeks of 1500 B.C.E. have writing? The Greek alphabet didn't develop until after 1000, but there was Linear A. Well, she couldn't pretend to be an historian. So much of her knowledge was second-hand, filtered through the sieve of literature.

The tattooed young person at the register was wearing a most unattractive stocking cap and did not seem to hear what Martha was saying, even when she repeated it more loudly.

"Ms. Whitaker?" said a funereal voice from behind her.

Trapped. She revolved slowly, hoping Colin was not as visible as he felt under her shirt. "Anton. I was just thinking the way the baristas write on the cup reminds me of Egyptian hieratic, and here you are."

Anton was looming over her, as they all did eventually. His chin had lengthened, his cheekbones thickened, his nose taken on a dignified arch like a condor's beak. His shock of dark hair rather resembled a condor's ruff, too. The eyes were the same, though, dark and full of exuberant gloom. He smiled, said "Still the same Ms. Whitaker, I see," and having squelched her just as neatly as she had squelched him, he continued, "Introduce me to your surprisingly small friend."

Colin's head had emerged from her blouse. "Chihuahua," said Martha hastily.

"Ah. I've never seen one look like that. Is it a chimaeric Chihuahua?" he said gravely. Colin glared at him, and a sad smile cracked Anton's face. It was odd to see someone so young be so full of sorrow, but then Anton had always been that way. Now that she thought about it, hadn't he had a younger sister who died? He refused to go on the eighth grade field trip because it would have meant leaving his family overnight when she was so ill. It wasn't cancer. Anorexia? Kidney disease? She couldn't remember. And Anton's parents had been tough. Grim. Cold.

She replied, "He does rather have a lion's head, and all Chihuahuas resemble goats in the body, don't they, but he does not have a serpent's tail, I'm afraid." How was she going to get rid of him? Ah, she knew. Ask fatuous personal questions. "You are in college now, of course? What is your major?"

"Writing, of course. A minor in archeology, ancient Egypt. My father says he'll let me study anything I want as long as I go to business school afterwards. Your dog--"

"Oh, business. Oh, Anton," said Martha in irrepressible sorrow, and he blinked at her.

"A person has to have some sort of career, I understand," he said indifferently. "Being condemned to earn an MBA will not particularly affect my current plans, I assure you." Martha could swear his voice had an echo, like the slam of a far-off door.

"Anton, I am leaving now." The nymph Seffie had poked her head back in through the door to the parking lot. The Medusa aspect had vanished. She merely had a heart-shaped face and expensively tousled hair. A tattoo of a beetle spread its lacy wings across the bits of her bosom visible through the thin blouse.

"Not yet, Seffie. Wait for me," he said, and she squinched her face and ducked back out. "Do you remember Seffie Lawler?" he said as if the nymph were still there to be introduced. "She was the year before me."

"Of course I remember," though she didn't, really, because there were at least five girls just like her in every grade: Expensive, petite, and as focused and centered as a drill press. "Are you keeping company?”

"She's pre-law, actually," said Anton, as if his answer made as much sense as her question. "Do you know what type of Chihuahua--"

"It's a friend's dog, actually," she said in the same tone he had used for Seffie.

He was not deterred. "I happen to know a great deal about chimaeras," he said, sternly. "I wrote a paper on them. They were animals made of parts of other animals. The ultimate myth. Did you know there are human chimaeras with two distinct sets of DNA?"

"Don't keep your lady waiting," she said. He knew he was dismissed, but he looked behind him as he left, not at her but down at Colin's russet fringed ears peeping out of her shirt. A half-familiar woman was standing in line behind Martha. She could have been anybody's mother. Martha resolutely did not look at the woman, but she left the line and walked toward the door, because she should have remembered the coffee shop was no longer safe from the parents. She wanted to get out before the woman could seize her sleeve, grab her arm, talk to her about her children, ask her advice about summer camps, complain about another teacher's grammar, or ask if she did personal tutoring.

"I remember now why I stopped going to this shop," she said to Colin in the car, handing him half a cracker from her handbag. He climbed out of her blouse and made short work of it. She ate the other half cracker, which was a bad decision, because she began to cough again. Little flecks of saltine sprayed out of her open mouth and dotted the steering wheel and the inside of the windshield. She imagined she could feel the blood vessels bulging in her eyes, and closed them, seeing the red inside of her eyelids glowing like a fireplace. Really, there was no reason for her to still be coughing if what she suspected was true.

Colin ignored her, began playing with a scrap of paper, kicked it on the floor, and ended up under the front seat scrambling around. She gripped the steering wheel and seized control of her breathing, holding her breath against the relentless itch. With her attention narrowed down to a pinpoint, she fought the battle until the world narrowed and darkened, but finally she was able to take a half breath without being bullied by her reflexes. Her chest hurt terribly.

A spring-water truck pulled into the parking space right next to her, and the driver, in a gray overall, got out with a hand-cart, pulling up the side of the truck to reveal glittering stacks of immense water containers. Martha started up the car.

As she began to pull out, a thump came at her passenger-side door. The woman from the coffee shop was grabbing at the handle. With her face this close, Martha realized with a shock that it was, once again, Mrs. Somebody from the Acme.

Meanwhile, the spring-water man abandoned his hand-cart in the lot and leapt back into the driver's seat, where he gunned the engine and began to back out alongside her, the water bottles trembling in their racks in the open side of the truck. He had his head out the window and was looking at her. It was, once again, Mr. Ray.

"Oh, snickerdoodles," said Martha, gunned her own engine, and peeled backward out of the parking spot and right into the midst of traffic.

She tore off, Colin squealing under the seat and the tires squealing as well. The woman ran a few steps after the car and then stopped, her arms reaching out in vague supplication, but Martha pressed down on the accelerator. Nobody's mother had any business yanking her car door open.

Martha's little car careered a hundred feet down the road, until she wrenched the wheel and made a sharp right into the bookstore parking lot, driving around the back of the store and coming back out onto the street just as the back of the bottled-water truck disappeared past the other side of the bookstore, one bottle falling out with the force of the turn.

"I am actually in a car chase," she said with a wondering tone, and she turned left, changed lanes immediately in front of a Mercedes, and turned right at the red light. She floored the sedan's accelerator pedal under the train bridge and around to the intersection of Mifflin Avenue, where the light was turning green.

She found herself on the familiar route to The Bolton Hills School. It was probably not a good idea. These people pursuing her all seemed to know who she was, or at least how to find her. But where else could she go? She was not about to undertake a cross-country road trip like a delinquent teenager in a stolen car.

She said to Colin as she drove, "Are you a very expensive pet? Is that it? Or are you someone's research project? I don't read the papers these days, but I know stem cell research is big. Perhaps you are what Anton said, an experiment in mixing different species. Are you someone's drug factory, or an organ transplant donor? You don't look big enough." Colin was wide-eyed, with his mouth open, and his clawed hands were clutching the upholstery of the passenger seat.

Here was the entrance to the school. No cars in the parking lot over break, of course. The gray fieldstone Middle School loomed empty. Its windows were dark, and it looked worn at the edges.

She unlocked the front door with her key card, fumbled down the darkened hall, and opened her classroom door. The air smelled musty, like sweat, fingerprints, pencil shavings, dust, and the many, many spilled liquids that couldn’t be cleaned out of the industrial carpeting. Colin scampered in and climbed the nearest desk, standing on his hind legs and spinning in place. He wasn't really four-legged, she realized, even if he sometimes went on all fours. No, his front legs were arms, and he had true opposable thumbs on those delicate hands--hands he suddenly used to grab his groin and dance, turning pleading eyes on her. "The boy's room is down the hall. I will show you," she said.

He disappeared into the door she held open to the bathroom, and she returned to her classroom. If he misbehaved, heaven knew the cleaning service was familiar with toilet paper being used as a decorative accessory in a school, and were also accustomed to retrieving random objects from the plumbing.

The classroom was so quiet now, and without students, it looked worn. The posters of the Trojan Horse and of Robert Frost were wrinkled and had thumbtack holes, and the student poems on the front bulletin board had been posted by thirteen-year-olds and therefore staggered in a slanted row rather than marching in right-angles. The carpet was stained, the walls were scuffed, and the blinds hung crooked. A noise startled her, a shift in the light. A foot shuffled in the doorway.

She looked up. Her heart clutched when she saw it wasn't Colin. A man in a seasonal snowflake sweater and suit pants was clutching a large red manila envelope with a wad of papers shoved roughly into it. "Oh. You startled me," she said. He said nothing, only gestured tightly with the manila envelope. He reminded her of someone. No, she was being irrational after her encounter with Mr. Ray and Mrs. Somebody. He just looked like a Coca-Cola Santa Claus.

A new parent. That must be it. Undoubtedly dropping off something, admissions paperwork, financial aid, or required health forms. "You need the Admissions Office? It's not in this building, and I'm not sure it's open now," she said briskly, getting up, but he came further into the room anyway. She had to go around a desk to the hall, and instead of coming after her he turned in place and watched. "You go out this door, turn left, turn left again, go outside, and go down the walk. Pass the first building on the left, and then it will be the next building on your right. You'll have to go around to the front, because I don't think the back doors are open when school is not in session--how did you get into this building? It's all supposed to be locked."

He looked baffled, and gestured with his envelope again.

Oh, lord, parents. You had to keep remembering that this was the first time most of them had done anything of this sort. They were not willfully stupid or ignorant, just very afraid and full of passion about the future of their offspring. She briskly said, "Of course. Come right this way," and she took him out the door, down the walk, and around Pendleton Hall to the front door of the Admissions. He came with her, lagging back a little, but not actively resisting. There were lights on in the building. The Admissions staff didn't observe school holidays. She watched him trudge up the steps, and made sure he went in the front door.

He didn't thank her.

Outside in the parking lot, she noticed the lights were on in her room. She hadn't turned the lights on.

Someone in her room was moving around, visible under the tilted lower edge of the blinds.

Someone in a flowered dress. Two of them.

An ancient Cadillac idled in the parking lot next to her little gray car. It was a cherry red Cadillac with a white vinyl half-roof, its lines square and long, like the doodled S’s her students made in class when they were supposed to be doing written work or paying attention. Its tailpipe chugged blue smoke into the air.

Who could they be? Cleaning staff? The facilities department did schedule heavy-duty cleaning for long breaks. But usually cleaning staff came in vans, with equipment, and these days even the women wore khaki trousers or jeans to clean, not dresses. And the cleaners were shy efficient people who cocked their heads and showed their teeth, and generally spoke no English, because the school outsourced cleaning these days instead of paying for benefits. It was so cold in the parking lot, but she lingered, undecided. Should she go in? Was she being foolish? Over-suspicious?

For the second time in a very long day, it occurred to Martha that perhaps she could not handle a situation by herself. She dismissed the notion promptly.

Then there was a hum from behind her. She turned to see a long green-silver Jaguar rolling up the driveway of the school, driven slowly as a hearse by someone who was gradually revealed, through the tinted windshield, as dark-eyed Anton, the boy from the coffee shop. He had one long languid arm draped over the steering wheel and the other around the young nymph Seffie, who was staring away from him out the window as if searching for some world--any world--other than this one. The car pulled up to the pick-up space at the curb and its passenger window rolled down. "Ms. Whitaker?" said Anton in his foggy, tired voice, leaning across Seffie to stare at her from his smudged eyes. "Isn't it vacation? Do you haunt the halls of academe even over winter holidays?"

"There's always work, Anton," she said. "Teachers never stop. You know we sleep at school, in coffins, don't you? What are you doing here?" Anton grunted dismissively and got out, leaving the driver's side door open despite the relentless pinging of the seat-belt alarm. The passenger window rolled back up. Seffie stared grimly into her alternate reality, sipping from a cup. Anton strolled toward Martha, slumped, hands in his pockets, apparently unaffected by the cold. He looked up at her window.

"We came to visit our old school," he said as if decades rather than months separated him from the place. "I thought Seffie might get something out of it. You still have the same classroom? Do you still teach Greek myths, Romeo and Juliet, all that death and destruction? I loved that." He had, she seemed to remember, insisted on reading the Fitzgerald Odyssey in order to correct the differences in the Fagles version she used for her eighth graders. "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" he said, gesturing, and then peering forward. "Hey, okay! You do have people in your classroom. Is anyone supposed to be in your sanctum sanctoris, Ms. Whitaker?"

"Oh, don't be pompous," she said and he looked down at her under his long dark eyelashes, so she immediately felt sorry she had said it. "I don't know who they are," she admitted.

He was gracious. "Pomp is in my nature, madam, along with circumstance. Where's your chihuahua?"

"He had to use the boy's room," she said, and realized she had said something peculiar, but Anton didn't seem to think it remarkable that a dog would use human facilities. He glanced at the Jaguar, still running, still pinging, then back at Martha. "Are you not at all doubtful about being alone in the building with barbarians at your gates?"

"Not usually, but--what are you doing?" He had taken her arm as if to help her across the parking lot. She peeled his hand off, and he acted as if she had done nothing. "Let us proceed," her gloomy young knight said, and headed for the school door.

She came along, trying to think of something to say to make him stop. She was still not entirely sure what he thought he was doing, but as always, his dark and confiding tone was irrepressible, as if he were an enchanted toad speaking from the bottom of a well to a wandering princess.

Inside the building, he disappeared through the door of her classroom, and she heard him saying, "May I be of assistance?"

Martha peered past him and saw two ladies bent behind student desks with the lids lifted, looking in. There could be nothing inside but sheaves of loose papers and broken ballpoint pens. Neither of the women said anything, just blinked at Anton from behind their glasses. Anton said again, "Can I possibly help you? I assure you I mean no harm." The younger one got to her feet and took the elbow of the older one, helping her get up. The old lady had her head wrapped in an expensive scarf, and oh dear, she was the one who had been at Martha’s door the other night.

The scarf lady wavered on her feet, and stood swaying for a moment. Then she tottered over to Anton and pushed firmly at his chest with both hands, rocking him backward slightly. Her friend followed and did the same. Anton laughed, but the women mobbed him like sparrows mobbing a hawk, and they fluttered past, worked the push-bar of the emergency exit door with an immense effort like tortoises shoving at a rock, and drifted slowly out into the parking lot.

"Stop them," Martha said with annoyance to Anton, who had drifted back into the classroom and was staring out her windows at the ladies.

"Pray why, madam?" he inquired.

"Find out why they are searching my room!" she said.

"They did not seem very forthcoming," he said, and did not stir, watching the younger woman help the older one into the car and fasten her seat belt. "I doubt they would add anything to our knowledge."

And now the Santa Claus man with the manila envelope appeared from the direction of the library. He walked across, opened the back passenger door, and climbed in. The Cadillac drove off, the exhaust puffing blue in the cold air. "That was most disturbing," said Anton with a dark and meditative relish.

Martha said abruptly, "Oh, drat!" and ran back out into the hall. "Colin!" she called, and was not entirely able to keep a quaver out of her voice.

#

Chapter Eight: National Thank Your Mail Carrier Day

“Colin!” she called again. There was a squeak and a scrambling noise, and then he came cantering out and sprinted for her arms.

"This is not actually a Chihuahua, you know. Not in the technical sense," said Anton, folding his arms and cocking his head as if weighing her in the balance.

"Of course it isn't. He hatched out of an egg. Dogs have live birth.”

“I might then be correct, and he’s a chimaera. He does look a bit fantastical.”

“You're not surprised. Nothing ever surprised you, I recall."

"Actually, everything surprised me when I was in eighth grade, over and over and over again," he said gravely. "It was rather like surviving the seven Plagues or a series of hurricanes. It would be unusual if I had not gotten somewhat accustomed to surprise. Ms. Whitaker, I think I had better see you and your companion back home."

"I am entirely competent to take care of myself. Do not treat me like an old woman you want to walk across the street. Your young friend will not be happy if you abandon her."

"Seffie will be comfortable with the idea."

Seffie was not comfortable with the idea, nor for that matter was she particularly happy with Anton, Martha, the school, those old ladies in the ugly dresses, Martha’s little rat, or the whole damn day so far, and yes it was in fact the end of the damn world as far as she was concerned, and Anton listened to all of this with a dark, sad expression and offered to let her drive the Jaguar and follow him while he took Ms. Whitaker home in her car.

When the caravan pulled up to the house, the door was open again. "Did you leave it like that?" asked Anton, still sitting in judgment.

"I locked it with the deadbolt," she said tartly. He glanced at her. "Young man, just because I am not at the height of my physical vigor, that does not mean I have lost all my wits," she snapped. "I checked the back door, locked it from the inside, left by the front door, pulled the door shut, and locked the deadbolt with a key. This key." She held it up.

Anton got out of the car. He walked around the outside of the house, and emerged from the other side looking thoughtful. "Your back door is open too," he announced, and went in at the front door before she could stop him. She watched his shoulders slip through, melting into the shadow. What was it about this particular boy that she needed to remember? And what was his last name? For that matter, what was his real first name? Anton was a nickname.

Seffie, who had pulled in behind them, leaned on the horn of the Jaguar. Colin babbled in Martha's ear. "We have to wait," said Martha. Colin hopped into the front passenger seat and rooted around in her bag. Seffie honked again. "I don't have any more crackers," Martha said, and dug in the bag for one of the poetry anthologies. She read him "Coffee in the Afternoon" by Rios, and he listened gravely. "A balm in the tenor of its language," she read, and he nodded. Anton returned midway through and waited politely until she finished the last line and looked up.

"There are dead leaves all over the floors, and there’s a handful of dirt on the kitchen table. I assume you did not sprinkle your house with an offering for departed souls?"

She shook her head. There really was no talking to Anton, still. Seffie leaned on the horn once more, and Anton went to reason with her, but there was no reasoning with Seffie, either. Seffie was done. Ms. Seffie Lawler wished to go back, and she wished to do it now, and he could damn well catch a ride with their crazy old English teacher if he was so set on re-living his life back to front, and she started moving the car forward while Anton was still leaning in the window, and that was very much that, even though he jogged halfway down the street after her car. The nymph drove down the street without a backward glance, nearly hitting Mr. Miklos, who was on his way up. Mr. Miklos was wearing a nautical cap with a brim this morning, and carrying a long stick like a pilgrim.

Anton came back towards Martha, and she rolled her window down. "Can you give me a lift home?" he asked. "I seem to be temporarily marooned."

"Is that your car she's driving?"

"Sort of. My parents gave it to me and they pay for the insurance, but I leave it here because I have a bicycle at school. My mother makes me drive it when I come home for break. Who's the gloomy-looking gentleman? Should I worry?"

"Mr. Miklos is a neighbor. He is trustworthy." Somehow she couldn't bring herself to call Mr. Miklos a friend, even if he was the only really friendly person in the neighborhood any more. Mr. Miklos arrived, and he and Anton regarded one another with identical expressions of mistrust. She laughed, remembering a time--such a long time ago--when she had been sitting at a lunch table in graduate school with one unmarried male colleague, and another unmarried male colleague had joined them, glaring at her companion with the very same expression. Back then they were both interested in her, the silly boys, and were prepared to do ritual combat (naming privileged access sources, contradicting superseded assertions, or quoting arcane citations at one another) to gain her favor, even back then when she was--what? Thirty? Thirty had seemed so old at the time. The nice thing about being a woman of her age now was that you were invisible to men and didn't have to explain about things like invalid mothers and responsibilities. They simply assumed you were part of the world's support staff.

"He is speaking?" said Mr. Miklos to her, jerking his head at Anton.

"Were you?" she said, bewildered.

"Not that I know of," said Anton.

"Yes, he is speaking. So the nights are gathering?" said Mr. Miklos, reassured, clasping his hands on his staff behind his back and puffing out his chest.

"The nights?" said Martha.

"You have joined our force?" Mr. Miklos said to Anton.

Anton said to him, very relaxed with his hands in his pockets, "I am my own army at the moment. I don't have to be anywhere just yet. I'm in between obligations, as it were."

Colin chirped. Anton and Mr. Miklos both turned to regard him with serious expressions.

"You might be thinking it resembles a mandylion," said Mr. Miklos.

"Oh, good heavens," Martha sputtered. "He's most certainly not the Shroud of Turin. He's some kind of animal, not an image of Jesus. Oh, dear, then you meant 'knights,' with a K, not 'nights,' didn't you? Mr. Miklos, stop this nonsense at once. This is not a war, and you are not a soldier."

"You meant a face not painted by human hands?" said Anton, ignoring her, and when Mr. Miklos nodded gravely, he said, "I thought he looked more like a chimaera, myself. But he is, of course, much more complicated than that."

"Brother to Sphinx, Hydra, and Nemean Lion?" said Mr. Miklos, and they both turned to look at Colin, who was sitting on Martha's lap licking his hand. "Would not then the attacks come from above?"

"Bellerophon on Pegasus, or Heracles from the over-world," agreed Anton. "But the idea of the over- and under-world are metaphors. These people pursuing Ms. Whitaker are not at all metaphorical."

"Agreed," said Mr. Miklos. They looked at one another searchingly, as if afraid to keep talking.

"Oh, you two are just looking for mysteries," said Martha in disgust. "If he's anything mythological, he'd have to be a phoenix, because of the egg. The Bennu of Herodotus. Except the egg had the ashes of his father, didn't it? Never mind. Just explain to me how a very ordinary UPS man, several school parents, an evangelist, and someone who looks like Santa Claus have anything to do with mythology?"

"Teachers wish to be sensible," said Mr. Miklos, as if meaning the opposite, and Anton said, "Teachers have to believe that life goes on," he said.

Martha set her jaw, but in the rear view mirror, she saw something turning into the head of the street. A mail truck. "Under the seat, young man," she said to Colin just in case, and he obliged.

The mail truck pulled up even with her car and a mail carrier swung out briskly, flipping her pony tail behind her, but it wasn’t her mailman Theodore, though this one did have an armful of mail.

Perhaps this was Christmas part-time help. It seemed like a sudden injection of normalcy, and Martha was a little embarrassed that they had wandered so far into myth. When the mail carrier nodded briskly at them all and opened her mouth as if to utter some holiday pleasantry, Anton and Mr. Miklos made way for her to head up to the front door. She smiled and paused instead. Martha suddenly had a thought and reached for the window control, but the ignition was off. Meanwhile, the mail carrier flung all the mail into Martha's lap through the open window, yanked the door open, leaned over her, and snatched at Colin.

The next few moments were most disconcerting.

Martha grabbed hold of Colin’s legs while the mail carrier had him under the arms, but Colin gave a horrid squeal as if he was being torn in half. She didn’t want to hurt him, so she let go, and he was yanked out the window, but now Anton had the mail carrier’s arm in a most awkward-looking hammer lock, one that would have disabled any reasonable person.

The mail carrier was not reasonable. She was not even particularly perturbed. She was kicking Anton’s kneecaps ,even though she could only do it backwards, swiveling like a hooked eel at the same time, and still holding a biting, yammering Colin with her other arm. She was either dislocating her shoulder or she had no joints to speak of, because she turned face to face with Anton and bit at him, hard, with a set of very even white teeth. Her eyes were horridly placid.

“No, stop, I’m trying to help!” yelled Anton, and the mail carrier was somehow loose and running down the lane.

All this had happened in perhaps ten seconds. Martha was halfway out of her car with the door open by the time the mail carrier got loose, and she trotted after Anton (and Mr. Miklos, who was also shuffling after the mail carrier at quite a rapid rate, with his elbows working hard) until halfway down the lane Anton caught her by with an improvised tackle, she fell hard to the ground, and Colin was tumbling end over end ahead of her.

Martha attended to Colin while Anton and Mr. Miklos grappled with the mail carrier, and by the time she had scooped him up and turned around, the mail carrier was free of both of them and running back up the street, her face calm, her eyes cold. She ran past her truck and turned left at the cross street, going out of sight. The mail truck was still idling next to Martha's car, trembling, sending out pale puffs of exhaust. Martha, buttoning her shirt, discovered a spot of blood where she had fought off fingernails, and a scrape on her cheek. She trotted down the lane to meet Anton, who was sauntering back, hands in pockets. "Her hands were cold," she said. "I think I have been wrong. We really ought to call the police. I have been resisting it, because they tend not to be effective and they jump to conclusions, but this is outside our ability to handle it."

"I don't think that would work so well," said Anton, and Mr. Miklos shook his head grimly.

"Why on earth not? Get a grip on yourself, young man. This is not some online game. There are no re-starts. No cheats. No powers you can buy. We could get killed. Let’s go back to my house. I'll call. Mr. Miklos, you come in. Some tea is indicated."

"No police," said Mr. Miklos grimly. "I will watch. I am watching."

"As you were watching before? That person reached right into my car, and all your watching didn’t help. You two can't protect me. You're being overconfident."

"Confident? There is no choice. Confidence requires choice," said Mr. Miklos.

There was a whoop and a growl of engines, and then at the top of the lane a police car turned the corner, its lights flashing. The police were already here.

Officer Bancroft emerged, leaving his car door open and ignoring Martha and her companions. He ran over to the driver’s side of the mail truck.

Then an ambulance, its siren wailing, roared the other way up the street, making Martha and her companions jump back. It was the Bolton Hills Fire Department ambulance. Her long acquaintance Matt jumped out of the passenger side and then Carole, who had been to the house with him a number of times. They bustled between the mail truck and Martha’s car, wheeling the collapsible stretcher, and then were indistinctly busy. The stretcher wheeled away, they loaded its freight into ambulance, and it roared on its way, siren screaming, lights still flashing.

After the ambulance left, Officer Bancroft went back to the mail truck, and leaned on the driver’s side window, staring inside. He straightened up and walked up to Martha’s open door, looked inside, and went back to his car again.

“I hope that woman didn’t hurt Theodore too badly,” said Martha. “My mailman. He must have been still in his truck. I hope they’re just taking him as a precautionary measure.”

Anton laughed. “Really, Ms. Whitaker. I think you were such a good middle school teacher because you always saw what you wanted to see.”

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded as they walked back up the street. He didn’t answer.

“Is he all right?” she said to the policeman when they got back even with her house. Officer Bancroft looked up and then out at her, or through her, with a five-mile stare. "We haven't seen one another for some time, Officer," she said. "I don't know if you know that Mother's condition worsened, and she died this fall." Officer Bancroft's face did not change, as if she hadn't said anything. "That's why she hasn't been calling the police on me," she added. He had an electronic tablet open. He looked down, tapped its screen, then started writing on it with a stylus.

"Officer Bancroft?" she said again, finally. She waited for him to look up, but he just kept writing. He had a radio on his hip, but it didn’t make any noise. It was very cold standing there. She felt the chill creeping from her fingers and toes up her arms, and finally into her chest, but she didn't want to just walk away. Surely he would need her statement.

Yet Bancroft didn't look up. It was rude. It was uncalled-for. She finally said, "I am going inside," and left him there, still writing.

It reminded her of the dissertation dream: Something terrible, long past and settled, now returned and needing to be solved all over again.

Mr. Miklos, who was sweeping up the dead leaves and dirt in the living room, let her in. She went into the kitchen, where Anton and Colin were staring at one another doubtfully.

"Ms. Whitaker, I don't think you can remain in your house," said Anton, and then he saw her face. "What is it? What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Martha.

"Nothing? You've gone a sort of bone color, and you're making a very disturbing noise when you breathe. You need protection. Are you afraid? Do not fear, this is all very normal and understandable, though perhaps unexpected." He took her elbow and hustled her back into her living room. She wrenched her arm away from him when he tried to sit her down.

"It is not normal. And I am not afraid. Stop trying to reassure me. Unexpected is a good word. This is all exceedingly unexpected."

"Coffee," said Mr. Miklos, coming in with a large yellow mug she never used and should have thrown away.

"No," she said. He held it in both hands like a chalice, and looked grave. "No, no, no, no, no. I do not need coffee or fuss of any sort. Kindly take it away."

There was a crash from the kitchen. Both men darted out, and there was a cry of horror:,"I only just finished sweeping!" from Mr. Miklos.

In the kitchen, there were Cheerios everywhere. Colin, the Lord of Light, the Maitreya, the burning phoenix, Chimaera rampant, the Mandylion of the Knights Templar heresy, was hungry and taking care of business.

The mail truck went away at some point. Martha assumed the Post Office had sent back-up. The mail must be delivered, of course, or perhaps they just wanted their truck back, as the mail was no longer what it had been when she was a child.

Officer Bancroft did not come in. He kept writing. After a little bit, he knocked on the door. Martha was reading The Hobbit to Colin, and Anton and Mr. Miklos were arguing about mythology with her encyclopedia open in the kitchen. The men didn't hear the knock, so Martha got up. Martha peered at Officer Bancroft’s tired visage through the spy-hole for a full minute before she opened the door. Mr. Miklos and Anton came running from the kitchen, and Anton grabbed the doorknob as if to slam it again, but Martha held up her hand. “Hello,” she said.

Officer Bancroft took a step back and his hand went to the gun on his belt. He froze, watchful.

Martha sighed. "See? You’ve made him nervous. Don’t be nervous, Officer. It doesn’t do to argue with them, Anton, I have found. They have to do their investigation, and then we offer them a cup of tea, they refuse, and they go away," she told Anton severely. "Hello,” she repeated. Officer Bancroft looked down at his tablet. He used it as a surface to sign his name at the bottom of a piece of paper, closed the door firmly, and stuffed the sheet through the mail slot.

"How disconcerting," said Martha. They watched the man get into his car and drive away.

"You surely did not find that surprising," said Anton. "Are you beginning to understand what is going on?"

"I understand that the police have become even more uninterested in ordinary people, and that I might as well not exist. He treated me as if I was invisible and inaudible," said Martha. She sighed. “I am used to that, being a middle school teacher, but I don’t expect it from adults. They are eventually at least polite. What are you two staring at?”

“You have not changed at all,” said Anton. “You read us poetry during that lockdown drill that turned out to be a real one. You handed out caramels.”

“I keep a supply of caramels in my desk drawer. It wasn’t nearly as odd as you think. I find sticky candy distracts young minds from imaginary threats.”

"Ms. Whitaker, that wasn’t imaginary!”

“No, there was certainly a young person with a gun, but you have to admit the caramels helped.”

He wasn’t listening. He said, "We have to buy some breathing room. You should come to my house. I have to catch up with Seffie anyway, and you can rest up there. We have bunches of guest rooms."

"Your parents will think it odd if you bring your former eighth grade English teacher over for a sleepover," she said. "I do not socialize with my students--"

"No, my parents are elsewhere at the moment," interrupted Anton. "And we have an alarm system. Mr. Miklos can come with us too, if you're worried about my intentions." She emitted an involuntary laugh, but he did not look at all abashed. "Age is less meaningful to me now," he explained gravely, as if being twenty or so was on the cusp of eternity.

"I am quite all right." She was not quite all right, of course. She was more astounded and offended by the current situation than she could remember of all the times her mother had called the police.

Mr. Miklos shifted from foot to foot, wrinkling the baggy trousers. "My wife does not expect me," he said, looking up and to the left like a small boy making up a story. "I could be going with you."

There wasn't any arguing Anton out of it. He had always been persistent and opinionated, but now he seemed almost unstoppable, and after a time she realized he had some sense on his side. She reluctantly accepted that if these odd silent people were going to find her wherever she went, it was probably a good idea to have someone with her. Martha packed some necessities--books, a change of clothes, her vitamins and her prescriptions--while Anton and Mr. Miklos stood outside in the pale winter sunlight, looking up and down the street for random public employees, parents, and any other potential attackers.

She stood up and looked around before she left. She had anticipated having the house to herself for the holidays, but now that it wasn't working out the way she planned, she had to admit that hadn't been such a wonderful idea after all. She was so tired of this house, even with all her mother's things given away or thrown out, even with a coat of paint in the living room, even with fresh bed-linens and curtains. Her mother had lived all her life in this house and died in it, completely speechless, without words or thoughts, and Martha wanted to leave death behind for just a little while.

Her mother had died alone of natural causes, while the aide had run out for the cigarettes neither the aide nor her mother was supposed to be smoking. Her mother couldn't talk at the end, but she could smoke, so she did, as if she were nothing more at the end than a biological machine for keeping a cigarette lit.

Martha had not informed the home health care service about the aide being out. If her mother had been alive, Martha would have requested a different aide, of course. Her mother could be persuasive even when she was nonverbal, and it didn’t do to indulge her, but it really wasn’t the aide’s fault.

"Are you coming?" yelled Anton from the front door. "Come on, Ms. Whitaker!"

"My dear young man," she said sharply, but he was already outside again. Oh, well. As he had said to the mail carrier, he was just trying to help.

Chapter Nine: Thanksgiving

She insisted on driving, if only to establish her independence, and opened the driver's side window a crack to let some of Mr. Miklos’s earthy aroma escape. Mr. Miklos smelled worse than a middle-school boy. Colin, on the other side of the rear passenger seat, clutched his yellow knit toy and hummed, looking out the window. He could see through it. His head was higher up than before. "Colin's bigger since yesterday," she said.

"Yup. That's how it goes. Turn left here," said Anton. "Would you mind if I turned on your radio?" Without waiting for her permission, he turned it on, and jumped at the blare of sound. "Someone’s been messing with your radio?"

"Pardon me. I just happen to like that station," she said. She turned it off again, because she knew others did not share her fondness for popular music and she only played it when she was alone and could sing along.

"You like that stuff? Ms. Whitaker, I am disappointed in you," he said gravely, and she scowled.

"All songs with lyrics are poetry," she said briskly, not liking his expression. It was rarely good poetry, granted. That was the trouble with the children who took English literature seriously when they were in school. They turned it into a religion, and then elected themselves to the vestry, and then they stopped paying any attention to real life. Anton pressed his lips together, obviously refraining from straightening her out, and stared ahead of him. She barreled through a yellow light just to make him flinch, and he did.

"Turn right here, Ms. Whitaker," he said eventually, having treated her to a stretch of reproving silence which she refused to acknowledge. They were entering an area where Martha rarely ventured. The winding lanes plowed between hedges holding back tidal waves of snow-dusted lawn, pine grove, and rhododendron, and at the crest of each wave of landscape jungle there was a house, if you could call them houses. They were more like sepulchers, memorials to all the money their inhabitants had made or inherited.

The fieldstone facades weren’t exactly ostentatious. They were just cleaner, more stately, and much bigger than they needed to be in comparison to Martha’s little cottage. They had gleaming windows, hand-tiled roofs, and copper flashing. There were solaria on the ground floor, and pantries out back beside the kitchen mud-rooms. They had wings, left and right and out-the-back. The very oldest ones had gate-houses guarding their front drives, though of course people employed landscapers and security companies these days. Every driveway had a little alarm-company sign next to it, discreetly announcing the deserved insecurity of its owners.

"Right again," commanded Anton, and she swooped her little sedan into a drive that was wider than the road itself and better-maintained. The car toiled up the hill to a house only partly visible through monster-sized trees.

This house was one of the really old ones. Martha generally felt sufficiently large for any setting in which she found herself, but the front-facing view of the house begged for a better adjective than "vast.” It was not a home but a Home, and there should have been a ticket-booth and a gift shop by the front door, with lines of visiting tourists.

No wonder Anton was going to business school. With this kind of upbringing, handling your finances was probably a full-time job.

Many of her students, of course, though not nearly as many as most people thought, lived in houses almost as big as this. They paid the Bolton Hills tuition in order to spend their days in the determined impoverishment of a private school, because Bolton Hills was a bit of a Name.

The windows were dark, though, and the snow in the drive had only one set of tracks in it. The tracks belonged to Seffie’s Jaguar, which was still running with the doors closed but without Seffie.

Anton showed her where to park next to the Jag in the circle before the front entrance. He got out and stared at the Jaguar with his hands locked behind his back, looking like a punished child.

“This changes my plans,” he said to the air.

"Is Seffie inside the house?" she inquired, getting out and peering into the car.

"No. No. She must have decided to turn back." He looked down at his feet, then, leaving the Jaguar running, turned and mounted the front steps under the portico.

Martha said, "Don't you want to turn the car off?”

Anton said, “It’s locked from the inside, and I don’t have the key.”

Martha stared at the car, trying to work this out. Meanwhile, Anton walked up the wide steps and swiped a card in a reader next to the double doors. When she came in after him, he was keying numbers into a pad.

Martha surveyed the huge entry hall, with the keystone arches over all the doorways and the grave dark paintings of someone's ancestors looking down on them. Colin was scampering out of sight through the nearest archway.

Immediately, there was a crash, and a yip, and Martha said, "Oh, dagnabbit” and scurried after him.

The next room was an enormous space, glowing golden with light. A huge painting of a sunset, with ships, hung on the far wall; on the opposite wall was a huge painting of ships, with a sunset. All around the rest of the room were heavy tables gleaming with polish and weighed down further by glossy vases filled with dried flowers. A curved staircase swept up from the far wall, and on each side of the room, large paneled doors permitted glimpses of even larger rooms on either side. It felt like an expensive hotel lobby.

In the one discordant note in the room, Colin glared at them from the middle of a table. He had already knocked a lamp off, and the fall had cracked its gilded base open, so that the brass rod and the wires were exposed, and fragments of pottery were spread out on the floor.

Anton curled the corners of his mouth up in a mirthless smile.

"I'm sorry. He behaves better if I read to him," Martha said. She dug through her bag, but her books weren’t there. They must have fallen out. "Do you have any books?"

"Well, yes, sort of," said Anton, looking suddenly embarrassed. "In a way." He strode through the left-hand door and slipped a light switch. The room was revealed as a spacious and effusively Victorian sort of library, with shelves reaching up to the lofty ceiling. Dark cherry bookshelves crowded in between the floor-to-ceiling windows, loomed above the doors, lined every available wall, and served as bric-a-brac pedestals in the center of the room. The shelves were filled with bound books, their stamped titles gleaming faintly in the late winter light.

The room should have smelled like aged paper, but instead it smelled like a tanner's workshop. The leather armchairs, crouching like thrones, looked spectacular, but no one, obviously, ever sat on those plump, shiny seats, and there were three actual bear-skin rugs on the floor, their stuffed heads rising from a lake of splayed fur as if emerging from a taxidermy swamp.

She hooked a tentative finger over the spine of a dictionary, but she couldn’t slide it out. She tried another.

The books were all so tightly crammed together she couldn't un-wedge one from the nearest row, even using both hands.

"Mama bought the library of someone who died," said Anton, looking around him. "She had parties in here sometimes. I think the cleaning staff went around with polish and polished the spines of the books as if they were all of a piece. I don't usually bother with them, because I have my own books, but if you want books, here they are.”

"I cannot get this loose," said Martha, still tugging.

Let me see if I can find something to pry it out for you." He vanished.

Though she loved books, Martha had no particular reverence for them as objects. A seventh edition in paperback, well-thumbed and dog-eared, with pencil underlinings and acerbic comments in the margins, was more precious to her than any uncut-and-therefore-unreadable signed first edition. She had even been known to buy an extra paperback copy of a large book and split it into sections down the spine, so the parts would fit in her purse. But she couldn't fathom this kind of vandalism. These were books that were not supposed to be read.

Colin, dragging his yellow knit toy, yanked his hand free from hers and climbed to the top of one of the center bookcases. He looked around, then scrambled down and scaled another of the wall-shelves, stopping at the seventh tier and yanking.

"They are stuck fast," she said. "Stop that." But he made snorted and hauled, planting both feet either side of his chosen volume. Something ripped, and he somersaulted backward, still clutching the book, and then there was an awful noise like a stepped-on-duck. Martha ran over, expecting to see him dead, but he was only panting, as he had when she spoke to him about the raisin bran. She picked up the book. The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind, by Wilhelm von Humboldt. "Colin, you are out of your mind. I refuse to read you this. It's above your reading level."

But when Anton returned with a claw hammer and a broom, she was seated on the floor with Colin in her lap, attempting to bring Humboldt's stodgy prose (rendered even more stodgy in translation) to some kind of life. "It sounds pompous. I thought you didn't like pompousness," said Anton ungraciously, dropping the tools with a clatter.

"Did you know Humboldt was the first person to say that language shapes perception? Chomsky often quoted him."

"Ms. Whitaker, sometimes I think you are far too erudite to be a middle school English teacher."

"You have an interesting conception of teachers," she snapped and picked up reading where she had left off. Colin, who had grown restless while she was talking, settled back down again, and started sucking on one of the legs of the knit toy. Anton continued to stand there, but she refused to look at him.

"Ms. Whitaker? I was being complimentary."

She kept reading. If he wanted her to be a stereotypical 8th grade English teacher, she would be a stereotypical 8th grade English teacher. That battle had been lost long ago.

"Where's Mr. Miklos?" said Anton, giving up on her and going out.

He couldn't help being ignorant. The young so often assumed that their elders had flowered early, if ever, and gone promptly to seed like a dandelion. She could tell him that it took a good deal of experience and wisdom to become as dull as she was, but it would be a waste of breath she didn’t have to spare. And now she was trapped by her own contrariness into reading a very dull book indeed to a small, rapt animal, in a completely decorative library, when she could have been home getting ready to paint the walls of her stairwell.

Considered in that light, her present situation was preferable, she decided, and kept reading.

Anton returned about a half an hour later, and waited until she paused and looked at him under her eyebrows. He had his arms folded.

She marked her place slowly and deliberately, and closed the book. Anton beckoned and pointed at the door.

"I am not a plane to be landed," she said. "What are you pointing at?"

"I didn't want to interrupt. You look like you could use a bath.”

She felt as if she had been slapped. "I beg your pardon?"

He seemed genuinely unaware that he might have given offense, and continued, “You probably could use a little lie-down, too? I have a spare room for you, if you would like."

Colin scowled and scrabbled at the book, but she arose nonetheless, feeling very out of sorts. Perhaps a bath and a nap would be a good idea. Anton showed her down a back hall, up a stair, and along a carpeted corridor to a spare room. "Nobody ever uses this one, so it should be in good shape,” he said, and drifted down the hall and out of sight, not noticing how far her eyebrows had gone up.

She closed the door, looking around. Actually, it was in very good shape indeed. Immaculate. Coherent. Tasteful. It was so much nicer than her own little spare bedroom that there should be a different name for it.

There was another door, and she opened it. Inside, a high round fountain supported a dreadful cupid, who in turn was reaching up toward a very large pigeon, which itself appeared to be vomiting water endlessly. The floor was an Etruscan mosaic, probably not original, with reclining dark-haired women wearing black eye makeup. It was a bathroom, in a technical sense, but again nothing like her bathroom at home. Anton’s parents had probably hired an interior designer rather than planning this bathroom themselves, but they shouldn’t have allowed the interior designer quite so much scope. His parents, she vaguely recalled, had been courteous but indifferent, not as if they were concealing anything but as if no one else really mattered. Not unusual in their situation, though she couldn’t recall at the moment what had been wrong with Anton’s sister.

Here was the proper sink against the wall, or at least it could be a sink or a baptismal fount, and there, that was a bath. Sort of a bath. More of a vat, really. It also had mosaics all around it, and enough plants to warrant a winding path. She leaned in to look for goldfish, and something hissed like one of Milton's devils and then spouted jets of mist. She looked underneath the leaves. Tiny plastic pipes were emitting the mist, not demons.

A yip came from outside the bathroom door.

"You can wait. I wish to use the facilities," she told Colin. A scrabble came and the door opened, as if she hadn't closed it completely. Doors did not seem to stay closed lately.

"No!" she said as Colin tried to push his way in. He sat back on his haunches. "I would like privacy. You can just wait outside until I am finished. I do not want company in the bathroom, thank you very much."

"No?" he said, in a hurt voice, very high.

"No," she said firmly, nudging him out with her foot. She closed the door, and then opened it again.

"Yes?" he said, and scampered in. She stared at him.

"Did you just speak?"

"No," he answered in a much more matter-of-fact tone, and standing up, he climbed up on the edge of the cupid fountain and lapped water from the cupid’s leg.

"So it's 'yes' and 'no,' then, and that's all?"

"Yes," he said, and accidentally splashed himself in the face, backing up and looking offended. He walked over to the bathtub, and pulled at the leaves of the nearest plant.

"Don't do that," she said. He looked at her and yanked even harder, until the plant started to crackle and lean. She grabbed him, and he opened his mouth as if to bite her, but let go of the leaf, so she let go too. He glared at her, and she at him. "People care about their possessions, and we are guests here. Treat people's possessions with courtesy. They are not common property. Needless destruction is a sign of ignorance, and is uncivilized." He continued to glare. "And because I said so. Please."

"Because said so," he said in that small voice, as if nailing down the important concept in her utterance.

"Yes." He galloped out. She expected to hear another crash, but all she heard was his feet heading away and then dancing down stairs, a series of thumps, surprisingly loud considering his small size.

Words. He had spoken words. Something that had hatched out of an egg had spoken to her. Everything seemed topsy turvy. Ordinary people like grocery store managers and policemen had stopped talking, but strange animals were conversing away.

She closed the door and took a shower, though she didn't really enjoy soaping herself in the middle of a rainforest. She expected snakes to drop from the ceiling or parrots to emerge shrieking from the foliage, especially when the automatic mist went off in the middle of the shower. It was an Eden of a bathroom. Adam and Eve should emerge, blinking and ashamed, from the tropical foliage.

When she got back downstairs, Anton was in the library, sitting in one of the untouched leather chairs. He had used his claw-hammer as a lever to good purpose and was surrounded by a ramshackle pile of books, as well as by an unfortunate sprinkle of yellowed paper scraps and shreds of binding. "I've been looking in bestiaries. He's not a basilisk," said Anton with gloomy relish. "A basilisk is sort of a snake. And griffins and phoenixes have too much bird in them. I was hoping he was Mallory's Questing Beast, but he doesn't have enough snaky bits. Do you think he could be a kelpie?"

"He's been talking," said Martha.

Anton looked up eagerly from his book and clapped it shut. "You don't say! Indo-European? Proto-Germanic? Greek?"

“English."

"You've corrupted him," said Anton. "I was hoping to learn his language from him, if he had his own. And now you have him speaking English. He'll forget."

"It's called socialization, not corruption. And he uses the word 'yes' in a fairly sophisticated manner, to make a request for permission, and then to confirm something."

Anton looked away from her and back down at his book. "You can call it what you like. I call it oppression,” he muttered, and she was glad she hadn’t mentioned “because I  said so.”

She gave up on him and went to see what kinds of foods Anton's parents left in their kitchen when their son was home on college vacation.

She didn't see that it mattered what kind of mythological creature Colin was. kLife had sufficient grimness in it that you didn't have to bring metaphors alive to explain. You kept moving , and you tried to be useful, and that had to be enough.

Mr. Miklos was rummaging around in the kitchen, surveyed from the chopping-block island by a crouching Colin.

"Has Colin said anything to you? He was talking to me earlier," she said, and Mr. Miklos straightened up and exchanged a level look with Colin.

"We have had words," he said, and Colin crouched lower. "Lady, I am cooking. Kitchen is busy."

It was the first time Mr. Miklos had ever turned down an opportunity to chat, and she was miffed. She didn't want to go back to the library and be condescended to by Anton, and she had been ejected from the kitchen, so she marched through a series of rooms and ended up in a small upholstered room with a huge but wafer-thin flat-screen TV dominating the far wall. It took her a while to figure out how to turn it on, though she couldn’t get the sound working.

The cable news channel, glowing radioactive blue and magenta, was showing images of airplanes and heads of people talking gravely. She flipped through the channels, but most of what she saw was the same.

Finally, she clicked off, having gleaned the usual impression of terrible weather, mysterious violence, and general catastrophe. She resolved once again never to watch television.

There was a muffled call, and when she found her way back to the kitchen her companions had already started their dinner, some kind of Mediterranean pasta which reeked of garlic and olives. Anton was reading Chomsky's Syntactic Structures to Colin, who looked intent. "That was in the library too?" said Martha. "It seems to be all bestiaries and linguistics textbooks. Whom did your parents mug to acquire that collection?"

Anton kept reading aloud. Martha gave up and sat down.

“Dinner is prepared, and you may eat,” said Mr. Miklos.

She collected herself and got a plate. She only managed to forge through about half of her serving, being unaccustomed to rich food. She pushed the plate away from her. A hand reached into her plate and seized one of the pieces of pasta. She seized Colin’s small hand, for it was no longer a paw, and she said, "No. Say the magic word."

"Is no magic words," Mr. Miklos snapped, sitting up.

"You know what I mean."

"Magic has no words," he said. "People have words. Human beings," he elaborated the last words carefully, as if he doubted her ability to understand. He blinked at her, as slow and imperturbable as an elephant. Perhaps, like an elephant, nerve messages took a long time to reach his brain. It was dark out. She was stuck here. Anton didn't look up, and Mr. Miklos leaned back into his chair and resumed his nap, his eyebrows bristling and moving faintly.

"Right," she said, pushing her chair back and leaving the plate to Colin. "I know it’s early yet, but I'm going to bed."

In the bedroom, she carefully draped her clothes over a chair, placed her shoes upside-down on the pale carpeting so they wouldn't get the rug muddy, climbed into the high bed, and turned the light off.

After half an hour with her shoulders up around her ears and her brow furrowed, she said to herself, I refuse to sulk. I am merely out of sorts. I have withstood much worse than this and I will not pretend that I haven't.

But she did not get up and she did not go back downstairs.

Someone very hot crept into bed with her a good while later, and half asleep she said, "Oh, hollyhocks," and made space for Colin even though it meant when she woke up uneasy in the middle of the night, she didn't dare get out of bed for fear of awakening him. She listened. There was no sound, not even the roar of the wind, though she could see the leafless tree branches shaking stiffly outside the window. She woke again two more times, but no one came in the night.

It wasn't until first light that Martha heard the groan of a motor coming up the driveway. Colin wasn't in the bed any more. She padded to the window. Down below, a large pickup truck was pulling up and parking. Another stranger. Another invader.

Martha threw on her trousers and blouse, picked up her shoes, and ran downstairs. She was too late to keep Anton from opening the front door.

Chapter Ten: Advent

Anton was smiling. “To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"I’m between things and thought I’d stop by," a woman's voice said, husky and abrupt. Not Seffie.

Anton opened the door wider and beckoned her in. "Between things. Well said. When people ask, I myself just tell them that I don't have to be anywhere, but “between things” is good, too. What happened to bring you here?"

"Here? You mean here with you or do you mean here here? I was cleaning up brush and dead trees around my house, and trying to get everything finished, but I was in too much of a hurry, so--who's that?" said the stranger, a young woman--taller than Anton and wider in the shoulders, with her long hair wrapped around her head in a braid.

Anton glanced around and said, "Ms. Whitaker! I did not know you had arisen! Holly, do you recollect Ms. Whitaker?"

Another former student.

Holly said, "Of course," reached out a hand and pumped Martha's up and down. Martha could feel every callus on the well-used palm that gripped hers. It was a reassuringly real sensation, and Martha felt the connection with real life tighten again. The young woman's lips were chapped and her skin was freckled. She had a scrape on her arm and another very bad scrape, one that looked angry, on the side of her neck, but she didn't move as if she was in pain. If that was her truck, she was doubtless accustomed to physical work and to pain as well.

It was a pity Martha couldn’t exactly remember her.

Anton's almost ghoulish delight in his visitor evaporated as he saw Martha's face. "Are you all right, Ms. Whitaker? You look faint. You're breathing heavily."

"I saw a truck. I didn't know who it was. I tried to get down here to help you defend the house, but your house has too many stairs."

"Like an Escher drawing," he agreed. “But you didn't have to worry. Holly is all right.” He patted Martha on the shoulder. "She's one of us."

One of us? Who was "us?" But the pat startled her out of her paralysis. "Don't pat me, and don't condescend to me. I am not your foolish maiden aunt, and I am not completely frivolous. I didn't know who it was, young man.”

Anton withdrew his hand from her arm, stung. Holly grinned, a big grin with well-tended teeth, and stuck both big hands into her trouser pockets. "Well, damn. She told you."

"Oh, do shut up, both of you," he said with uncharacteristic brevity.

"Don't pay any attention to him," said Holly. "Anton thinks it's all the Anton show. We don't have to go along with him if we don't want to, do we? I'm certainly of two minds about his intentions myself. What's the matter? Why are you staring at me?"

The young woman's face had shifted layers again, echoing the "two minds" remark. "Sorry. I'm trying to remember what you looked like when you were younger."

"I had hair that covered my face completely, and acne," said Holly cheerfully. "If you remembered me, I'd be surprised." She furrowed her brow, slumped, and made a mock-scowl at Martha, who suddenly had a recollection of a blocky, stubborn girl sitting in the back row with a curtain of hair over her square face.

"Oh! Holliday Morrison," said Martha. "You have changed. You don't look as if your refusal to master the predicate nominative has limited your advancement."

Holly grinned. "Why thank you, Ms. Whitaker," she said. "Not that I would know even now what the predicate nominative was." Martha decided it was not the time to tell her, though it was hard to restrain herself. She followed Anton into the kitchen. Colin was also in the kitchen, of course, sitting on his hindquarters on the clean table eating a boiled egg, while Mr. Miklos busied himself at the stove with a frying pan. Colin looked upat Holly and stuffed the rest of the egg in his mouth as if she were going to take it from him.

"What kind of hellcat critter is that?" said Holly. "You some kind of windigo?"

"Ngo," said Colin, and swallowed. "No," he repeated.

"He talks! Did you teach him to do that?"

"Nooo," said Colin firmly, with a scowl, before anyone else could say anything, and Holly laughed.

"Glad to meet you too," she said, reaching out her hand, and grabbing Colin’s. Holly shook it, sturdy hand enveloping the tiny knuckled fingers, though Colin pulled away half way through and looked wary. She pulled out a chair and sat in it, tipping it on its back legs and stretching her own strong legs out straight. "So tell me the mission," she said, and Martha obliged, though Anton made faces during parts of her narrative.

"You knew the guy who told you to take care of the egg?" said Holly when she finished.

"I think he must have been a former student at Bolton Hills.”

“Must have been?”

“As you have just discovered, my recollection of my former students is not always perfect.” Martha’s face was burning, but Holly laughed, a big, open-mouthed laugh that was very attractive. She used to be such a sullen girl. Miserable beyond all rationality, with no obvious reason. Miracles happened, and school was certainly not everyone's best theater.

"How long ago was he your student? If you saw a photo, would you know him? Hey, Anton, you got yearbooks?" Anton realized it was a command, put his fork down and departed again. "Don't worry about him," said Holly aside to Martha. "He'll be fine. You just have to be straight with him, that's all. What was the idea of coming here, anyway? It's not safe. You may only have one entrance to the property, but there's too many unofficial ways in. The nearest neighbor's a quarter-mile away across an electrified , and the evergreens make good cover for intruders."

"I absolutely agree with you. I think Anton puts too much trust in the alarm system."

"They all do out here. As if a bit of wire and a line to the police department will keep you from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or even a determined smash-and-grab. Some rinky-dink security company is not going to get here in time if you're attacked, anyway. So the hounds of hell are chasing after your little friend here? Have they told you why?"

"Are no words for what they want," said Mr. Miklos.

"They certainly have not said anything so far," said Martha. "Are they still after you, Colin?"

"Yes," he answered, abstracted because he was face-first in a piece of buttered toast, trying to eat it from the center out.

"That is one silly little voice you have there," said Holly. Colin looked offended. He climbed off the table with his toast, his eyebrows rucked up like an unmade bed and the corners of his mouth pulled down, with crumbs sticking to him all over.

"Throw me a towel," said Martha, going after him. "Butter on the expensive upholstery in this house is not a good idea." Colin screamed with injured dignity as she wiped at him, and he beat at her hands.

"No," he begged. "because no no no." She scrubbed grimly.

"Hey, no need to manhandle the gremlin," said Holly, tipping her chair forward with a thump and standing up as if she was coming after Martha, who frowned at her but let him go. Holly had not seemed protective of Colin before.

"No handle," Colin said with a sigh too deep for his small lungs, and gravely passed the towel over his furry arms and chest. He handed it back to Martha, who silently conceded defeat for the moment. Colin was acquiring quite a vocabulary, and combining the words in different forms and in different ways.

Anton came in with the yearbooks, and Martha sat down with them, their glossy pages still smelling of old printer's ink, while he and Holly vanished went out.

"Young ladies should not be dressed like workmen," said Mr. Miklos gloomily, as if it was all right for older gentlemen.

"Oh, she's fine. I know the type," said Martha absent-mindedly. "She's the flip side of Anton's other young friend, Seffie. Today Holly has one beat-up landscaping truck, next year she'll have two, and in ten years she'll have a fleet of trucks and wood chippers and be going to a personal trainer to get some exercise. Bolton Hills produces a certain number of tree surgeons and cabinet-makers along with the attorneys and financial analysts. Like him." She pointed to one of the well-groomed faces in the yearbook. "Jeffrey. I saw his sign the other day. He does historically accurate renovation contracting. None of them would ever dream of becoming a plumber or an electrician, mind you, that would be too hard for them to get into, but they'll climb trees or drive nails for a while and somehow they end up owning a business and employing people, and sending their children to Bolton Hills. Money and privilege come in handy even if you’re not going to work in finance."

"Young ladies should resemble young ladies," said Mr. Miklos. "Nonetheless."

“You're talking like my great grandmother. Young ladies don't exist any more, not in the sense you mean." She closed the last book. "I taught a good two thirds of the seniors in these books, but I don't see the boy from the other night here at all. I was so sure I knew him. What are we doing here, anyway? Why are we sitting around? Mr. Miklos, you said your wife will not be expecting you, but surely overnight would be a problem?"

"She does not require my services at the moment," he said with finality, and it was clear he did not expect the conversation to go any further.

Martha put the book aside, standing up, and felt a little touch of vertigo, but she pretended she didn't feel it and it went away. It was important to be stern with oneself.

"Heads up!" shouted Anton, and came running in. "Taxi in the driveway!" They rushed out to the side windows and looked out over the yew hedges to see a Suburban Cab Company car pull up and a driver get out, a rumpled man in a suit and tie. It took a moment for Martha to recognize him. He glared haughtily up at the house, and the watchers shrank back instinctively.

Holly said, "You didn't call a cab?"

"Do not be absurd," said Anton.

"Oh, shoot," said Holly. "Doesn't look good. You say they're easy to fend off, though?"

"It's as if all they want to do is get to Colin, and we’re objects in the way,” said Martha. “Though that elderly lady pushed Anton, and the mail carrier was rather violent."

Like a kettle-drum, the front door thudded deliberately, the knocks spaced far apart. "This gentlemen is exerting quite a bit of force, I'd say," said Anton. "Perhaps they are getting stronger."

Holly said, "I'm going out the side door and see if I can chase him away," and took off.

"I don’t recommend it,” Anton called after her, but she was gone. “There’s a window right over the door. I'm going to drop things on him instead.” Anton turned toward the stairs.

"Anton, No! I know him. He’s a very influential person," said Martha. “His name is Mr. Ray.”

"Undoubtedly," said Anton. "But from the sound of it, he’s trying to break down my front door." He headed up the stairs at a lope.

Colin was crouched on the table, his wide eyes reflecting the light, and he was shaking.

"You are safe here," she said to him.

"No."

Nobody was listening to a thing she said. It was clear they were all as pigheaded as they could be.

She went to the front door, because that was where the disturbance was, and nobody else had gone there. She could hear Holly yelling outside. She saw to one side an elegant low bureau with claw feet, and she tried to drag it over in front of the door, but it wouldn’t move. She went in search of something with mass that was more movable, and found a huge urn, planted with a fig tree that looked artificial but wasn't. It was very heavy indeed, and when she started to drag it, she realized it would score tracks in the mirror-polished hardwood planking of the floor. Finding a tiny Oriental carpet, she tried to lever the urn onto it. Her hands were too weak. She wasn't used to thinking of herself as weak.

The booming abruptly ceased, and she heard a voice outside. "Go away!" said Holly. "Shoo! Avaunt! Avaunt! You fiends below. Go home!"

"That’s Poe. They teach a good deal of Poe in tenth grade, I don't know why,” said Martha, rocking the urn with both hands.

"Poe?" said Colin, who had followed her.

"Edgar Allan Poe, dear. A very gloomy gentleman he was. Rather thumpety-thumpety. He liked writing about death."

Colin shook his head emphatically. “No death.”

Meanwhile, Holly was still yelling at the interlopers. There was a clatter and a scuffle. And silence. And then the knocking began again.

"Holly?" Martha called . No answer. Thud. Thud. Boom. Now the knocks were serious. The door shook. Boom. A loud crack from the door, as if Mr. Ray had used himself like a battering ram. Boom. Then a crash--the sound of something large breaking--and a triumphant yell from upstairs. The booming stopped.

Another tinkling crash. "Got you!" yelled Anton. "Go on. Go away!" A further crash, farther away from the door. Then nothing.

Martha realized she was straddling the urn on the carpet, holding a golf umbrella like a lance. Colin was in front of her, as if he were protecting her, instead of the other way around.

Anton galloped down the main staircase, sliding down the last half on the banister, his face still gloomy but radiating satisfaction, like a mortician showing off his best work. "That got him," he said. "He shot off like a rocket." Holly reappeared, with a new red mark on her forehead and a rip in her overall, looking glum. "You all right?"

"Been better," said Holly. "He hit me with a pry bar, and that first lamp you dropped caught me on the shoulder."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Why on earth is the urn in front of the door?"

"I was trying to block the door," said Martha feebly.

Anton laughed a laugh like a movie monster, and said, "Let's get you some ice for that shoulder," to Holly. Martha dragged the urn and the little Oriental carpet back where she found them. She didn't want to know what Anton had been dropping on the cabdrivers. Probably antiques. Costly ones.

Oh, lord, she really was not up to this. Everything she did to fight off the attackers had been inadequate. She clearly might as well stand and flap her hands at them, or wave a handkerchief at them and faint. It wouldn't do. She would have to prepare herself with some kind of weapon. She gestured with the umbrella, but its folds flapped, so she put it back.

She said to Colin, "We will let the young people protect us. That is, after all, the job of the young, isn't it?" He jumped up into her arms. "Oof! You weigh too much to be doing that!" Funny, now that she looked at him, he was bigger again, as if she had seen him first through the wrong end of the telescope and was only now seeing him straight on.

Back in the library, she put Colin down. He ignored Anton's bestiaries, and he seemed to be finished with the linguistics textbooks, for he trotted to another part of the room and scaled the shelves there. She wandered around, and found with interest an entire shelf devoted to grammar and usage, some of it not even old. How endless, eternally renewed, and futile were the labors of the would-be guardians of English!  Samuel Johnson had expressed something of the sort.

There was a trill of inquiry, and she jumped because her mind had drifted off into a shifting place full of language. Colin had come back to her. "Grammar," she said to him, waving at the shelf. "The more you know, the less you know," and chuckled. He sat on his haunches and cocked his head. "Human beings speak grammatically from the beginning," she said. “A few theorists believe it’s innate.”

"Grammar?" he said, and he meant his one-word sentence to be sarcastic. She stared at him. Apparently he had opinions now, along with the rudiments of language.

"And again I ask you, how do you happen to know about linguistic theory?" said Anton, who apparently had been standing nearby watching her. "I didn't think it was part of teacher preparation coursework."

Martha took a breath before trusting herself to reply. “I have picked up a few nuggets of information here and there, you know.”

His face flushed slightly. "Of course. Of course. Holly's fine, in case you were worried."

"I assumed so," said Martha. "Are we going to drop things out of windows again the next time someone comes to the door? We should arrange a signal so the rest of us don't get hit by your missiles. Friendly fire."

"Holly is parking her truck across the end of the driveway," he said, ignoring her and going to the window. "That way, they'll have to come in on foot."

"Doesn’t that mean our car is parked in as well, then?"

"Oh," he said, as if she was being unfair, and he went out again. She appeared to have been swept up in some form of military campaign, with Anton and Holly the generals. Mr. Miklos was probably a noncommissioned officer. Martha and Colin were the local villagers, being protected for their own good.

Colin grunted, as if expressing an opinion. She shrugged her shoulders. "Yes, I was abrupt with him. I don't like questions which start, 'How do you happen to know?' They imply that an eighth grade English teacher acquired all her knowledge in eighth grade herself, and never went any further."

Colin turned his back on her and climbed up to the grammar shelf, touching the spines of the books one by one with his long-fingered hands. Then he gave up and went higher, scaling the book faces like a gecko. She asked, "How do you know which books you want if you can't talk? Can you read somehow? Or are you channeling some sort of vibration? Smelling the essence of a book, as if it were perfume?"

He stopped at one of the spines and tapped it. "This."

"You don't want Fromkin. I think that was a feral child study."

"No?"

"No."

He tapped the book next to it and looked at her.

"That one's about a chimpanzee. Do you want something about acquiring a second language, or about learning language from scratch?" He mimed scratching himself, and she laughed. "My dear, you already know language if you understood that. Don't shake your head at me. I'm sure you know what you don’t know. I see Gleason, up there, but I think Gleason would be far too long and overly comprehensive. How about, let's see--Oh! There's Lightbown and Spada! It's a short review. Yes. That one."

He braced himself and pulled.

"Ms. Whitaker?" said Anton. As she turned to answer him, Colin and the book landed on her head and she sat down hard.

"Oh, damn," said Anton, and came to help her up. "I'm awfully sorry. Friendly fire, indeed. I seem to be hitting my friends right and left. Are you angry with me, Ms. Whitaker?"

"I am a trifle cross at the moment, understandably, but it is with the cosmos itself in general as well as with those in my immediate vicinity,” she said wearily.

He brushed the book fragments off her, ignoring what she was saying. "Do you need ice too? And seriously, how did you know about all those books just now?”

"It was not part of teacher preparation," she said primly.

His eyes narrowed. He looked down the arched nose. "I said I was sorry," he said dourly.

"That was a good beginning, and now I would like you to stop condescending to me," she said firmly.

"I was not, in fact, condescending to anyone."

"Why shouldn't I know something about language theory? Because I'm an eighth grade teacher? I know my students make fun of me behind my back. It’s a time-honored middle school tradition and I have never seen fit to interfere with it, but I will thank you not to carry that tradition into adulthood."

"Don't be so defensive! Come on, now--"

"'Don't be defensive?' That statement is the classic tactic of the bully, and I'll thank you not to repeat it," she said. "People are entitled to be defensive when they are attacked." He had that cold face people got when they had decided you were being irrational. Her mother had that face often near the end.

Holly said from the door, "Ms. Whitaker was always funny about grammar. The moment you thought you got it, she told you about the exceptions. No surprise. Not to interrupt, but can I borrow your car keys, Ms. Whitaker? I want to re-park our cars so we can get out if we need to. Good suggestion of yours."

"It’s just that I once knew a good bit about linguistics, because that was my graduate study field, though it was a long time ago, I didn’t finish, and I've forgotten most of it by now. I apologize, Anton. Perhaps I'm being petty. It has been a difficult few days, and you have tried to be helpful." She pulled her keys out and handed them to Holly.

"Oh, don't let him off the hook like that, he's not nearly as sensitive as you think.” Holly left.

Colin yanked at Martha's pants leg and held the book up at her. "Yes. In a moment," she told him.

"What is your little monster trying to do?" said Anton. "Do you have any idea? You really went to graduate school?"

She decided not to expect him to apologize properly. "I did. Once upon a time. Not for long. As for this young person, I believe he's trying to learn how to speak," she said. Colin grabbed her leg with both hands and hauled, tipping her off balance, and she sat down suddenly again. He slapped the book into her lap.

"Aren't you hypothesizing prior to the evidence?"

"Yes, I'm guessing, if that's what you mean. All I know is he seems to want to invent speech all over again. Or--I don't know what he wants. All right, all right, I'll read," she said to Colin.

Colin nodded and pointed. "Because, yes, speak.”

Some time later, she heard a clatter. Then she heard footsteps approaching, slow ones. "What was it this time?" she called, but no one answered. The door swung open. A boy in a heavy sweater and a long knit scarf walked into the library and headed toward Martha, holding an open back-pack in one hand. "Oh," said Martha. "Oh, you're back."

It was the boy who had told her to keep the egg warm, the one who had knocked at her car window. He wasn’t smiling now.

"Are you coming to take the egg back again?" she said. "He's not so easy to carry now."

He didn't answer, didn't even give her a look. Instead, he crouched down and reached for Colin, asleep in Martha's lap. But he smelled of snow, or mud, or something else damp and cold, and he had no expression, none at all. Martha gasped and slapped his hands away, and he rocked and spun, a little off balance, but turned back to her, still reaching. He still looked familiar. But his mouth wasn’t tucked in any more. There was no smile. No charm. He was cold and sad. No, he was tired, as tired as a human being could be and still be standing upright.

“Help! Help! Help!” she screamed.

There were scurrying feet in the hall, and Holly ran and grabbed the boy by the arm, efficiently wrestling him into a grip that should have hurt. He ignored her and kept reaching for Colin. Holly yelled. Anton burst in. It took the two of them to drag the kicking, biting boy out of the room. The door slammed with a boom like the end of the world. She heard muffled swearing, and then another slam, far off.

She sat feeling as desolate and abandoned as a grave in a desert half buried under sand. Something about that young face had sucked all the life out of her. It had been the exact opposite of everything she loved about teaching. She liked seeing her students awaken and become interested. This boy had gone the opposite way. When he first peered into her car, he had been humorous and alive, and he had acted with purpose. Now, it was as if he had turned away from life and joy, and folded himself up and away. And he had tried to take Colin back, when he had been the one who had left the creature with her for safekeeping in the first place.

Colin. Where was he? Oh. Colin was up on top of one of the bookcases.

It took Martha ten minutes to persuade him to come down again; he kept shaking his head at her mutely.

“He looks like a middle schooler."

"That was the young man who left Colin with me," said Martha, and then she began to cough again. She managed to get out, "He could talk before--" but that was it. She was absolutely barking, her chest seizing up, and then she fell forward on her hands and knees. She felt as if something was rummaging through her with rusty tools.

Mr. Miklos appeared out of nowhere with a glass of water, which she could not drink, and also cookies for Colin, and he left behind him an odor that took some time to dissipate. Holly thumped Martha on the back, which didn’t help but Martha couldn’t say so.

She heard Anton saying over her coughs, “It doesn't seem to be perspiration,” and it took her a moment to realize he was talking about Mr. Miklos, not her. She could make less and less sense of what she was thinking. It was like reading Dewey or another one of those theorists everyone loved. The content, the meaning, was leaching out of it. It was like denim soaking in strong bleach. She tried to take a deep breath, but her chest hurt too much, so she just stopped. That was better. She started to feel much more relaxed.

Colin, said, "No. No. No.”

She gasped, startled. It was a most unpleasant gasp, and it felt as if something was being shoved through her throat and into her lungs.

She wasn’t coughing any more. She couldn’t.

She looked up, breathing against her will. Anton and Holly were leaning out the windows, peering through the increasing dusk at two patient figures in the yard, as if she had not been coughing at all. "This is giving me the creeps," said Holly. "I thought you said they were running away and not coming back, but now they're hanging around."

"It's getting dark," said Anton. "They're waiting to attack. They'll get a group together and storm the place."

"No storms," said Mr. Miklos sadly. "Just wear us away like steady wind."

Holly made a face at him. "You got any more nuggets you want to share with us, big guy? Or you are you happy being a gigantic room anti-air-freshener?"

There was the scream of machinery outside, of someone making a tight turn on a slick road. A car motor being abused by its gears howled up the driveway and screeched to a stop out front. Everyone ran for their positions, but there was no thump on the door.

Instead, the doorbell rang, and rang again. "Open the door!" said a woman's voice, and Anton trotted down the main stairs looking delighted, yanking the door open. "Seffie," he said. "I thought you had left me!"

"There’s all kinds of cars in your driveway." Seffie Lawler said, sweeping in, ignoring the hand he reached out to her. She glanced at the others, dismissed them, and said, "Anton, I'm bored. Come play," waving her purse at him with the other hand.

"I am rather busy right now," Anton said. "You left the Jag running, by the way."

"Picky, picky. I borrowed another car. You're not any busier than I am. We don't have much time. We have to go out. We had a deal."

"I'm sorry, I can't," said Anton.

"Anton! I come all the way back here to get you, and you won't come?"

He stood in the doorway, no more animated than a wax statue, his face sad. "I just can't, Seffie. You know there's something I have to do. Stay here. Stay with me."

"There is no way I am wasting my precious time moldering in your parents' catacomb with you. You promised we'd get to hang out together, but you didn't say it would be boring."

"We will have all the time in the world to hang out. Just stay here for a little bit, and when it's over, I promise--"

"I'm done with your promises." Her face was even more vivid than before, almost glowing with annoyance. Anton said nothing, just stared at her mournfully. "Oh, you can go to hell all by yourself, Anton." She swung around and marched away to her new car, which was a BMW.

Martha was impressed by her ability to sweep out as if wearing a full train and hoopskirts. The door of the car slammed immediately, and the sound of rubber being pointedly peeled faded into the distance.

"Seffie Lawler?" said Holly. "Seffie goddamn Lawler?"

"Yes, well," said Anton, looking to one side.

"But Seffie Lawler? Are you planning to do the until-death-do-you-part bit?"

"Now, Holly. Be sensible. We complement one another in a fashion. And my parents respect her family. It keeps them from nagging."

"Your parents think money is holy water, and washes off the nasty."

"As if your father didn't have money," he said furiously. "Right. Of course. Now I see much more clearly."

"At least my mom knows how to wipe her own butt."

"The way that young lady drives, she's going to get herself killed," said Martha, who felt that an awkward interruption was probably a good idea right around now.

Holly stared at her, shook her head, and stalked off. Everyone around Martha thought they knew so much more than she did about everything, except possibly about English grammar.

Chapter Eleven: National Truckers Day

Lunch was silent, haunted by the awareness of two figures standing on the back lawn. The meal was a concoction of sharp cheese, artichokes, pasta, and unidentifiable vegetables shrouded in a pale herb sauce, and spiced insidiously by the unforgettable aroma of Mr. Miklos, even though he ate standing up on the other side of the room. Colin ate only the pasta, plain.

After lunch, they all gathered in the television room, because it was comfortable. Anton casually flicked on the sea-sized TV and muted it, as if turning on the lights in an aquarium tank. Holly, her hair yanked back in a pony-tail, had taken off her coveralls. Underneath, she had painter's pants and a flannel shirt. She seemed to have more energy than the others, yet she was even less inclined to act. "We should wait for the right time.”

Anton regarded her with narrowed eyes. “And when exactly is that? Do you plan to entertain yourself in the meanwhile, like Seffie?”

“It’s a choice. Some people treat life like it’s an endless party.”

“She’s not—“

“She is, and she does,” said Holly flatly.  “Look, I know she makes your heart go all fluttery, but that’s because she’s your polar opposite. You treat life like a fancy funeral. You need to face facts and recognize the inevitable. Funerals end and everyone else goes on.”

“I am a serious person, I admit, but I do share with her a certain, shall I say, vitality. Or should I say we live purposeful lives.”

Holly did not say, “How dare you,” because she was not that kind of person, but if her eyes had been knives Anton would have been a pile of stew meat on a plate.

Martha felt the conversation needed to be headed away from Holly’s life choices. "These people certainly seem purposeful,” she said loudly and they looked at her as if she had appeared out of nowhere.

"Purposeful like old movie zombies. The Resident Evil movies.' Or 'Shaun of the Dead,' or the Resident Evil movies,” Anton said after a pause.

“What do you have against zombies, exactly?” said Holly. “Their refusal to stay dead?”

It was Anton’s turn to glare.

“Those aren’t old movies,” protested Martha, and they laughed kindly, because to them, anything older than four years was an archeological artifact. She subsided, recognizing they were not in the mood for a lesson about perspectives. Zombie movies might explain why the young people seemed so unfazed by the concept of blank-eyed people grabbing at them.

Martha found it very difficult to listen to them talk with the TV on, even though the sound was off. All that text blinking on and off, moving pictures inside other moving pictures, like great glowing blue-and-red jellyfishes down in the vasty deeps where only bathyscaphes could go. It was a geometric jellyfish, a pile-of-Christmas-presents of the glow-in-the-dark variety. Yes. A Christmas present, holding mystery and promise, and vast possibility, and ecstatic satisfaction of all desires, up until the moment you actually opened the thing and found it was an end-table book about trains or a pair of maroon socks embroidered with smiling cats.

She had stopped listening to the conversation.

“Contains information,” said Mr. Miklos to her, she thought, or perhaps she was dreaming it.

After a while, the television stories repeated themselves, like a canon: Winter weather, a downed plane, misplaced people, car accidents, Christmas celebrations. The anchors looked too young to be on television.

Bad things happened to young people, too. Martha even knew young people who died. It happened. Two Thanksgivings ago, Wilhelmina Anderson, 8th grade, hit by a truck. Two years before that, Luke Benson, brain cancer. Artemis Demetrios, from anorexia, though she left school a year before she died. There was something about Artemis she wanted to remember, though it didn't matter. Lyle Johnson, in college. Bobby Siegel's sister, too, and the fourth grade boy with meningitis, and of course, Tripp Burgoyne, dying right now of brain cancer, after all those years of lost hair, parental hopes, spasmodic school attendance, and fatuous praise. Nice boy. Pleasant sense of humor, if appropriately immature. Tripp was being gradually sanctified by the school community, and once he finally expired he would become an utter angel in memory. He would have a building or an award named after him.

How morbid she was being. She gave a deep sigh, as if she had been holding her breath.

"Ms. Whitaker?" said Anton, apparently for the third time from his tone. “You don’t look well.”

"Oh! I'm sorry. I don’t feel well.”

“Welcome to the party,” he said. “You were staring at the screen.”

“I don't watch television news much," she said. "Do you suppose anyone else is encountering zombies? I don't see anything about it."

He glanced at the screen, surprised to notice it on. "Oh, probably. There are enough people in the world that the odds are in favor of it. But as I was saying, Holly and I will stand watch. Why don't you go read to the chimaera? If we need you, we'll come get you. You too, Mr. Miklos."

"Will wash the dishes," said Mr. Miklos and stalked out.

Martha got up and left, while behind her Holly and Anton sat and argued.

She read to Colin. Once she was interrupted by a crash outside, a crash that involved breaking glass, but it was followed by articulate cries of triumph in familiar voices, so she didn't get up to go look. She kept on reading.

"I can't do a single line more," she finally said to Colin, clapping shut The Wind in the Willows.

He opened the book to the same page. "Read," he said in an intense, urgent voice.

"You read. I can't."

"Can't read?"

"My brain is simply not up to the task at the moment."

"I can't read," he said sadly, looking at the illustration, which was by Arthur Rackham and too gloomy for the subject matter.

"Why not?"

He blinked at her in the cozy light. The fur on his face was close and fine, almost invisible, she realized, and the wide flat nose was developing a bridge. The large eyes now had whites, and the teeth had become blunter since yesterday. He was about the size of a bobcat now, and his legs had grown longer too. "I just can't read," he repeated.

Sentence structure. Conjugation. Adverbs. He could already do more than many eighth graders thought they could. "Do you want to learn to read?" she said, and sighed as he nodded happily.

In the distance, she realized she was hearing the groaning of a big truck changing gears, and a bellow as it came up a hill, getting nearer. In the hall, she paused to listen again, and with a chill realized the sound was getting closer, and closer, and deeper, and slower. Then there was the shriek and hiss of air-brakes, so close she could have been in a truck-stop parking lot, and then there was a groaning crash that went on for a while, shaking the floor under her and rattling the windows.

She ran, stumbling.

Downstairs in the foyer, the brass-and-glass ceiling light fixture was draped over the windshield of a full-sized truck cab, shiny white and with gleaming chrome, its headlights blazing. It looked like a dragon's head, or a sea monster's, thrust inside the body of the house as if questing for delicacies. Inside the cab, a wide man, wearing a Disney T-shirt and a dark windbreaker, was shoving at the driver's side door, trying to get out. He paid no attention to the people on the stairs. The engine was idling, though "idle" was a word too small for the tide of noise pouring into the room.

"My parents would go crazy if they were here," shouted Anton over the noise with gloomy satisfaction, standing well away from the monster's head.

“You have to admire them, finding someone with a semi.” Holly had her hands in her pockets, watching the truck driver fruitlessly work at his door handle.

Anton said, “This is the suburbs. Everybody drives.”

The driver looked very focused.  It was the gentleman who looked like Santa Claus, of course. Of course.

The truck took up the entire hole it had made, and was surrounded by a splintered crown of two-by-fours, wall-board, fieldstone facing, and pink insulation. Next to the door a small red light was blinking steadily in the corner of a keypad. "The security alarm," said Martha, and pointed.

Anton said, "Well, we don't have to call 911, then. The police will be here pretty soon. They can deal with him." He turned and headed upstairs, leaving Martha looking at the truck driver, who was undoubtedly not speaking or even looking at them. No, he was looking at Colin, even though he couldn’t get out of the cab. Colin showed his teeth and loped for the stairs. She scurried after Anton, her heart sick.

From the upper window she could see the truck was a tanker, and its gleaming silver tank was almost at right angles to the cab and tipped slightly, so that one set of wheels was off the ground. Someone was standing just behind it, illuminated by the red tail-lights: one of the ladies in print dresses who had been in Martha's classroom. The lady still didn't have a coat on, but her Cadillac was parked just behind her, with the other lady at the wheel. Up the driveway, and then swerving onto the grass to get around the Jag still parked there, came a squat white truck with green letters that said, "True Green – ChemLawn." It ground to a stop behind the Cadillac and the driver, in uniform, got out and went to the back of the truck. It was the wrong uniform for ChemLawn, because it was a postal carrier’s uniform, but the woman who was wearing it had indeed been a mail carrier the last time Martha had seen her, so perhaps that was all right.

"Gonna fertilize that lawn," said Holly.

"I think we're in big trouble," Anton said, hands in pockets.

The snowbound scene beneath them began to flicker and flash, and took on a party atmosphere which Martha suddenly realized was produced by the lights of a police car coming up the drive.

"Open the window and call out to the police,” said Martha.

"They won't hear us," said Anton.

"It is far too noisy," she agreed doubtfully.

The policeman got out of his car, started toward the front door, surveying the scene, and looked up.

"Oh, dear, it's Officer Bancroft," she said. She waved halfheartedly. His expression was blank and severe.

Three more patrol cars slipped up the driveway, lights swiveling. Martha's mother had never rated more than one police car.

Quietly, with efficiency, the officers stepped out of their cars, leaving the motors running, the lights revolving, and the doors open, and they all stood looking at the house, arms folded, legs straddled. One of the officers walked up to the front door and knocked, then peered in the front window. Another one went around behind the house. Martha heard a door open and footsteps inside, but none of her companions went to look. The feet went up the stairs and down the hall.

“Should we—“ started Martha.

“No,” said Anton, not moving.

The burglar alarm stopped flashing.

The policeman came back from behind the house. Then they all started laughing and chatting among themselves. They got into their cars and sat, and after a few minutes, they put their lights on and drove away, leaving Officer Bancroft behind, jotting something down on his tablet.

"How very odd," said Martha. "You'd really better go out and speak to him, Anton," and Anton laughed and folded his arms. She was even more bewildered by his inactivity. “We cannot stay here. We have to act. The house has been breached.”

“Act,” said Anton. “Act how?”

“Do something,” said Martha with an effort. “Put on our coats, go outside, and speak to someone, at the very least.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Holly.

Martha took a deep breath and chivvied them all downstairs, gathering Mr. Miklos and Colin and helping them find their coats.

The truck was still idling in the entrance and the big man, blank-faced, was still fiddling with his cab door. Martha glanced at him and decided he was not, at present, despite the tragedy of his predicament, especially relevant. She got Anton to show her a side door, and they came outside into the cold, Colin in her arms, shivering. Officer Bancroft was still sitting writing.

"This is the son of the house," said Martha to him through his window.

Bancroft didn’t react.

“Anton, can you call your parents and tell them to talk to the police?”

“Call them?” said Anton. “With what?”

“Don’t you have a cell phone? Everyone has a cell phone. Though I seem to have left mine at home somewhere, now that I think of it.”

Anton was as silent as a statue, looking at her with the same tired expression as the one on the boy in the library. “Ms. Whitaker,” he said slowly, glacially, like a half-speed audiobook. “You really need to understand something—“

“TV van,” said Holly.

“What?” said Anton.

"That. That’s a TV van.” It was a white van with writing on the side and a huge dish on the roof, and it had turned into the driveway and headed straight across the lawn.

"TV van?” said Anton, briefly more animated. "They’re ruining the lawn. Dad paid good money for that turf."

A young woman slid out of the passenger side of the van, wearing sneakers and a wrap dress. Martha recalled seeing her on one of the local news channels, one of the very young ones, a cheerful and perky young person who did local interest stories about hospitals and fatal diseases. The woman’s expression was indeed fixed in a cheerful smile, but it didn’t change as she began to walk into the drive. The young boy and the Mr. Ray started to shove their way through the hedge, and the two ladies and the mail carrier joined up with them. They advanced slowly up the drive toward Martha and her friends.

Officer Bancroft closed his door and started his car.

"We’re not safe. The house is penetrated. We need to leave now," said Martha. “We can go in my car. Come on. All of you. No nonsense. Hustle now. You too, Mr. Miklos.”

“I’m getting my truck,” Holly said, and Martha nodded curtly. The rest of them piled into Martha's car, heating it with their breath and misting the windows from the inside. Bancroft pulled down the driveway ahead of them, and she heard Holly’s truck rev and backfire.

"Where are you planning to go?" Anton asked.

"I will follow the officer to the police station, I suppose," Martha said, doubtfully. “It will at least be safer there.”

"No safety,” said Mr. Miklos.

Martha followed Bancroft anyway. She kept looking in the rear view mirror, but no lights were following, as if the invaders of Anton’s driveway were too disorganized to get in their vehicles immediately.

She had never actually been to the station, and wasn’t quite sure where it was. The officers who responded to her mother's calls always came to her house, looked around, stood up, and talked to her mother, and then they only talked to her once they realized her mother didn’t make any sense. Meanwhile their cars sat out front with the lights slowly spinning, illuminating the neighborhood with shame. But they never took Martha to the station, no matter what her mother said to them.

The officers always left with reassurances, with advice, with barely concealed impatience. Her mother was wasting their time, which they preferred to spend setting speed traps and arresting people they thought didn’t belong in Bolton Hills, but they wouldn't hold her mother’s calls against her, especially if she didn't do it again too soon.

Martha recognized the building now when she saw it, though she hadn’t actually known it was the police station. It had been on that corner on Whitman Pike since she was a little girl, a quarter mile from the supermarket. It wasn’t really a building now, though. It was half torn down to make way for new construction. In the winter darkness, excavators and bulldozers were huddled around its remains as if they were using the carcass to keep warm.

The police offices themselves were in three temporary trailers off to one side, surrounded by hurricane fencing and lit by spotlights. Martha parked on the street, Holly pulling up behind, and they all went inside and stood uncomfortably in a closed entry-room with a desk behind a window. Martha rang a bell, but no one came out.

She turned and looked at her companions. They were tired and passive, even Colin. It seemed she was once again expected to act. She pulled a door open and peered through.

It looked like an insurance office in need of a paint job: partitions, tropical plants made of fabric, rolling chairs, chrome-armed sofas with square vinyl cushions, and fake-wood desks. The walls had scuff-marks in odd places, the same way schools did. It smelled of disinfectant. And it was very warm. There was a space heater under Officer Bancroft's desk, aimed at his knees while he ran his fingers through his hair. He methodically tapped on his tablet.

Another police officer came in and sat on Bancroft's desk. Bancroft looked up at the other officer and shook his head.

"It must be a busy time of year for you," said Martha to the officers with an effort. "With the bad weather and the holiday parties and all."

They did not comment. They didn’t even react. There was an uneasy silence. Officer Bancroft stood up abruptly and left, and the other officer got up and wandered into another room.

"Hmph," said Martha. "So we are still inaudible. Invisible. What shall we do? We should not go back to Anton’s house."

“Do you get it now?” Anton asked.

“I prefer not to say ‘get it,’” she said. “I understand that the world is peculiar, but it is not the first time the world has behaved oddly and will not be the last. One must face facts. That’s all.”

“You almost make sense,” said Anton. “You always almost made sense. I thought maybe it was just me, and you knew what you were talking about, but you don’t have any secret knowledge about anything.”

She looked at him, but he wasn’t being sarcastic. He seemed lost. “I am willing to agree with you that I am a bit confused at the moment,” she admitted. “But surely your house is no refuge now, either.”

Holly said, "Let’s go to my place. We can make a plan. It’ll buy us some time."

Anton shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't matter where we go, really. They'll find us. They'll get us. My object is to be in the right place at the right time when they do."

“Mine as well,” interjected Holly.

Anton and she glared at one another, and Colin’s breath hissed loudly, as if he was the only one breathing in the room. He was looking back and forth between the two.

"We will protect you, Colin,” Martha said to him. “Or at least I will. I promise you that. It’s a habit of mine, to protect people who need protection. Don’t look at me like that,” she told Anton. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Yes. Let’s go to Holly’s house.”

Chapter Twelve: Assumption Day

When they pulled up outside, Martha turned off her car and walked up to Holly’s truck to talk to her, because Holly’s house was not the refuge she had been envisioning.

"I am not so sure this was such a good idea," said Martha, regarding the little home with a dubious eye. "It seems isolated." The tiny Tudor-framed house, encircled by a high stone wall, was perched on a precipitous wooded hill, up a winding drive, just past heavy iron gates, on the way to a house that had once been the mansion of the estate and now, according to a big brightly painted sign out front, was condos. Holly’s home had clearly once been the gatehouse.

“That’s its strength,” said Holly, grinning. “Nobody around to bother us.”

“There are lights on in that big building,” said Martha, pointing, and then she realized the parking lot of the condo building was empty.

“Automatic timers. I don’t think anyone has moved in yet. Anyway, everyone in the tri-state area is sitting in front of a roaring fire in a cabin in the mountains somewhere," said Holly. "They’re sure not here employing tree surgeons. You may not like the location, Ms. Whitaker, but at least it's fortified."

"What was it you had to protect yourself from?" asked Anton, who had likewise gotten out.

"My parents paid for the wall because I'm on my own. I'm not in school. I work for a living," said Holly. "Like your parents' house isn't a gated community all by itself."

"A hit! A palpable hit!" said Anton cheerfully, and there was a silence.

Holly pushed a button on her dashboard and a wide gate swung open in the wall, while a green garage door in the side of the house rolled up smoothly. Inside, the ground floor of the building was a darkened barn-like cavern that smelled of diesel fuel and old grass cuttings. The walls were hung with tools, wires, and bicycles, and there was room for another pick-up truck, an open trailer filled lawn machines, and a huge wood-chipper on wheels, with just enough space for Holly's truck to squeeze in.

Martha parked her car outside, between the wall and the garage. They all piled out, and Holly led the way up some dusty unfinished wooden stairs going up the back wall. She opened a door in the ceiling and they emerged into a large warm space. Colin jumped out of Martha's arms as Holly flipped a switch.

The light revealed an upper heaven to the underworld of the garage below. The wide planks of the original floors glowed with varnished radiance. The sturdy walls, painted a flaxen white, supported deep casement window bays curtained against the night in white, while above their heads arched thick old beams as lovingly finished and lustrous as the floors. It was all one huge space, though on the two end walls were high lofts with wooden steps leading up to them. Under the lofts were bays of shelves with couches facing them. Photographs nestled on one of the shelves, snapshots in dark frames.

"Whoa," said Anton, turning in place with his head back. "You do all this work yourself?"

"Who else?" said Holly.

"Well, I know your parents gave you the place," he said in an injured tone. "I didn't know if they fixed it up for you too."

"They dumped this carriage house on me when they sold the big house to the developers," she said. "They didn't want to bother fixing it up and the developers were just going to tear it down. I said I'd take it on. I spent my college fund and all last summer cleaning this up."

"Where are they now?"

“Hanging around,” she said flatly. “Hanging on. Getting on my nerves. If your parents were like mine, you’d be agreeing with me.”

Anton looked away.

Holly added hastily, "I'm wiped out. You must be too. There's couches for the guys, and Ms. Whitaker, you can have the far loft bed--it has sheets on it already."

"I don't see a TV," said Anton.

"Far wall," she said, pointing at what Martha had assumed was a picture window concealed behind long curtains.

"You have cable? I want to check the news," said Anton. "See if anyone I know is on it."

Holly gave a sharp bark of a laugh and went into the kitchen, breaking out canned soup and bagged salad from a refrigerator too big for her, and suddenly they were in exactly the same situation as in Anton’s house, settling in like nomads who had pitched a tent and were here until the weather changed. Anton and Holly began talking about a video game on Steam, which was a remake of a vintage 90s one, and which involved, apparently, death and a very primitive conception of the end times. They were both making rather strong assertions and Martha got the feeling they weren’t actually arguing about the game. Mr. Miklos sat looking at them, slowly shaking his head from time to time.

Martha was too horribly tired to debate eschatology with college-age people, though certain lines from Milton did occur to her." I am going to go to sleep now," she said severely, "And I suggest you all do the same. It is late." There was a thud, and they all jumped, but it was just Colin, pulling a book out of the top shelf under the far loft. "And I am not reading that to you right now, either," she snapped at the creature, passing him on the way up the stairs. She didn't look behind her to see if he was going to plead with her.

The loft was a sturdy cage of varnished two-by-fours, and the bed, when she reached it, was a foam mattress on a pine-slatted box. The smell of sawdust and varnish still lingered, and the thin coverlet was the kind selling for thirty dollars at the household megastore. Holly's college fund had been spent carefully. Martha sat on the edge of the bed and pried her shoes off with her toes, then fell backward into the center of the quilt, uncaring. She felt as if she was a doll in someone's hand-made dollhouse, and half expected the lamp on the bed-table to be a fake when she reached to turn it off. The dousing of the light had no effect on the illumination of the room from the main area, where people were still moving about. "Poor Ms. Whitaker," said Anton quite audibly. "I'm sure this isn't how she planned to spend her vacation."

"Poor Ms. Whitaker nothing," said Holly. "You know, when I was in high school you didn't seem nearly as much of a twit, Anton. Just because she's, what, sixty and a middle school teacher, that doesn't mean you can talk about her as if she's an idiot."

"If I’m a twit, you’re a jerk," said Anton kindly. "You have always been a jerk. I’ll bring you around. I always do.”

“You think you can convince me? You always did it by boring me to death. I’m not letting you do that now. It’s too late.”

"63," said Martha clearly. There was a silence. She breathed in, feeling her chest rise, feeling the sensation like a knife just below her breastbone. "I'm 63, I went to graduate school in linguistics, I spent two years on my own hitchhiking from city to city in Europe when I was in my twenties, I did two years in graduate school abroad, and I did not intend to end up an English teacher taking care of my afflicted mother any more than either of you ever planned to become your parents. Now for heaven's sake shut up and lie down. We may not have much time to rest."

"Yes, Ms. Whitaker," said Anton after a pause, and Holly laughed comfortably. Martha felt somehow that she had lost ground rather than gained it. She had so been looking forward to time by herself, away from the impatient young of the species, and here she was surrounded by a group of young people gripped by the usual unreflective urgency of the young adult. If she were in their place, she'd be wondering what had happened to them, why these strange people were pursuing Colin. And why he wanted to learn to read. And why she was so horribly tired. But she wasn't in their place, and somehow she couldn't bring herself to care either.

The overhead lights, rice-paper globes hung by their wires from the rafters, flicked off without a sound. There was still a yellow glow from beneath. She could see it through the floorboard gaps. Across the room, Holly chuckled, and she heard steps creaking, and then two more lights flicked off.

"Read," said Colin's voice.

"I do not read at present. But I will teach you," said Mr. Miklos heavily, with the despair of a man at the end of his tether.

"Teach me," said Colin.

"These . . . there are letters," said Mr. Miklos. Martha heard a binding crack flat, and a page turn. "Here."

"That," said Colin.

"B . . . for . . . boy!" said Mr. Miklos.

It was all she could do not to rise from her bed and smite them. How could someone Mr. Miklos's age no longer read? How could he think any sensible person actually learned to read by naming the letters? The alphabet was only a ritual, a magical incantation, an aid to memory, a litany of names, designed to be sung or recited, not read. The sound of "b" was not "bee," any more than "w" was "doubleyew" in practice. English was one of the most bizarrely nonphonetic languages since Egyptian hieroglyphics.

"And that?" said Colin, unfazed.

"D . . . dog."

It was more than she could bear. She would get up in a moment. She could not breathe like this. The gravitational attraction of the thin foam mattress was remarkable, however, as if she were spinning in a centrifuge or a Tilt-A-Whirl, with her shoulder-blades glued to the rim.

As so often happened when she was very tired lately, just before she slipped under, she remembered her mother and remembered her mother was dead, and for a long thin moment, she recognized she was not alive herself any more. She had lost whatever self she had once had, and now was just a set of perceptions and habits. As if she were reciting Mr. Miklos's alphabet, which did not even have the auditory clarity of the International Phonetic Alphabet, for heaven's sake, but for accuracy you really needed analphabetic phonetic notation, didn't you? That notation made the words so very long, and the spelling varied according to dialect, which made it an awfully swan-like dive with or without wings. . . She lay on her back, sweeping down the river of sleep as if she were Ophelia on a catafalque, into the caverns of dream, blessed dream, and beneath her Mr. Miklos's voice said, "K . . . king" and Colin laughed.

It sounded as if the laugh came from behind her rather than from ahead of her, and for a moment she thought of sitting up to look back where she had started, but she let the thought slip, and she slipped after it.

She awoke to full daylight with a most unpleasant taste in her mouth, a fierce crick in her neck, a hot spot on her ribs, and the smell of slightly singed scrambled eggs in her nose.

She sat upright, coughing, and Colin, who had been spiraled in a knot against her side, leapt into the air and scrambled down the stairs. He was perhaps the size of a small chimpanzee. Chimps were supposed to bite as they matured, she recalled. There was that awful story of the man who visited his pet chimpanzee after it was taken away from him and put in a refuge, and it chewed off the man's face along with some other bits.

Chimpanzees never mastered much in the way of language, even sign language.

Oh, dear. The cough was spreading like a cross over her chest, and she bent over her knees. Definitely time to get up. Holding the cough at bay, not daring to stop breathing but not daring to breathe any more than essential, she made her way down the stairs, passing Mr. Miklos at the bottom and nodding to him. He apparently had not moved since the night before, and was sitting bolt upright in a sofa made of plywood, outdoor cushions, and two-by-fours, surrounded by books lying open.

"Is Christmas Eve," he said, his hair slicked down on one side as if it had been licked into place, the other side sticking out loosely.

"Is it? Oh, dear," she said vaguely. "I haven’t been keeping track."

"You don't keep track of Christmas?" demanded Holly. She was at the large round table in the kitchen area. The other side of her, Anton was slowly scraping scrambled eggs onto a plate with the TV, muted, displaying the giddy sculpted faces of a man and a woman seated at a table and talking with their teeth showing.

"Christmas is such a commercial holiday. I prefer Easter. Was there anything about Anton’s house in the news?" said Martha evasively. She did not like Christmas, but it wasn't because it was commercial. She disliked it for the same reasons she disliked Thanksgiving, because it was all about family and Martha’s family had only been her mother and her ever since her brother Lawrence died. Nobody answered her question.

“It won’t be in the news," said Anton shortly.

Another long pause.

Martha looked from Holly to Anton and back again. Neither was looking at her. The TV camera zeroed in on a male anchor's face, which abruptly became serious, as if the proximity of the lens had induced a state of gloom. Then his face was replaced with the image of the carcass of a car upside down, with people in dark coveralls standing about it. Over the picture of the SUV appeared what was clearly a yearbook photo of a young woman, smiling in three-quarter view, with her hair neatly combed. With a wrench Martha recognized the nymph Seffie. The picture lingered for a good ten seconds, and then the image switched to a hospital entrance and snapped back to the serious anchors. "Oh, dear," said Martha. "I'm so sorry."

"She's still in the hospital. Clinging to life,” said Anton bitterly.

"I'm so sorry, Anton. Should we go see her in the hospital?"

"Don't tiptoe around me," he snapped. "I don't like it any more now than when I was a kid. I'm just sick and tired of waiting for Seffie to make up her mind."

Martha stared at him. He did look grouchy rather than sad, though of course there were stages of mourning. "Make up her mind?"

The bread popped out of the toaster and Anton slapped it on the plate and held it out to her. "Happy holidays. Here’s your present."

The TV winked out suddenly, and the light over the table, and a noise went away she hadn't realized was there, the sound of the hot air blowing from the grates. "Power's out again," said Holly cheerfully, as if loss of power and the death of close acquaintances were everyday things.

The eggs were indeed burnt, and the toast was white bread the texture of Styrofoam, but in observance of grief (or whatever it was), Martha refrained from complaining. Besides, she was hungry, even if the faint fragrance of Mr. Miklos penetrated subtly all the way across the room. She wondered if he had always had that smell, even when he was young and more adept at conversation. She had never gotten close enough to him to tell.

Seffie might die. People die, she thought, but did not say. They are born, they live, they die, some of them abruptly, and some at the slowest possible pace. Seffie at least lived with appetite, going fast, and if she died she wouldn't smell as bad as Mr. Miklos. Anton still seemed to be in a rage, as if the smell of burnt eggs came from him.

"So, the power's out. That seems ominous," Martha began cheerfully. There was no answer. "We should take action. If they talked, we could ask them what they want."

"They have no speech," said Mr. Miklos from the other side of the apartment. "Do not bark or grunt, even."

"You're not much better," muttered Holly, and quietly to Martha, "I don't know his accent. Is he some kind of Romanian or something?"

"No. I believe he is from New Jersey, though I know he grew up elsewhere. I was not well acquainted with him before this, so I don’t know where that was."

“You are determined to miss the point, Ms. Whitaker." Anton folded his arms and stared out the window, face blank.

Martha was temporarily quelled. She roused herself. Someone had to make an effort to wonder about their situation. They couldn't just sit here being negative. "These people chasing Colin, are they somehow possessed?

"Dispossessed," said Mr. Miklos from the far sofa. "Are dispossessed, not possessed. No longer in possession."

"Right," said Anton. "Like Seffie is no longer in possession of her car.”

Martha snapped tartly, “You always did like gloomy things, and word play, but we are in a terrible situation and you need to pull yourself together.”

"Maybe I only like gloom when I'm the one spreading it," said Anton sourly. "This is not how I planned things. It's disorganized."

"Planned what?" said Martha, but he didn't answer.

"You like some more eggs?" asked Holly, speaking to Martha but grinning at Anton.

"Eggs," said Martha. "Colin was hatched from an egg."

"He hatched?" said Holly. "Must have been an awful big egg. And isn't he a mammal? He looks like one."

"The egg is one of the most ancient symbols known to Man," said Martha. "The Ukrainian pysanky egg stands for spring, but the egg is also the universe, and means rebirth as well, I think. The mystery of life. We ought to look it up."

"You can't stop being an English teacher, can you?" said Anton.

"I find language and symbolism interesting, and so did you once upon a time," she snapped. He gave an impatient shrug and turned away, but she refused to care. She had dealt too many times with upset children to be much affected by it. Their disturbance passed, for the most part, or it didn't, but if she let it get to her, she wouldn't do them much good. "This has to do with symbols. It has to do with symbols, and words, and grammar, and signs. The people attacking us don't speak. They can’t talk. Colin wants to learn to speak, and to read, and the things he reads are about language. Perhaps there was a reason the egg was left with me. Though the young man who left the egg talked, at least to begin with. I wish I could remember where I know him from."

"Most are at a loss for words, is true," said Mr. Miklos.

Anton went over and sat in one of the deep window bays and stared out into the snow-draped trees. "Nobody knows Seffie like I do. She's all full of life and energy, full of want and grab. She doesn't like to give in. Not that I do, either, but at least I’m doing something about it."

Martha said, "I'm sorry, Anton. But I don't think our enemies have given up attacking us. They just haven't found us yet. We have figure out what they want. What's our next step?"

"You could Google it," said Anton, the same as all her students, as if "Google" were an oracle. "But we don't have power."

"Cell phone?" said Martha.

They didn’t even reach for their pockets. Holly grunted. "No service. No point.”

"Public library," said Martha, searching her handbag and not finding a phone in it either. "The Internet is wonderful for figuring out how to start, but for real facts you need books. Or a scholarly database. Colin seems to be mostly interested in books. Anyway, if the power is out here we’re sitting ducks. We need to go somewhere."

Anton laughed. Holly said over him, "Library? Who goes to the library any more? There's no animals allowed in the library, so we couldn’t take your little doggie, and we don't know if the power is on there either. Does the library open on Christmas Eve, anyway?"

"You don't need electrical power for a book to work, do you?" Martha pointed out.

Anton was done laughing, but he still seemed to find everything terribly funny. “What would you look up in a library, anyway? Aliens? Ghouls? Stepford Neighbors? Robot rampage? You’d call that fantasy.

Martha, who now wanted to just get them all moving somehow, said, "Vocabulary. Theory of reading and writing, theory of speech production. That's what Colin wants. We could start there. Once he can talk more, he might be able to tell us why those people are after him. And I think Colin would make a very convincing little boy if we put clothes on him."

Colin looked back at them hopefully with big eyes, and they realized that though his body retained its thick pelt, his face was now completely furless and his nose an ordinary child’s nubbin. True, there was still a cleft down the middle of his upper lip, but the wide bristling whiskers had dropped off.

“I’m going to take him, and that’s that,” Martha said, getting her handbag and standing up. Colin stood up with her.

Anton held out his hand. “Stay,” he said.

“No.”

"Oh, humor her. Why not? Where we going to get him some little-kid clothes?" asked Holly.

"I know just the place," said Martha. "We could buy them, but I can get them for free. And I'm not staying here where we could be attacked by surprise. It feels safe here, but it really isn't."

"Nowhere's safe," said Anton, and Mr. Miklos nodded.

"Where there's life, there's hope," said Martha, and they all stared at her until she realized how awful that sounded. “Or something like that. We’ll take my car.”

Chapter Thirteen: Lost and Found

The Bolton Hills campus was still empty. "Don't tell anyone my card works over break," said Martha, letting them inside the building. “Security is very strict about outside access.”

"Why the security? Fear of child predators and shooters?" said Holly. She was holding Colin's long-fingered paw, which looked more like a hand than ever.

"Over break? Fear of teachers burning the place down or stopping up the plumbing, I suppose. During school? Fear of custody disputes," said Martha, leading the way down the hall between vast messy bulletin boards. "Estranged dad or mom comes and picks the child up without letting the other parent know, and someone calls the cops. Predators are actually incredibly rare, and at any rate most of the time a child molester is someone the child knows well. Shooters, you can’t really prevent, any more than you can survive a bomb.”

"Oh, stop," said Holly. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know that."

"Most people don't. Here." Martha stopped in front of a closet door, wide open and revealing a tiny space jammed with clothes, books, bags, and shoes, some of it hanging from coat hooks and others piled overflowing in boxes. "The Middle School Lost and Found. There'll be something here."

It took longer than expected, and the room smelled ripe, as if the clothes had fermented. Though they found a cotton pullover and a pair of corduroy trousers, Colin, deeply indignant, tried to bite Martha when she attempted to put them on. Holly tried to help, and that was worse. The little animal had one leg of the trousers on and one off, twisted behind him, and though they had gotten the neck of the sweater over his head that was as far as they got. When they let go of him, he peeled everything off again.

"We have to do this," said Holly, getting down on her knees and facing Colin, who shrank back and held onto Martha’s legs. "You want to read books?"

"I don't read," answered Colin, puckering his face as if he had eaten a lemon.

"You want to, though, right? Right?"

Colin bared his teeth at her.

"We're going to a place where there are books. And you have to wear clothes. So get used to it."

"No," said Colin, and all the young people laughed because he sounded so much like a two-year-old, but then he started to wail. "No clothes," he sobbed.

Holly turned his face in appeal to Martha, and let go one of his arms to pat his shoulder. He wrenched away from her.

"They are fooled, but I am not," said Martha firmly. "Stop that at once. Or you can continue crying. I don't care which. If you want to go where there are books, you have to put up with the clothes."

"Lady, you are so cold," said Anton. "Can't you persuade him nicely?"

Colin, his mouth wide open and emitting a siren wail, eyed her through his squinted eyes while he did it. They locked eyes. His mouth turned down and he looked grouchy. Martha recognized the look, and sat back on her heels until he reluctantly let go of her legs and stood stiffly.

She rummaged through the pile again, coming up with some larger, looser clothes. "Give me your foot, please," she said firmly. He shut his mouth and kicked his foot out, and she grabbed it and stuffed it into the leg of the trousers, then did the other foot, and followed suit with the shirt’s arms. He sat down grumpily, splaying his legs out and holding his head in his arms as if mourning, and she used the position to slide his feet into a pair of sneakers.

They left the building in silence, Anton and Holly leading, holding Colin's hands with their backs firmly set against her, and Colin sniffling loudly and theatrically.

It was not the first time she had made a young person cry, and it would not be the last, and she didn't like it any more than they did. She had read enough critical theory and modern classroom management texts to know that the teacher-student relationship was an unequal power-struggle and the result was oppression and forceful socialization into passive subservience and the reproduction of a rigid class society, and she didn't give a hoot right now. Crying was a perfectly acceptable mode of expression, but it didn't mean nearly as much as people thought. She should know.

"Colin, get on the floor," she said when they got to Martha’s car, Holly sliding into the driver’s seat without asking. Holly and Anton turned to her in outrage. "We'll get pulled over if someone sees he isn't in a child seat," she said practically, "And besides, those mute people might see him." Colin scrambled into the back and curled up on the floor, and Martha took her place beside Mr. Miklos above him, breathing through her mouth so she wouldn't have to smell the man. Since she was being unpopular, she said tartly to him, "You smell horrible. Isn't there something you can do about it?" and Anton's shoulders tensed.

"Efforts are underway," he answered gravely. "Must take measures," and he cranked his window open and leaned his head out the window. The odor lessened somewhat, and they pulled out of the parking lot. There were no cars out, even on Whitman Pike. Lights on, nobody home.

"Surely the entire metropolitan area can't afford to leave town for Christmas?" Martha said, peering up at the star-shaped Christmas lights sweeping past on every electric pole. "Though it is still very early in the day."

Holly shrugged, not bothering to reply. The stores were lit up, and there were plenty of cars parked, but the usual self-absorbed and unpredictable suburban traffic seemed to have dried up and disappeared. It had been years since Martha remembered the Pike being empty. There should have been long impatient lines of cars at every stoplight. She caught movement out of the corner of her eye, but it was just a red neon figure running in place on the front of the chain drugstore, advertising digital photo processing.

"Look. The library’s open," said Anton, pointing. Indeed, the library was alight. They pulled in and parked.

No one was at the circulation desk when they entered, so no one saw the red-headed boy uneasily swaddled in cast-off clothes who swung between Holly and Anton, holding on to their hands. "Where are we going?" said Holly.

"Is this library Dewey? If it's Dewey, 400s, if it's Library of Congress, P," said Martha.

"Speak English," said Holly.

Martha smiled. "Language."

Holly scowled. "All right, then, speak the English language."

"I think it's Dewey," Anton said. "She means the language category in the library, Holly."

Colin, meanwhile, let go their hands and trotted between two high shelves. "He's going in the right direction. Better go after him and make sure he doesn't pull all the books out at once," said Martha, and the two young people disappeared into the stacks after him, their shoulders still expressing disapproval. She felt uneasy letting him go with them, somehow. He seemed nervous around both of them.

Mr. Miklos seated himself on one of the oak benches and put his hands on his knees grandly as if he was posing for a portrait. Martha, meanwhile, slid into the open seat in front of a computer. She might as well occupy herself while the others rummaged. The screen was open to a search engine. She would type something. She couldn't think what.

Their attackers didn't talk. What was the neurological term for loss of language? Oh, yes. "Aphasia," she typed, finding it hard to remember how it was spelled.

The screen didn’t change. The indicator didn’t even spin to show it was looking. Nothing changed.

She was as bad as the young people, expecting a search engine to provide the answer. She actually knew a little bit about aphasia, which was the inability to speak or understand language, and it wasn’t really the right term for what Colin was doing, or for what their enemies were going through. People with aphasia very confidently continued to talk, even if they were emitting nonsense, but the people trying to capture Colin simply didn't talk, most of them, as if they didn't see the need for it.

Well, not aphasia, then. What else? How would you describe the gentlefolk who were attacking them? "Zombie," she typed, feeling silly, and once again the screen didn’t change. She didn’t know why she kept trying. The IT people at school were often impatient with her because of her doggedness, but generally once they had stopped assuming she was an idiot and tried everything she had already tried, they realized her computer was actually having a problem and fixed it.

She knew about zombies from her students back when zombies were popular, anyway. In the old days before viruses were the popular explanation, the original zombies were under the control of a houngan. That required, in addition to believing in zombies, a belief in some vindictive person controlling them. Medieval revenants, on the other hand, had to be wicked, vain, or evil in life in order to come back and haunt the living.

None of these pursuers looked particularly evil. They looked, if anything, tired and distracted.

She returned and returned to the search engine, and though the screen still didn’t change, it made her think of other ideas. How about "monster?" Colin was no longer particularly monstrous, unless you considered verbal facility a frightening trait, or rapid growth. The word "monster" came from the Latin “monstrare,” meaning to show or point out, probably from traveling exhibits. This did her no good at all, she realized with a start, and told herself sternly to focus. Vacation was affecting her brain most negatively.

A reference librarian drifted to the front door and did something to the lock, then drifted away again. Martha was monopolizing the computer. She got up, went to the periodicals section with the nice sofas, and sat down to think.

She entertained herself trying to decide if Colin could possibly be a drow, a catoblepas, a phoenix, or a nix. Perhaps the attackers were Gakis, spirits afflicted with a terrible hunger. Perhaps they were hungry for Colin. She was getting morbid.

She picked up the Greene County Times. The front page, as usual with local papers that still survived, had a photo of a ground-breaking ceremony and another photo of a happy group who had participated in a fund-raising banquet, with several articles about national news that had been lifted from what was no longer called a wire-service.

On the second page was a headline about Tripp Burgoyne. He had died finally,  officially, on the last day of school, at night, right after the faculty Christmas get-together. That made sense, despite all the fuss people had been making about him, and despite the fund raising and the cancer walks. Tripp hadn't been into school since mid-September. She didn’t remember him all that well because she hadn’t taught him for more than a week, only remembered the hangdog annoyed humor that characterized so many eighth graders. Everyone was so upset about him, as if it was contrary to nature for children to have terminal diseases, but Martha had taught long enough to know that even young people died. She glanced down at the photo at the end of the article.

Oh dear.

Tripp Burgoyne.

Now she remembered him.

He was the young man in the heavy sweater and scarf, who had told her to keep the egg warm, the one who had made his way into Holly’s house to take Colin back. No wonder the boy had looked familiar. How awful. Why hadn't she remembered his face?

If it was Tripp Burgoyne, he was actually a current eighth grader, and therefore her responsibility.

That changed everything, didn’t it?

She was mortified. Here she had been worrying about helping Colin, but Colin wasn’t even a current student. That wouldn’t stop her from helping, but she had to remember not to concentrate on only one child. That was a rookie teacher mistake.

She re-read the obituary, and disapproved, because it represented Tripp as some sort of angel. Martha had a quiet conversation or two with him in September about doing his own work instead of plagiarizing, and Tripp came to the conclusion that he would not do any work at all in that case. Martha saw his point and they came to an understanding.

So what was the best thing to do for Tripp now, since he was officially deceased? That was the important problem.

The reference librarian wafted past, straightening the newspapers. She heard the hiss of an automatic door, and felt the winter air pour over her as a small group of people without overcoats came in through the main door and shoved through the turnstile, heading for the bookshelves.

Mr. Miklos stood up slowly. Standing up herself, still clutching the newspaper, she made to put it down again and saw the headline, "Widower Continues Missing," with a photo of a younger, cleaner, much less dilapidated Mr. Miklos, smiling.

“Oh, dear,” she said. ‘Widower? I didn’t realize your wife had died. You must think I’m terribly rude. She won’t be missing you, then. I do apologize. No wonder you kept trying to give me the paper.”

“I warn you,” he explained.

“Yes, you have been warning me and warning me.” Martha flipped through the newspaper again, searching for her own name in the pages, but it wasn’t there, at least not yet. Good. She had too many tasks she wanted to complete.

There was another rush of cold air, and someone else slammed through the turnstile, a slender young woman who headed purposefully toward the far wall. Martha, looking at the young woman in profile, suddenly realized things were exactly as serious as she had imagined. Seffie had returned again.

And now Mr. Miklos shambled forward, shouting, "I warn you!" again, like an end-of-the-world preacher, and headed between the shelves after the coatless intruder. Despite the comic magnificence of Mr. Miklos's shout and shamble, the reference librarian did not look up from her desk.

Martha shouted “Stop that at once” in her best all-purpose stop-that-at-once teacher voice, but a thunder of falling things came from the back wall out of sight, and a yelp. Whether the thunder was falling bodies or books, she couldn't tell, but either way, substantial mass was involved.

Seffie appeared between the shelves, Colin clinging to her neck. Martha ran at her and put her arms out to block the way. The girl paused and glared at her. Anton popped out behind her, his hair mussed, grinning in a way that really didn’t fit his face. His broad smile faded when he saw Martha. "No, wait, Ms. Whitaker," he said, and then the girl pried Colin's grip loose from her and thrust him at Martha, as she were handing a suitcase to a bellboy in an old movie.

"You take him. He's heavy, he looks like butt, and he's messing up my hair," Seffie said in a perfectly ordinary, exasperated voice. "We can't go out the main entrance. They were in the parking lot gathering ,and they’re going to come in that way. What were you thinking, being out here where they could get at you? God, I hate this."

The turnstile spun again, and Mr. Ray strode toward them, straightening his suit jacket, followed by the mail carrier, now in old-fashioned gas station overalls. Colin wailed. Holly, looking as ashy as if she were going to throw up, was just behind Anton. Martha turned, shifting Colin in her arms so that he wasn't wailing right in her ear, and ran for the EXIT sign back past the bathrooms.

There would be time to figure it all out later.

The alarm went off when they pushed the door open, a nasty buzzing shriek instead of the expected clang, but they managed to shove their way out and into a narrow side yard between the library building and the dentist's offices next door. They all ran for the parking lot, hearing the door come open again behind them.

Seffie stopped abruptly once they got to Martha’s car. "You're not making me get into one of these little foreign cars," she said. "They're unstable. They tip over. I know what I'm talking about."

"I don't expect you can get killed twice," said Martha reasonably. "Aren't you dead already?"

"Excuse me? And you know this how?" snapped the young woman. "You read it in a textbook, maybe? I'm not dead yet. I'm just almost dead."

"Dead or not, or in between, come on," said Anton.

"Fine," Seffie snapped, reaching for the driver's door.

"I'll drive," said Holly firmly, pushing her hand out of the way. "You're not going to flip this one."

"Don't try to be funny. You're not good at funny," said Seffie, hauling the side door open and climbing into the car. They all began to jam in.

Their pursuers caught up. Mr. Ray grabbed at Martha. Colin's wail reached for a higher pitch, and he clutched her neck so hard it made her gasp for breath.

"Just kick him, for God's sake," said Seffie, and desperately, Martha did, even if Mr. Ray was an influential parent. She felt her foot connect, and managed to climb in head first. Mr. Miklos had already taken the front passenger seat, and Anton backed himself into the car after Martha, yanking fiercely at the door while kicking at the mail carrier. While he did it, Holly started the car and jerked it forward, and Anton started to slide out sideways, his left foot now in the grasp of the mail carrier. Martha hooked her arms under his armpits and yelled, "Holly! Stop!"

Holly slammed on the brakes, the mail carrier fell to her knees, Anton shook his foot loose, and then, with the door still open, Holly spun the wheel, shoved down on the accelerator, and did a fast sliding U-turn in the parking lot, over-correcting, hitting three bumpers, and sending off a caterwaul of car alarms. The alarms were echoed inside the car by Colin's screams and Seffie shouting "No tight turns! No tight turns! You'll flip it!"

Another engine started nearby, and Martha looked up to see a yellow school bus lurching into gear in front of the library, Mr. Ray at the wheel and Mrs. Somebody clinging to the open passenger door. "Everybody kindly shut up," said Holly through her teeth, pulling onto Whitman Pike ahead of the school bus, and turning right on the red light without stopping or signaling. In the rear view mirror, Martha saw the yellow school bus running the red light behind them and leaning out of the turn. Anton managed to haul the back door shut, and as he did the school bus, still turning, wobbled, shook, tried to come out of the turn, and slowly, grandly, slid off the road and into the front of a store with a wonderful clatter, scrape, and crash.

“Those things are even less safe,” said Seffie with satisfaction.

"Now do you see?” said Anton to Martha, grinning. “You’re dead. We’re all dead.”

“For heaven’s sake, I knew that,” snapped Martha. “That’s really beside the point, isn’t it? What matters is what’s in front of us. We need to find a way to protect Colin.”

Anton’s face was a study in incomprehension. “No, it’s the other way around—“ he began.

"No, no," interrupted Mr. Miklos from the front seat. "Not yet dead. Somewhat dead."

“How can we be somewhat dead?” said Martha, annoyed.

And at the same time, Seffie said, "Speak for yourself, old man. I'm not dead until I say I'm dead."

"Until pronounced," agreed Mr. Miklos, and she glared at him.

"Everybody do stop arguing, please. What matters is, I think we got away for now,” said Martha.

“And Seffie’s back," said Anton, recovering his smugness. Seffie glared at him. Colin scrambled out of Martha's arms and climbed into the front, where he stood, his hands braced on the dashboard, staring through the windshield like a relocated hood ornament.

In the distance, sirens sounded. "What does 'somewhat dead' mean?" said Martha, annoyed.

"Who isn't somewhat dead?" said Holly in a quiet voice they could barely hear, driving with her eyes on the road. "Hair is dead. Skin is dead. Bits of your teeth and bone are just minerals."

"That’s true enough," said Martha. "Everyone, stop talking. I have to think. I can’t think straight."

"Think in circles," said Anton, still breathing heavily but with his eyes bright. He seemed awfully happy for someone partly dead and being pursued by silent strangers. Seffie’s appearance had cheered him up immoderately.

Martha, for a moment, felt all too alive. Being dead was supposed to be restful. A slide into oblivion. A light-rail trip towards the white light. Not rattling in a car full of young people roaring down Whitman Pike, being pursued by animated corpses. She refused to be dead, or even half dead. Not right now. Not when her mother had finally gone and she could have her house to herself. She wasn't going to stand for it.

Chapter Fourteen: Funeral Director and Mortician Recognition Day

Holly ran the red light next to the Giant store, too. Nobody honked, there were no brake squeals, and nothing swerved to avoid them. Whitman Pike was empty and dusted with snow that swirled behind them like the wake of a boat.

Martha peered through the window while bracing herself against the bouncing and swaying of the car. "Are we invisible, or are they?" she said. “Where are all the people who ought to be out here?" but nobody could hear her over the roar of the little car’s engine being pushed to its utter limits. It was like being on an airplane, a wash of noise. "I have things to do,” she added quietly to herself, almost as a complaint to the universe.

Anton was leaning over talking to Seffie, who had arranged herself sulkily with her legs folded under her. She had her jaw set, and her arms crossed. Mr. Miklos sat like an abandoned department-store dummy, staring forward, and Holly was obviously having a wonderful time driving 80 miles an hour in a 25 mile-an-hour zone, weaving from lane to lane and running every light Whitman Pike could provide. Colin was still in the front, his teeth chattering, looking back at her from time to time. It was worse than a middle school classroom. They were not concentrating. Someone needed to do something.

A thin whine in the distance was growing louder, and Martha got to her knees and leaned forward. "Slow down and turn off. The police are coming, and these ones won’t be the right kind of police," she yelled in Holly's ear, and the girl jumped, nodded, and took the next right.

"Where to, Ms. Whitaker?" she called over her shoulder.

"How about the mall?" said Martha.

"Gonna fit in some shopping?"

"People don't die at the mall," Martha said. “Not often, at any rate.”

"I don't think that means we can't die there." Nonetheless, Holly turned left onto Lawrence Avenue, now doing a sedate ten miles over the speed limit.

"No, I think it means there won't be as many people there to attack us."

"Come again?"

"I recognize most of the people coming after us. They’re local. The mall's only twenty years old. There hasn't been time to build up a backlog of lost souls."

"Whatever," said Holly, charging through the next red light. "If you know something I don't, explain it to me later."

Mr. Miklos turned his head to look at Martha, and she met his eyes with difficulty. They had the liquid clarity and cold astonishment of fish eyes. Fish eyes in shaved ice, inside a glass case. He bowed his head to her gently, and she looked away. She could believe that at least Mr. Miklos was almost dead. He certainly smelled like it.

The sirens were still faintly audible in the far distance, and then the raucous honk of a fire engine clearing an intersection. "Are you staying this time?" said Anton, continuing his conversation with Seffie. “I really want you to stay.”

"I don't know!" said Seffie with annoyance. "Don't get all possessive. I don't know how I feel yet! I mean, one moment I'm zipping down Saw Mill Road, and the next moment I'm in the hospital, no one will listen to anything I say, and I have no way to get around on my own without stealing a car because my own car is totally, I mean totally, destroyed." She really did have a penetrating voice. Martha couldn't even hear what Anton said in reply, but Seffie obviously did. "Shallow?" she shrieked. "I'm shallow? The death monster calls me shallow? Excuse me. I still had things I wanted to do in this life."

Martha felt uncomfortable. It was too close to what she had just said to herself. Holly's hands tightened on the wheel and she slammed on the brakes, so that everybody in the back fell forward and Colin tumbled onto his bottom in the front with a startled grunt. "Just shut up. I can't concentrate," said Holly.

Everyone sulked. After half a minute, Holly started up the car again.

"How did you find us?" said Martha to Seffie.

Seffie glanced at her, obviously having forgotten her existence. "I followed the crowds."

"You're good at that," said Anton.

"Excuse me? Like you don't follow the crowd? Mr. flavor of the year hot college? Mr. My-mama’s-in-Milan-so-I-drive-the-Jag? You have no right to talk."

The car swerved to the right and ground to a halt in a crunch of gravel. "That's it. Shut up or get out of the car, both of you." said Holly.

"Excuse me?" Seffie turned, blinking in outrage as if Holly had sprouted out of the ground like a time-lapse film of a weed.

"Settle down, Holly. I’m not leaving you alone," said Anton, and Martha found herself wanting to slap him.

"It was old in tenth grade, it was old senior year, and it's geriatric now. I'm sick of it. Stop now or get out of the car,” Holly repeated.

"You'd kick me while I'm down?" demanded Seffie. "I'm almost dead. You can't do this to me."

"You're almost dead? You think you’re the only one? You think that would stop me even if you were? Just watch," said Holly grimly, and waited.

Seffie scowled. "Holly, be nice."

Anton said over her, "Calm down, Holly."

"No. Door. Road. Out."

They sat mulishly silent. Holly's hands squeezed on the wheel, her knuckles whitening, and she glared out the windshield. A car passed them, splattering icy crystals all over the road with a crackling noise. It didn’t stop, so it wasn’t one of their pursuers, but Martha wondered if it was another group of the almost dead. If they weren’t the only ones out here.

Finally, Holly put the car in gear again, and pulled onto the road and over the hill. Ahead and below, the mall parking lots were full in every direction. It was late morning on Christmas Eve. Of course. It would be jammed. But all the cars were covered in snow, as if they had been there overnight.

Holly pulled in, parked near one of the entrances without paying attention to a no-parking sign, turned the engine off and said to the windshield, "We're here."

It wasn’t as appealing a place as Martha remembered, not surprising, since she never came here any more. Twenty years was a long time for a mall to exist, especially when it had been built around the time malls were failing. The faceless walls of the big anchor stores were dingy, stained with ash and soot. The doors glittered, clean and glowing, at one end, but the other entrance was closed and sealed with plywood, and had hurricane fencing around it, and a bulldozer outside. Perhaps they were renovating. Perhaps they were knocking it down.

"We will eat?" said Colin hopefully. Martha didn't look at him. Everyone just sat there.

"Fine. It's a mall. I'm shopping. I need a change of clothes," said Seffie, sliding the side door open and hopping out. Following her, Martha saw a dark stain, almost black, down the back of her left leg. The back of her blouse had a pull ending in a large frayed hole. She wasn’t wearing a coat, either.

“Shopping?” said Anton under his breath. But he gave a half-smile and strolled after her, and Holly and Mr. Miklos followed. Colin clambered out the side door and put his hand in Martha's. "Lunch," he said, and tugged.

"Lunch," she said, and didn't move, watching the rest of them all walk away into the mall entrance and disappear, as if they'd been hypnotized. The entrance seemed to loom high over them like the Wonderful City of Oz, or the entrance to a mountain fortress.

"Will we eat?" he asked.

"We will eat," she said. "Talking with you reminds me of talking with my mother, except in reverse." Impatient, he tugged firmly at her hand, and she reluctantly started forward still talking, the creature striding along beside her. "My mother made less sense and talked less as she went on. You seem to be going the other direction. I suppose that's part of the charm of children. The illusion of reverse entropy."

"Entropy?

"You know, I really don't feel like explaining everything," she said. "Especially if I'm almost dead."

"Lunch," he agreed and held her hand tighter.

She didn't feel hungry. They always said hair grew after death. Did digestion continue?

Inside the mall, she found the pylon with the map on one face and a list of stores on the other. A pair of escalators was chugging away, one up, one down, full of silent people who didn’t seem interested in Colin. A temporary climbing wall had been erected the other side of the escalators, though no one was on it, and a bored young woman leaned on a lectern in front of it. Nearby, a kiosk was doing a brisk business in hair ornaments and socks crusted with glittering false gems, with a forgotten hand-lettered cardboard sign in the midst which said "BACK IN TEN MINUTE'S." Martha involuntarily shuddered at the misplaced apostrophe, and looked the other way. And back again, and down one boulevard of the mall, and down the other. She couldn't see any of her companions anywhere.

"Christmas Eve in the mall, and we have been abandoned," said Martha, looking down at Colin. He looked sober and pale, and shifted from foot to foot.

"Bathroom. Lunch," he announced with utter gravity, and she laughed.

"You're right. I was starting to act as if I were on a field trip. Taking attendance. They'll find us, I'm sure. Everyone seems to find us. Well, either I'm right and things will be quieter here, or I'm wrong and it's just too bad."

She sat on an uncomfortable decorative bench outside the restrooms while he went in, watching the twinkling lights and waiting for her small companion. In spite of the surging crowd, the mall was quiet, as if people didn’t come here to talk. It was not a comforting quietness. She rubbed her painful chest.

It seemed she had guessed correctly about the mall, though. No one seemed to see her sitting there. No blank souls, reaching out oblivious hands.

A woman with sleek long hair strolled past, carrying packages and looking straight ahead of her. A couple sauntered by in bright knits, each dangling a shopping bag by one index finger, holding hands, not speaking. A father in sports gear stumped along, one hand grasping his waistband, the other holding the hand of a miniature version of himself in an identical jersey, both father and son with packages under their arms. A small crew of 14-year-old girls took up tremendous space with their slender bodies, changing places with one another as they moved forward, like a swarm of gnats, glancing about, shifting bags from hand to hand, and touching one another, but not speaking. There should have been noise, but the place looked like a silent clothing commercial.

There was water falling somewhere. She could hear the relentless pump of the escalators under the harsh sigh of the invisible air vents. There was the occasional echo of object against object (a door closing? a package falling?), but mostly she heard the breath of human machinery, like the noise you could hear in the school hallways when all the children had left.

She sat and stared at nothing. Something was bothering her, though. What on earth was the name of the store across from her? Neon scribbles glowed in the window, but though they looked like writing they didn't make any sense. For a long falling moment she wondered if she had suffered a stroke, or if she was lapsing into the wrongheaded certitude of dementia the way her mother had before her. That would be more sensible than being pursued by the undead.

Then there was a scream of rage from the restroom hall, and she lurched to her feet. Outside the men's room door she dithered for a moment and the scream came again, so she shoved it firmly open, reminding herself that she had thrust open many a boy's room door in her time with even less evidence of disaster.

Colin was hopping about in the middle of the tiled floor pulling at his clothes, his pale face flushed an unbecoming mottled color. Nobody was attacking him. How very odd. "Do you need help?" she said.

He opened his mouth and snarled at her with his nice, white, regular human teeth, and said, "I can't! I can't! It won't!" gesturing at his pants. She tried very hard not to laugh or push his hands away as she did up the stubborn fly-button on his corduroy trousers.

“Wash your hands,” she said sternly and walked out. When he emerged again, there was water all over his shirt, and his pants were unzipped, but she congratulated him gravely. "I think I could use some coffee, " she told him, smelling the aroma from somewhere.

They found the coffee shop. Staring at the menu board, she was so busy trying to make out the illegible words, she didn't realize for a moment that someone had stepped directly in front of her. "Excuse me," she said. The line-jumper, a woman with a carefully-highlighted bob, did not turn. "I was in line," Martha said a little more loudly. "Pardon me." Neither the woman nor the cashier paid any attention. The woman ordered inaudibly, and the cashier turned and called out to the barista, her voice inaudible past the hissing of the espresso machine.

"That woman walked right in front of me," Martha said to the cashier, who turned around to fuss with the brewed coffee tap.

“Oh, dear, I had forgotten for a moment,” she said to Colin. “It all feels so very normal.”

Colin grunted. Martha hesitated.

Then, with great reluctance, she moved up to the counter, and while the employees ignored her she took two sodas and a packaged cheese-and-fruit plate out of the cold case and counted out some money, guessing how much it cost and adding another five just in case, and leaving it in the tip jar.

Seated at a small table outside the coffee shop, Martha sipped and watched Colin eat. His knit shirt was wrinkled over his chest, and the too-big trousers were twisted the other way. The fine golden hair of his first day had thickened to a wayward red thatch, thickest on his head and drifting into a glitter of stubble along his neck and arms. His eyes were a muted amber brown, still clear and fierce but not animal-like.  Such a redhead. He ignored her, chewing intently on a cube of cheese and holding an apple slice ready to cram in after it. She looked around at the near benches, where tired people all seemed to be waiting for someone. "Is this place an alternate world of some sort?" she asked Colin. "Where dying is a sort of slow disappearance? Are these real people, or are they just mirages, a sort of persistence of memory?"

He swallowed with his brows knit and said, "Only one world. One world only?"

"There is only one world," she said, putting it in a complete sentence.

"There is? Where is there?" She thought for a moment he was asking her for confirmation, but then realized he was asking a language question.

"Oh, dear. 'There is.' That's an expletive construction, isn't it? 'There is' or 'it is.' They can be vague, I agree." He crammed the apple slice into his mouth, watching her doubtfully. "English grammar. I'm talking about English grammar and you're telling me alternate worlds don't exist."

He mumbled through the mouthful.

"Speak up."

"Same thing," he said, swallowing. "Ways of saying. Rules for following."

She blinked, realizing for an instant she was discussing the nature of existence with an egg-born monkey who had only just figured out how to use prepositions and adjectives, and to form gerunds from verbs. "Alternate worlds are just a matter of variations in grammar?"

"Just?"

"Just. It means 'only.' I hadn't realized how much I depend on my students' already knowing the language--or some language anyway," she amended, remembering former students Bash and Skip, who had grown up speaking French and German respectively.

"Books," he said, shoving a handful of grapes into his mouth and sliding down from his chair.

"In a mall? Oh, Colin," she said, but he was already heading out the door. She picked up her coffee, absent-mindedly noticing that the hieroglyphs on the side of the cup didn't look the same as usual--surely that was a Greek "theta" and a "mu?"--and then darting after him into the promenade where the store signs were nonsense, and where every passing face was abstracted and withdrawn. When they did find a chain bookstore, it didn't do either of them any good once they went inside.

Every cover of every book was meaningless.

Colin wandered, disconsolate, through the tables of new releases and the best sellers, kicking at the table legs and slapping the spines of the inscrutable books in the shelves. Martha opened a trade paperback, vaguely expecting "etaoin shrdlu" or "ipse lorem" but meeting instead something even less comprehensible, a litter of marks like fallen seeds. No, this mall wasn't an alternate world. It was no world at all. “Oh, dear. I was afraid it was a bad idea, but I didn’t expect this,” she said aloud.

"This what, Ms. Whitaker?" said a sad voice from beside her.

"Oh! Anton!" she gasped, putting her hand to her chest like a Victorian lady. "You startled me!"

"Good," he snapped. "Where did you go? We've been searching for you." Now she saw Seffie flipping through a book on a table, using her fingernail and a disdainful expression, and wearing a new outfit, which was in all essentials identical to her old one. Holly was sunk in a cracked vinyl armchair, scowling, and Mr. Miklos stood with his hands behind his back, practicing the dead fish expression.

"I searched for you," she said feebly. "You all disappeared, and then Colin had to go to the bathroom."

He was not mollified. "You said it’s a ‘bad idea.’ Why?"

"I was wrong about malls. People don't die here, and this one hasn't been here long enough to build up any kind of a--charge, I suppose is the word. It isn’t alive at all.”

"What are you talking about?"

"All this," she gestured at the shelves and the people in line. "These people are just images, like advertisements. They're not real.”

Holly said, "This is a dead end?"

"Yes," said Martha hesitantly, staring at her because her voice had sounded odd. Fuzzy. "I don't know what it is. These books, these shops, they’re a sort of use-memory, an archetype."

“How fascinating,” Anton said gravely, and then spoiled it by laughing. "Ms. Whitaker, you're brilliant."

She ignored the condescension. "I suppose we could stay here, but there's nothing happening at all. It's like the eye of the hurricane."

"The widening gyre," said Holly, still sounding blurred.

“Yeats. Good heavens, what a thing to remember. Exactly," said Martha. "I do think we're safe here, but it is going to do us any good. Colin needs books, but he needs books that make sense. We are going to have to go out into the world again."

"Then we need survival equipment," said Holly. "Me for the hiking store. Coming, Colin?"

“More tools? Your answer for all of this is more tools?” demanded Anton, putting himself between her and Colin.

"Isn't it?" she asked.

"And your answer for everything is literature," said Anton to Martha. "Right?”

"You used to be so much more reasonable," said Martha, feeling Colin’s hand slip into hers.

"I grew up," he said. "Your students grow up, and they stop being able to believe everything you say. It's like Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy."

"I'm so sorry," she said, not apologizing, but expressing regret.

His face grew tighter, and he said, "So am I," and walked away again. Always walking away, that boy.

"Did you have to get him started again?" demanded Seffie, and strode after him.

Realizing she had lost them all again, Martha went out into the promenade, but couldn’t see them anywhere. Mr. Miklos sat bolt upright in a wooden bench, framed by lush plastic foliage. Behind him, a waterfall unfolded into a dark-tiled pool. In the pool, pennies glinted at the bottom, wavering beneath the ripples. Mr. Miklos had his hands on his knees and resembled a statue of an Egyptian pharaoh. The high vault of the mall was a glittering mosaic of glass windows four or five stories high. Winter sunlight glinted sideways through the panes, and above them the sky was a remote and faded gray.

Something twittered. Something chirped, and kept chirping. There were no birds above or below the glass, but still she heard far-off cries. It reminded her of a playground, of children shrieking, the way children liked to do. Was that Anton and Seffie down the promenade looking at each other and talking, their faces glowing in the reflected light from a store window? Or was that just some generic couple?

And what was that irritating noise?

Not children's voices exactly. The noise reminded her of a smoke alarm, or of a telephone, or the faint ringing from the old air conditioner in her bedroom.

The mall was vast and peaceful, a gentle maelstrom of light and sound, and if it were not for that tinny little noise just at the threshold of hearing, she could lose herself in this place. She began to understand why people did their shopping here. It induced a trance state, a very pleasant one that did not require the lotus position or drugs. Was that such a bad thing? And what was that noise?

"Ouch!” Colin stared at her defiantly. She glared back, rubbing her knee where he had hit it with his fist.

His mouth opened, but all that came out was a sea-gull's yawp. He punched her in the knee again, and keened like a cat. It was the noise she had been hearing. Why had she thought it was far off? "What is it?" she said, though it was hard to get the words out. “Why are you bothering me?” He mewled, and tried to grab her hand. "Can't you talk?"

He shook his head.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She couldn’t think of a suitable expletive, so she just said, “Oh.” again. She couldn’t see Anton or Seffie any more, couldn’t see Holly, and Mr. Miklos had his eyes closed and was sagging forward.

Chapter Fifteen: Resurrection Day

“Mr. Miklos! Wake up!” Martha shook him. He blinked slowly and opened and closed his mouth, but he seemed as all right as he was ever going to be, and he even stood up on his own and followed her when she went in search of the others.

Holly was in front of a sports-apparel store, looking at a sign on a stand as if it contained words. Shouting produced no effect. Martha pulled Holly’s arm, and she turned her head slowly, staring at Martha, staring at Colin. Martha pulled harder, but the young woman's inertia was implacable, and Martha's back began to protest, so she let go. The arm dropped. Holly slowly took a step toward her. "Holly!" Martha shouted in her ear. Holly put her hand up to her ear and rubbed as if an insect had flown into it. Martha waved her hand in front of Holly’s face. She recoiled, put her hand to her mouth, and made a faint, far-away noise.

Colin snarled and grabbed Holly’s knee, and she staggered a step to the right. Then Martha shook her by the shoulders until the sturdy head was rolling.

"What are you doing?" yelled Holly finally, taking a step back and balling up her fists.

"You were lost," said Martha. "You were disappearing."

"I was reading the directions."

"What directions?"

Holly looked at the sign on the stand and tried to form words with her mouth, but the words didn’t come. “It had a message on it,” she muttered.

“You can figure it out later,” Martha said, wondering if Holly had ever been tested for dyslexia in middle school. Probably not. Too late now.

She found Anton and Seffie strolling hand in hand between a computer store and a luxury fountain pen shop. Martha resorted to towing them by their hands toward the exit. Holly, holding Colin’s hand, almost got away again just before they reached the entrance, but Colin pulled away from her. Martha managed to get the others outside into the cold December air and then went back for her.

“I was busy,” complained Holly, but she allowed herself to be retrieved. Martha was worried about her.

No one had towed their car. It was probably invisible to anyone still alive. It was an imaginary car, even if it made a familiar rattle when it started.

"This isn’t what I intended to happen," said Anton in the car, sounding as if he were at the bottom of a well. Seffie, her arms folded, wasn't talking at all, though it was hard to tell with her if she was unable to speak or just annoyed

"It's all about image in there," answered Martha, watching Holly fumble at the ignition, though Martha wasn’t sure the woman should be driving. "Not words. We should have tried a national park or some place people don't go at all, if we wanted to recoup for a while." Holly put her head down on the wheel, and Martha said, "Here. Let me drive. Go sit in the passenger seat." Holly nodded and climbed out, while Martha slid over.

"Drive to where?" said Anton. "The library was no good, we got attacked there. The mall nearly made us disappear."

"It has something to do with words, and death, and memory," said Martha, starting the car with an emphatic roar that made her jump. "Right, Colin? Oh, sorry," as she crashed the gears getting into reverse. "And something to do with Colin."

"Words, death and memory," said Anton. "The library should have been perfect."

"Or a funeral," said Martha, "or a cemetery. Sorry," she repeated as the car nearly stalled. "Or one of those spots on the highway where people put flowers as memorials for traffic deaths ." She did a much clumsier U-turn than Holly had. Colin, standing up and holding on to the back of her seat, hissed.

"Do you even know how to drive?" demanded Holly, sounding more lively.

Martha gritted her teeth and pulled through the parking lot. Snow was starting to fall. “I have been driving longer than you have been alive,” she said.

"When did you learn to drive--1930?" snapped Seffie.

Martha scowled. "I wasn't alive in 1930.”

"You were dead?" said Colin's high voice from behind her right ear.

"No, not born yet . . . Colin, are you the ghost of a dead person?"

"Ghost?" said Colin. "Not ghost. Dog."

Peering at the road through the gentle swirls, Martha tried to figure out what he meant. She could feel the truck's wheels spinning a little as the snow settled, a lovely floating sensation, but she eased off on the accelerator as she pulled around a turn and up a hill. The intersection at the top of the hill was blocked by an old station wagon, one of those long boats with pretend wood on the sides. It was surrounded by a small group of people. A high bank with tree roots loomed over the left side of the road, and a rock-cluttered stream down below the battered metal barriers on the right side. There was no way to get by. Martha pressed down on the accelerator again.

"Hey, slow down," said Anton. "You'll hit someone."

Martha grimly aimed the car, feeling the ground drift under the tires.

"What are you doing?" Anton reached for the wheel, and Martha swatted his hand away, steering left-handed through the narrow space between the station wagon's bumper and the road barrier, a space which was barely wide enough. There was a very ugly loud noise, and then she was through. The hill revolved past her, and then the barrier, and the hill again, and she came to a stop with the back of the car tucked snugly into the barrier, wheels on the road. The station wagon was still rocking, knocked askew.

"You'll never teach in this town again," said Anton, laughing ghoulishly. A sturdy lady's shoe emerged from the station wagon, followed by a gloved hand, and an elderly woman got out and started toward them, the little group of people trailing after her. A boy in a sweater with a scarf wrapped around his neck headed toward the front of her car. Tripp Burgoyne. Martha took a breath. It felt as if she were inhaling fire.

"Oh," said Anton. "I know those guys." Martha ignored him, holding her breath, and pressed gently down on the gas. The car inched forward, and then the engine raced while the wheels spun. She slapped it into reverse, rocked it back a foot, and engaged first gear as it rocked forward again, tearing muddy tracks in the verge and wallowing out onto the road through the little crowd of people.

There was a thump. Seffie screamed, "You ran him over!"

Martha compressed her lips and floored it. They fishtailed as she pulled out, but she corrected and accelerated.

"The boy!" said Seffie. "You ran over the boy!"

"The boy is getting up and walking after us," said Martha, looking steadily in the rear view mirror. "So are the rest of them. I don't think they get hurt easily." She would not, she refused, she absolutely refused, to feel sorry for him. Tripp was dead already. He had died right after the faculty party. There was no doubt about it.

“He was a nice boy,” she said. “Sweet sense of humor. He wasn’t the saint people started making him out to be, but a pleasant young person nonetheless.”

There was a shocked silence, and then Seffie yipped with laughter. "You rule, Ms. Whitaker," she said. "Getting your revenge on all those middle schoolers you taught?"

"I don't want revenge. I like middle schoolers. You just have to be firm and fair. Just firm and fair," said Martha with an effort.

Seffie grimaced. "That sure was firm, but I don't know if it was fair."

Anton leaned forward between the seats. "He was already dead, Ms. Whitaker. You didn't kill him."

"I don’t need reassuring, Anton. But I don't hold with causing pain to children if it doesn't help," said Martha faintly. "If they aren't going to get something out of it."

Anton gave her his archaic smile. "Even dead children?" he said. "Well, we all got something out of that, didn't we?" He turned his head again and peered out the back at the rapidly disappearing scene of the accident. “I’m afraid there are too many of them for us to keep running away."

Martha shook her head. "What bothers me is how few there are. Why aren't there more? Everybody dies, after all."

"Memory. Words. Stories," said Mr. Miklos heavily.

"Your breath smells like an outhouse," said Seffie.

Martha pulled into a parking lot. She turned around in her seat. "Mr. Miklos."

"Lady." His lips were pale. Outside the car, the light was pale as well, filtered by the blowing, thin snow that continued to fall.

"Mr. Miklos, you are trying to protect Colin. Why? You were hovering over my house from the moment he arrived, and that was the day you disappeared. Are you dead too? If you're dead, why are you helping us when those other dead people are attacking us? Why are they trying to steal Colin?"

Mr. Miklos seemed to be trying to phrase a thought, and she waited. "I do not-I am not—I will not die," he said finally. “They wish to die.”

She sighed. “That doesn’t make any sense. Seriously, does anyone know why they’re trying to kidnap Colin?”

"Is not stealing," Mr. Miklos said. "Is theirs." He closed the fish eyes and leaned back in a gesture of utter weariness. "Want their dog back. Dog does not wish to return."

“I don’t,” said Colin as firmly and rudely as any fourteen-year-old being offered broccoli.

"Get going, Ms. Whitaker," said Seffie. "Some more are coming."

Martha whipped her head around and saw the shapes coming out of the snow across the street, approaching the front of the car. Mr. Ray, Tripp, and the older ladies, but others as well. The erudite professor who used to live down the street from Martha when she was small, who had died from alcoholism in his living room. Mabel Erickson, whose windshield was hit by a Canada goose on the highway when she was on a road trip with the chemistry teacher.

The faces were familiar. They were people she had known who had died, whose funerals she had attended. "I should not have said there were too few of them. I was speaking too hastily. No, this really won't do. I can't have this." She peeled out of the parking lot and into the road again, burrowing into the twilight of snow.

"They're not very smart," said Seffie critically. "They could have surrounded the car with other cars and penned you in."

"Minds on other things," said Mr. Miklos.

Martha's mind needed to be on the road right now, and she didn't want to be thinking what she was thinking. "How many people do you know who have died?" she asked. The engine stumbled and stuttered, and she eased up on the gas.

"Multitudes," said Mr. Miklos. "A sea of souls."

"Not you, Mr. Miklos. You young people. How many people do you know, I mean know well, that have died, that you can remember?"

"My gramma," said Seffie. "And Luke in 4th grade. Remember Luke?"

"Oh, yeah, Luke. The bald kid," agreed Anton. "Cancer, I guess. My sister Artemis."

“Luke Benson. And Artemis Demetrios,” said Martha, remembering the last name finally. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Anton, I remember your sister. That was awful.”

“It wasn’t nearly as awful as you think,” said Anton. “If you know my parents, it was a logical career move.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” The engine coughed. Martha jumped and looked at the dashboard. The engine coughed, though the car kept going. "I forgot to fill the gas tank," said Martha, bewildered. "What was I thinking? Where are we? Is there a gas station near?"

"Would they even serve us? It's Christmas Eve and we're invisible."

"They're all self-service now, aren't they? Oh, this is Whitman Pike. There's a station two blocks from here. The one next to the church, across from the grocery store."

“Church,” said Anton, nodding. “That would be a perfect place. I bet a church would work.”

Holly muttered, “Easier. Closer.”

Anton glared at her. “No, you don’t. I’m in charge here. We’re following my plan.”

What plan? Martha couldn’t make out what he was talking about, but she needed to concentrate. She slewed right at the light, the car hiccupping. She kept the gas pedal barely depressed, forging slowly through the swirling flakes. There were no car tracks in the snow ahead of them. A pizza parlor's neon sign gleamed faintly and scrolled past. Up ahead on the left in the light gray sky, the grocery store sign, like a lighthouse lantern, shone steadily. On the right, atop a landscaped mound and set back from the road, the old United Methodist church glowed from every stained glass window. The gas station lights, however, weren't visible. The engine missed, caught, missed again. Martha steered the car gently into the driveway just past the church, and they pulled to a stop at the pump, where the engine coughed one last time and gave up the ghost.

There were no lights except the panel above the soda machine. The office was dark, the engine bays were closed and locked, and the displays on the gas pumps refused to flicker into life. Anton went up to the office door and peered at a white hand-printed sign taped to the inside of the glass. "I can't read it, but it's Christmas Eve. They must of closed early," he said grimly, climbing back into the car.

Martha, still in the driver's seat, looked ahead. "Have," she said. "Must have. 'Must of' means nothing." There was a faint figure trudging down the center of the pike toward them from far ahead. She didn't want to know who it was.

"Is that why all this is happening?" said Seffie. "Because it's Christmas Eve?"

Martha shook her head. "You're thinking of Easter or Halloween. That's when the dead come back. Christmas is just an excuse for a party. It's a winter solstice thing."

Anton shook his head. "There's rebirth at Christmas. The rebirth of the sun. The Holly King dies and the Oak King is born." He smiled and his eyes glittered.

“Ha. Ha,” said Holly.

"We're all as good as dead, we're being hounded by the definitely departed, the car is out of gas, and you're yapping about Wicca," said Seffie. "I’m going inside where it’s warm," and she left the car door open and headed toward the building.

Anton got out after her, then Holly and Mr. Miklos, but Colin didn’t move and neither did Ms. Whitaker. Another figure appeared in the middle of the road, and the first figure became clearer. Holly glanced back at them from the church doors and gestured. She went inside, leaving the door open, streaming light from within.

“No church,” said Colin direly.

“You may be right,” she told him. "But it is warm inside. We have to go somewhere. We’re out of gas and it’s cold,” and she took his hand, because the first of the walkers was Mr. Sattergood's wife, whose first name she could never remember, and after her came Martha's fourth grade teacher, followed by someone who resembled a former mayor of the nearest large city. “I haven’t been to Christmas Eve services in ages,” she said, and they got out of the car.  Despite the arrival of the dead, there might be protection for Colin in the church. After all, what would be better equipped to deal with the afterlife?

She walked up the steps to the church and opened the door into the quiet vestibule. No one looked back at her, though the place was jammed with people holding tapered candles. A long red carpet scrolled out like a tongue between the square white pew-ends, and on a high white table, a plain cross reared up. A minister in black with a tab collar and an unflattering skirt sat near the sparse choir, which apparently had just finished a hymn, because they were still settling like brooding hens adjusting their eggs.

Martha took a tentative step inside, entering into a cloud of evergreen, cinnamon, and candle wax, and saw Anton and Seffie standing next to the altar already as if they belonged there. Anton was whispering in Seffie's ear again and she was looking away from him, her arms folded.

A face turned toward her from the front. Mrs. Somebody. And next to her was Mr. Ray, just sitting down. Oh, dear. This wasn't good. She let go Colin’s hand and said, “Run!” and he darted back behind the last pew and out of sight.

The minister stood up. The overhead lights went out, and in their place wavered the gleam of dozens of candles swaying back and forth in the hands of the worshippers. An electric organ tootled, and the choir also stood up. Instead of "Silent Night," or "Away in a Manger," they hummed the first line of "In the Bleak Midwinter." Oh, heavens. Christina Rossetti was all she needed.  

The snow struck the stained glass windows, and they rattled, sending the candle flames fluttering. Martha walked over to one side and got down on her knees awkwardly, trying to see under the pews. Where had Colin run to?

The front door swung open and flakes gusted past her down the aisle, vanishing into the red carpet.

The choir still hadn't broken into words. The humming was getting on her nerves. More latecomers shuffled in, a sour-looking gentleman with a white comb-over whom Martha recognized vaguely as her Uncle Theodore, who gave Christmas presents to all his nieces and nephews every year and expected them to say thank you. He looked around, his eyes narrowed, and he strode briskly down the aisle, making someone move in to accommodate him a few rows ahead of Martha.

A dark form crawled under the pew to the left as Uncle Theodore sat himself down. She peered. It was Colin. Martha hissed, "Get over here." The dark form paused. Every head in Uncle Theodore's row bobbed down, and Martha saw hands appear below the pews, grasping, clutching. The crawler squirmed and squeaked, the choir broke off in mid-hum, and everybody in the church, including the gaunt minister and the white-clad choir, stood up and crowded silently toward the noise.

There was no sanctuary in this church.

She looked wildly around. Holly was standing to one side. Her face looked weary. Heaven knows she hadn't asked to be part of this quest, Martha thought. Not that any of them had.

Anton and Seffie hadn’t moved an inch. Anton was leaning forward, looking more like a crow than ever, his eyes eager, as if he was expecting something. “Don’t let them get him!” called Anton. “Bring him to me!”

Colin yelled as a Uncle Theodore and raised him up like the Communion host, heading toward the altar, everyone else swarming forward alongside. The only voice in the church was Colin's, and he was spitting with rage. He wriggled mightily as the crowd closed in.

“Now!” yelled Anton, and ran forward.

Then, with a shriek, Colin tore himself loose from Uncle Theodor’s hands and climbed onto the top of his head, rumpling the comb-over. A stout woman--good heavens, was that old Mrs. Norris, the school crossing guard? She hadn't seen her for so long, she was sorry to hear she was dead--grappled with the infuriated little creature, and overbalanced backwards into the pew behind him, which rocked with the fall and toppled back into the next pew.

Pinned, the people behind him continued to grab, but twisting like a falling cat, Colin rolled and bounded over the hands, leaping into Martha's arms at the end. She clutched him and scrambled back toward the front door and fending off the grasp of a girl in a Catholic school uniform. "Holly, come on!" she shouted, looking behind her. "Anton! Seffie!" The former mayor headed towards her. He was very large.

"We must be going," called Mr. Miklos from next to the car. “The young folk can run after us.”

"You are absolutely correct," said Martha. "The car’s out of gas, so we can’t take it. Which way?"

“Any way," Mr. Miklos answered, swaying slightly. The snow swirled around him, obscuring his form. He looked like a standing stone in the half light, and then he raised his arm slowly and pointed at the sign in the sky.

"The supermarket?" said Martha. "Oh, well, that's as good as anywhere else, I suppose.” She broke into a shuffling jog, coughing.

"Not going back," said Colin, bouncing in her arms.

"No, we're going ahead. Loosen up your grip, you're strangling me."

"Don't want to go back," he said, sniffling.

"Not if I can help it."

Carrying a thoroughly solid, homely, red-headed boy in battered corduroys, she jay-walked across Whitman Pike and trotted toward the grocery store, with a blank, remorseless crowd pouring out of the church behind her.

Her feet ached fiercely with Colin's weight by the time she reached the automatic glass doors at the store, but Colin clung too tightly to be removed. The door swung open, revealing stacked pillars of canned soda cartons, and beyond them vast arrays of radiant fruit. The door chirruped again behind her, but it was only Mr. Miklos. A spotty young man in a bright green apron shoved past them as if they weren't there, and reached up to fiddle with the door mechanism, and then firmly turned a key in the lock, shoving the door to make sure it was locked. As he turned away, the parking lot outside slipped into snow-veiled dusk. The lights had been turned off. The store was closed for Christmas Eve.

Outside, gray figures began to gather at the edges of the parking lot, and Martha turned away from the darkness and headed in.

Chapter Sixteen: National Supermarket Employee Day

The overhead lights went off before they were ten feet into the produce section, but neon signs still shone like auroras on the walls. A soft drink machine shimmered contentedly ahead, promising reprieve and refreshment. To their left, plastic pouches made a coastline of spinach and radicchio; to their right, geometric mounds of bright oranges, apples, grapes and cherries surged in pyramidal waves. A bundle of Mylar balloons stood sentry in front of the flower case with inscrutable messages on them.

Colin tugged at her hand, reaching for the piles of pretty oranges half visible in the neon.

"Don't touch."

His eyebrows knotted. "I'm hungry!"

"You just ate, and this is not the time."

He snarled. Someone called something indistinct at the back of the store and there was a muffled slam, and then another, employees leaving.

Martha looked back. Mr. Miklos stood in front of the locked automatic doors, facing the parking lot and a dim gathering host of people outside. Snow was settling on their heads and shoulders. Martha and Colin were trapped inside. Colin tugged again. "I'm hungry. I'm hungry," he said, staring at her, his eyes almost level with hers.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know. I have forgotten what it is like to be young and hungry. But I don't think oranges would be a good idea for you," she said. "They take too long to peel, and you frustrate easily. And they're messy. How about an apple?" She selected one, thinking that she should find a place to wash it off, and then satisfying herself with a rub on her sleeve while Colin kept his hand out. Her mother always used to rub it, so she did too. Whether pesticides, dirt, or any other kind of noxiousness could actually be removed by friction didn't matter.

Watching Colin eat, she realized it was the first time she had been able to think of her mother as anything but an angry, anxious ghost in a housedress, calling for help and searching restlessly for a telephone or an open door so she could escape her daughter’s custody. But here it was, an image from her memory: her mother, competent, much younger than Martha was now, buying an apple for Lawrence and an apple for Martha at the grocery store, and polishing them on her sleeve before handing them over.

Colin reached the bitter core and kept going for another bite, which disappointed him. "No!" he said, spitting, and tossed the rest of the apple away from him.

"You're not supposed to eat that part." She picked the apple core out of a display of pineapples and held it delicately between her fingers for a few more steps, then stopped and put it in one of the plastic produce bags. "So it won't smell bad and attract insects," she said.

He cocked his head.

She laughed. "My mother used to do that. Every scrap of garbage went into a paper bag or a piece of waxed paper before she put it in the trash. She would lay out the waxed paper on the counter and collect scraps on it while she was making dinner. She didn't like to waste paper, either, so if there wasn't enough from dinner she'd leave the waxed paper out, folded into a little packet, overnight until breakfast. There was always a little mound of scraps on our kitchen counter wrapped in paper. You know, sometimes I ate some of it, like cucumber ends and carrot tops, because she wouldn't let us snack between meals. She was an odd woman, even before her mind started to go. What?" Colin was tugging impatiently at her hand.

"Books," he said.

She laughed. "There are no books here. This is a grocery store."

"Words," he said.

"We're at the end of our rope, Colin. They're going to break in, and they're going to get you, and all the words in the world won't stop them."

"I need words," he insisted. She startled herself by laughing, and he glared.

"I'm sorry. We need to get out of produce, then. It's all stickers and bar codes here."

For the first time in her life, she wondered why anyone would need words so badly. The thought horrified her. Of course people needed words. She let him lead her past the crinkly bags of walnuts and the shrimp laid out like skinned fingers on ice.

They swung around to the cereal aisle, narrow in the dim light, boxes mounting up either side of them. "Life. Quake,” Colin crowed. "Pebbles? Kix."

Are you reading those? I can't read them." The cereal box he was poking had no letters on it as far as Martha was concerned. “I don't know if 'pebbles' is a fighting word, though I suppose you could say 'Kix' is. 'Cheerios' is more of a friendly greeting. Wait! You actually read those words yourself! You can read?”

Colin nodded absently, scanning the shelves. "Make words out. Letters and sounds. Uncoding."

"Decoding, not uncoding. That's part of reading, certainly. Colin, what good will words do you against all those people outside?"

He let go of her hand, reaching for a box. "Smacks!"

"Those are Sugar Smacks. They wouldn't make good ammunition unless you wanted to give your enemies hypoglycemia. Stop shaking that."

He tossed the box to the floor and set off again in a slow trot while she picked up the box and put it back. He was a plain boy, with his baggy shirt un-tucked in the back, his trousers twisted around, and his shoes untied. "French Roast," came his voice from the end of the aisle. He circled the end-cap display, and then as she broke into a reluctant jog herself, she could hear him reading the names of the juices on the other side of the shelves.

Something thumped at the front of the store. Martha glanced that way and saw Mr. Miklos's stolid back, his head thrust forward, his hands braced wide and high on the doorjambs like a human wall. Outside, faces and hands pressed against the door ,and the snow pelted the high windows above the diapers and bird-feed. She started humming “White Christmas” as she followed Colin down the next aisle, though she only remembered it snowing on Christmas once before, when she was 12.

There was something odd about the next aisle. It looked pokey. Small. Cluttered but not flashy, not like the mall. People didn't come to the grocery store to escape. They came to pick up a gallon of milk and some hamburger and rice. People lived their real lives in the grocery store, even more than anywhere else. That was probably why nobody was here inside with them. There wasn't any sort of death in a grocery store, either, though, was there? Except for the plants and animals who died to feed the customers, and why was she thinking about this now? Colin turned the corner ahead of her, and there was another thump from the front of the store.

These shelves were missing those coupon machines that stuck out into the aisle, the motion-activated ones. Also, there didn't seem to be any of those unit prices below the merchandise, and no bar codes. She picked up a bottle of apple juice and looked at it. The bottle's label was yellow with a big, bright, round red apple on it, a smooth apple of an unlikely red, and in the middle of the apple was a small white sticker Odd. She looked up. Strung across from the top of one shelf to another was a banner that, from the graphics, should have said, "Double Green Stamps” if she could have read it.

"Colin!" she said.

"What?" he snapped from not too far away.

"Wait for me. We’re slipping back in time somehow."

"I'm doing something," he said, sounding entirely too much like a middler schooler.

A tinkle of glass sounded from the front of the store, and fear sped her feet. He was holding a small orange-yellow box. "Arm and Hammer!" he said to her happily.

"We need to hide," she said. The baking soda box had another small white sticker on it. "Colin--" but he broke free, muttering to himself, and ran ahead. When she came out at the end of the aisle, Mr. Miklos was now inside the doorway, and shoulder to shoulder with him, facing the open automatic doors, were Holly, Seffie, and Anton, snow melting in their hair. Beyond was the mob, not speaking, not gesturing, just pushing and reaching. There was a thud, and huge packs of paper towel rolls fell off the shelves on the front wall.

Mr. Miklos turned his head and saw her. "Be going, lady!" he said. "The gates are open!"

She turned and ran, but Colin was not ahead of her in the net aisle any more. Calling and running, she darted along the ends of the aisles looking along each one. When she reached the dairy cases at the end of the store, she turned and ran back, but not before noticing that there were glass bottles in the milk case, glass bottles with crimped paper caps. The store was steadily moving back into the past. Or into her past, at least.

"Colin!" she called. "Colin!"

She could see Mr. Miklos staggering backwards, with Holly, Anton and Seffie a half step behind him now, slapping at grasping hands, kicking at feet and shoulders. There was an old wire newspaper stand next to the door, and on the front of the paper was Mr. Miklos's face. She was only slightly miffed that her own face wasn’t on the paper.

"I can't find Colin," she shouted to Mr. Miklos, who did not look nearly as good as he did in the newspaper photo.

"Many called, few chosen," he said sadly. His eyebrows bristled like a gnome's.

"For heaven's sake make sense," she said.

"Sense makes itself."

She gave up, looking around. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something move, but when she glanced that way, it was only the reflections off the meat counter case, empty now and buffed to an antiseptic steel glow. Above the counter was a hand-written sign in red and blue. Something moved again, behind the case. It was Colin, walking on the counter against the wall. "Get out of there," she hissed. He glanced at her and kept going, reached the end of the counter next to the door to the back room, and hopped off, disappearing from her sight. The wordless clatter and scuffle from the front of the store intensified, but Martha stood irresolute.

You didn't go behind the counters in the grocery store. That was a childhood law she didn't know how to break, one her mother didn't even have to tell her. You stood with your mother at the proper place to order. You took a number from the hook. If no one was there, you were permitted to ring the little round service bell, only once. You didn't fidget or kick the counter, and you didn't let go of your mother's hand, thank you, miss. Then you waited for the emissary to emerge, Mr. Murphy in his white apron smudged with pink, wiping his hands of the blood from the carcasses. No latex gloves for the butchers of childhood, no shrink-wrapped factory-packed pink mounds in white foam for them. No, they hacked your dinner from curving slabs of red and white with ribs in them and gristle, and there were little pink bits of meat on the floor underfoot, but you didn't comment on that, and you didn't say anything about poor dead animals. There were rules, and Mr. Murphy did not tolerate remarks from little girls.

Something crashed. Over near the door, someone was on the floor and three people were struggling above, in slow motion. A face turned toward her, a white oval, and turned away. There was the service bell on the counter, black button upright. Next to it stood a hook on a stand with numbered cards hanging from it. She wasn't a little girl any more, and she didn't have to do what her mother said. She strode forward, then superstitiously veered right to tap the service bell before she slipped through the rift between the counters. The tinny "ding" hung on in the air behind her.

It was cold back here, and dark except for the light from the red "EXIT" sign off to the left. The tiled walls and floor smelled of bleach and the outhouse reek of room freshener. She had expected somehow to see quartered cows, or chickens hanging headless upside-down to drain, but instead there was an ordinary workroom with papers tacked up all over the walls, a stack of boxes up to the ceiling, and three huge steel doors in the back of the room. One of the doors was ajar. "Colin?" she called, afraid that Mr. Murphy was going to emerge out of her childhood wiping the greasy blood off his hands with his apron, asking why she had gone behind the counter where she wasn't wanted.

There was no answer. The room was dark. The interior of an open walk-in refrigerator, seen through the partly opened door, was even darker. A waft of air freshener drifted past her, and she heard the sound of running feet out in the store.

Why was she thinking of Mr. Murphy, who was thirty years gone? He hadn't crossed her mind since she returned to live at home and teach. Mr. Murphy had come forth from his lair then, and revealed himself as an elderly Irish-American with broken veins in his cheeks, a high hard drinker's gut, and vague blue eyes.

When he retired, he was replaced by a plastic-wrap machine and Sean, a former cashier with a brush cut and a very clean apron. Sean rode a motorcycle to work and had acne and an earring. She grasped the big handle of the half-open refrigerator door, and swung it open all the way.

Colin, sitting on a huge red-plaid can labeled "Three Bean Salad" blinked furiously at her from the back, surrounded by vast factory-packed plastic jars of potato salad, olives, and coleslaw. He bared his even little teeth in a comic and savage grimace. "I won't go," he told her. “I don’t have my words. I need my words.” His breath puffed out around him in a cloud of condensation.

"Won't go where?"

"I won't go back there," pointing outward. "They can't make me."

"If you want to hide, I don't think this is a very good place," she said. "It's too cold."

"This isn't cold. Not like the other place."

"Like the other place? In the road? Inside the egg? The egg was hot enough."

He shook his head. Outside, the service bell rang again with a tinny jingle. Colin darted past her and pulled the door shut, submerging them in darkness. "Colin. No!" she gasped, and reached for the handle, meeting his hand still clutching it. She could not pry his fingers loose without hurting him. Then the clammy handle wiggled of its own volition, and she changed her mind about opening the door and started trying to keep it closed instead.

She and Colin struggled together against the slow movement in the dark. Despite the jars of potato salad, she began to imagine heavy slabs of meat swinging above her, like the smeared and ghostly bodies in that artist's paintings, who was the painter? Oh, yes, Francis Bacon.

Something scraped all the way down the door outside. Scrape, scratch, slide, scuffle. It was an animal sound, random but not impersonal, as if cats were sharpening their claws on the door, or a horse scratching its backside, or a doctor plucking a chart from the door-rack while you waited inside in a backless gown, waiting to hear the bad news, but she wouldn't think about that. The handle slowly moved through its arc, against every effort she and Colin could expend. The door mechanism went "thunk," and though they put their whole weight against it, the door slowly drew open.

A single figure stood in the doorway, wiping stubby, greasy hands on his apron. He started in, his blue eyes even vaguer than thirty years before. It was Mr. Murphy.

Martha drew in a short, sharp breath and then she threw her shoulder into Mr. Murphy's high, hard belly. The belly resisted, not like human flesh but like a diner booth or a vinyl armchair. She got purchase with her feet and shoved again. He stumbled and sat down, knocking several other people backward behind him, and Martha bolted past the reaching arms for the big red EXIT, Colin running after her and stepping on her heels.

She and the boy burst out between a trailer truck and a pile of raw wood pallets, past a tiny rusted forklift, a battered metal cart, and a dumpster full of flattened cardboard boxes, into the snow-covered parking lot. The darkened sodium lamps, their heads like cobras crowned with snow, brooded high above, guarding against the swirling sky. The neon lights of the stores across the road were dark now too, and there were no cars on the white, thick, snow-pillowed road. The latch bar of the exit door thumped behind them, and Martha began to jog. Her breath, always effortful, creaked like an old well-pump. The cold air was razors in her lungs.

Colin reached up his hand and took hers, cantering along beside her as she broke into a jog again. She realized as she turned out of the parking lot, gasping for breath, that she was heading for her own house. For her home. After all, where else should a person make a stand? There were no fortresses handy, no bunkers, no place where a person of late middle age could shut out the onslaught of the long dead and the weary past, and she was ding-dong-danged if she would fight it out in some strange place where the few memories were awkward ones.

That was what was wrong with dying in hospitals these days. Why did they make you go to those places to die? You were going to die anyway, everybody died eventually, and if you knew it was coming why did you have to go to a strange place to do it? Like those apocryphal Inuits who took their grandparents out onto ice floes and left them to drift. Which apparently they didn't do, of course, but hospitals were almost worse than the thick and cracking ice. The smell, and those horrid beds that cranked into strange shapes, the flat sheets restlessly un-tucking themselves, the blankets crumpling sideways. The televisions on high brackets, the open doors, someone's sad elderly voice wailing over and over again, "Help. Help. Help" from another room somewhere, or worse, a wordless wail from the mouth of that person who once was your mother. The brisk people who spoke to your mother as if she were a child, and spoke to you as if you were insane. They all wanted you to take your drifting mother to the hospital, set her loose, and wave good-bye from the edge of the bed as her face receded into the distance, bewildered, but Martha thanked them and insisted, and took her mother home to die in peace while the aide was out getting cigarettes for her, like a human being.

"Come on," said Colin, and shoved her in the rear end. She realized she had slowed to a walk in the snow and that her face was covered with tears.

"I don't want to die," she said.

"Nobody wants to die," he said. "Not even the damn dead."

"Don't swear," she said automatically.

"Come on," he insisted. "No dying. Not doing it."

She shambled back into a trot, then glanced behind her, worried.

"What about the others?"

"They'll come."

"They will, won't they?” she said, and laughed, thinking of a Roger MacGough poem about a young man’s death.  A children's poet but not a children's poem, that one.

Colin didn't answer, just forged grimly alongside her, laboring in the snow. It was terribly deep already, as if it had been snowing all day. The traffic light was blinking yellow, the way it did after midnight, and there were still no tire tracks in the road. Down Newkirk Street they went, the way she used to ride on her bike when she was twelve. She remembered tidy sidewalks and the cheerful flags on the poles jutting out from the shallow porches of the rows of twin houses. Martha's mother never drove on Newkirk, because the people on that block were Irish and Catholic, and the little girls had hoop earrings, like gypsies her mother said, and the boys spat in the street and stared. Her mother had been a horrible snob and a racist, too.

Tonight, the porches were bordered with nets of Christmas lights, and the nylon flags dangled in the shape of fat Santa's face, conical Christmas trees, stylized holly leaves, and huge candles bearing sunny nylon flames and dripping nylon candle-wax. The lights and the flags were frosted with snow. The close-clipped privet hedges wore cowls of white over their glowing strings of lights. One tiny front yard held glittering reindeer made of lights, and across the street a half-size crèche of plastic saints beamed rosily through their snowy shrouds. All along the street to the end, cones of coiling snow seethed under the streetlights.

Something hummed and creaked behind her and she looked back. A small parade was trundling out of the supermarket driveway, led by a pair of float-like vehicles. It took her a moment to resolve the first indistinct silhouette through the thick snow and realize it was the tiny forklift from the back of the store, but with people clinging to every available surface of it. There were four or five people on the shelf of the fork, two standing astraddle the driver, and a couple of people crouched on the hump behind the seat, apparently holding on by their fingernails. The lift, humming, turned left out the driveway, heading her way, and one of the people on the back slid off and landed in the road, on all fours.

Behind the forklift was the battered metal hand cart, shuddering, creaking, and bumping, pushed by four people with their heads down, the cart bearing another six on its platform, and after that came a walking mob. Over the hill past the driveway she could see dark shadows, more dead folks coming along to join the parade.

Mr. Miklos had said the gates were open. She whispered the first lines of Kipling’s poem about being near the gates of Hell, feeling the snow on her upper lip.

"Oh, come on, you stupid old woman!" said Colin, yanking.

"You are being quite rude," she said.

"And you are saying a poem to death. Death doesn't read poetry."

That was quite a shock. It made the hairs on her arms lift in a very unpleasant way, and she shivered and realized she was already covered with snow from standing there. The red-haired boy pulled again, and she stirred her feet into motion, still feeling very nasty. How could Death not read poetry? Though what she had been saying had been, after all, Kipling and not very good Kipling at that, so she could understand if death was not particularly impressed by that. But surely, poetry had its use in any and all situations.

Something else occurred to her. "We should go back. Anton, Mr. Miklos, Holly and Seffie, they're still back there. We shouldn't get separated."

"If they’re out there, they're out of the poem too.”

“Oh, dear heavens. You mean if they don't catch up with us, they're as good as dead?"

"Well, they been dying all along," he said. "Almost. It's easy to give in."

"Have been dying," she corrected, again automatically, and he snorted. The street lamps winked out, leaving only the steady shine of the Christmas lights on either side. Behind them, louder and stronger, the distant growl of the forklift rose higher, the squeal of the battered cart sharpened, and the tread of muffled steps turned to a distinct and visceral crunch. Then she heard the sound of air brakes and the throaty rumble of a diesel engine, and a huge shadow came out of the grocery store parking lot. Its air-horn sundered the snowy firmament, shuddered the ground beneath their feet, and made Martha's heart leap horribly in her chest as if she had touched a live electrical wire. The tractor trailer, with a jolly painting of fresh fruit and vegetables on its side, slewing a little in the snow, began to roll down the hill towards them.

Martha and Colin fled between the walls of Christmas lights toward the dark, narrow road to her own lane.

Chapter Seventeen: Mother’s Day

She had snow inside her shoes and socks, and snow caking her knees where she had fallen several times. Her hands were wet. She couldn't feel her fingers. She had snow on her hair and on her nose, and she was sniffling. Death was supposed to bring surcease and peace. Instead, she seemed to be experiencing all the less aspects of being thoroughly alive.

There. Far off. She could see her house from the top of the lane. It was the only one with its lights still on, though it was the smallest one on the street. The porch was flooded with golden radiance, and wide fingers of light reached from the windows and from the door transom into the falling snow. There were no footsteps between here and the house. No one had gotten there before them. Her breathing was so labored, though, and the drifts so thick, that she wanted to sit down where she was. Just for a moment. She relaxed her grip on Colin's hand, but he wouldn't let go, just kept tugging like a two-year-old. He was the wrong size for that. His head was up to her shoulder now.

"You go ahead," she said, but he snarled and yanked so hard she fell to her knees. He dragged her a little way like that, and the hard metallic cold air went up her nose the way it had when she was young and went sledding. He stopped. Holding on, she got her other hand under her and scrambled back to her feet. "Young man, you and I are going to have to have a little talk," she said severely.

"Inside," he agreed. "We talk inside."

"But I'm so tired. Honestly, I swear I’m getting old. Colin, I'm getting tired. I can't do this any more. I can't do any of it."

"You be tired inside."

"But--"

"Inside. With the light."

She couldn't figure out what he was saying. She didn't know any poem with the inward light. It was the Quaker term for the soul or the spirit, she thought. The outer dark--Kipling again, and maybe Stanley Plumly. They were wading through snow that was knee deep by now. It was not possible for it to have accumulated that fast, she thought, but then it was not possible for the throngs of the wordless dead to be following her in a rusty forklift.

The house was bright and peaceful when they got there. Something flickered and moved inside. She hoped it wasn't something on fire. She hadn't left the stove on, had she?

"One foot. Two foot. And again," said Colin, and they made it up the walk that way. He let go of her hand when they got to the door, and she fumbled with frozen fingers at the knob, turning and turning without being able to get any purchase. Colin glared at her hands as if he could force them to work with his eyes. She grabbed a fold of her coat and laid it over the brass doorknob, then clutched and turned one more time, hearing more than feeling the movement and the slide of the latch. It didn't seem to be locked, though she had locked it when she left.

The door opened a crack, and they stumbled in. "Is anyone here?" said Martha, her heart hammering. No answer. Inside, it smelled familiar, and looked familiar. Too familiar. Surely she had just painted the living room? But it was a wash of dirty gray, a dingy shadowed color, stained by the smoke from her mother’s cigarettes. It was definitely not sunny yellow. With each effortful breath, she drew in in the odor of body fluids and disinfectant, and under that the sweet warm smell of incontinence, never completely scrubbed away. But no paint. She should be able to smell fresh paint.

"Make the door shut," said Colin urgently, and she did as he asked and then put the hook and eye on. She could hear her breathing again, a weary whistle, but behind that she heard something else, a furtive rustling sound. Was it her lungs? The feathers of her bronchial passages stretching and tearing even more from the exertion of wallowing through the snow? The doctor had said her lungs were congested, but right now they felt the size of a child's clenched fists, and were pounding against her rib cage to be let out.

Colin ran up the stairs, tripping half way up and using a word he shouldn't have known, and then she heard him scrambling in the linen closet. He ran downstairs trailing a beach towel of hideous hue, which he flung over her head with an effort. The hem trailed over her face, and she could breathe even less; she put her hands up to tip it back and felt him yanking at her shoes.

"What are you doing?" she said severely.

"Sit down. You get dry." He pulled her back toward the kitchen and she heard with horror her feet squelching in the shoes. They were new shoes, and she had meant them to last. He sat her down at the round pine table and yanked at her shoes while she coughed, the towel still hanging over her shoulders. What was that Charles Simic poem about Death's wife? She felt like Death's wife, sitting home alone while Death was out looking for someone with a bad cough. That didn't make sense. But then, Mr. Miklos said that sense made itself.

Far off, she heard the thunderous squeak of air brakes again, and managed to strangle her cough enough to say, "This house can't stand . . . a truck."

"It snows," said Colin, as if that would reassure her.

There came a thunderous far-off crunch. It was from a distant cataclysm, something not close to home.

"It's slippery out," said Colin with satisfaction, and she laughed because not only had he begun with a pronoun, he had--sort of--ended with a preposition. Or was it an adverb in this context? Her laugh made her cough. There was a tickle in her throat like a naked electrical wire, and clear thin fluid welling up in her windpipe to replace what she expelled with every bark. The fine fluid did not soothe. Instead, it seemed to accelerate the corrosion, the way water catalyzed rust in a steel pipe or on a bicycle standing outside in the rain. "Pneumo" means air, she thought, hunching over and hacking, with the towel flapping back in her face. Right now a hundred trucks could hit her house and she wouldn't care, she just wanted to get some air under her ribs before she coughed so hard she threw up.

So she didn't care, or even notice much, when Colin removed her shoes and started clattering and crashing around in the cabinets, but it wasn't until she had finally achieved equilibrium--her lungs so weakened the tickle in her throat couldn't make her cough any more--that she could accept the mug of tea he thrust at her. Hot tea.

"Should you be using the stove?" she husked. He frowned at her and she obediently sipped. "Did--" she paused to clear her throat and sipped again. "Did that truck hit something up the street?"

"Probable."

"Probably."

"Blee," he mimicked. "No talking."

"If it's an adverb you want, not an adjective, it ends in –ly," she mumbled stubbornly, and coughed again. She felt awful hot. Awfully hot, rather.

He drew himself up and knit his brows. "I use adjective. They don't use me," he said. A firm knock came at the back door behind him.

"Humpty Dumpty said something like that. I suppose our pursuers have arrived," she said, putting her mug down on the table and rising. She was in her bare feet and her legs were wet, but she stumped over to the front and peered around the edge of the front window curtain, taking its hem in her numb fingers. .

"Well, that settles it, I suppose," she said, dropping the curtain and stepping back. Curious how calm she felt.

Colin came to stand behind her and stare at the door, his hand on her shoulder. "Who's there?" he said. It was fortunate they had chosen such baggy clothes for him, she thought, because now he was her height, and trousers weren’t too long any more. She didn't answer him.

The door thundered again.

"Family always comes home for the holidays," she said. "At least that's what the commercials say. It seems lately as if everybody leaves home for the holidays instead. But that's my brother Lawrence out there. He died just after I got into graduate school. We thought at first it was his death that was affecting Mother's mental state so much."

Colin said, "I won't go back."

Lawrence scuffled over to the window next to the door and banged there until the glass cracked. The curtain bellied out as if an invisible fish was trying to swim through it.

"Boards, a hammer. Nails," said Martha, getting up again and going down to the basement. Someone was beating on the cellar door like a drum, too, but that was padlocked shut and there were no basement windows to break, so she ignored it and looked in her scrap-wood bin. Colin started yelling upstairs, so she hurried.

When she got back, Lawrence was halfway through the broken window, and before she could get to him he fell through, head downward on the living room floor, still moving his arms and legs about like a stunned lizard.

She unlocked the front door and opened it up to the swirling snow, and then got down on her knees and started shoving. Lawrence--the passed-on, the late Lawrence, the deceased, the ex-Lawrence, she thought coldly--was wearing the same shaggy haircut he had when he died, and a nylon shirt and tight trousers, and he still had a bit too much lard in his midsection, though if he had lived the intervening thirty years he would certainly be much stouter by now.

He was hard to move, and was resisting her, but she managed to tip him over the doorstep back onto the snow-dusted back porch, where he lay with his nylon arms in the air, a beetle on its back. She slammed the door again and locked it. The wind blew through the front window, misting her arms with huge wet snowflakes that melted as soon as they touched her. It felt good. She was so hot, though she had been cold before.

Lawrence stood up in the swirling snow and stared mutely at her. His unkempt hair was plastered to his high cheekbones, and he shifted from foot to foot. She nailed a board up over the front window, bang bang bang bang, and another, this one extending past both sides, covering the aperture. When she ran out of boards, she put some more nails into the ends of the ones she already had up.

She stopped pounding and let the hammer dangle, but of course she could still hear banging, because now Lawrence was trying to get in again. "I can't say I didn't enjoy tossing him out," she said. "Lawrence had a nerve overdosing when he did and leaving me all alone with Mother. I got over missing him a very long time ago. I have no idea why he decided to pop up now. Colin?"

He was staring at the front door. She peered through the spyhole. The face in front of the throng, serious and a bit impatient, was familiar. "It's Anton!" she said, putting her hand on the doorknob.

"No!" shrieked Colin, and grabbed her hand.

"Let go, young man!" she said sharply, and the sharpness set her coughing again. "He's--our friend!" she managed to gasp, and shook herself loose of his grip.

"No friends," gibbered the boy, and slammed his back against the door, daring her to open it. "All dead."

"I can't believe you are behaving this way."

"Ask for the password!"

She wavered, confused. "What password?"

"Any password!"

She laughed. Very well. She would humor him. She undid the lock, but left the hook and eye up. "What's the password, Anton?" she said through the crack.

He grimaced at her impatiently, said, "There isn't a password," and pushed. She started to let him in. Behind him was Mr. Miklos, his eyes as big as twin moons, his jaw thrust forth, and he said, "Please, lady." She let the door swing open and leaned over, coughing and coughing. Then Anton slipped on the light snow on the porch floor, and fell backwards. Holly, her face set, was right behind him, and Seffie yelping after her, so Anton tumbled backwards into both of them. Mr. Miklos leaned over to help him up and ended up sliding in turn, until there was a clot of them descending thump thump thump down the three porch steps into the hip-deep snow, where they tried to get back up and clung together swaying as if they were in an old silent movie.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Martha, and started to laugh. A creak sounded from behind her, and the sound of springs. The sound of an elderly recliner adjusting itself. Then she heard the scrape of a match. She turned away from the open door and the scrambling noise, and turned back into the living room.

"Mother," she said. "I should have known."

The recliner appeared to have returned from the dead, along with her mother, and her mother's cigarettes.

The chair was a dark acid blue vinyl, with its headrest leaned back perilously and its footrest lifted like an alligator's upper jaw, to reveal casters and steel springs in its dark under-mouth instead of teeth. On the footrest were her mother's feet, clad in a sturdy pair of athletic socks, with the soles white as the snow outside, because her mother never walked anywhere any more.

Between the fingers of a hand resting on one of the bulging chair-arms was a cigarette, the smoke leaking out of it and settling away from the cold breeze wafting in from the front window. There were small round burn holes melted into that arm of the chair, holes with black rims, and the fingertips of the hand were brownish-yellow with tar. The hand lifted itself and its burden of smoke upwards, and the fish mouth closed around the filter and sucked.

A muddle of footsteps. Martha didn't pay attention. "I'm soaking wet!" snapped Seffie from the doorway.

"There are towels in the linen closet," said Martha without looking away. "Shut the door behind you."

Her voice was so firm that Seffie didn't say another thing. The lock snicked and the hook slid into the eye. Footsteps trudged up the stairs.

Meanwhile, the sunken tortoise eyes blinked slowly and shifted to look to her left, and the recliner creaked again and started to collapse upwards, the footrest folding down and the seat-back progressing forward. Martha was reminded of a stage set on wheels, with the living room sliding away and a street scene closing in from the back while building fronts dropped smoothly from the upper depths. Stage front, holding the pose, the ghost of her mother with a cigarette, big as life and twice as alert, began to put her stocking feet to the floor, which she had been unable to do for two years before she died. Life for her had been no crystal stair, but death, it seemed, was a heck of an escalator.

"No, Mother," said Martha automatically, hearing her voice settle without a break into the caretaker's brusqueness. "You don't want to do that, Mother." But Mother did want to do that. Still holding the cigarette, she leaned herself forward and tipped out of the chair, unbending her knees and trying to stand. An unfortunate glimpse of her sanitary undergarment appeared where her skirt hem was hiked up, caught on the sticky tape. Her eyes, so pale now, so hooded in folds of skin, were fixed on Colin. That did not bode well.

"Mother. Sit down," Martha said, going to her and standing to one side. Her mother pressed on, but with long practice Martha took her shoulders, inserted a thigh under her mother's rump, folded her off balance, and settled her back in the chair. "Sit down!" Martha said again and took the cigarette away, sticking it in her own mouth when she couldn't think where to put it, and squinting against the smoke. She rooted around with a free hand around the seat of the recliner.

Her mother tried to peel Martha's other hand off her shoulder, but Martha ignored that, as she always did, and kept a firm grasp. "Got it!" Martha said, and pulled one end of a strap out of the depths of the seat. It had seemed so cruel when her mother was alive, but now it came in handy. She found the other half of the strap and let go of her mother's shoulder long enough to insert the tongue into the clasp and click the seat-belt shut.

Her mother started fumbling with the clasp, which gave her something to do while Martha went to the kitchen to put out the cigarette in the sink. When she came back, she straightened her mother's skirt so it hung down respectably, as if she was dressing a life-size doll. Then Martha sat down on the living room couch and put her head between her knees.

Colin watched her doubtfully. People were moving on the second floor. Something banged against the front window again.

Martha sat up and said to Colin. "I believed. . . I would never have to do that again. He looked back at her and she realized his eyes were dilated with fear. "What will they do with you if they get you?"

"They take me back," whispered Colin. “They put me in my place.”

"To the land of the dead. Are you their king?"

"The place between, to be the dog at the door," he said. "The one who keeps the dead safe, protects them."

"Is that such a bad thing, then? Because it doesn't look as if the dead are terribly dangerous." The banging, random, got louder. She heard Anton and the others talking.

"I am done being the dog,” shouted Colin. “I was done a hundred years and a thousand years ago."

"Of course you were. Forgive me. They’re looking for their lost dog?” Martha said. “That makes sense. Nobody likes losing a dog. But you are not a dog, Colin,” she hastened to say when his face turned bright red.

He shouted, "I am not dog! Dogs have no history. They are just dog, from beginning to end!"

The front door crunched.

The seat-belt clasp clicked.

Martha's mother tried to rise again, but Martha, with the ease of long custom, was there to click it shut again before she could stand. "No, Mother," said the daughter, and put her arms around the shoulders, smelling up close the nicotine and the baby smell of old food and layers of powder, feeling the fragility of the bones and the soft gel of the skin. "No, Mother." The body stilled under her touch, as it often did toward the end, and when she pulled away her mother blinked up at her with that half smile, the one that sometimes convinced her there was intelligence still creeping somewhere in the folds of the brain. "I have to go now, Mother. I'll just be upstairs," said Martha to her, and she took Colin's hand and started up the steps. Her mother mewed behind them and her fingers began working at the clasp again, but Martha couldn't put her mother, not even her dead mother, out in the cold as she had her brother.

So Colin was no mandylion. He was a Cerberus, a guardian. The dead were not the vengeful haunts of ghost stories or the rejoicing souls of the shriven saints. They were like the sad shades in the Elysian Fields. They had lost their memories and their selves, and all of them their speech, but they knew they wanted their dog back.

Surely the dog wasn’t the only guardian? There had to be a dog owner, didn’t there?

At the top of the stairs, she went to the front of the house and looked out. The truck, at a diagonal, had hit the Norris house, and the hood of the cab was crumpled up against the windshield. Three cars were stuck behind it with their headlights glowing beneath the snow at the head of the lane, and a school bus and two SUVs sat at the bottom of the lane, also at an odd angle.

The school bus looked like the one that had chased them from the library, and indeed its side panel was bowed in and its front grille was very battered.

Like ants around a syrup jar, however, the wordless dead were milling in her front yard, and more were cresting the hill at the top of the lane. One of the dead looked up at her as if it could hear her through the window-glass, and then they all did, with moon eyes.

The front door groaned and there was the sound of loosening nails. "Anton?" called Martha. "Holly? Mr. Miklos?" No answer. She glanced into the bedroom and flicked the light switch on, and off again when she didn't see anyone. "I have no idea what they are doing," she said. "Well, I feel entirely too ill to be dead, and I'm still talking, so let's take it as assumed that I am still alive. I think the bathroom is probably the safest place to take shelter, don't you? There's a lock on the inside of the door, at any rate." A shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairs: Her mother, thin and absurd in her loose clothes.

"Let us retire," said Martha to Colin. "Shall we, young sir?" and they went into the bathroom and locked the door.

Chapter Eighteen: Memorial Day

Colin sat cross-legged in the bathtub, looking determined, holding the toilet brush because it was the only weapon-like thing in the room. Martha sat on the edge, armed with three spray bottles of tile cleaner, listening to the muffled tumult below. The house shuddered, and loose paint fell from the ceiling. There were heavy feet on the landing. It was rather like a lock down. You sat in a corner of the classroom and kept the children calm, while a very foolish and misguided child with his father’s pistol roamed the hallways, until the PA system announced everyone could come out.  And then you still didn’t come out until you heard conversation in the hall. No one was talking in her hall right now.

"Well, we seem to be in the bad part of the story now," she remarked. "And I was wrong. My home is no refuge. Not at all." She dug in her handbag. “Here, have a caramel.”

"This is no story," he said bitterly, taking the candy, unwrapping it, and cramming it into his mouth.

"Of course it's a story. That's how human beings tell the difference between the present and the past. They tell stories. If it's in a story, it's over. If you can't make a story out of it, it's the present."

He glared at her. "This is real life." There was nothing of the little monster about him now, except that all middle school children were monsters of a sort. He was only a husky, slightly homely redhead in the awkward beginning of adolescence.

"Stories are real enough. A story is a way of making sense."

"Stories,” he said, and made it a swear word. The window, loose in its frame, shook with the wind and she jumped, but it was nothing personal, just the weather.

She kept on, "I honestly think a story is exactly the thing at the moment. You said yourself you are looking for words. Maybe you’re looking for a story of your own.”

“I have a story,” he said contemptuously.

“Of course you do. I’m forgetting. You are the dog of the dead, aren’t you, Cerberus, wasn’t it, but of course that was a long time ago.”

"Big hero brought me back and left me there,” said Colin bitterly.

He was correct. Hercules had returned Cerberus to Hades when he was done with the creature. “That must have been horrid,” she said, and fell silent in the presence of first hand experience. The snow spattered against the glass, which was beginning to frost over. With an effort, she said, “But you must have met so many interesting people.”

“Dead people.”

“Oh. You have a point. The dead don’t talk and the living  aren’t permitted to enter. Was it Charon who told Orpheus only the dead are allowed?”

“It was me, I told him, and I bit him, too,” he said firmly, and looked away, his lips pressed together. She stopped trying to talk. Besides, there were more thumps outside, and then a louder thump, and honestly, Martha had no idea what to do. now Martha was never in that position. Ever. There was a scuffling noise at the door she recognized all too well.

"No, mother," said Martha, beginning to get up and realizing they were doomed. She sat down again on the edge of the bathtub. A crash and the sound of someone sliding down stairs.  A reprieve. But only for a moment. Pick, pick, pick went the door a moment later. Then someone pounded hard.

People pounded on her door all the time in school. Sometimes they opened the door, walked in, and asked her a question in the middle of a lesson. Sometimes there were assemblies, and fire drills, and snow emergencies. She kept teaching. She had even kept teaching when the planes hit the World Trade Center and all the parents arrived one by one to take their children home. This was merely a matter of degree. "Is that why they want you back? To keep the living out?"

“Live people make problems."

“They do? How?”

"Hold on."

"I'm sorry?”

"No. They hold on. They don’t let go."

The door bulged inward, and made a cracking noise. Martha slid primly away along the edge of the bathtub, and watched the door, now crooked and with the round pads of fingertips visible through the narrow crack between door and jamb. The door shoved out again, and the bottom hinge ripped loose, so the lower half of the door swung in, the top half obviously striking a number of the crowd outside on top of the head. Her mother's feet in their athletic socks slid into the room. Mr. Murphy, the butcher, who was down on his hands and knees, wedged his liver-colored face under the door and peered in like a dog coming into a room where he was not allowed.

She got up, kicked the butcher's face, and then pushed the bottom of the door back as he pulled away. The door shoved back on her, though, with a squealing, splintering groan. She staggered backwards under its weight and the weight of all the bodies behind it, until the backs of her knees hit the side of the bathtub, and she went down into it still backwards, hard.

There was a dreamlike, noisy minute, with people all around her shoving each other and her in a scuffle that was noisy despite the lack of any shouting, or any breathing for that matter.

Something clanked, and someone almost fell into the bathtub after her. Martha, feeling very stupid, tried to right herself and get out. She grabbed at the taps and succeeded in turning one of them on by accident, and everything got even more slippery and distracting.

Colin yelled from somewhere nearby, "No! Let go of me!" Martha flung a leg over the side of the bathtub and found herself facing the wrong way. As she twisted, the scuffling died away. Something was growling. Someone--several someones--were apparently falling down the stairs again. She brought the other leg around and turned to see what had happened. It was not immediately clear.

The bathroom door was leaning at a diagonal, not doing anything to block the way, but now Anton was standing in front of it, and beside him, Holly was holding a red-faced Colin in a hammerlock while he tried to bite her arms. No one else was in the room any more.

Holly was wrestling Colin capably, because Colin was only a thirteen-year-old boy, someone not quite strong enough yet to fight off someone used to climbing trees and lifting logs.

"Let go!" yelled Colin, and twisted his legs in mid-air, kicking back at Holly's shins. She didn't even grunt, just straddled her legs wide so he was kicking empty air.

"Stay put, Ms. Whitaker" said Anton. "They'll be back up the stairs." He shoved at the door but didn't succeed in getting it upright again. Martha turned the spigot of the bathtub off, giving it a little extra turn to make sure it didn't drip. Holly muscled Colin to the other end of the room from the door, toward the window where the snow fluttered in the darkness just outside, and sat him firmly on the radiator, still holding his arms behind him.

"Get her off me!" he yelled.

"Holly, it's not necessary to restrain him like that," said Martha, "You mustn't lose your temper with children. It doesn't work." Holly didn't look angry so much as very focused. People didn't realize how useless and counter-productive it was to manhandle children. Now Colin gathered his feet under him and launched himself forward, but Holly caught him. "Holly, stop," Martha said. "Stop it at once. He can move on his own."

"Holly, no," said Anton. "Not now, Holly."

Martha looked at Anton, not sure she had heard him right, and as she did she heard the window sash rumbling up, and felt a cold knife of air at her back. She stood up from the edge of the bathtub.

Holly shoved Colin backwards through the open window, and followed him into the swirling darkness like a dollar bill going into a vending machine, her boots catching on the windowsill for a moment and then vanishing.

"Anton!" Martha gasped.

They both got to the window. Below, in the light from the living room, it looked as if someone had made a very messy snow angel. There was a thunder of feet on the stairs, a banging door, and already she could see a dark scramble of people was heading away around the front of the house.

"Oh, hell," said Anton, offended. "She went over to the other side. That's not what I planned. That will mess things up."

“They are at the front of the house. Go get him back!" said Martha, and Anton trotted out the door and was bounding down the narrow stairs. The front door banged again. Martha leaned farther out the window. The unmistakable roar of a school bus engine turning over cut through the quiet hiss of the wind, and then some more engines started up, and past the edge of the house a caravan of vehicles headed down the lane, their headlights creating cones of glowing, whirling reality ahead of them and leaving nothing but darkness and a running Anton behind. By the time Martha got downstairs, Anton was standing in the middle of the road next to the dead eighteen-wheeler, staring down the street at nothing.

"Oh dear. Oh, dear," said Martha. "Oh, Holly. Oh, dear." She realized she sounded idiotic, and shut her mouth.

"I didn't expect that," Anton said with resignation and kicked at the snow. "She wasn't supposed to go this early."

"So Holly is actually dead all the way now? Well, you can't anticipate everything," she said automatically, still shattered by Holly's treason and by what it implied. “We have to rescue him.”

He shook his head. "We’re stuck here. Nothing but a dead tractor-trailer. You left your car in the gas station. They're too far ahead of us." The front door slammed behind them and Mr. Miklos shambled out, followed close behind by Seffie.

Seffie wrapped her slender arms around herself, looked aside at Mr. Miklos, and shuffled away from him, even though he wasn't doing anything except looking out at the snow.

It was terribly cold. Martha opened her mouth to tell everyone to go inside and get warm, and closed it again. If Colin was gone, if there was no child left to rescue, if she was somewhere near the end of her life and there was no future except wordless reaching, why should she even go inside? Why not stand here until she was part of the snow, as unable to speak or read or remember as a statue or a snowman? Like the Wallace Stevens poem that was so hard to memorize. She squeezed her eyes shut, horrified that she was thinking about poetry in the midst of what must be an end-of-life experience.

She heard a rasping sigh, and opened her eyes wearily. Mr. Miklos, with a tremendous effort, said from the porch, "Lady, you must not surrender. Must stand against the dark." He rolled his cold fish eyes to one side and shrugged.

Anton, a shadow in the middle of the road, began to turn around, waving his arms like a windmill, looking in a circle. "Wait," he said. "Ms. Whitaker, when was the last time things seemed normal to you?"

"Thirty years ago."

"No, I mean when did they seem ordinary this week?"

"The day school ended, when I was driving home from school after the faculty holiday party."

"You drove your car all the way home?"

"Yes. I parked it and put my forehead on the wheel, and that's when I lost consciousness, just before the young man tapped on my window. What?”

Anton was staring at her. “You knew it was happening? You knew you were dying?”

“Of course I knew,” snapped Martha. “One doesn’t miss a thing like that. But I had too many things to do, so I didn’t pay it any mind at the time.”

Anton was only at a loss for words for an instant. “Then your car must be here still. This afterlife is connected to the real one. And in the real world, the car is somewhere right here." He was windmilling his arms and walking with his legs wide, as if he had his eyes closed and was trying to find something in the dark. Martha watched him, feeling drowsy.

"Breathe," said Mr. Miklos.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, what are you on about, man?" Martha asked.

"Take deep breath. Breathe!"

She did, despite herself, and he stepped off the porch and waded through the snow towards him. Even in all this cold, she could smell him. He smelled like the middle school boys' locker room again, which at least was a more positive association than dead-animal-behind-the-wallboard. She held up a hand, and he stopped.

"Come on, Seffie! Help me look!" called Anton.

"I am not setting one foot into that snow," said Seffie. "These are new shoes. I have too much invested in these shoes to get them all soggy so you can find that dumpy little car, even if it isn't imaginary."

"What if it was an imaginary Lexus?" said Anton. "A Ferrari? Would you help me then?"

"No middle school teacher is going to drive a Ferrari," said Seffie. "And I have a Lexus already."

Mr. Miklos stepped closer, only an arm’s length away. It really was most uncomfortable and disruptive. “Stop that at once. It’s undignified,” she told him.

"I give you dignity. I give you new shoes. I give you Ferrari," insisted Mr. Miklos. "I give you birth of new year, heart of summer, heat of sun. Only breathe." As if she were a small child having a tantrum and he was promising her a pony.

There was a thud, and a cry of annoyance. She looked up, and Anton was clutching his hand. Next to him was a glossy dark swipe in mid-air, like snow scraped from a window, and in fact that was what it was. It was a car window, and part of the door, under the snow, mid-air but rock-solid. "Hit it dead on with the side of my hand," complained Anton, rubbing his wrist. "Come on. Get the rest of the snow off it."

Martha drew one long slow shaky breath. Mr. Miklos backed away. Seffie said “Ugh,” and jumped with both feet into the snow on the path. She slipped and slid over to the glossy dark apparition in the air and gave it a tentative wipe with her sleeve. Mr. Miklos left Martha then, and he, Anton, and Seffie cleared the whole thing off. Mr. Miklos opened the back door for Seffie and stood at attention, and after she failed to murder him with a single long glare, she slid in and started dusting the snow off her legs. Mr. Miklos went to the other side and got in himself. The car started and the windshield wipers began to go.

"Let’s go,” Anton said, gesturing at Martha. “He won’t come with me unless you’re there.”

"I have to get my purse. It’s in the house," she said. Mr. Miklos looked at her anxiously, but she made it back to the house and through the front door. She paused at the door with her bag in her hand. No one was in the house any more. She was leaving the house in disrepair, with her mother's recliner reincarnated, and the bathroom door splintered off its hinges. However, even if this wasn't the real world, but some kind of in between place, it was not necessary to keep the house tidy all the time, really. Especially if it was as imaginary as her car, and especially if she were lying half dead somewhere. Oh. She was probably in the hospital. Matt and Carole had been getting her out of her car after the mail carrier attacked. That made sense. She went out the door.

The car's engine hummed, and they lurched forward through what was now over a foot of snow, sidling and sliding down the street, giving the eighteen-wheeler plenty of room. "Oh, stop!" said Martha. "I didn't lock the front door."

"Leave it unlocked. It doesn't matter now, does it?" said Anton. "Follow the tracks in the road." Martha bit back a retort and steered gently. "I'm sorry," Anton said. "I don't need to tell you how to do everything, do I?"

She smiled and kept moving. The students did, after all, eventually turn into real adults, many of them, and could often notice things. She followed the disappearing furrows plowed by the school bus and its attendants through a wallowing left turn.

She closed her eyes and opened them, and tried to focus on the bus tracks in the snow. The problem with living in the same place for so long was that you saw everything in layers of history, with the oldest and deepest layers the most vivid and visceral, like the internal organs of memory.

The snow skittered down the windshield like candy sprinkles, and she turned her eyes back to the road. Anton had always been such a charming boy,even if he was shrouded in perpetual gloom. He hadn't dabbled in false melancholy, that boy, not like the children who dyed their hair black and wore black T-shirts with skulls or the names of bands. Those children were often rather sweet and hopeful underneath, or at least endearingly nerdy. No, Anton had been the kind of child who could dismiss a cheerful platitude with a look and a cutting remark, who shriveled optimistic remarks unborn, who had only to meet your eyes across the room to make you feel as if your willingness to give the world the benefit of the doubt had been not only misguided, but dangerous.

The landscape through which they were trundling and, often, sliding, was almost featureless now, a ghostly tunnel of white snow piled up deep on lawns and porches, roofs and trees. She knew where she was going. Oh, not by the street signs, which were half obscured by the heavy snow even if they had still been readable. Because she had lived here so long, all it took was a sketch of a building corner or the merest blotch of darkened window to know that here was the little street where the sour corner grocer sold popsicles, canned corned beef, and expensive white bread, and there was the block where the health club was before the owner had the fire. Martha wallowed the car around a corner and down a hill, and announced, "They're going to the highway."

"Road to hell," pronounced Mr. Miklos from the back seat in a particularly hollow voice. "Paved by inattentions."

Martha glanced behind quickly, because he had sounded so odd, and after she glanced back at the road, she looked again, because something wasn’t right.

She said, "Where did Seffie go?"

The girl was not in the back seat.

Anton sighed, folded his arms, and stared out the passenger window as if there was something there to see. "Typical. Most dying people say to themselves it isn't so bad, and they surrender. But not Seffie. No, she decides the rules don't apply to her."

"Don’t you like that about her?"

Anton snorted. "I don't know if I like it or not. I don't have any say in the matter."

“They took the highway east," said Martha, and swung the car right. The ruts were faint but definite, because the highway was unplowed and empty. She dared not go much faster, because she could only see a few score feet ahead. It was as if the road was materializing out of nowhere, and disappearing into the void in the rear-view mirror. But the tracks of the bus were still there ahead of her, like the wavering high tide litter-line on a beach.

Who was it, Democritus, who said that you couldn't step in the same river twice? And what was the river? Life? Job? Family? Love? There was always a choice, even if it was to try to live or try to die.

"Return!" said Mr. Miklos, and she jerked the wheel, slithering back onto the road from the median, her heart pumping and her breath as harsh as if she'd been underwater. A great green glowing sign appeared ahead over the highway, and though she couldn't read it, she recognized the silhouette of an airplane. "I wasn't breathing again? Oh, dear. If they’re taking Colin to the airport, are they going to put him on a plane? Where would they send him? Do they have regular routes to the afterlife?"

"Stay with us," said Mr. Miklos. "Do not wander."

"I'm talking because I’m trying to concentrate." She took the exit to the airport, and a few hundred feet farther on, the track of the schoolbus disappeared into the wet salted roadway.

At the fork, she decided it didn't matter that she had no idea which vast green sign said "Arrivals" and which "Departures." They were arriving at the airport, and departing from the highway, so it was all pretty much the same thing. The road curved and descended, and the red tail-lights of a parked car appeared ahead of them on the shoulder. As soon as they passed it, the lights of another parked car replaced it, and another, and another. "Who are those people supposed to be? Why are they here?" said Martha.

"The living. They're waiting for the dead to come back," said Anton gloomily. "If the gates are open, people can travel both ways. The living want the dead to come back. At least they think they do."

"What? Are they avoiding short-term parking? Are the dearly departed going to give them a call on their cells when the plane is at the gate? That's ridiculous." But they passed more and more of the cars, their tires half-buried and their tail-pipes puffing out clouds of steam.

The lights of the main terminal building appeared as the curve of the road straightened out, and Martha pulled the little car into the brightly lit stretch next to the terminal, slowing to the curb. The snowflakes fell into the light and melted on the empty surface of the road. Anton said, “I’ll go find him. You catch up,” and got out, leaving the door open, and loped toward the steadily revolving doors.

“I thought he said he needed me with him to help him with Colin,” she said.

"I escort you to the entrance," said Mr. Miklos, leaning in the passenger side door and staring at her with his faintly glittering eyes.

Martha sighed, put the parking brake on, turned out the headlights, turned the car off, and locked the doors before she followed the patiently waiting Mr. Miklos toward the building. She didn’t want its battery to run down.

He waved her into the revolving door, but something dark seemed to flutter down from his arm and she glanced after it involuntarily. It was a shred of cloth with threads trailing from it, as if his clothes were decaying off him by themselves. "After you," he said gallantly, arm still extended, and another tuft of dark cloth floated away into the snow.

Chapter Nineteen: Ascension Day

Past the bag self-check kiosks, the long row of ticket counters was empty, and the stanchion tapes and posts divided the empty floors into empty spaces. Puddle-water footsteps, some of them still with a foam of snow floating in them, led from the automatic door to the base of an escalator at the end of the hall.

The threaded teeth of the escalator opened up from the floor and rolled toward the lighted ceiling of the upper floor, dripping with snow-melt. Anton stood at the top of the escalator, beckoning, and as Martha and stepped onto the humming beast he turned and disappeared.

At the top, a further space was all squares and emptiness--square floor tiles, square ceiling tiles, square panels in the fluorescent light panels, square skylights at the tops of square recesses in the high square ceiling, and above, the blank dark snow-filled night. All the stores had their security gates rolled down and their lights off. “This way,” called Anton, and they followed into another tidy forest of stanchions with long gray webbing straps between them, dividing the space into empty lanes. A lectern, surrounded by a ten-foot plastic shield, guarded the entrance to the maze, but there was no TSA agent at it.

Martha hesitated. She opened her bag and looked into it. She had forgotten her wallet. She had no identification. She didn’t have a ticket, either.

But Anton was already ducking under the webbing straps, past the sign showing how to put shampoo into a quart-size plastic bag, as if there were no rules to be followed, and no identification needed. “Hurry up,” he called and headed for the screening machines.

The straps felt like actual walls to Martha, but Mr. Miklos held them up for her one by one, and that made it easier to step through.

At the end of the line, the security belts rumbled smoothly through the darkness of the X-ray machines like rivers diving into caverns, like roads into tunnels through mountains. In between the machines, the body scanners arched. It was all gates, all magic portals, all points of no return, even if there weren’t any impatient TSA agents standing and shouting about shoes and computers.

Anton was already on the other side of the screening, jogging toward the departure gates as if he knew where he was going. Mr. Miklos shuffled through a scanner and emerged on the other side, unscathed. But Martha didn't move, and he turned around and looked back at her. He beckoned. The light was behind him, so he was just a silhouette. Martha ran after him, feeling the thrill of trespassing and reveling in it, because she hadn’t broken any laws that she knew of since she was twelve years old.

No one stopped them. No sirens went off, no lights flashed. The pale floor tiles gave way to a geometric-patterned carpet, where the wet footprints disappeared. Gray vinyl chairs bolted in curved lines near podiums and counters.

All the missing humanity was here.

Every wall had someone sitting against it charging a phone or a laptop, and every featureless column had someone leaning against it. They all had the normal attitude people had in airports: the closed, bored face, the folded arms, the slumped posture. Some even had luggage. For a moment, Martha thought she was back in the normal world.

Clearly, the snowstorm had hindered air traffic, and these poor people were just trying to get home for the holidays. It was all so ordinary, and Martha had a brief moment of dismay, wondering if she was had hallucinated a reality full of Terrible Signs when she really was in an airport. She couldn’t see Anton anywhere.

Something beeped behind her, and she jumped. A cart passed her with bench seats on either side, a flashing light revolving on its vestigial dashboard. It was driven from the back by a woman in a postal carrier’s uniform and carried six people: Mr. Ray, Mrs. Somebody, the Santa Claus man, Uncle Theodore, and the evangelist, and of course Martha’s mother, facing sideways, smoking a cigarette and squinting at the passing scenery through the smoke.

That settled it. People weren't allowed to smoke in airports any more, and hadn't for years. "We are officially in hell, I think. Or at least limbo?" She said to Mr. Miklos, who stood next to her with little bits of fabric flying off his dark jacket and disappearing in mid-air.

"I do not know," he said. “I do not come here, ever,” and he blinked his eyes at her as if he in an aquarium, peering below the surface like a man in a snorkel mask. He wasn’t just fraying. He was disappearing.

"Mr. Miklos," she said, but she could see through him to the window. And then he was not there and had never been there. "Come back!" she said, reaching, losing her balance somehow and ending on her knees. The cart trundled off, beeping and flashing, heading into a deep and featureless fog. "Mr. Miklos?" she called again, raising her voice as if he was a middle schooler who had gotten separated from a field trip. No answer.

Her knees hurt. Her wrist ached. She felt too heavy, too burdened, to get up from her knees, as if she was carrying one of those backpacks under which her students labored. No Mr. Miklos to remind her to breathe. She would have to remember for herself. She took a breath. It felt like small knives. She took another. She grabbed a nearby vinyl chair and got herself up.

Out the nearest window, past where Mr. Miklos had been a moment ago, was the runway, but she could see only a little of it through the fog. The other way, more windows looked out on even more fog on the other side, lit by the glare of high floodlights. There were no descending or ascending lights in the hovering sky, no planes coming in or out, just snow and more snow, and a vague dim darkness out past the sweep of the lights.

She looked around for Anton, but saw only strangers, none of whom were looking back. Behind the closest counter, a woman in a polyester vest, her curly hair as ragged as if she had just gotten out of bed, tapped at a keyboard in front of her, stared at the screen, and tapped some more. The video display behind her showed a picture of a palm tree and a blue sky.

Nobody was going anywhere right now. That was clear. And the last of her little crew of companions who could still talk had gone and left her in a snowed-in airport somewhere at the end of life.

"Well, no," she said. "No. Don’t be silly." And she rummaged in her bag and found a caramel, which she unwrapped and popped into her mouth. Sweetness exploded and everything swam around her for a moment. Then the world steadied. Another breath. And another.

Martha sat down in the gray vinyl seat beside her to take her shoes off and shake the water out of them. She wiggled her toes. Could your feet hurt if you were dead? The fluorescent lights flickered. It was cold in here, but the cold of climate control, not the sharp cold of winter. It could have been mid-summer air conditioning, if she hadn’t looked out the window. She interlaced her fingers so she could feel some warmth. She was still awfully tired. Perhaps she would just sit here and wait for Anton to come back. She would keep breathing, but she would just close her eyes and doze a little too. She would say a poem to herself, as she often did when she couldn't sleep.

Her eyes opened a few moments later and darted about in panic. She couldn't remember a poem offhand. That had not happened to her in decades.

She scanned the room, looking for inspiration. Nothing. There was an Elizabeth Bishop poem called "In the Waiting Room," but she couldn't remember a word of it. Yvor Winters had written a poem about the San Francisco Airport, hadn't he? She couldn’t remember that one, either. She glanced out the dark window and saw, past the false, hard reflection in the pane, the darkness swallowing everything. It was all night out there, forever. Out of the night—that was the beginning of that poem Robert Louis Stevenson’s friend had written, “Invictus,” the one that Nelson Mandela liked and the Oklahoma City Bomber, and she knew that one backwards and forwards. She began to say it to herself, and leaned over to put her shoes back on.

“I would prefer to remember a different poem," she said to the blank-eyed white-haired woman opposite her. The woman didn’t respond. "The author was chronically ill, which I suppose excuses him. Can you hear anything I say?" The woman did not move. Martha scowled at her. Really, there was no excuse for just giving up like that, even if you were dead.

"This is ridiculous," said Martha, and got up from the chair. "There is something to be done, and apparently I am supposed to be doing it, so I will go on."

A long dark figure opposite her, in the middle of a rank of chairs, its legs stretched out wide, lifted its head and smiled at her mournfully. "Bravo, Ms. Whitaker," said Anton.

"Eee!" was all she could utter, which hardly seemed suitable. “What are you doing here? I thought you were way ahead.” The woman across them was gathering up her bags.

"Me? I’m waiting for my plane. I was too late. The gate will be announced any time now. They have chained the dog to the empty throne, and I have nothing left to do except go into the darkness alone like everyone else." Indeed, the public address system was mumbling something in a woman's flat, tired voice, and everyone else was starting to get up.

"What a morbid thought," she said sensibly. She dug in her bag and handed him a wrapped caramel. He took it and stared at it.

“It goes into your mouth.”

“Ms. Whitaker, candy doesn’t solve anything. It never did.”

“No,” she agreed. “But then I never pretended to have any solutions, young man. Go ahead. I’ll have one too while we’re thinking.”

“Thinking about what?” he said, idly peeling the wrapping off and then putting it in his mouth.

“Oh, anything. Everything. Why is the throne empty? Who is supposed to be in it?”

“My mom and my dad. They had the job. And when their plane went down, it was supposed to be Seffie and me. At least that was my plan. But then the dog got loose.”

“Your parents are the King and Queen of the Dead?” Somehow, having known Anton’s parents, she found it easy to believe. It explained that depressing house, at least.

“They were, but they can’t come back, and my sister didn’t want the job. And now the dead have put the dog in their place.” She looked up at him. He was so very tall and so very gloomy for someone she had once taught in eighth grade.

"He's not really a dog, you know," she said sensibly. The crowd had mostly gotten up out of their seats and trudged away, as if a gate change had been announced. “What is he guarding?”

“I’ll show you,” he said wearily. ‘You can follow me if you like. I’m heading that way. You’re probably going there too, anyway.” She followed against her better judgment. They walked over to a moving walkway going down one side of the hall. A man in a stained white jacket, his T-shirt showing through the unbuttoned front, was standing leaning on the handrail, staring at nothing. It was once again Mr. Murphy, the butcher.

Martha averted her eyes, not out of fear, but out of exhaustion. She was fed up with the distant past of her childhood, however symbolic it might be of something. She was done with her childhood, and with most of her adulthood for that matter. Anton forged ahead of her, his long legs scissoring, his shoulders gaunt. His hair swayed around his head like a dark halo. She started to scurry after him, and then slowed. Why rush? She wasn't in any hurry to get there, wherever there was, especially if Colin was imprisoned again.

Anton turned around on the moving belt when he didn't hear her footsteps, peering at her raven-like with his head cocked and his dark eyes bright. "Are you coming?"

"Why should I? And why should you, for that matter? What do you have to gain by giving up your life?" But she stepped on herself, and they rolled forward.

"What do I gain?" he said. "An excuse not to go to business school. A chance to decide what I want to do. A chance to have a life. It’s not as if I have much choice. And you, Ms. Whitaker, should come with me, because who else will help but you? It's what you do."

"I'm done with that," she said. "I'm not the one who takes care of everyone else any more. I've never been good at it."

"You were never much of a caretaker, that’s true," he said. “But you took care of me when I was in eighth grade."

"You were an awful boy. You argued with me, and disagreed with my opinions about your writing, and I can't imagine anyone trying to take care of you against your will."

"Oh, people tried, and they tried," he said. "You were the only one who noticed I didn't need to be taken care of. You respected me. And I notice you didn't put your mother in a nursing home, either."

"Horrid places," she said. "They would have talked to her like a baby and pretended they liked her. And they would have charged the earth for it, too. It was nothing but common sense to keep her home, even if it was trying at times.”

"It was respecting. You stand for something, and you respect people," he said. "Don't make that face, it makes you look like a Pekingese. You always let me be myself. That's what you do."

Martha could not think of a thing to say to that, she was so furious. A Pekingese? How dare he? But before she could collect herself, the walkway ended and Anton strode away. She scurried after him. Anton certainly didn't seem to need any caretaking. He seemed to know what he was doing, and why, and where he was going, and she agreed it shouldn’t be business school, at least not for Anton.

They came to a much taller space with a circular ceiling. Directly across from them was an immense archway, like a Grand Central Terminal entrance, made of a blond close-grained granite that shone as if with candle-light. On the other side were indistinct shapes, though she could hear faint faraway cries from somewhere ahead. 

"I don't remember this," she said.

"No one does," said Anton, who was standing looking into the dark. "Sometimes I came to see my parents at work, so I remember it. No one except me ever remembers this, and Colin perhaps, and a few mythical heroes. If we set foot over the threshold, we are not expected to come back. Are you ready to go where you could never come back, Ms. Whitaker?"

"I am planning to finish painting the interior of my house and catching up on my reading, actually," she snapped. "And are you planning to be a mythical hero?"

"No, not exactly," he said, and once again the grandeur of his expression lapsed and he looked unsure. "Keep me company, Ms. Whitaker. I had planned to have a companion on this journey."

"You thought Seffie Lawler was coming? Anton, you can't ask someone to travel to death’s country just for love. Even if her name is Persephone," she said, remembering. “She doesn't strike me as that kind of person. Nor do you."

"Ms. Whitaker. I am exactly that kind of person. I've always been fascinated with death. I used to write about dying in my journal in eighth grade, and coffins, and you let me read Poe and all the other gloomy people."

"There is always a subset of young people who like that sort of thing," she said.

“Oh, Ms. Whitaker, you’re impossible. Seffie was born to be a queen, and we’re both about to be dead. I accept that. I accepted it a while ago. I was just looking for a way to make something out of the situation," he said, and stepped into the archway.

"Anton!" she said, and darted after him, but when she reached to grasp his him, seemingly so close, he was already far ahead, his coat-tails swaying at his calves. She broke into a slow, lumpy trot, wondering when Anton had acquired a long black cassock like a French priest or like that young actor, so serious, in that science fiction movie. And was this an airport concourse or an underground subway station? It was much too dark here. Anton seemed to be under a spotlight that moved along with him. She slowed, realizing she was very much not designed to run any more. English teachers did not run, ever. They progressed, like nuns, but instead of having their hands folded in front of them, they were generally holding a book, or a pen, or someone's mislaid binder. Anton wheeled, the skirts of his cassock swinging around him, and beckoned with a grand sweep of his long arm, and she managed a shuffling trot as if she were the Pekingese he had called her.

A scream echoed in the distance.

Her heart thumped as if she had been struck, and she began to run for real. She recognized that tone of fierce outrage. It was Colin.

He was still free enough to fight.

The scream came again. She took a deep breath, so deep that her shoulder blades expanded, and she ran as she had not run for decades, barely skimming the ground with her feet. Martha had nearly caught up with Anton by the time they emerged from the darkness. Ahead, once again, was an open space, and once again, beyond it, rows of ceiling lights retreating toward infinity above, and once again a big booth where the TSA agent should be sitting.

Once again, there was no TSA agent.

But it was a much bigger booth than usual, and it had extra features. It didn’t have a plastic shield, but it did have two high seats behind the desk. In front of the booth there was a leash and a bowl, and a big round pillow with the imprint of a body on it.

But no one was in the seats, and the leash was empty.

Past the booth were more stanchions, more ropes, and another maze. And beyond that? Another security checkpoint. All over again.

But this was a security checkpoint in the midst of what looked like a full-scale riot.

Chapter Twenty: Day of the Dead

Martha darted past the TSA station and into the maze of ropes.

A sea of slow struggling figures milled around and around the conveyor belt and the scanner. It reminded her of the hallway between classes in the Bolton Hills Middle School, and had the same purposeful chaos. Between classes was a very dangerous time indeed. It was why teachers had to stand in the hall and be watchful. Some child would shove another in retribution for an earlier slight, and someone else would stagger to the floor or into a wall. Other children, seeing a humorous advantage, would kick at the fallen person. Book bags were wielded, and pencils came out, and some oblivious innocent poked in the back would turn, swinging another pencil.

A dangerous time, but you could keep it from lapsing into utter mayhem if you were purposeful. If you took responsibility. If you knew that power rested not in a loud voice, but in an endless series of small actions: A voice in one ear, a hand on an arm, a suggestion that those who had stopped to watch should leave now, until only one or two angry, helpless children remained, accusing one another, and could be dealt with. She'd done it many a time. She could do it again. She had to.

Because that was Colin standing on the arch of the central body scanner, just past the stanchions.

On all sides of Colin, people were shoving and reaching while he kicked and scratched. They kept swarming up at him, but they were pulling one another down as they did it, and any time anyone got their fingers on the top of the arch, Colin removed their fingers.

A young woman standing on the conveyor belt fell down on her belly. It was Holly. She stared, reaching vaguely, with eyes as dark as a snowman's, feeding through the scanner like a bag of groceries, and disappearing into the dark.

There was Anton. He was trying to push his way through the crowd to get straight to Colin.

"No, that won't do, young man," Martha said, trotting forward. "If you use physical force on them, if you push against them, it gets even uglier." He didn’t listen, just kept shoving.

She slipped across the edge of the crowd and off to one side, then began working her way around to Colin. He was trying to make someone let go of his leg. It was Holly again. She had emerged from the tunnel of the scanner behind him and wrapped her hands around his ankle. He stamped on her arm with the other foot, but she pulled again. He wrapped his arms around the crossbar and clung.

"Excuse me, please," said Martha to a woman ahead of her, and wormed past. Someone's elbow struck her in the shoulder, not on purpose, but it knocked the air out of her. Apparently she did not need air, for she was able to keep going, saying, "Pardon me, would you mind?" and "Could I pass, please?" because it was always a good idea to be polite. Everyone seemed taller than she was, which helped, because she ducked under arms and through spaces too small for anyone else.

Martha clambered onto the conveyor belt, imitating Holly, who had one leg up on top of the X-ray machine now, and was gaining purchase on Colin. Someone grabbed her shoulder. It was Anton. He said, "Stop. Stop! Ms. Whitaker, come back! Don't cross over. Stay on this side!"

She shook off his hand, got her knees under her, and leaned forward on the belt, diving into the tunnel of the scanner. It was dark, and it hummed, and took far longer than it should have, but finally she saw Holly's booted leg moving, keeping pace with the belt. As she rumbled forward out of the tunnel, Martha grabbed the leg, pulled downwards, and shoved. Holly fell on top of her.

Martha struggled to get out from under, and then she hit the end of the belt and fell off the end with Holly still half covering her, the feet and legs of all the crowding dead surrounding them. Something grabbed her shoulders with hysterical force, like the clutch of a frightened cat, and sharp fingers wrapped around her neck. It was Colin.

He screamed again, right in her ear, and she panted and stood up with him still clinging to her. She wheeled around, the weight of the boy bearing her down and making her stagger. Holly was getting back to her feet, her hair radiating out from her head like Medusa's snakes, and the other side of the X-ray machine Anton stood straddling the belt, hesitating, waiting, his deep-set eyes apprehensive. Between them, the wordless dead surged forward, a tsunami of faces, or a football crowd after the game.

It didn't do to fuss or wait. The idea was to take action. She turned around and ran the wrong way, further into the terminal, because it was the only possible direction. Colin wound his arms around her shoulders and made her feet even heavier. The area just beyond security was almost empty, though there was an indistinct crowd farther on, but right ahead of her was a desk, with a door and a window past it.

Out the window was visible the huge body of a plane just emerging from the whirling snow, taxiing at an angle toward them, lights flashing. The entire side of the plane had been ripped away, and one of its engines was burning, the mouth of the jet a circle of flaming teeth, the tail of the jet a white plume. The door to the jetway swung open. What now? What grim monster would emerge to threaten her more? But it was only a small man in a tidy uniform, who secured the door and went over to the counter.

Colin had his fingers wound in her hair. It hurt. "Get down, young man," she said. "You are old enough to walk on your own." Instead, he gripped her hair and wound his legs around her waist, and she stopped, panting, to catch her balance.

Out from the jet-way entrance came the first of the passengers from the flaming plane, a dark-clad man and woman, the woman stiffly upright, the man imposing, both of them glossy, trim and well-groomed, and both of them terribly familiar. Martha knew there was no escape in this direction and that she had to stop expecting it all to make sense. No. This was not the way out. Apparently, it was Parent Conference Day in the afterlife.

Because the two people (beckoning to her now, or no, they were beckoning to Anton) were the King and Queen of the Dead, Mr. and Mrs. Demetrios, whose son Anton was yelling at her right now from the other side of the X-ray scanner, "Ms. Whitaker, not that way! Whatever you do, don’t take him that way!"

She said firmly, "Colin, get down," because she had to admit that even if she was not as small as a Pekingese, she was still too small to carry the full weight of a middle-school boy much farther, and she was wheezing. Colin tightened his grip. She folded her legs under her and sat down.

"No! Get up!" panted Colin, unwrapping his legs from her midriff and planting them either side of her so he could hook his arms under hers and lift.

"I can't carry you, Colin. You have to walk," she rasped at him.

He let go. "I will walk. I will fly. I will swim. Only get up. Get up!"

She stood again, and leaned slightly to put her hands on his shoulders and speak into his face as quickly as she could. "We will both turn and walk toward them, toward the security gate, and I will say 'Now." When I do, you see where Anton is, at the end of the conveyor belt? You will dive through the scanner on the belt, and he will help you. I'll distract them."

"He will not help me and they will still come," he said, shaking. "They will come get me and bring me back."

“Anton!" she shouted. "Get ready! Get Colin away when he comes through."

Anton shook his head slightly, but he opened his arms, smiling, oddly triumphant.

“Oh dear. You really don’t want to rescue him, do you?” said Ms. Whitaker. “Silly me. Silly me. If you’re going to be King of the Dead, of course he’s your dog now, isn’t he?” She whispered, “Change of plans. Colin, when I say ‘Now!’ I want you to pretend you’re running to the scanner, but when you get out of Anton’s sight, you must go left and go around the crowd, and run as hard as you can.”

Colin nodded against her chest. She stood up straight and pointed encouragingly toward Anton, who smiled. She waved, and Anton, who thought she was naïve, who thought everyone was naïve, waved back.

"Now!" she said, and cannoned into the nearest approaching dead person, who happened to be Mr. Ray. It hurt a good deal, but the gentleman staggered obligingly and Colin, with a whoop, burst past him, ran to the belt, got down on his hands and knees, and went left instead, fast and hard. ”Keep going! Run for it!" Martha shouted. The crowd was turning and following Colin, but as slowly as ever. She had counted on that slowness. Martha ran the other way and emerged on the other side, seeing Colin already upright and wiggling under the roped-off lines between the stanchions. They had done it. He was getting away.

Then Colin was in someone’s arms, but it wasn’t Anton who had grabbed him. It was Seffie Lawler, holding him in a headlock. She had come back.

Colin was trying to bite her. The dead were still heading for them, but Seffie didn't move. She had her head high and was grinning at Anton, who was walking toward her, his face as happy as she had ever seen it. “I decided what the hell,” she said.

“What the hell indeed, Your Majesty,” said Anton. Colin screamed in Seffie’s face, but the young woman didn’t seem to notice. She had her chin raised and was looking in Anton’s eyes.

Martha’s nose was running. She sniffled, and wiped it discreetly with one hand, but when she lowered her hand she realized it was covered with blood. She ducked under the ropes and ran past them, but not to escape. She had an idea. She was heading to the TSA booth at the entrance to the checkpoint, where the chairs and the leash had been.

She climbed up onto one of the chairs and sat down. A red light glowed in the surface of the desk in front of her, like an alarm button, except that it was in the shape of a large multi-faceted ruby, and surrounding it was a heavy gold frame like the rim of a cup. She leaned over and pressed the ruby down until it clicked. The light went out.

There was a “ding” and everything went quiet, except that Anton’s despairing voice said, “No! No! Not after all I’ve done!”

She heard shuffling behind her, and saw people coming back from the checkpoint and getting into line. The zig-zag of ropes and stanchions filled up in front of her. People emerged from the dark arch, approached her, and stopped, one by one. She nodded, one by one, and they went forward. They entered the lanes between the stanchions, and began to move through security, taking off their shoes, putting their coats in the bins.

Martha wasn’t sure if she was now the dog or the Queen of the Dead, or both.

One of the people in line was Tripp Burgoyne, still in his sweater and scarf. He came with a small crowd of people still grasping at his sleeves, but he shook them away and they stood back--surely that was Tripp's mother-- and stood in line, his face closed and still. His mother backed away slowly, silent, her eyes welling up, and then she turned around and walked away.

Her mother passed through, still smoking, followed close behind by her brother Lawrence, their faces calm and quiet.

"You can't do that!" said Anton, coming around the front of the booth, carrying Colin.

"Why not?" said Martha, grasping the sides of her desk.

"It's not for you! It's not for you!"

"Is it such a bad idea?" she said. "I appear to be half dead already. At least I could rest."

"No!" he said again, with a terrible anger. "Get down. You can't. It's mine. I refuse to go away with the dead. I have trained for this all my life. I am ready. You gave me back my dog, and my queen has returned, and I will have my birthright or nothing."

Anton was bigger than she was, and much taller, and his long dark face was the face of an eagle or a buzzard, with eyes all dark, no white, but Martha, on the other hand, had the big red button and the chair.

Also, Colin was crying. It would not do.

"You are still alive. The living must go back," said Anton. "Back to life. Back to mourning for the dead. They don't belong here." She heard the beep of boarding passes being scanned, and when she looked she saw the passengers lining up to get back on the shattered, burning plane. "Please," Anton repeated, holding Colin even tighter.

"Don't you want to join the living? You don't want to be dead," she said. "I'm older than you are. I'm the one who should be dead."

"Oh, that’s taken care of," said Anton. "I was on the plane with my parents when it went down on takeoff," and he gestured toward the flaming plane outside, where everyone had turned around and was getting back on in an orderly way now that the security checkpoint was back in operation. “I am king of the afterlife. I am ready for it. I studied for it. The moment the plane went down during takeoff, I knew I had to act or lose my birthright.”

"Oh, Anton," said Martha. "Colin doesn't want to be here any more. You’re making him cry. He’s a child.”

His face glittered with fury. "How dare you," he said and turned his harsh face from hers. "He is no child. He is the dog of the dead, and I am now the king of the dead, and he stays. I need my guard dog, to protect my dead against the grasp of the living. It’s part of the story. It’s the mythology. You can’t rewrite mythology." He had grown even taller, and he was so dark he glowed. "Get down or I will pull you down myself."

And then his implacable eyes widened, and for a moment he looked like a boy again. "What are you doing!" he said, not to Martha.

"What am I doing? I’m taking action," said a familiar voice, and Seffie Lawler clambered into the other chair next to Martha, "You just charge off with that dog like a goddamned knight in shining armor and leave me to get run over by people trying to get in line? Ms. Whitaker, you really don’t want to do this, trust me. You’d have to spend eternity sitting next to me, and you know I always got on your nerves."

Martha laughed in spite of herself. Seffie looked marvelous. She always looked marvelous. She had been one of those rare middle school girls who never went through a bad phase, and now that she had decided to embrace mortality, she was even prettier.

Anton grinned and held out his free hand to her. “She has a point, Ms. Whitaker.” But he didn't release Colin.

"Oh, wait a minute," Seffie said. "I have to go say goodbye to my mom and dad. They're just getting back on the plane. Did you tell your parents yet?"

"No. You tell them," he said. "Are you sure? Your parents will try to make you go with them."

"My parents have never been able to make me do anything I didn't want to do, and if they tried I'd rip their lungs out. I’ll leave you two to figure things out,” and she was gone again.

"Let Colin go," repeated Martha.

"No. It his duty, his mission, his destiny to be my dog. We're all dead, Ms. Whitaker," he said, and began to laugh. "Go on your way." Behind him, Persephone Lawler was coming back to join him, with a very large purse tucked under her arm, her parents waving behind her.

Colin emitted a sob. Anton's hand came down hard again, making it more like a yelp.

Martha said to Colin, unable to help herself, "Could you explain that in actual words, young man?"

Colin yelped again. All his language, gone? He had tried so hard. But she would not have pity. Pity was corrosive. “You wanted words?” she said. “You have something you want to say. Go ahead, say it. Everyone else is getting to talk right now. You might as well chime in.”

Colin, hissed something between his teeth, his eyes wide. It came out as a jumble, but Ms. Whitaker was accustomed to understanding young people. She knew what he meant. It was a very good point.

"Oh,” she said. What was that?" She leaned closer. “Shh, Anton. This matters. He should have a voice in all this. It’s important. Go ahead, Colin. You were quoting a story.”

Anton's remorseless hand held the boy down. His face was darkening, and his brows were lowered with fury, but then he lifted his hand a little.

Collin took a breath and said rapidly something she couldn’t quite make out.

“What?”

“Only the dead,” he shouted. “Only the dead are allowed.”

“Only the dead are allowed. What the boatman said to Orpheus,” Martha said and straightened up. “You can’t rewrite mythology. Yes, I thought it was a good point. Anton, he’s not dead,” said Martha. “He’s not even dying. He doesn’t belong here.”

"No!" shouted Anton.

“Look at him,” she said. “Just look, for heaven’s sake. Use your eyes. Tell me that isn’t a living person. That is an eighth grade boy you’re holding, and I would like you let go of him. It isn’t a good idea to manhandle children, is it? Let go.”

Colin was a mess. His face was smudged and scratched. His shirt was stretched. His trousers were wrinkled and his shoes were untied, and at some point he had started walking on the backs of the shoes rather than force his feet into them. He had freckles, and he also had a scattering of pimples, and his expression was cold and furious. In other words, he was a middle school child who had been through a very long day and was fed up to here with everyone and everything.

“He’s not human,” said Anton, with just the faintest hesitation.

But Martha said, “He’s not? He looks human to me. Whatever he is, you can’t have him. He’s alive. He’s becoming more alive every hour. He doesn’t belong to you,” and getting down from her high seat, she wrapped her fingers around Colin's ankle and held on, hard.

Anton, instead of getting into his seat, tried to pull Colin away.

Normally, one never got into a pulling match with the children, but Anton wasn’t a child any more. She was making an educated guess that he was at least slightly a grownup, or at least a demigod, and he wasn’t going to tear Colin in half. She hoped she was right.

Ms. Whitaker’s hands could be as remorseless as Anton's, when it mattered. Anton might be the Lord of the Dead, but she was a middle school English teacher.

Just as Martha was afraid she had guessed wrong, Persephone Lawler grabbed Anton's arm, and said something in his ear. “You what?” demanded Anton.

Seffie looked irritated, and repeated. “I don’t like dogs. I’m allergic,” she said. “I’m already sneezing from being near him. You can get me a cat if you like. They’re pretty. I like cats.”

“A cat?” repeated Anton. He loosened his grasp slightly, and Colin slithered out between his fingers. Martha was pulling so hard she sat down with Colin landing on top of her. Anton walked toward Seffie, and began to climb up on the empty seat.

A black wind mounted and roared, like a tornado.

Martha sat up again.

Far above, as if looking up a mountain, she saw a great double throne, and statues of sphinxes either side of the throne, one facing forwards, one facing backwards.

In the seats of the double throne sat two vast dark Presences, turned towards one another, ferocious condor beak facing dainty tapered fox-like muzzle, both of them crowned with crests, both of them clothed in sumptuous dark robes, both of them talking a mile a minute and not listening to one another. Anton and Seffie appeared to be having another argument. The black leaves had sprouted even more and there was a dark canopy up past the ceiling in the sky above the throne, a tree bigger than the whole terminal.

Osiris and Nephthys, Hades and Persephone, Jaydes and Grambi, Thanatos and Macaria, they were squabbling away happily for eternity, guarding the gates of death against the yearnings of the living, against memory and mourning. Protecting the dead against the clutch of grief holding them back from release into darkness.

She held out her hand, Colin took it, and he helped her up. They walked away together, silently, side by side, until the darkness closed in.

Chapter Twenty One: Christmas Day

When she opened her eyes again, she thought, "Now this is much more like a proper afterlife,” though Martha would not have chosen to paint Hades quite this shade of pale green.

The wails of the damned in the distance were faint and brief, as well. Not the unrelenting chorus she had been led to expect. It was more like conversation than wailing, really, though it echoed properly. Also something was beeping rhythmically. However, everything else seemed in order. Of course, stories had to make sense. Reality did not.

It was very empty here, though, and that made sense. The emptiness felt at once far away and uncomfortably close. Her whole body hurt, and her throat was raw..

Things loomed, pale, with lights flashing steadily. She tried to look at them. She couldn't move her head properly. She tried to call out, and could not. Yes, all very much in order. Definitely the afterlife. Either an eternity in torment, or a sort of Purgatory. Perhaps she should reevaluate her religious beliefs. Too late now, of course.

Faint Christmas music, of the blander sort, was playing.

"Somebody help me!" wailed a voice suddenly from very close, and Martha twitched. Something rustled, and something else fell to the floor with a clang. "Somebody! Anybody!" said the voice. It sounded urgent and elderly. Now that was a proper wail of the damned, Martha thought, and snorted, which started her coughing. She couldn't cough properly, because she had such a sore throat.

For a very long time, if there was time, that was all there was. Now and then, the lost soul nearby let loose with an unearthly screech, and all the while, the beeping and the carols continued. Ghostly figures bustled in and out. One of the ghostly figures leaned over her, and then went away. It had a very unflattering blue suit on, and a face mask.

Her partner in torment cried out again, "Somebody help me!"

Another voice, very dry and plain, said, "What do you need, hon?"

Hon? The minions of Purgatory should use more elevated language. Someone had failed to keep up standards. Perhaps that was part of the torture devised specifically for English teachers.

"I need help," said the faint outraged voice.

"Don't undo that. You'll fall out of bed. Would you like a nice drink of water?"

"Water," said the damned in torment.

"There you go, a nice drink of water. Lemme fix your pillow. Now you have to be quiet for a while, your roommate here is trying to get some rest and you're bothering her."

"I need help." The voice was querulous now, and reminded Martha of her mother's.

Oh, hell. Or rather, not hell at all. This was a hospital. She wasn't even dead.

The woman with the mask leaned over her now. "You're awake! You should be asleep. Go back to sleep," she said. Martha widened her eyes in outrage, but the person went away and didn't come back. This was worse than Purgatory, because it was undignified. She did not want to be in a hospital, dead or alive. She fell asleep again in spite of herself.

"Wake up, hon. Merry Christmas. It's time for you to be cleaned up," said a completely different person, with a small solemn masked face, a soft round body, and interestingly pierced ears. Martha blinked and tried to lift her hands.

"No, honey. We have your hands restrained so you can't pull things out. You kept yanking things out, bad girl." Then the nurse did something unspeakable to the inside of her throat, and for a while all Martha could do was try to cough, unsuccessfully. "That sounds much better," said the nurse and left in the middle of the spasms.

"Somebody! Help!" keened the woman in the next bed, and Martha felt tears of fury leaking out of her eyes. It was insupportable. Unacceptable. And there was a television looming like a clumsy moon over her head with the sound turned down, glowing in red and blue, showing the daily litany of disasters, with talking heads, a scrolling chyron, and a series of meaningless scenes. Someone invaded something she couldn't read because her glasses weren't there. Somebody else took hostages. A plane had crashed on take-off, killing nearly a dozen people.

It switched to local news, mostly about the weather. Mr. Miklos had been found in a dumpster, apparently having fallen in when he was trying to retrieve a discarded desk someone had thrown out. They showed video of a car being turned back upright, and Seffie Lawler’s photo. They said nothing about Tripp Burgoyne, Holliday Morrison, or Martha Whitaker, all of whom must have come to grief in a way that wasn’t sufficiently interesting for the local news. She supposed she didn't need to know the specifics, but the only way she could keep the television out was by closing her eyes. She closed her eyes, and fell asleep again.

"Will somebody please help me?" whimpered her roommate again. She jerked awake.

"Let's look at you," said a dry voice, and another masked woman with a stethoscope leaned over Martha and did some horrible things to her throat, and then listened to her chest. “You’ve been overdoing it as usual, Ms. Whitaker,” she said.

“Diamond Daniels, you’re one to talk,” said Martha. “I remember you going without sleep for nearly a week at exam time.”

“That was eighth grade. I’ve learned to pace myself since then,” said the doctor dryly, but she seemed pleased with Martha’s chest. When the doctor went away, the nurse took off her restraints and sat her up to have some awful chicken noodle soup.

Martha coughed some more, and went to sleep. "Your nephew's here! Fifteen minutes, sweetheart!" announced a voice and went away.

"Aunt Martha?" said Colin, of all people. "You there?"

She opened her eyes and stared at Colin, who was still wearing the outfit from the lost and found, but had a yellow knit toy on a keychain hanging from his belt loop and a very ugly hat. "Who on earth are you supposed to be?" she demanded.

"You forgot me?" he said in outrage.

"No, I couldn't possibly forget you. I want to know who you are supposed to be. I don't have a nephew."

"You had a brother. Maybe he had a kid. Maybe you're the kid's guardian."

"Grand-nephew. Lawrence has been dead too long.”

He laughed.

“So I didn’t die after all," she said and closed her eyes. "You are a thirteen-year-old boy. I don't want a thirteen-year-old boy."

"Too late.” Colin sat down next to her bed.

"Go away. I'm too sick to talk. I'm probably going to die."

"You have bronchitis or something. Or pleurisy, or pneumonia. They won't tell me, but I looked it up. It's your lungs, anyway. You're getting better."

"They're lying to you for your own good. I think it's cancer from my mother's cigarettes."

"Hah. They're kicking you out soon. They’re talking about rehab."

"I refuse to be put in skilled nursing,” she said, alarmed.

“I told them I’ll take care of you.” He grinned.

She argued with him for a while, and then the nurse made him go, took her temperature, and got her out of bed on feeble legs to walk to the toilet. The nurse left the bathroom door open and didn't come back to help Martha out. Now Martha couldn't even see the TV. Martha took a deep breath. Unfortunately, that started her coughing again, and she couldn't stop. She couldn't catch her breath, and somehow all the phantoms in the world, all the stories, all the poems, when you came down to it, weren't as important as that next breath. And now here she was in the hospital, in the bathroom, waiting for someone to come help her get back into bed.

"Nonsense," she said, and hauled herself off the toilet with the grab bar, wavering dizzily in the doorway on her unreliable feet. Her roommate, she saw, was a pleasant-looking lady who smiled at her and showed no signs of dementia. "Help," the woman whispered, and smiled again when Martha smiled. Hospitals, the living Purgatory, where you went to be forgotten.

She felt her way around the end of the bed, holding on to the bed-curtain, until she reached the door and could look up and down the hall. Toward the end of the corridor, near the far window, a man in a belted bathrobe stood looking out. He paused and turned his face, and though the light was behind him, he was unmistakably Mr. Miklos. He waved solemnly. She ducked back into her room, her heart pounding. She felt very silly. He was much healthier-looking than she remembered. Almost dignified. And in that short glimpse, he had looked clean.

"So what happens next?" said Colin, who had sneaked back in somehow and apparently had watched her struggle to the door with interest and without considering the idea that he might be useful. He was sitting in a visitor chair. She ignored him, reaching the bed, clambering up, crawling around on all fours until she was in a position where she could fall over in a reclining pose with her head more or less on the pillow. "What happens next?" he insisted.

She thought for a while, and he swung his feet.

"You will go to school. You will be a very disagreeable boy, which is normal. You will have a very unpleasant time in school, which is also normal, and you will annoy your teachers very much. If I can get you into Bolton Hills Academy, you will doubtless make my life a misery, because everyone else will insist on complaining about you to me. You will tell me stories about school, and your teachers will tell me stories about you. No one, I'm afraid, will write any poems about you."

"But I get to live happily ever after."

"You get to live," she agreed cautiously. "Now go away and let me sleep."

"Tell me a story first," he said. After a long pause, he said reluctantly, because she had her eyebrows raised and was waiting, “You like telling stories, and I’m bored.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, would it kill you to say please?"

He just grinned.

So she told him a story, beginning in the middle, which is where all good stories begin anyway.

About The Author

Delia Marshall Turner

Delia Marshall Turner has achieved everything she has accomplished due to her utter inability to concentrate on one thing. In addition to writing novels, she is a sabre fencer, a teacher, a craftsperson and a visual artist. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and with, currently, only very small and badly-assembled cat.

Twitter: @howrawhowrue
Website: dmturner.org

Books By This Author

Nameless Magery

Of Swords and Spells

The Stick Princess