Harris leaned against the cold stone of a shadowed doorway, and for the fifteenth time checked that his crossbow was hidden. Not that he’d get in too much trouble for such a thing if he were stopped, but the Reasoners tended to wonder why a man wasn’t happy with a bow, and whether that man might someday be unhappy with a crossbow. He thought with longing of his blunderbuss, the wood worn smooth from his hand, the barrel shining in the flare of battle. But the Church had won the Wars of Reason, and no one save Tinker-Priests and their cohorts could carry the weapons now.

A pair of watchmen drifted by, and Harris started to light a pipe casually as they paused to look him over. He feigned intense concentration on the quavering flame he stole from a brazier, and they shrugged and moved along towards Dreamer-Goddess Square. He dropped the lit twig, shoved the empty pipe back in his waistcoat, and drifted into the cobbled street. The echoes of his footsteps and the echoes of the raindrops and gutterdribble played back and forth between the high housefronts. When he came to the garden wall, he was alone and the street was still.

Up and over he went, and crouched in the rain-wet grass, savoring for a scant moment the unfamiliar smells of rich, uncovered soil and growing things. Then he was off to his hiding place behind the fountain statue of the Tinker-God. Again he checked his crossbow, this time to make sure it was dry, unbroken, and ready. A clock high in the bishop’s house called out the hour - just the kind of thing a Tinker-Bishop would have - and true to his time, a cloaked guard trudged along the garden path a minute’s count after.

Harris hurried softly across to the house and easily lifted the bar on the kitchen door with a thick iron shank. The kitchen was close and warm, with a lingering smell of fresh bread and musty stew. Harris stepped forward into the darkness, and just barely stopped himself from stepping on a sleeping girl, curled on a rush mat on the floor. Suppressing a shudder at his near-discovery, he stepped over her and made for the servants’ stair.

“Mr. Harris,” a sonorous alto murmured behind him, and he turned in shock and terror. The rush mat was empty save for a rude blanket, and standing beside it was the shapely form of the woman who had hired him to kill the Bishop. In her hand shone an exquisite blunderbuss.

“A musket…you’re a Tinker-” the shot was deafening in the close space, and Harris was still staring at her burgundy vestments in surprise as he felt the angry heat of the blood seething out of his chest.

She bent over him as he bubbled his way to the beyond, and checked his pockets. There was the money, but he’d been too canny to bring any letter. No matter. She tucked one into his breast pocket, writ in an excellent facsimile of the local Merchant-Bishop’s hand, asking for a meeting. “Don’t worry, Mr. Harris,” she crooned, “you did the job I hired you for.”

←Part IV

At the base of the great stair, one of the dessicated guards held up a hand to halt the Dancer, and they spoke in a tongue strange to Anthea. The Dancer turned and smiled ruefully. “You shall have to wait to meet the Mask of Winters, Anthea. He is entertaining an embassy from a mortal city, and will be closeted with them for several hours.” Seeing her charge’s crestfallen look, she raised a cold finger to gently lift the girl’s chin. “Do not be sorrowful. This only means that we shall have time to array you in keeping with your new state, before you see your destined lord.”

Anthea glanced at her blue silk gown, which had seemed very fine indeed when she left… wherever it was… and now seemed not only wrinkled, but faded and plain. She nodded and eagerly followed the chiming sylph along the hall. They passed door after door of black ash, and one that broke the symmetry of the hall by echoing the shape of the others in black steel. She passed it without great curiosity, though, and was drawn through one of the ash doors. The halls beyond were vaulted, of pale quartzite, and hung with tapestries of midnight blue in whose darkness shapes could almost be seen. The corridors were very like, one to the other. No furnishings save the tapestries that swayed restlessly without wind, and a series of closed doors at even intervals. They turned from one corridor into another, and passed through a door only to find a hallway exactly like that they had left. At last, they opened a door onto a suite of chambers panelled with black ash and elegantly furnished. The wardrobe and tables appeared to be inset with ivory, and a faint smell of incense sweetened the chilly air.

The Dancer picked up a small bell that lay on a console by an ample bowl of fruit, and rang it – the note had not yet died when the air was full of servants, conjured from the very walls to tend them. They stripped the blue dress from Anthea, and when she shivered in her shift, lit a pale fire with a gesture, and swathed her in a dressing gown. How strange it was to have one’s servants pass through you like a shiver to grab an ivory brush on a nearby table – and then to become flesh, or like it, once more to brush the knots from your hair. The fingers of the dead were cold on her scalp, but nimble, and her hair was put up in a grand coiffure in a trice. Other servants touched her arms with oil of myrrh, and others still brought coffers of jewelry, or delicately washed her face. The Dancer stood by, remarked, and smiled, and she and Anthea laughed as girls do.

The servants opened the wardrobe, and brought forth robe after robe, each more opulent than the last. Some were masses of black velvet, others layers of white chiffon so thin they looked like cobwebs. Anthea looked at the Dancer imploringly, unable either to make up her mind or to guess what might best please the Mask of Winters.

“In the land of the living,” the Dancer said, as if remembering, “did not brides wear red?”

“Oh yes,” cried Anthea, “it is our tradition.” The Dancer nodded to the servants, and they brought out a dress of deepest scarlet silk, high at the throat, with a full, loose skirt. They pulled it up Anthea’s arms and clasped it down the front, and it fitted perfectly, tailored tight to her shoulders and arms, and spreading at the waist. She fingered it and admired the scrolls of scarlet embroidery disappearing down the skirt. The swooping spirits buttoned soft leather boots to her small feet. The Dancer herself fit earrings of onyx and rings of carved bone onto her friend, and clapped for the servants to bring forward one particular chest, as Anthea reached hungrily for a bunch of grapes in the fruit bowl before her.

“Your dowry,” she said, and opened the lid with a touch. She lifted out a veil in sheer black, dotted with beads glistening like black eyes. It was marvelously embroidered, and fixed to a beautiful silver comb, which the Dancer worked into Anthea’s piled black hair. “Your mother has an artist’s hands,” she offered, and stepped back to let Anthea see herself in the great glass.

She was beautiful. Her olive skin, in this pale light, was as smooth as ivory, and her eyes glittered with the bewitching velvet of the night sky behind the somber veil. Her lips were as scarlet as the rich dress she wore, and her girlish form seemed for the first time womanly and regal as she stood in the mansion of the dead. She stood and stared at herself, and saw the Bride in Radiant Mourning, eldritch and lovely, a serenade to Death.

The grape fell untasted from her fingers, and even as a servant bent to catch at it, she turned away from the mirror and faced the Dancer of the Silent Grotto with terror in her heart.

“Are you all right, my dear?” said the Deathknight smoothly, and Anthea smiled weakly, searching for words.

“I have travelled long,” she faltered, “and I do not remember how long, or whether, I slept on the way. If… my lord is not at leisure, perhaps I could rest on this couch a while and meet him thus refreshed.”

The golden eyes of the Dancer met Anthea’s, seeking to pierce the dusky veil. Anthea stared back at her, hoping her horror did not reveal itself as she stared at the inhumanly beautiful face. She saw that a dark trickle of blood had crept from behind the soulsteel diadem, and the Deathknight had not wiped it away. Then the eyes blinked, and the Dancer nodded, “Of course you may rest, dear Anthea. I will return for you in an hour.” She swept away with a sighing melody. The host of shades dispersed as eerily as they had come, and the light of the lamps faded behind them.

Anthea dropped with a gasping breath to the settee, and ripped the veil from her head with such energy that her hair fell back into loose curls around her. She pulled off the bone rings with revulsion, and showered the jewelry to the cold marble floor. She almost cried, but here, in the palace of the damned, her voice choked within her. She must escape, somehow, or be given to the Deathlord like some sacrificial ewe. A letterknife caught her eye on the writing desk, and she caught it up, trying to push down the stiff satin cuffs of her grand dress. But no! What good could come of taking her life in this place? What freedom could await her soul, if, liberated from her body, it battered against the walls of this citadel? How could she play death false by running to it? Death had never been her path, and she let the knife fall to the floor.

The doorknob turned, and Anthea threw herself on the settee, her face to the wall. “The Dancer of the Silent Grotto bid me bring you this draught,” a hollow female voice echoed in the room, and Anthea heard a tray settle against a table. There was a breath of sound, almost a whisper, as the spectral ladies’ maids had made when they moved around her. Anthea turned her head a bit, to see if the shade was gone, and saw in the half-light the pale shape of a girl, hesitating by her couch.

“It is you,” the dead girl whispered, and Anthea did cry this time, as if she had driven the letter-knife into her heart.

“Marina!”

Part VI →

Now that I’m 23, I know things I didn’t know before. Like if you see a news helicopter in the suburbs, take the back roads home. When you see TWO, abandon the car and run screaming, because your feet will get you to your house faster than the vehicle.

Yesterday, before 8:11 pm, I did not think of these things, and merely watched the helicopters idly, with no more interest than if they had been seagulls. Now I have seen, negotiated, circumnavigated, and cursed, the traffic jam responsible for the conjunction of whirligigs, and I am much much wiser. And older, but that applies to all traffic jams.

Today, my friends, marks the twenty-third time the wobbling peregrination of our roughly spherical home around its lucky star has carried me with it. However, today I shall not consider that I am one year older, wiser, closer to death… nor shall I ruminate in these phosphorescent pages about the increasingly loud sound made by that time bomb euphemistically called the “biological clock”. No. Instead I shall tell you how much better I have it right now than I did last year.

In my old job, I was overworked, constantly stressed, unappreciated, and often criticized for things I could not control. In my new job, I am sometimes sure that everyone, scientist and lab assistant alike, thinks I am a radiant being come down from heaven to help them, blowing away piles of confusing paperwork with my fluffy wings. Old job: glare “I didn’t want this stapled.” (but never said, and the last three things…) New job: grin “Thank you SO much for getting this ready for me!” (making some copies) “The lady up on the hill was so glad they were stapled—I didn’t even think of it!” (umm, I pressed a button when I made the copies. But continue to praise, I’ll just bask here.) Everybody loves me. One lab got up a little birthday party, with cheesecake. One boss brought me flowers. A co-worker bought me verbena-scented hand lotion from France. I am a small and pampered god.

In short, my faintly glimpsed readers, life is good. Once again, the turning of the earth around the sun has brought good things to me, and once again, I am really indubitably grateful.

Eek! I do not know what I, my co-workers, or the Tanasbourne area may have done, but someone, some vast, perhaps even ineffable someone, is angry with us. First the light in the area dimmed, casting the thrice-washed winter greens of the conifers into more vivid depths of color. Then, far off, we heard the sound of thunder—a sound almost forgotten since those days in the Midwest and in Wyoming, where such noises were expected, accepted, and as loud as the trump of doom. Then, as we gathered by the windows to watch, wondering what might befall, sheets of hail appeared all at once, pouring down and intensifying until even the awe-struck spectator had to laugh at the sheer exuberant fury of it. Then, as it abated, and reluctantly started its rattling diminuendo to a heavy rain, I saw against the evergreens a pure white feather floating softly down, undriven by the hail that surrounded it. Gently it descended and nestled among the bushes.

I think the thunder-gods smote a goose.

← Part
III

The great doors, cast in the shapes of bare, intertwining branches, opened before Anthea and her companion, as behind them, the lesser servants of the Deathlord’s house glided unbidden to unload the carriage. With the unnatural quiet of their work behind her, Anthea stepped over the threshold of the dark palace.

The wide corridor was floored with smooth, cold stone, and the walls rose in striated shades of grey and white. From them, graceful arms extended, holding tapers whose wicks burned a cool blue and did not consume the wax below. As the softly chiming form of the Dancer whispered by with Anthea drifting by her side like a captive blossom, the arms slowly moved to better light their way.

“We have been expecting you,” the Dancer of the Silent Grotto said to her charge. “My lord Mask of Winters is most pleased at your coming, and will doubtless wish to speak with you immediately.”

Anthea did not respond at first, as they had passed into a great open chamber, where the light of the tapers was augmented by a soft glow from the marble underfoot, casting dark, angular shadows up to the vaulted ceiling. On either side, the walls were marked with intricately carved doors of dark wood, between which, every now and then, a shade moved with a tray or a chest, in Mask of Winters’ livery. They were marked from the living or even the grosser dead by a certain paleness, as if they were traced with watercolors where the world was painted in oil. At the far end of the hall, a wide, torch-lit stair in vertebral white spiraled upwards, flanked by liveried guards.

The Dancer saw Anthea’s abstraction, and smiled, “Is it not lovely?”

“It is beautiful!” Anthea breathed. “Never have I seen such a place. But I am a poor friend,” she made a rueful moue, “for I little attended when you spoke just now.”

“No matter,” the Dancer replied, “I said that my Lord Mask of Winters has awaited your coming, and will wish to speak with you. You are a most fortunate girl.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” Anthea faltered, for the beauty and richness of her surroundings had quite cowed her, and her new friend was likewise awesome, “but who is this lord? I have heard…” she frowned for a moment, “I have heard someone speak of him before, I think, but I cannot recall who he may be, nor guess why he has condescended to honor me so much.”

“All this land is his,” the Dancer waved her pale, beautiful hand, “by right of conquest. He is a Deathlord, come with fire and war to release this land from its living torment. His citadel, the undead warbeast Juggernaut, you may have seen betimes. Its pale mass rests outside the walls of Thorns. This,” and again she spread her hand with a graceful gesture, “is his other home, a place for retreat and meditation, where the emissaries of living lands can, for a moment, forget his might and see instead his majesty.”

Anthea nodded gravely, “All this I should have seen, dear friend, but it does not explain why such as I should attract his notice.”

The Dancer’s smile was piquant. “My dear, were you not told you were bound for a wedding?” and with that, she swept on to the staircase, and Anthea followed in a dream of excitement, drawn along by their interwoven arms.

Part V →

← Part II

Anthea fell back onto the dusty cushions of the carriage, disbelief and fear fighting for primacy within her rigid form. What can I do? she finally managed to think. Even if I were free of this carriage and safely away from the ghouls that attend it, then I would be alone and lost in the midst of a Shadowland, whose size and bounds I do not know! And more, at night, when they say that even if you should find the edge of a Shadowland, it gives not on Creation but on the Underworld. “What do they want with me?” she whispered, almost sure a spectral head would appear through the dark woodwork to answer her.

It might have been a minute or an hour that she had spent tracing circles of confusion, terror and abhorrence in her mind, when she heard a sound without.

“We are almost there, mi-la-dy,” sang the human footman mockingly, and she started from her misery. The carriage was poorly supplied for a battle, as, indeed, was she. She hefted the lantern and prepared to break it over the head of whatever beast might come to carry her out — for now, indeed, she feared to be wrenched from the haven of the carriage which had seemed a prison only a few minutes before.

The horses’ hooves sounded once again on cold stone, and echoed back and forth in some great space that must, she judged, be a courtyard. The carriage turned, slowed, and halted, and she heard a scrabbling of fingers at the latch without. She raised her lantern high.

The door opened, and she saw a smoothly flagged courtyard lit by flickering lamps somewhere beyond her view. The grinning footman’s mocking smile ducked away before she could be tempted to bring the lantern down upon it, and beyond him she saw, smiling and impassive, a young woman.

Or was she young? Her face could have been cut from marble and set on a monument for a mourning muse, but its very smoothness seemed of a type with stone — not new, but unchanging. Her white-gold hair was coiled behind her head, and long tendrils of it held back from her face by a diadem of dark metal that sat low on her forehead. Her lips, curved into a welcoming smile, were as white as her shining teeth. She wore a wide-skirted, bare-shouldered dress that came to her knees, and was made of hundreds of thin leaves of black soulsteel that chimed and keened when she moved. She moved now, stepping forward and raising a hand for Anthea’s. “Good night, and welcome, Anthea di Nassos,” she said in a soft, low voice.

“Stay back,” Anthea barked at the malefic figure, but the pale woman only smiled the wider, and raised her face to better study the girl.

“I am the Dancer of the Silent Grotto,” she said softly, and stared up at Anthea. She had terrifying eyes, the alien eyes of a tiger or an ebon shadow, and just as golden. They were shining and cold, dilated on pools of utter blackness, and Anthea wanted to cry out, to run, do anything rather than stay within their gaze. “Let us be friends,” the soft voice said clearly.

Anthea smiled like the sun breaking through clouds, and, putting her olive-skinned hand in the Dancer’s white one, stepped down from the carriage, eager to see her new home.

Part IV →

Okay, maybe I’m not ‘youth’ anymore. However, the other day, the news was depressing me past my usual ability to bear it, and I switched back over to 89.9 FM, my favorite station for a long time. It was, in fact, only ousted from that position definitively by my long commute into Portland with little sleep, on which words were required in order that I might not drowse and allow the car to have its head. In less than an hour of listening, I had identified two things I Could Not Live My Whole Life Without, and therefore added to my [(À propos of nothing, nothing at all, did you know it’s my birthday next Wednesday? You know, just randomly and à propos of nothing.)|text|PYP played this. Damn, what is it? It’s scrumptious! It’s lovely! Oh, of course, Bartok. And later still, God, what am I humming? It’s Bartok again. Intoxicating stuff.

Immediately after adding the offenders to my wishlist, I resolutely stopped listening and went back to NPR, grimly listening even to direct audio quotes of the Shrubling. I don’t have the money to listen to the classical music station. My stomach lining I can still afford to lose a little of.

← Part I

Anthea ran from her room and down the long spiral stairs, praying there was something, anything, she could do to save the vineyards. Her bare feet pattered along the stone floors and came to a sudden halt in the atrium, where her parents stood, smiling at each other over the household shrine.

“Mama! Papa! You are back just in time! Did you not see as you came in, the fields are burning!” she grabbed a nearby urn, dumped the dried flower arrangement from it, and plunged it into the pool to fill it. Her parents turned to face her, still brimming with smiles as with a secret joy. “Are you mad?”

“Of course not, my dear. We are merely happy,” said her father.

“Happy?” she cried in disbelief, frozen to the tiles in her confusion. “Our fields are burning!”

“The fields are nothing,” her mother said dreamily, “a beacon we have lit to light our lord’s way and greet his coming.”

“You…lit?” she stared at their sooty faces, and murmured, “You are mad, both of you!” she rushed for the door, clutching the urn of water and shaking away a sob. She clumsily pushed at the wood and emerged into a maelstrom of smoke and wind.

On either side of the long road that wound up to the villa, the flames leapt, reaching across it occasionally as if the infernos were courting, exchanging caresses. The night sky was light with flame, and it was with horror that Anthea saw that her little nightmare could not be the whole. She turned in dread towards Thorns, and saw smoke and flame playing among the houses. Beyond Thorns, like a storm cloud billowing up out of nothing over the gulf, there was a great pale mass moving and shifting like a gargantuan maggot. Around it, in the dim flickering light, a host of smaller figures ranged, a tide of ants flowing around the walls of the city.

Anthea stared at the wrack of all she had known, the vines already beyond her feeble help, the city where she had laughed and danced foundering in the maw of destruction. There was a resounding crash back in the house, and she came to herself, dropping the useless urn and running for the atrium. She shut the great doors with a shudder, as if they could keep the horror out, and turned to see her parents standing over the rubble of their household shrine. Her mother was uncorking a venerable old bottle of wine, and her father drawing a knife.

“What are you doing? Papa! Mama! Grandpa made that wine, you said we were saving it! PAPA!” she cried, as her father made a long cut in his own forearm and poured his blood on the ruined altar. Her mother poured the rich wine to mix with the blood, and they murmured lowly. Anthea’s confusion and fear roiled and turned, and gave way to a stronger passion; rage. She seized the bottle from her mother’s hands and shoved her against the wall. “Tell me! What are you doing?”

Her mother’s eyes seemed to focus, her lips stopped mouthing words, and smiled instead. “A new life has come, my dear, the life beyond life. Our lord Mask of Winters has answered our prayers and come to Thorns. The glorious death has come to walk the lands of the living and spread its beauty over Creation.”

Anthea stepped back, staring at her mother. “You joined a death cult.”

Her mother nodded eagerly, “We came back not just to light this pyre of celebration, but to share our joy with you. The Deathlords have come, my dear! The squalid struggles of past life can subside into the quiet serenity of death.”

“No,” Anthea whispered.

Her father spoke for the first time, his brows drawn together over his once-sparkling eyes. “Mind your mother,” he growled.

“No!” she shouted, “what were we made for, if death is better than the life we were given? Why do you turn from what you are,” she thrust a hand at the ruined altar and its spreading libation, “and offer your life to the grave, where it does not belong?”

Her mother shook her head sadly, but her father glowered. “That’s enough out of you, young lady. Haven’t we always taken care of you? Don’t you know that we shall only do what is best for you? We are older and wiser, and you shall follow the course we have set. Come down with us to Thorns, and we will celebrate the coming of our lord.”

Anthea spit at the feet of her father and ran up the stairs. As she slumped against the bureau she had pushed before the door, she felt dizzy with disbelief at her own rebellion. But, she told her pounding heart and swirling head, she was right, and they were wrong. Whatever had led them to this dark path, it was wrong, and she would not blindly follow. She slowly drank off the last of her grandfather’s wine and set the bottle on the window sill, where it caught and bent the light of the burning fields and the sack of Thorns.

It had been a week since her door had last opened. She ate sparingly of the little grape vines, caught foul, sooty water with her bedside cup, and kneeled, still and prayerful, hoarding her strength. Her parents came and went, pleaded and threatened, and got no reply. For all I said I would not follow their path, she thought wryly, I will go to ‘glorious’ death soon enough.

“Anthea, my sweet,” crooned her mother at the door. “I need to talk to you.” she waited. “Anthea, perhaps we were wrong to try to force you to follow our lord. Faith must come from the heart, as ours does.” Anthea opened her eyes and stared curiously at the door. “I know, though you hid it, that you were not over-happy with our plans to arrange a marriage for you. But now that we are at even greater odds, perhaps you shall reconsider?”

Anthea’s heart leapt. Though she was willing to die rather than follow her parents’ new twisted whims, some life, somewhere, would be better than starving here. She stood carefully and leaned against the wall near the door. She cleared her throat and opened her dry lips. “Away from here?” she asked shakily.

“Away from here,” her mother agreed. “We received a formal offer just today from a lord whose lands lie to the East. Will you come down and look, at least?”

With difficulty, Anthea pushed the bureau out of the way, and was relieved to find her mother standing patiently, almost sheepishly without. Her mother supported her on her way downstairs, and gave her a good meal as they pored over the exquisitely calligraphed marriage contract. Anthea barely recognized the name, but it sounded familiar. Doubtless she had danced with him. He was only five and twenty, and his lands were extensive, and, it seemed, far away. She signed with a rising feeling of hope, and went back to her room to pack her things, her denuded grape vines in their pots, her best clothes. The bridegroom, her mother told her, was aware of all the upset in the lands around Thorns, and wished for haste. A carriage would arrive that very week.

Anthea and her parents held to a wary truce. She kept to her room so that she would not see their rites, or the shambling servants that brought messages up the dusty road from Thorns. It seemed like a month had passed when the promised carriage finally pulled into the courtyard and the horses stood stamping under her window. Her father stood back, giving a few gruff words of approval and even of gratitude, while her mother cried and carried on. Her trunks were put up behind the grand, old-fashioned carriage, and her mother, with another shower of proud sobs, laid a locked chest atop them.

“Your dowry,” she smiled through her handkerchief. Anthea smiled back politely, anxious to be away from these people who wore the faces, the dress, and even the manners of her parents, but who had prayed for the destruction and death of their city.

She mounted into the carriage without a backward glance, seating herself on the green velvet cushions and arranging the cornflower silk of her best dress. The dark-clad footman secured the trunks and inquired, “Shall I close the shutters, milady? There is a great deal of blowin’ ash on the roads.” She nodded, and he bowed and shut the door and the wooden shutters, so that she felt she was inside a slotted lantern with the wick unlit, the afternoon sunlight filtering in in strange patterns and lines. She lit the small lantern hanging within, and opened a book.

When she awoke, it was from a dream of cities, the sound of cobblestones still ringing in her ears. Of course they wouldn’t have gone through any cities, and she bent her ears to reassure herself that the sound had been imagined. Indeed, the sound of the horses’ hooves was an odd, soft thud, and the carriage rocked along softly, rather than shaking over paving stones. It did rock uncommonly much, though. Occasionally it lurched – perhaps just such a lurch had awakened her – and there was no light outside. How long had she slept?

She fumbled with the latch of the shutter in the door, and stared out into incomprehensible darkness. Pulling the lantern from its ring, she leaned out into the night, and saw, stretching away on all sides, a fetid, grey expanse of foothills marked here and there with sharp, dark crags. The road flowed along the lowest ground, a pallid ooze that looked horribly like formless flesh, soft and spongy under the horses’ feet. On either side, black, spiky shrubs grew from half-buried somethings or someones that writhed in pain as the roots struck deep into their flesh. A weak glow rose from the unwholesome ground, and among the cruel plants and thin, grey stems of grass, small shapes flittered like the pale ghosts on her eyes at waking. The sky was black and starless. As she gaped, a horseman flanking the carriage spurred forward. She saw his lipless smile open as if to speak, and threw herself back into the carriage, slamming the shutter to. She was in a Shadowland, riding into the heart of decay and death.

Part III →

At 4:45 this morning, I woke up, stumbled into the bathroom, and had the usual early-morning hope that I was actually awake and in the bathroom, and therefore wouldn’t be dreaming frustrated bathroom dreams for the next half-hour. I stumbled out again, fell into bed, and was deliciously floating off to sleep when a sound met my ear. Click-click. Ah, the thermostat. No problem there. I re-cozied my head against my pillow. Click-click. Why in the dickens is it clicking twice anyway, let alone in such quick succession? Click-click. Click-click..

“Matt, whyza thermostat clicking onanoff, onanoff?”

“I dunno, sometimes it does that. It’ll fix isself, go back to sleep.”

I snuggled into my pillow and fixed the mental image of the thermostat with a look of nonchalance. Click-click, it remarked. Click-click. Was it my imagination, or was it getting louder?CLICK-CLICK. CLICK-CLICK. The delay was shrinking. CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK, CLICK-CLICK! it wildly trilled. I stared at the ceiling in disbelief as it continued its drum roll. With a final, triumphant CLICK-CLICK it subsided. I smiled and closed my eyes. Click-click. I groaned quietly. I counted to ten click-clicks and swung out of bed.

It perched innocently on the wall. CLICK-CLICK. It was very loud at this proximity, and the lights flashed. I jabbed the warmer button, but it did nothing conclusive. CLICK-CLICK. I sighed and blinked drowsily.

“Tap it!” Matt called from bed. He did not have to urge me a second time to use force against the vile automaton. I tapped it on every available surface, CLICK-CLICK, graduated up to cuffing, CLICK-CLICK, and was considering whether punching would be out of the question when Matt appeared. He did quite a bit of wise-looking fiddling with it. CLICK-CLICK. He looked so wise, in fact, that I went quietly back to bed and shut the door.

I heard his footsteps go downstairs, the furnace turn on. No clicks. I sighed happily. The furnace went off, and his feet re-ascended. Click-click. Click-click. After some time, he came back to bed, confessing he wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he’d stopped it. I drifted, finally, back to sleep, sometime around 5:30.

At 6:51, I rolled out of bed and faced the fact that the time was simply not there for creeping onto a heating vent and going back to sleep. Click-click. What? Click-click. Grrrrr. I stumped into the shower and drowned the sound. While I showered, the thermostat clicked silently on the other side of the wall. I jumped at a thump and a rattle against the wall, deduced Matthew had risen from sleep, and went about my business. Emerging from the humid bathroom some little time later, I saw the black bracket, electrical pins and sundries clinging to the wall where the thermostat had been. The clicking had stopped.