

### A WALK ON THE WEIRD SIDE

### Tales Beyond the Banal

### by Linda Talbot

Cover: illustration by Linda Talbot for "Orchis Amoroso"

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot 2013

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**Table of Contents**

Orchis Amoroso

Music of a Golden Grave

Wind Walkers

Sand

The Price of Perfection

The Secret of the Stone

Callisto's Conversion

The Abduction

The Wicker Man

The Back Street Boy  
Author's Note and Contact blog

Elisha gazes fondly at the dwarf she has just found under a drooping palm in the palace garden. He is brooding, but brightens when she takes his hand and smiles into his pale green eyes.

She is spoilt but solitary, and, anticipating unprecedented novelty, draws him out from under the palm. He sits shyly on her knee as she strokes his thin hair which feels like leaf mould and runs her fingers over his close-fitting jacket made from looped blades of grass.

As she strokes him, he slowly grows. His head wobbles as his brown neck thickens, his face expands, but he retains his squashed nose, his transparently pointed ears and wispy beard. His arms and legs lengthen. Soon he is half her height.

He does not speak; merely mutters incomprehensibly and chortles as she caresses him. Eagerly she undresses him and tries to rouse him, but he is as limp as a wet leaf. Angrily, used to having her way, she pushes him into the grass. His squashed face crumples in dismay.

Elisha strides indoors. In the library she seeks information on dwarves. She discovers they are merely figments of men's minds. Yet she has found one. At least he looks like the illustration.

Elisha is bored and needs a lover. There is no one suitable in the palace. The attendants are wimps. Her snobbish cousins are engaged to cold women from other dull dynasties. How can she cultivate lust in the bearded dwarf?

She is incongruously compelled to lift down a book about flowers. She studies the aloe's spikes, primed like red hot torches, the virginal gaze of the African daisy, the spotted convulsions of a canna.

Then she sees the orchids. There is Orchis Italica with petals resembling a satyr; a pink blotched being that might break into devilish dance. There is the Ophrys Scolopax, from which an ominous insect seems suspended and the Greater Butterfly Orchid; green-faced and fanged with apparent ill intent.

Then she reads that the orchid's tuber is an aphrodisiac because it resembles a man's testicles. If men eat the large firm tubers, their women will give birth to sons. If they eat the small ones, daughters will be born. And she reads of the places where they grow.

Elisha steps, blinking, into the afternoon sun and runs to the drooping palm. She sees the dwarf wandering round it in a daze, wondering perhaps how he has come to be half the size of a human. She grabs his arm and he stares at her, his watery eyes wide with apprehension.

"Come with me!" Elisha urges, pulling him towards the end of the garden and beyond, into a countryside of spiky blue trees with purple fruit and plumed grasses ethereal in sunlight. The dwarf hangs back, casting long looks over his shoulder at the distant palm, but Elisha pulls him on into the murmuring growth of the grasses.

"We'll make a man of you!" she promises, gripping his damp hand. He stumbles two steps behind, muttering at stones that shift under his feet, whose length he cannot yet manipulate.

The huge white orchid gleams suddenly in their path.

"Aha!" Elisha stops, bends and fondles its sensuous petals. She runs her fingers slowly down its stalk, then starts digging in the soft soil with her long nails, until she uproots the plant to reveal the double tuber.

The dwarf watches, mystified. He balances on branches, leaps through leaves and rolls recklessly down hills, but he has never uprooted a plant, because in bad weather and when man thunders past, he burrows down wet holes to wriggle through a labyrinth of roots. There he rests his back, gnaws their fibres to sharpen his teeth and swings under and over them to keep his damp limbs in trim. Rheumatism is a scourge.

Elisha picks up the root, grabs the dwarf once more by the hand and drags him on through the grasses that fly at him like feather whips.

"Aha!" Elisha spies another, smaller orchid. Within green petals stands a proud centre; yellow with red spots and orange stamens. Again she scrabbles in the earth and pulls it free, breaking off a more modest tuber.

The dwarf frowns and mutters. In this mutated world, reverting to a magical past, he has watched the damage done by man; choked on the dirty air, seen birds and insects dying from insecticides. He has watched men shoot birds too small to eat and pour effluent into clear rivers. Now this girl is mutilating orchids.

"Are you wondering what I'm up to?" laughs Elisha. No doubt by the same enchantment that increased his size, the dwarf understands her words. But not her action. His frown deepens.

"Come on - I'm going to give you a delicious dinner!" she says. She holds the orchid roots by their base in one hand and grasps the dwarf with the other.

Tripping over his feet, he hurries in tow, casting a malevolent eye at a low-flying aircraft and saddened by the thorny growth replacing the lush leaves of ancient trees. He assumes the whispering grass and rare orchids will vanish next - especially if this excitable girl persists in her vandalism.

They reach the great garden; a muddle of growth that has coarsened through self defence with struggling tufts and depleted flowers. In the centre lies a glowering pool where black fish that have relinquished their colour through an evolution of withdrawal, swim in desultory isolation.

The palace looms. Its turrets probe the sky like a mouth of mal-formed teeth. Long windows mourn. A bramble clings to the blemished stone.

"Our children will inherit this!" says Elisha with an imperious sweep of her hand.

The dwarf's dark complexion pales. Children? Inheritance? The girl is deranged. Dwarves breed by shaping their image in earth and leaving it to breathe under the moon. Yet, during his strange growth, he has noticed a change in his formerly innocuous genitalia. A protrusion mysteriously appeared, where Elisha had rested her slim hand. What does it mean?

Now she is striding through the garden to worn stone steps leading steeply to a bronze coloured front door. Briefly she and the dwarf are reflected in its shiny surface; distorted like mutants at the end of man's maltreated world.

Elisha pushes the door which glides silently open and they step into a high-ceilinged hall painted red as running blood. Tables bearing bowls of inflated fruit and chairs whose legs end in twitching human feet, stand against the walls.

At the end of the hall, to one side, stone steps lead down to a dim door. Elisha and the dwarf descend. He thinks of the underearth - the mangled roots where he finds release and recreation. The underearth he enters through the dim door is filled with pots, pans, ladles and a bulbous vessel on a ready-built fire.

"Sit here!" Elisha points to a chair with a cleverly carved back. Clumsily the dwarf climbs its rungs and flops onto the hard seat. Elisha places the orchid roots on the bare wooden table and fetches a cheese grater and a blue-striped bowl from an overhead cupboard. She lifts the larger root and begins to grate it into the bowl.

The dwarf is increasingly mystified. What devilment is she devising now? She finishes the grating and from another cupboard fetches milk and spices. She mixes these by hand with the grated root, smiling at the dwarf, her eyes dancing deliriously.

"Now!" She lifts the bowl and brings it to him. "Open wide!"

In disbelief, the dwarf sees her small hand filled with the devilish food, approaching his mouth which he opens as though spellbound, to reveal stubs of earth-stained teeth. Swiftly, Elisha thrusts in the food and the dwarf gulps it down. The taste is better than he had expected. He empties the bowl.

He sighs and feels a faint and unfamiliar stirring in his reconstituted genitalia. He grabs Elisha's hand and raises it to his mouth, still rimmed with milk-soaked orchid root.

Elisha smiles and helps him from the chair. He follows her willingly now, from the kitchen to a grand staircase at the end of the hall. It is carpeted with a grass-like fibre and sweeps to a landing whose rose walls are studded with white stones. Their black centres gaze like the critical pupils of countless eyes.

Elisha is breathing fast. Her hand in his is urgent and hot. She heads for a blue velvet door, pushes it open and pulls the dwarf through. He sinks his clumsy feet into the deep pile of a pure white carpet. The walls are lined with mirror glass and an enormous round bed, draped in folds of black fur, stands in the middle of the room.

Elisha leaps onto the bed, dragging the dwarf with her. She pulls off her green and gold trousers and blouse, then the dwarf's grassy clothes and spreads her legs. The dwarf does not know what to do but her lesson in love is swift and comprehensive.

Afterwards, still lightly linked, Elisha and the dwarf sleep. He snores. She wakes and turns to contemplate her curious companion. She is repulsed yet drawn to him with a fast growing fondness. He is ingenuous and with him she can indulge her whims. She strokes his beard and follows with her fingers, the tapering of his transparent ears.

"I'll call you Dustin," she says gently. He wakes and, without disclosing his discoloured teeth, slowly smiles. Now there is a glint in his green eyes.

"We have made the boy. Now for the girl!" declares Elisha.

Again, they go down to the kitchen. This time Elisha grates the smaller orchid root and mixes it in the same way with milk and spices. Chortling, Dustin eats it without her help, anticipating the pleasure to come. He bounds up the stairs before her, now finding his feet easier to manage and flaps his arms in undiluted delight.

In the bedroom there is \- with subtle variations - a repeat performance on the great bed which slowly revolves as the lovers entwine. Afterwards Dustin again falls asleep and Elisha watches him once more with mixed feelings and finally drops into a fitful doze.

An hour later she wakes to hear the palace stirring after the siesta. She looks at the slumbering dwarf. He cannot appear in public. But she does not want him resuming his earthy existence in the garden. She nudges him awake.

"I'll give you a bath, trim your beard and find you somewhere to live," she says.

Dustin feels the call of the fields and tangled tree roots, but even stronger, the need to savour Elisha's sensuality. Anyway, he has no choice. She marches him into the bathroom where gold fish squirm, for ever cheated of fresh water, on the taps and turquoise tiles illuminate the floor.

The dwarf shrinks from, then enjoys the hot water heaving with scented foam and chuckles hoarsely as Elisha rubs him dry with a copious blue towel. She washes his hair and trims his beard, then slips on the grassy jacket and trousers which defy laundering.

Stealthily she leads him from the bedroom across the landing to a large cupboard with pink painted doors. Inside are piled unused eiderdowns, bedspreads and feather pillows.

"There - your new home. I'll bring you supper," she promises.

Dustin lives in the cupboard for eight and a half months. He grows indolent; pampered and played with by Elisha. She starts to swell and has to sew concealing clothes from the unused bedspreads.

Dustin is proud of his sexual prowess and longs to practise on a female dwarf, but he dismisses such thoughts as disloyal to the hand that fondles and feeds him.

"We may have to go away for a while before the children are born," Elisha announces one crisp winter morning. She knows she is carrying twins.

Dustin frowns and burrows deeply into an eiderdown. But he knows he will follow Elisha. He has forgotten how to forage and would waste away without their amorous diversions.

They creep from the house one afternoon, shortly before Elisha is to give birth. She wears the camouflage of a white fox fur and has stitched a fur jacket and trousers for Dustin from an ancient ermine she found in the back of her clothes' cupboard.

"Find me shelter!" she orders the dwarf.

He pauses to recollect the land he had left. He remembers one of the few ancient trees, with a hollow trunk, rising regally from the spiky new growth. They trudge through the deep snow of two fallow fields, then he sees its bare branches lifted as though in supplication to the iron grey sky. He scoops snow from the hollow and they climb inside.

And that is where, a few days later the twins are born. Like Dustin, the boy has a crumpled face and pencil-sharp ears, while the girl, resembling Elisha, is as fragile as a flower. But, where their bodies end, instead of legs, lie the straggling roots of orchid tubers. They wave as though pleading to be planted.

"Oh dear!" sighs Elisha. Bewildered, Dustin gazes as the creatures jerk small arms, twitch brown roots and screw up their faces to cry. They refuse Elisha's milk. Their torsoes turn grey, their faces fall in dismay.

"I'll have to plant them," Elisha decides.

Solemnly, Dustin nods agreement. They wriggle from the tree into the melting snow. With his sharp nails, Dustin digs two holes in the softening ground. Elisha plants the girl, who smiles and lifts her small arms to the pallid sun. Dustin plants the boy who gives him a lop-sided grin.

Dustin decides, after all, to stay in the hollow tree where magically, he shrinks to his former size and is no longer driven by the sexual urge. Elisha returns to the palace, claiming she got lost in the snow.

But she visits Dustin twice a week and although she misses love making, she fondles him as he sits contentedly on her knee. And on her way home she looks under leaves for other dwarves she might abduct.

Meanwhile, with Dustin, she watches the children grow and, listening to Elisha, they utter their first words. Then, waving to Dustin perched in the tree, they laugh in the rise of the soft west wind and the strengthening sun of spring.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

Down. Careful. Down. Peace at last. The end of the line. Goodbye.

So, thinks the man in limbo, why am I sensing, feeling, knowing the wide awake world while unable to move a muscle? I need neither nourishment nor air. I am not bored with the dark, the immobility. I seem to have developed a sixth sense that penetrates the pine of the coffin and focuses on the small band of mourners who are burying me.

The woman walks in suspension. Between life and death. Drawn to the darkness where he lies yet moving through the fickle flow of light. As the coffin is lowered she succumbs to incredulity. He had died young; his illness mauling, depleting, destroying. The sun strikes her face. In the sun he had opened like a forceful flower. The brutal backlash had been brief.

The freesias shine. Only yellow ones had perfume he claimed. His perceptions were prompted by fragrance and complementary colour.

At least they came, thinks the man in limbo. Ross, whom I suspect, despite his protestations, despised my prejudicial candour. Melinda, maternally unpretentious. Sayal; thoughtful, unobtrusive and true friend. And Lara; loyal, loving and overlooking my petulance.

Oh lord! There is Aileen, the ex-wife I kept quiet. How did they find her? She is poker-faced, unforgiving and no doubt intent on claiming those few thousand pounds I made on that dodgy deal. And there is Delphine; my dear, forsaken daughter. Forgive me.

Not a bad speech by the young vicar. Making far too much of me though. He must be reading from Ross's notes. How forgiving, regretful, unreal they all are.

Now the women are silently weeping, especially Lara. Dear Lara. So sensitive. Don't waste those tears on me. There will be others more worthy and you are too fragile, feminine and susceptible to feeling.

Ah! You brought the yellow freesias. The only one who did. Only you know what I like. I feel the weight of well meant wreaths. But the colours are wrong.

Thank you Lara. With her sod of earth she has thrown a yellow rose onto the coffin. It falls softly, like an infinite fragment of herself. A silent solace for me in the dark. The sods land; harsh, derisive, finally seeing me off. For the first time, true solitude, as my mourners move slowly away, recalling my quirks of character, their sadness mixed now with practical considerations, such as who will travel in which car. Will they come back? How often? Once a week at first? Then once a month? From love, guilt, wondering?

The woman walks away, drawn as though by gravity to the void she cannot comprehend; a blackness entered prematurely, in pain, without the peace of resignation. A grasping oblivion forged from anguish and disbelief.

"Why are we here?" he had asked, making no sense of suffering. Simply, she thinks, for fulfilment of an earthly life in liaison with nature. She perceives beauty in a permeating present, in soft cycles of unfolding and decay.

But she cannot accept curtailment; the cells that had run amok. Would cremation have been easier than the knowledge of the body, whole, yet alien, and subject to decay? She does not know.

He had loved flowers. Her faith lies in the cycle of growth and its reliance on the earth. His flesh will lend logic to its life. She should perceive the possibility of peace.

Silence. Lara walks away. She is confused, thinks the man in limbo. She wants to join me. Not continue with a life where petty preoccupations are of the past. She has dispensed with small needs. Good. Because, here in the dark, in the peace, there are none. The pressures once so vital to survival are incomprehensible.

The doctors insisted one lived or died. But not linger between life or death. Of course I had wanted to live and although I knew I would die, the transition was ungraspable. How could I have made, within days, this final and momentous move?

The woman returns to the grave; kneels, places the freesias at his head, puts her ear to the ground and hears its surreptitious sounds of unceasing change; the sifting of seasons and time, as persistent as her pain.

She longs for a fabricated faith. An encounter with a soul; that suspect entity, created to ease pain. She longs for the categorical communication of the spirits, the terrified ghosts of trauma, emerging to parry madness. But she hears only the tireless workings of the earth. She knows only the negation of dead flesh. If a spirit may be said to have passed from him to her, it is the culmination of her pain, coiled now within her, as the cancer had in him. Its hard hand alters the implications of the day as she sees the tragic transience of the flowers already fading on his grave.

She will plant a golden garden on the grave. Gold, flame and green. Its roots will reach to where he lies. She gets up, stoops, still drawn earthwards. Her flesh feel light, irrelevant. Substance is unreal. She walks through shadows, mistrustful of the sun.

Had he known his death day, what might he have done? How might he have exploited each moment? In place of incredulity and hope, what brief mastery of mortality might he have achieved?

No knowledge of the soul cushions her retreat. Any resurrection will be within herself.

Now, muses the man in limbo, only the gentle trickle of earth; the newly disturbed, seeking settlement. My perceptions of the mourners are fainter as they disperse, leaving the flowers with their messages like sad flags of retrospective feeling, shining in the October sun.

Now Lara has left the cemetery. Yet her image does not dim. She wants to wail loudly and without inhibition, like the women hired to keen for the dead. What a compliment.

She is lethargic, absent-minded. Everyday details, once demanding, are irrelevant. Like the pointless bickering and performance of medical rites days before his death. When, instead, the momentous ending of consciousness should have been recognised, respected.

Now, each day, she will know death in life. She had stood on the brink, as acutely, when she faced destruction from the same disease. Then death had been defied. Now it has prevailed and she will carry it within her like a stone.

The man in limbo thinks, how long have I lain here? Time does not exist. The earth now is still, although I sense rain has fallen and some of the flowers are fading. Yet most still shine defiantly and above my head, Lara's freesias lie softly.

She had learned of his death by the sea. He identified with lands of sea and sand that glow in defiance of death's inevitability. She had sat numbly in the blackened sun, uncomprehending how other lives could persist. He had understood the sea; loved and feared its allegiance to infinity, knowing that, at any moment, it could claim him. At such times he had raged against insensitivity, the injustice of fate, of being singled out for suffering.

The man in limbo senses her pain, especially at night and sends intimations of comfort through the dark. He sees her, as he did in life, floating among the planets, compelled to fulfil mysterious assignments as though seeking some key to casual and contrary existence.

In the dark, man's music moves him still. The classic composers, confronting the raw and the revelatory, responding with outrage, aspiration and a solace for the senses. Fragments of notation are trapped in the cold earth.

Through the memory of music, he recalls the pain and pleasure of the life he left. Laughter, coalescing colour, a woman's fleeting fragrance.

Lara's body seems fleshless. She moves through a fog of dull feeling, removed from petty preoccupation. She senses the indifference of infinity.

At night memories of him move through time, touching her like fingers of quiet feeling in the dark.

She is dreaming, senses the man in limbo. She is defying the gravitational pull of pain, rising as he had seen her, from the limitations of the Earth, weightlessly wandering on an impulse. She is drawn, like an undulating length of light through the boundless black. She is moving from him. Yet listening, as though for some indication of his presence.

Music now is a still point to which he is drawn, willing it to weave a web of sound through blue-black space. Find her, he wills through the dark. Remind her how I loved life. But also how often I denied it. So many mistakes, diversions, dodging the issue and the deep drinking of delight. Find that life Lara. Discover it in the stars. I am bound now by infinity. You are still finite, yet glimpse please the beauty of beyond that makes a mockery of man.

The woman is floating above the sun struck sea, drawn up to the boundless black. She has heard that every sound uttered circulates in space. Is there, after all, some logic in the idea of man's spirit persisting - its irrepressible charge of life drawn from the dead flesh to live on in another dimension?

She wants to believe in its existence; scientifically, without emotion. But the encounter with death has been too cold.

She passes from Earth, the taste of sour soil in her mouth, her body drawn down still by gravity, but her earthly spirit reaching for the realms in which he had perceived her.

She moves through the legendary layers where sound upon sound is steeped, stretched through time and drawn into a tapestry where no sound predominates but all are integrated, like a lyrical yet wordless language.

She floats weightlessly, vainly seeking him, to rise higher, leaving the conciliatory waves murmuring like a tideless sea. Already she perceives a perspective that is boundless; an audacious and unlimited span that is matter moving, changing, rebelling and relenting.

She has never wanted immortality. Yet she cannot accept a lifespan cruelly curtailed. Nor the perversity of pain. Her grief wells. She is careless of her course.

She is drawn to the orbit of Venus; brash intimate of the Sun. Forks of white lightning strike; the source of Ashen Light. The planet glows. The resentful core of maddened, aimless motion. Beneath foul cloud, the epitome of man's imagined Hell. The fire seeks lustful release in the outer atmosphere but is trapped in volcanic metamorphosis. So closely allied to the blind demands of man. But here, belching unheeded belligerence. She is stirred, as aware of human fallibility in the black heat of this orbit, as on Earth.

The man in limbo feels Venus burning; feverish goddess of love. Feel her fire Lara. Raw as my long-ago lust. My fervour enfolded women. I consumed, flame feeding flame. I was a golden god by a treacherous sea.

The music drifts to the woman borne through blackness; a burning abandonment, like an extension of the planet's surface.

He had loved music, moving constantly through its abstract perceptions. Like the searching of a soul in which she had not believed, the strains envelop her. She is motionless, suspended in heat and sound, enhanced by white lightning. Could this be his way of communicating? Was there, in spite of her scepticism, some universal charge so strong, it defied death? The music too is an aspect of his temperament. The reaching for assurance from a lonely limbo.

She returns from her sunbound passage and passes over Earth; the blue of its wide waters emanating calm; the conflict and decay incomprehensible. And she is borne on the solar winds through the blood red reflections of Mars.

Her faith founders. Here lies the soul of illusion; a fiery field of light sealed in cold. Its rust red is water, locked in callous ice. Its volcanoes are active yet their ardour is absorbed among the interlaced valleys where water once ran.

The man in limbo utters, "The essence of Mars, Lara." Fire sealed in a frozen face. Desire betrayed by fate.

She succumbs to desolation. The planet lies like drained dereliction after rage in the ice cold grip of regret. She pities the land where lack of ozone admits the naked sun which harasses the soil with strange properties.

She hears though, perturbing echoes of some past. Might Mars have had its life cycle before man's evolution? Time is man-made and, in universal terms, meaningless. One life span of this planet might be spent, yet vestiges still contribute to the mystic means of change. She is privileged to be borne briefly from human limitation and is possessed by a commanding compassion as the music reaches her. A lament for life that was.

She is dazzled and misled by asteroids, their swirling particles challenging complacency, proclaiming endless change, the essential shifting of atoms, a breaking and uniting as relentless as hormone, tissue, the ebb and flow of the human body.

As she moves through the asteroids, she perceives the immensity, the apparent chaos which man calls god, coalesce, cancel out and create from wind, ice and fire, cores and drifts of desolation and beauty.

She enters the abyss of the unknown, as he had on dying. Inexpressible isolation. She feels again the cold soil closing, obliterating yet separating; a nucleus of life. She hears bursts of alien sound; the radio waves from Jupiter's fierce magnetic field which traps electrically charged particles that conjoin and endlessly whirl. Above the tumultuous giant she is blinded by a blanket of red-crested cloud.

The man in limbo declares, "You are touched by the turbulence of Jupiter." And he thinks: planet of jollity, yet charged with impatience - as I was impatient for limitless life. Do not fear its force Lara. It is brief. How I took for granted that fusion and desire. The delirium of need, the recurring day. How soon the searing certainties relent to impotence and fear.

She sees the planet's liquid metal shining, like a star-struck sea, rising from the pressure of the rock core. A restless, reaching land, needing to be known, building and disbanding fickle banks of cloud. And she recalls his petulant impatience, quelled at times by regretful recollection.

That galaxy, Lara, thinks the man in limbo, may be a spangled figment of your mind. The fires and winds extensions of your needs. See how stars fall; crumbling cosmic dust. Yet as one dies, another is born. That is hope.

I have exchanged my place in a row of hospital beds for an allotted place among graves. So far no one lies beside me. Like having a room of my own. But I feel the perturbance of the newly dead; a shock as a coffin is lowered, like new admissions to the ward, except here we are sealed in a patience without purpose or perceptible end.

Is this a permanent limbo, the birth of unprecedented perception or the brink of an incomprehensible void?

The woman is brushed by great winds that eddy through the atmosphere. She is aware of passing from one dimension to another; an unbridled world where the solar laws abruptly change. The winds rush from some demon source and she is flung, an atom of no account towards the fine lace lines of Saturn's rings; the eternal dance of ice particles around a buoyant planet ruled by the fastest winds in the Solar System.

Now Lara, wills the man in limbo, feel the force of Saturn. The unleashed wind that couples with beauty. Masculinity seeking the malleable. The chemical liaison of love. Your force, Saturn, like mine, shall be spent. Your intentions fly too fiercely in the face of time. I was presumptuous. So are you Saturn, pitching your profile too high. Your insistence will wither to a whining need and drear dependence.

Lara, in the seduction of Saturn, remember the buoyant and beautiful force. Be borne on the brute, benevolent back of love.

The woman is aware that Saturn plays with the senses, appearing hazily bland, then swept by clouds driven in a demented race round its equator. She succumbs to the roar and rush of the winds and is ensnared in the planet's intricate rings, circling and blinded by beauty conjoined with force.

Feminine geology. Fast, flamboyant. Fragile as a thought perceived, loved and lost. Moved by the masculine. Universal woman wooed by man. Momentous elements in space that are condensed on Earth in a fearful, hopeless race, running from reason.

She relives the man's addiction to life and lets it bear her briefly in celebration through the dancing ice. She moves on, her limbs exultant. She is borne outwards, towards the greenish glow of Uranus; an introvert lying on its side, prone to strange seasons and as she passes above its surface, she sees the gleaming seas of diamonds, moulded from carbon atoms. From hot oceans they rise, pure and defiant in the dark.

She contemplates Neptune's blue face, fraught with wild weather; another large planet of water, casting reflections to delight and deceive, as it whirls on the perimeter of our perception.

Only Pluto remains as she passes on, desolate now. She is so far from the Sun, confronting the paradox of her insignificance yet remaining relevant to the ungraspable system of ever-moving matter.

Pluto; small, cold, orbiting eccentrically, lies below. The epitome of isolation, the legendary realm of the dead where Charon ferried souls across the River Styx.

Now Lara you are lonely, thinks the man in limbo, as you float within the isolated orbit of Pluto. So far from what was vital to us. Pluto too, washed by wide waters, yearns for the Sun.

Please pause Lara. I am losing your image. I feel your desolation but your face is vague. Now even your feelings grow faint. But I hear music; resigned, recalling, infinitely sad. I visualise the theme. Can you hear me, Lara? Hear the music. Now you know man is immortal. With universal alchemy his shape is changed. He flows into infinity.

The woman turns earthwards, feeling compassion for the Moon. Cold, clear, hung in conjunction with the Earth, charcoal black without reflected light. She understands its dilemma of being bound to Earth and dictating the tides, yet being drawn to a nameless sphere. Was the Moon long ago captured by Earth's gravity, to be held involuntarily, striving for release? It turns to her its dead fossil face.

The man's music moves still, faintly, as though recalling her to Earth, yet reconciled, released from anguish and regret. She sees with sudden insight, the mad yet logical, harsh yet monumental core of the cosmos; its breaking, conjoining, constant integration. It has no purpose. Its persistence and power are its justification.

"Why are we here?" His question reaches her in the blackness. She sees humanity now as an indispensable aspect of existence which is elusive yet as constant as universal motion. In human terms, there is no compensation for his death, yet every particle of his lifeless flesh retains significance. It returns to the source, nourishing and re-emerging in fresh forms, part of the profound continuity.

Here lies immortality. More meaningful than that contrived by men who seek a literal god. For man is more than the preservation of presumptuous spirit. He is an essential aspect of existence to be evolved, dissolved and re-absorbed.

She descends through a maze of bright gases; condensing as they flower. A star blows apart, showering the blackness with light, precipitating the creation of new stars. Re-birth.

Someone is approaching my grave, senses the man in limbo. Ross and Melinda? She is planting red roses. I love yellow. Never mind. Thank you.

The woman wakes. Calm. Understanding why he saw her passing among the planets. There had been purpose in his dream. In the awesome outer limits she had undergone mental metamorphosis, from the confines of outrage and loss to a comprehension of the cosmic dance. And on his grave, in the fluttering flames of green and gold, she will know his essence.

Immeasurable time lulls the man in limbo. Then, more footsteps. Lara. You are back. You carry yellow freesias. Their fragrance reaches through the dense dark earth. You are planting bright shrubs and you fill the raw spaces with yew. Green, yellow, gold. Those are the colours Lara. Thank you.

Sometimes Sayal comes. Pink carnations and deep sadness from the quiet well of his being. But Lara comes each week. I can hear her footsteps at the gate. A measured tread. She talks to me as she plants the grave, placing fresh freesias in the blue vase.

Today someone was buried on my right. A woman. Not old, but her spirit numbed as she was lowered from the world into the deep dark.

I try to reach her. But she is not yet of the earth. Soon she too will be suspended in the limbo that has no need. Then she will hear me. I shall no longer be alone.

But I will wait for you Lara. Will you come in the waste of winter? I will listen for your step. Plant yellow freesias on my grave.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

He died without a word; the same closed expression on his face. Liane had looked at the frozen features, sighed, and, according to his wishes, placed his ashes in a bronze urn.

Martha - Liane's dour daughter - receives her mother with habitual humility in her lonely home.

"I want his ashes mum! I've no one," she states. Jilted, scorned for her disdain and discomfiture with close contact, she lives alone, sourly eeking a living as a school secretary.

"You shall have them," Liane promises. "I'm going to the sun for a few weeks - an island in the Mediterranean with much mythology that might take my mind off your father."

She will always have a hollow where knowledge of her husband's secretive soul should lie. She is haunted by the inexplicable weight he bore within; a black melancholy in which he brooded for days.

The urn stands in the centre of the long shelf over the bleak fireplace. It glowers like the man whose remains lie inside. Martha runs unkempt hands over its surface. She had not unveiled her father's dark depths either.

"Do you believe in life after death?" asks Martha.

"Of course not!"

"No chance of immortality?"

"Not a hope."

"Would you want it?"

"Depends what it involves. Could be hell rather than heaven."

"I want an end and I want your ashes in this urn with father's. I would be less lonely." Martha has a brutality born of emotional neglect since leaving home.

Liane flinches. "You shall have them," she says, looking quizzically at this strange middle aged woman she has spawned. Her red hair is cut too short for her ill-shaped face. She gains weight she cannot lose. She wears shabby clothes from the charity shop. Liane takes a final look at the obdurate urn and leaves.

She is relieved, yet, deep within, still ill at ease. She pins up her thick black hair and threads through it a defiant red scarf. She buys flimsy clothes to float in the sun and flatter her delicate bones. She tries to abandon the past and ignores symptoms of her failing heart. She intends to plunge into the essence of sun, sea, the potency of illogical myth.

The island floats on a placid sea; a ghost grown in a dream-steeped past. White birds wheel over its lyrical slopes. Green growth reaches from the humble hills to the nudging of the sun-struck water.

Liane has hired a small boat which phuts gently through the water, its reassuring rhythm overriding her stress, until she empties and lolls, lifting her face to the soft west wind.

She has not felt this wind for years. It wanders at first, caressingly feeling her face with what might be the fingers of an airborne being consumed with curiosity.

Liane laughs and draws the boat into land. At the base of the stark white rock she sees three figures; vague yet apparently women; sinuously stirring, although half shrouded by shafts of brilliant light.

Narrowing her eyes against it, Liane strives to follow their undulations. They appear to be walking on the water, from which they lift now and then to hover in the hot air. Then the wind enfolds them, weaving with the strains of a wistful song.

Is this the island's mythology they talk of? Liane wonders. Who are these women? As she nears the shore, they swing ahead, always out of reach, as though challenging her to keep pace.

The sun slides briefly behind a cloud. The figures, whose skeletal arms are loosely linked, are clear now. They have skulls devoid of flesh, yet framed by windswept hair, bodies of bones that rattle, with nails still growing as in normal death from clenched hands. Their bones seem hollow like those of birds, for now and then the women rise from the water to hover and clash, their long hair entangled and stiff with sea spray.

Liane shivers in the heat. The west wind gusts, inhibitions loosed and borne beyond humanity and the memory of myth. The skeletal women are lifted and whirled by the wind among the great white birds that dip and dive in futile dance.

Liane returns to her hotel. She fears that her instability after her husband's death, is spawning delusion. Do the skeletons symbolise death? Are her efforts to escape being foiled by desperate dream?

Then she learns of the island's perturbing past which has created a recent mythology. Ten years ago three women were pitched by a high west wind, from a small boat onto the island's edge. When rescue came they had already died and their bones picked clean as the west wind wrapped them in a capricious shroud.

Liane takes the boat out again. She rocks towards the island on a restless sea. The land's limestone contours cavort in the haze. Now she sees gaunt trees with the same skeletal impact as the fleshless women.

She beaches the boat and walks through the brittle green growth. Taller fronds with a lace-like grace stir as the west wind wanders, then gains strength, plucking her hair and rippling her dress against her breasts, honing her stunned senses, until she wants to surrender as though to a lover of flesh and blood.

She knows the wind's moods, from tender innuendo to boisterous abandon, the irrepressible warmth shaping dreams as the imagination moves to soporific planes of sensuality. This is the wind that coaxes, heals and from which one cannot run. The will is spent and succumbs.

Where are the women - the beautiful bones that walk on the wind? Where are their souls that were stripped with their flesh? Liane toils up a slope and looks down on the ocean, spread like a carefully woven cloth, textured by the wind. Her boat bobs below - a purposeless toy. Life and death gain perspective. She must come to terms with her late husband's anguish. She must accept the isolation of loss, the panic and irrational sense of guilt.

The west wind murmurs; consolingly; a conspirator in the painful process of recovery and self acceptance.

Liane pities Martha, not knowing how to ease her desolation. Will the west wind reach her kindly in the night like a lover slipping softly through her sleep?

Liane turns down the stone strewn track. A sudden pain pierces her left breast that she has unconsciously bared to the wind. She falls as though struck by a lover turned traitor with sudden lust and lies broken, burnt by the sun and washed in the wisdom and warmth of the enveloping wind.

Liane is cremated and Martha places her ashes in the bronze urn.

"In life you two quarrelled. You could not relate and I was flotsam," she says. "Now I have you both. You can't threaten to part and split me in two as you did in life, so I was afraid to live with a man and commit myself to love."

She spreads both hands round the urn, holding fast the ashes of her ruptured life.

One day a fresh west wind quivers with enquiry round the house. It finds an open door, brushes past Martha at the table and surreptitiously slides the lid from the urn. The wind quietly scoops out the ashes and bears them away, through the blue black drift of clouds. It extracts the essence of Liane; her sorrow, her joy, her compassion and desire to be one with the elements.

Her essence is drawn into that of the wind, then it absorbs the soft centre of her unhappy husband. Both are one with countless men, women and children, whether reduced to ashes or stripped in the grave of superfluous flesh. All are now immortal on the wings of the west wind.

Bones remain, indissoluble - a symbol of earthly mortality - but hollowed by the wind to dance for ever in the effervescent air.

Martha puts the lid back on the urn, at a loss to understand how that light wind could have lifted the lid and stolen the ashes. Some gentle influence guides her to paper and pen and she roughs out her Will, requesting her ashes to be placed in the urn.

She thinks "We are immortal. We return to the air, the water, the earth. That is eternity."

And the west wind - the deathless intermediary - sighs and gently rides a cloudless sky.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

The logic of ecology is dead. The Earth warms. The seas flood. And into the future flows the past. The force of the sun - once worshipped - evokes shades of an ancient race, subject to sand, heat, an elaborate system of belief.

Using one man as their medium, they awake. For when they died, they were painstakingly preserved and have been waiting, with a collective will, for man to clear his cluttered world and create the sun-struck wastes that welcome their return.

The sand from the Sahara began to blow into Britain at noon. A flame coloured cloud advanced majestically from the south, broadening over Kent, casting a sallow light on the land.

A strange wind whined and bore it hotly above the towns, fields and motorways. And from it fell a fine, persistent rain of sand. It coated cars, crops, people in the street. Looking up, their eyes were instantly filled with malicious grit. Some sheltered. Others merely brushed in irritation at the sand.

The cloud darkened. The sand fall thickened. Cars halted and were covered like undulating dunes or humped ruins from some unrecorded history.

The hot wind rose, whipping the sand in deep drifts so it lay in fiercely serrated banks against walls and wrapped stealthily around the trunks of trees.

At last everyone took shelter, shutting windows tightly. But the driving grains forced entry, depositing a fine film.

Asa watched the storm from the window of his top floor flat, until the sand lay so thick on the glass he could see no more.

The sand entered surreptitiously, depositing glittering grains on his lay out for the oil company account, filming the soft skin of the grey leather chair and lying like a meticulous galaxy on the clear glass table.

Two hours later the hot wind dropped. Uncanny silence fell. Warily and with difficulty, Asa opened a window. Buildings were barely definable, having turned into a boundless, steep-sided desert, rolling with intermittent pinnacles, to a sour horizon.

The sand gloated. Its tones veered from gold to sultry brown, laid like the strata of a thousand years. A city had been obliterated.

Now the sand was charged with the beauty of sudden stillness; a balm on the clamorous and inconsequential. Where was everyone? Asa looked up and down the urban road. No one stirred. He went downstairs, the film of sand that had drifted even to the stairwell, squeaking beneath his tread.

He knocked on number twenty four. No reply. He put his ear to the door. No movement. He knocked on number twenty three. Silence.

He went outside and crunched through the sand, past the submerged Hungarian restaurant, across the silent, car-blocked road to the Underground station. Two people were hunched at the entrance; motionless and stiff, like human sphinxes trapped in time.

Asa prodded one, probably a man. He toppled, his limbs sealed fast, his face barely perceptible beneath the sand layer. Asa brushed some away. The man's eyes were tightly shut. Asa tried, unsuccessfully, to prise them open. The other figure - a woman - was similarly enchanted as though blood, water and consciousness, had been sucked from the flesh that had solidified.

Brushing sand from a car windscreen, Asa saw the driver; rigid, hands still tightly grasping the wheel, but his eyes too, shut fast. Asa discovered other drivers, frozen upright, as though suspended in disbelief.

He was beset by desolation. A low, warm wind rose and whined as though in belated regret through the gaps that lay like shallow valleys between the cars and over the steep-sided roofs of restaurants and shops. The wind lifted particles and carried them in subtle rearrangement. The long line of traffic dunes slyly shifted shape. The buildings acquired fresh facades.

Asa could not find the entrance to his flat. He forced a door where he calculated his should be. It did not move, locked by a thick ridge of drifted sand. He could open none of the doors.

He was abandoned in a metropolitan desert. Two hours earlier, he had cursed, as he did each day, the din and pollution. Now all movement had ceased.

Asa recalled the meteorological warnings and what happened as fossil fuels trapped the sun's heat in the atmosphere. The "greenhouse" effect brought irrational weather. A hurricane hit Britain in October 1987. There was a heat wave in the Arctic, snow in the Greek islands and a minor sand storm had blown from the Sahara. Now the ozone layer was being eroded, admitting the sun's ultra violet rays.

Asa leaned against a steep-sided bank. The wind worried, warmly acrid. Then he felt against his back, the stiff yet distinct undulations of a woman's body. Repelled, he spun round and found her sealed, upright and almost indistinguishable from the slope against the building.

He supported her brittle body, tried to dust away the sand, but it clung to her flesh with tenacity. Beneath it Asa perceived features that were regular, probably youthful and limbs whose litheness was now rigid.

He shook her, desperate not to be the only person left alive. She was unresponsive. Yet he sensed this was not death but some spellbound sleep that had crept with the seeping sand into the breathing flesh.

"NO!" Asa's voice was thrown back, edged with alienation, from the silted landscape charged with lunar loneliness. He shook her again.

To his horror, she began to disintegrate; slowly, as though contemplating the finality of death. The sand at last lay, without identity, shifting already towards the steep wall, obliterating some restaurant or shop. Now it was malleable, as the setting sun penetrated the sallow cloud. The sand winked wilfully at Asa.

He kicked the lifeless mass, scattering the fine grains, spraying a sharp shower into his eyes. He dropped to his knees, covered his face with sand-stained hands and wept.

Desperately he began to remould the woman's limbs from the shapeless sand. Strangely it held, pliable, responding to his frenzied coaxing. Her body re-emerged, the sand flexible as flesh. Thighs, breasts, moved beneath his hands. Her face was formed, the mouth full, nose straight, eyes deep set.

She stirred. Her breasts moved with the sharp intake of breath. She raised long arms, glistening with minute grains and with one lithe hand touched Asa's face. Her eyes searched his. She seemed mystified, afraid, recreated from chaos yet out of time and place.

Asa moved to touch her unearthly flesh. She flinched, dropped her arms and took a faltering step back.

"Please!" Asa's voice was urgent in the deepening dusk. He grasped the woman brusquely round the waist, pulled her to him. He cried with the pain of sharp sand that shot through his flesh. He could not draw breath. He fell to his knees.

He painfully rose, looked up. The woman had gone. Darkness lay on the sand banks, a full moon turning them to ice; a land now of northern indifference.

Asa stumbled southwards, subconsciously seeking warmth, the consolation of a latent sun. He watched for the woman, prepared to suffer again the pain of her sand flesh, to draw from her by patience or force, a human response to render this catastrophe bearable.

Sand grains persisted in the air. Asa forced a door. Inside the building, once a restaurant, a man and woman sat stiffly, their eyes closed, as though asleep.

He pushed them. They fell like brittle dolls to the floor. But they still faintly breathed as though in a sleep too deep for arousal.

Desperately Asa broke through other doors to find more people behind counters, sealed at tables; frigid, unwakable.

As darkness descended on the silent city, he felt the first infiltration of fear. It lay on his limbs like a sand-scarred hand, drawing him to depths where he relinquished responsibility and yearned to be sealed in indefinite dream.

But he sensed he was set apart, singled out, unable to lose that last link with reality. And he wanted the woman. She was his creation.

He began walking in the dark. Now the sand cloud obscured the moon but intermittently, street lamps spread brief pools of low light on the gritted pavement.

Some buildings seemed familiar but Asa guessed their identity only by bulk or distinctive roof shape. Shadows deceived, flocking soundlessly like people of the metamorphosis with whom he might take comfort and talk. But as he approached and reached for a dark arm, the shadows dispersed. He encountered only air.

At first the woman's touch was barely perceptible. There was the hint of a sand-filled breath, a brush of fine fingers. Asa cast helplessly about in the hushed street. He stumbled against the silted up exit of the Underground and with an effort stood still, waiting for her to come again. But only the grit-laden wind pulled petulantly at his sleeve.

Asa woke. He was surrounded by undulating dunes. His flesh was hot and heavy. He longed to shed his skin like a snake and dissolve his inner layers until he was pure spirit.

He considered man before the storm of sand. Materialism in conflict with the mind. The triumph and misuse of technology. The long years of strife, elation, the equalising of hope and despair. All swept away by the sand.

Asa dragged through faceless streets. Above them, about half a mile to the south, rose a solitary tower block whose upper floor remained untouched by sand. Asa went towards it through the dunes.

He flung back the sand blocking the entrance. Inside the air was sour, the sand a mere film on dark stairs. He mounted, his footsteps harsh, unrelated to reality. He did not try the sealed doors. But one door at the top stood ajar. He entered.

The sun cast a complex design of light and shade on the carpet. Furniture was irrelevant, left from an era in which Asa could barely believe. On a low bed along one wall he dimly perceived a woman's form. She stirred. It was the woman of sand.

Her skin glistened; minute galaxies of light. Her black hair cloaked bare shoulders. She appeared to look through him, without surprise.

Asa reached her, knowing that from his frenzied creation had grown this symbol of womanhood, as though, while others slept beneath the sand, she came in compensation. She was drawn from a fearful, magical past and the cataclysmic present.

Asa feared her, yet heard himself say, "I've found you." She appeared not to hear, seeming now, not cosmic but robotic, uncomprehending.

"Say something!" Asa pleaded, touching her dark arm. Alarmed he encountered the feel of flesh. He grasped it. She did not flinch. But slowly, eerily, she smiled.

"You're happy." Asa was relieved. "Are you glad to see me?" He brought his face close to hers. Her breath had the hot edge of a Sirocco. As though bereft of will he was drawn into her, as into the harsh, suffocating sand. It paralysed, penetrated, swirled within him, until obliterating memory, intention, response. Yet beneath these sensations he was aware of manipulation. His manhood was expanded, used; ruthlessly over and over until he was no longer conscious.

Asa woke in darkness. Beside him the woman breathed and stirred. She opened strange eyes whose colour he could not assess. "It won't be long now," she said.

"What won't be long?" he asked. She seemed surprised he did not know but said nothing. He said, "What is happening?" But her mouth closed and her eyes glazed as though her warmth as a woman was once more unaccountably threatened.

Light. Dark. How many days? Time was unreal. Asa lay with the woman as though beyond the dimensions dictated by man. He was sand, lust, defeated flesh. And one day, as the sky grew light, the woman gave birth; silently, cleanly, the girl baby crawling from the womb; a tiny replica of the woman, her black hair coiled like smoke about her sand soft limbs.

Asa picked her up. Her eyes were unearthly. But she smiled.

"Takush!" Asa named her involuntarily. He placed her beside the woman. Then he saw the woman had stopped breathing.

"No!" He pressed against her horrified, almost crushing the baby, then withdrew. Like the woman of sand-silted flesh, this one too, obsessively moulded, was disintegrating. Her face and shoulders absorbed the black hair and crumbled. Her breasts, belly, arms and legs became amorphous, then spread wanton grains across the bed.

Asa seized the child and would have pressed the breath from her body. But he was powerless. His strength ebbed and he dropped the glimmering girl into the aimless heap of sand.

The sun, hotter than the previous day, struck through the wide window of the tower block. It fell, as though ordained, on the fragile figure born the day before.

Asa recalled the woman, as the child did not gaze at him but into some lost era known only to herself, as though already she foresaw the future.

The dim room lost its impenetrable corners. Piece by piece, tall pillars appeared. On them Asa could faintly discern the shape of a lotus.

"Takush!" he said. The baby looked at him with unnerving profundity.

Time stopped. In the tower block neither man nor child had need of sustenance. Asa paced the room. He touched a pillar and found empty air. He trod the basalt floor like a cloud.

Each day Takush radically changed. Her limbs filled. Breasts, buttocks rounded. Sixteen years were condensed into as many days.

Asa watched her obsessively. She moved, reclined, slept, as though he did not exist. At night he longed to touch her, draw from her a recognition of his presence. "Takush, talk to me," he pleaded.

She said nothing.

"You're my daughter!" he persisted, hoping to arouse some latent form of love. She turned her back, was half lost in shadow.

One night Asa approached the bed and took Takush in his arms. He held air, his arms wrapping haplessly round his own body. Then Takush appeared in the shadows on the other side of the room, smiling - pleased with her art of delusion.

One morning, Asa saw from the window of the tower block, a wide blue lagoon lapping in the brazen sun between the humped dunes and intermittent tops of buildings. He recalled again the wayward weather before the storm of sand.

As pollution permeated the atmosphere, the Earth warmed. Great winds strafed the land. There were prolonged droughts. Elsewhere, where heavy rain fell, crops grew rapidly yet lost nutrition. People starved. In India the Monsoon failed. The Ganges flooded. Seas flowed over the land. Salt poisoned the soil. There were tidal waves.

There were discussions about using more nuclear power but several disasters had halted its expansion. The last great forests, providing a climatic balance, were destroyed.

Asa opened the window and felt the sun strike hard. It plucked gleaming points from the water. Was it an overflow from the Thames, lapping audaciously at the tower block's lower storeys?

Days were a dateless span of time and Asa dreamed of holding Takush. He did not touch her again, fearing the rebuttal of illusion. He took increasing pleasure in her fluidity, patience and repose, her face averted from the sun.

Fierce storms came. Lightning scythed the sky, rain snatched at the great lagoon. Then Takush trembled, as though touched by primeval fear.

One day when the desert city was restored to calm, Asa saw a young man, burned almost black by the sun, rowing a boat over the lagoon. His eyes were fixed unflinchingly on the upper window of the tower block. He rowed to the building's base where Asa could no longer see him.

Then a snaking rope leapt at the wall and fell helplessly back. Repeatedly it slapped against the brickwork, sometimes almost reaching the window. But each time it fell back.

Eventually, as the soft glowing gold of the sun expanded to cast a broad path on the water, the young man pulled in his rope, turned the boat and rowed back as though seeking to be consumed by the sun.

A few days later another small boat appeared. A second young man - fair and badly blistered by the sun - performed a similar ritual.

As time passed, a third, fourth and fifth appeared. Throughout their futile exercise Takush remained in the shadows, elusive among the lotus pillars, a faint smile on her face.

In Egypt Satis bore Onurus with difficulty. He fought against entry into a hot, dream-sealed world. He sensed danger. Satis saw in the blood-red dawn, across the empty acres of land, a long shadow that seemed cast by the air that lay like lead on her limbs.

Onurus was fully grown when the sand storm blew from the Sahara across Europe. With Satis he watched the great clouds gather like orange beasts of prey and move with a concerted howl of hot wind across the desert.

One night he woke. His room on the desert's edge expanded. Faint pillars formed, carved with lotuses. And by one stood Takush, her skin shimmering with countless atoms of sharp sand. She smiled, then was absorbed into the room which contracted, restored to reality.

Her face followed him incessantly and, obsessed, he prepared to leave.

"Don't go," Satis warned.

But she could not prevent him. For his going was a flight of flesh and mind, as effortless and wilful as the storm of sand; the first flight of a formidable new era no longer governed by the logic of natural law.

Now half the world lay deep in sand. Countries changed shape as the hot wind worried, rearranged; sealing humanity in shock, obliterating buildings, technology, arrogance and despair. Even the flooding seas hesitated and hung at the desert's edge; grey foam hissing on the hot sand.

Through the new era flew ghosts. And on the hot wind rode Onurus. Instinctively he found the lagoon. He took the small boat from beside a half submerged building, whose windows lay like blind eyes unable to absorb the alien water.

Onurus rode as the sun spread in the east, turning him to gold.

It was a golden god Asa saw that morning gliding across the lagoon. This time he was afraid. There was utter conviction in the stance of this contender. For now Asa knew the young men were seeking Takush.

Each had failed. But Asa no longer believed the evidence of his eyes and arms; that Takush was an illusion. He suspected that for this young man she would draw breath.

Onurus reached the base of the tower block. High against the wall he threw a thick rope that, shot with the sun, seemed forged of gold. It reached Asa's open window at the first attempt.

Asa grabbed it, tried to throw it back. The rope coiled defiantly and shot through the window thrusting him aside. It lay on the floor, unattached, yet did not stir as Onurus climbed it. He stepped through the window and stood before Asa.

"I want your daughter," he said.

"No." Asa lunged. Onurus did not move. Yet Asa fell as though stunned by a blow. Involuntarily he crawled out of the door, turning to see Takush walk fluidly across the floor.

Asa descended the stairs and, as though in dream, moved into London's sand blown waste. He recognised no landmarks. The dunes rose and fell, mesmerising and misleading, their rhythm regulated by the sun. He saw no one. He remembered people sealed in dreamless sleep.

He walked aimlessly round the lagoon. The long terraces of tightly packed houses were humped beneath the sand. Once he saw a lizard-like tail vanish through a crack. A new ecology was born.

The hot wind whined faintly, ruffling and softly dislodging the dunes. As dusk gathered Asa sat on the sand by a long curve of the lagoon which seemed to have expanded since dawn. The wind dropped. Asa felt the night infringe, the temperature dropping as in the genuine desert, until he burrowed into the sand for warmth. He saw Takush, the untouchable, now vulnerable flesh; yielding, laughing.

Desolation possessed him. By dawn he had decided to return.

Relentlessly the sun rose, deceptively mellow, then disgorging pure light and the first hint of heat.

Asa rose and turning, saw the top of the tower block protruding from the dunes. He began to walk but the tower grew no closer. As in a dream in which one runs but does not move, Asa could not calculate how long he strove to reach the building from whose windows light was thrown as though from the facets of stones.

Night fell. The tower grew no nearer. It seemed some power impeded Asa while a ritual was realised in his room.

With darkness the wind rose. Hot, harsh, snatching the breath. After each step Asa gasped. But this time the tower, lit now by the white light of the moon, drew nearer, its windows blindly poised. Except that of Asa's room which gleamed as though with phosphorescence.

Asa reached the door, climbed the stairs, his footsteps dreamstruck. He entered the room, saw Onurus lying where he once lay, white with the limpid ice of the moon.

Asa moved towards him, cupped his hands to circle his sleeping throat. The pain stabbed through Asa's vertebrae; a stark shaft that thrust him flat onto the outstretched form of Onurus.

Asa saw a figure in the shadows. Takush. She had seen the shape of a man advance towards Onurus. She had picked up a knife. She had plunged. Now as the moonlight fell faintly on him too, she saw her father, motionless in an attitude of stark arrest. Beneath him Onurus dissolved into silver sand.

The room at the top of the tower block filled with sun. Takush, a woman of flesh, stood by the window, watching the lagoon. Asa, the knife still leaning at a savage angle in his back, lay on the sand spilt bed.

Takush left the room and descended to the dunes. Dawn lay cold fingers of light as though in violation, on the newly drifted sand. Takush was not sure if the people who walked towards her were real. They seemed an agent of the shadows, treading automatically in silence.

They were the inhabitants of the buried town, roused from sleep as though by the vibrations of the night's brutality, their flesh glistening with inflexible grains, their minds sealed in a limbo beyond life. They brushed Takush as they passed like cold whispers of sifted sand.

Takush knew she had lived before in a land of sand, superstition and social order. She suspected this desert was a hoax in a present gone awry, which had roused her from the folds of death.

Onurus, another figment from the past, had forged her flesh. Already she felt his child stir in her. Asa, destined to die, had been the catalyst.

She mounted a flight of steps. She looked down. The people gathered, the sand grains now an intricate element of their flesh, glimmering in the strengthening sun. They turned golden eyes on her, electing her their representative. A new dynasty of the sun had dawned.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

With apologies to Pygmalion

The pile of white pleurite stands starkly in one corner of the dim workshop. Hymie ponders it in silence.

Is he a sculptor skilled enough to form this revolutionary modelling material into the perfect woman ? She has grown with voluptuous insistence in the black well of his lonely life. Every curve and kind gesture has been created and refined. But can he draw her from the inanimate in a form so life like he may be steeped in delicious and indefinite illusion?

His first attempts to coax coherence from the pleurite result in amorphous abstraction. Then the volume and fundamental form emerge yet remain inert. Hymie turns from his work in desolation, seeking solace in sleep.

Ten days later he approaches the fledgling form and with the determination of despair, wrestles to rework his obsession. He steps back - alarmed \- when a high breasted woman with smooth thighs and long legs emerges from his frenzied hands. She grows as though of her own volition, to lean lightly forward, her lovely face with blind eyes, poised with the patience of a plaster saint.

All night Hymie sits in his sagging chair in the unruly workshop. His eyes never leave the woman's white body punctuating the gloom.

As dawn seeps softly through the open door, Hymie gets up, goes to the woman and tentatively reaches one hand to her left breast. She flinches. Fearfully he withdraws, incredulous. But, breathing heavily, he approaches her again. He lifts his hand to her motionless face and strokes her cheek. Her left eye slowly opens, then her right. She looks directly at him. Her eyes gleam like blue ice. Terrified, Hymie falls back into his chair. Now the woman lightly slides her right hand against one lovely leg and moves her left leg to the edge of the dais on which she has been created. She steps off into the scattered pleurite shards littering the floor.

She walks cautiously to Hymie and kneels before him. He trembles with fear and anticipation as she reaches her right hand to his dust-caked face.

"Oh - Lisane!" he exclaims. So he had called her in his fevered dreams. "You're here. I made you. You're mine!"

He feels a slight stiffening of her fingers, but then she reaches her other arm and holds his face tenderly.

Hymie grabs her waist, rises from the sagging chair, his hands moving madly over her breasts, belly and thighs. He avoids the ice of her eyes, throwing her hard onto the floor. He falls onto her, covering her frozen flesh with wet kisses and forces open her legs, pinning her arms against the sharp shards of pleurite. Repeatedly he thrusts into her.

When he finally withdraws and falls, spent onto the floor, Lisane softly closes her blood-stained legs, sits, then slowly stands. Hymie meets her arctic gaze, the blue eyes clear as water borne from boundless heights and he feels her silent curse conveyed through the pale dawn light.

With resolution and grace, she half turns and very slowly begins to grow rigid, her arms turning back to pleurite.

"NO,NO - PLEASE! Forgive me!" cries Hymie. "Become a woman again,I beg you. I won't touch you. I worship you!" No matter that the days of the goddess are long gone. He will spearhead worship of a new deity - his creation will be an inspiration and remain untouched.

Lisane stops her reversal to the inanimate and sits with dignity on a spindly gold chair. Her flesh is mortally warm but within lies a cold as implacable as the marble-like pleurite.

Hymie wooes her with delicacies and heaps the floor at her feet with flowers from his wild summer garden. At last, as she sips a glass of fine wine, the shadow of a smile brushes her lips. But she maintains her lofty gaze above Hymie's bowed head.

He makes her a bed with embroidered satin sheets strewn with rose petals on which she sleeps soundly for eight hours each night. He buys her silk clothes and steals a collar of winking stones that lie like alien stars at her neck. He brings her an exotic bird in a golden cage, whose irrepressible song fills the studio with sunshine. But she does not smile again.

She gazes sadly at the caged bird, but when Hyme can stand the incessant singing no longer and opens the cage so the bird flutters free, her smile returns and her strange eyes dance and shimmer at him her thanks.

Hymie reaches once more, with caution, to touch her white flesh. She does not flinch, and barely able to breathe, he hoists himself onto her bed. He whispers and sighs but does not touch her again.

Lisane starts walking in the garden, fondling the hollyhocks and the ice cool delphiniums, murmuring in a voice like clear stream water to the small brown birds splashing in the bird bath. She casts no shadow and leaves no footprints in the grass. Is she, after all, a goddess?

The past reels through infinities of space, turning full circle and reasserts phenomena and beliefs in the present. The future remains a figment of mens' minds.

Hymie fashions a green shrine for his goddess - a leafy bower interlaced with clematis and a white rambling rose. He places within it objects he hopes will please; the coalescing colours of blown glass, ivory figurines inherited from his father, feathers from the tiny golden birds that flutter about the hedge.

Lisane fingers each object, talking to them, as though invoking a gentle midsummer magic. But she feels strange. Something stirs deep within. She lies often on the satin sheets and is sometimes sick in the morning. Her belly begins to swell.

Hymie sees and is consumed with guilt. This is the result of the rape, for now he lies chastely with Lisane, offering only a careful caress and murmured adulation.

He has nightmares where broken mutants move through fields of flowers, crushing and snatching and wailing at their malformation. Hymie is convinced he has spawned a hapless freak.

But Lisane is calm, passing from the garden to the open field washed with wild flowers and the drowsy hum of bees. And at night, when the moon is full and floods the earth with white light, she dances; a slow-turning moonflower under the leaf laden trees.

When her time comes Hymie hovers, ready to ring the hospital. He cannot believe it when a puff of pure white matter issues from Lisane's body. Within is curled a perfect girl child, each feature delicately drawn and her tiny head already thick with fair hair. The white matter rests on Lisane's belly, expands and disperses, leaving the baby curled up on its mother.

So Felicia is born. Physically she seems human, yet behaves as though bewitched by some faerie force. Like a bird, she appears to have hollow bones, seeming to weightlessly glide round the house and bright garden.

Lisane looks at her frail beauty and recalls the horror and violation of her conception. She cannot love her. Felicia exists in a limbo of unrequited need - reaching for crumbs of compassion from her mother and absorbing the awe, although bereft of fatherly affection, of Hymie. Initially he regards her a a sacred aspect of Lisane and , like her, to be worshipped, flower-decked and inaccessible - a miracle of flesh from a body that he once created from inanimate pleurite. He was their creator, yet can only worship without words.

As the seasons turn in a household heavy with estrangement, Hymie feels familiar stirrings as he watches Felicia - now almost a young woman - moving like a phantom through her loveless days.

He wants to stroke her fair hair, touch the yielding flesh of her lovely neck, run his muscular hands over the gentle curve of her thighs. Only the knowledge that he is her father suppresses the impulse.

Felicia meanwhile, succumbs to melancholy. She wanders her cold domain with an imaginary friend, whose responses ring with earthly conviction in her mind. Yet she is fleshless and Felicia is ultimately left with only a bleak weight of isolation.

Hymie hears her talking to herself and decides to make her a companion. He sets to work with a fresh piece of pleurite, shattering and honing it - limb by limb - into a girl who is so similar to Felicia, she might be her twin, emerging to stand at last in gentle contemplation.

Hymie sits before her, willing her to breathe. She remains motionless. He stands and gently runs a work-stained finger along her sloping shoulder and down one arm. His face brushes her ice cold cheek. He stands back.

The girl stirs. Her hollow eyes gain a hint of blue. She meets his gaze. She moves hesitant legs and steps onto the littered floor. Hymie runs to find Felicia. "Come, I have a friend for you!" he calls. Felicia appears from the garden and steps into the studio.

The girl smiles, extends her long arms and moves towards Felicia. The friendship is silently sealed. Two spheres of sad disorientation meld into mystical sisterhood.

Lisane watches them and feels a dissipation of her guilt and of the harrowing intrusion of the past. Hymie too watches the girls' interplay of enquiry and exploration - the probing and anticipation of growth.

Yet it is Felicia who grows more beautiful by the day. It is her smile, her gestures, her voice that overwhelem Hymie like a dream doomed to obsessive nightmare.

Lisane sees it all and her desire for Hymie's self destruction grows like a canker, turning the soft smile he had worshipped, to one primed with mockery and malice. She relishes Hymie's inner struggle - the developing desire at odds with paternal awareness.

He names the new girl Leone. Her initial similarity to Felicia does not keep pace with the near magical movements and fine-boned grace of her friend. Yet she is beautiful and Hymie fights to focus his needs on her.

Shadows move through the house at the end of an autumn day, pausing in places, as though portending some deed of human darkness.

The strange family eats and speaks absently together. They are polite, inconsequential, while rivers of resentment and desire run deep within.

Leone sleeps in her own room at the top of Hymie's ramshackle house. She goes up as usual at the end of the long evening, lying behind her now like a lightless limbo.

She values her love for Felicia. But she has forgotten where she came from, has no idea where she is going or why she is sheltered by a coldly exquisite woman and a man whose lust threatens to eliminate his creative impulse.

A leafless tree scrapes a dry branch against her window. Murmurs, like the pensive expression of the building's shifting shadows, move through timbers and along the walls of Leone's room. She drifts into a dreamless yet unrefreshing sleep.

A stair creaks. Leone does not know if she is dreaming or awake. The man's weight is sudden, his breath foul and fast. The pain he inflicts is like the thrust of a knife.

When he finally rises and walks blindly away, Leone knows it was not a dream but the kind of waking nightmare existing only in reality.

Lisane has only to look at them both the next day to know what has happened. She is compelled to go into the studio. Hymie works in one corner. Felicia and Leone follow Lisane, working their way among the glinting shards of pleurite.They link hands and stand in a strong shaft of sunlight. Lisane mounts the dais where half finished figures stand like the maimed remains of conflict.

Hymie stops works, stares at his unworldly women; sunspilt, self contained and slowly, limb by limb, stiffening, ceasing to breathe, inexorably returning to the solidity of pleurite.

He moves, as though in slow motion towards them. He sees Lisane's smug smile of satisfaction, the fear and incomprehension on Leone's face and the sadness sealing Felicia's fine features. His tentative touch confirms their bloodless rigidity - mystically borne beauty lost through misdirected lust.

Hymie draws night about him like an unforgiving blanket. He lies without feeling or thought; a numb element of the earth to which he belongs. But a world spawned by myth and imagination wakes beneath him. As he drifts into deeper darkness, its shroud thickens and, before dawn, draws him down to death.

The explanation will be heart failure, but in reality Hymie has been claimed by the restless shades of the underearth. His essence hovers among the damned, compelled for eternity, to perform tasks that can never be completed. None is demanded of him. But as he hovers in the half light, he sees a procession of wonderful women, walking on a hilltop path, their long limbs white and moving with effortless grace, their proud heads poised in perfection. Hymie cannot move a muscle, but he can see that every woman is made of pleurite and primed to walk past him, out of reach , for ever.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

Max climbs the final slope of scattered grey stone. From the top he looks over the alien land - a geological interlocking unlike any he has previously explored; an island of grey boulders; indented and obtruding like mysterious menhirs with smooth carpets of small stones laid as semi-precious afterthoughts; pale grey, stark white and the occasional glint of garnet red.

In a deep valley squat trees with bursts of blue-green leaves grow in line, as though instructed not to straggle, and beyond lies the sea; a sheet of molten silver spreading into the haze of a lost horizon.

Max, an archaeologist, has come here to seek evidence of the lost Kyanote people who lived on the island three thousand years ago. Their existence had not been heard of until 3002. Now artefacts are surfacing on a group of sun-soaked islands laid like the weathered studs of a curving belt in the southern sea.

Max - lithe, from constant trekking, knows he is more than an archaeologist who discovers, classifies and moves on to the next dig. He has worked with teams and at each unearthing his response has reached beyond their enthusiasm, to enter the essence and inference of the objects retrieved.

He has felt the obligation and love, laced with fear, of the woman who used a copper cooking pot, the instinctual anticipation of the horse that wore the bridle tooled for war, the ignorance and awe of the people thronging a subterranean temple.

Periodically Max takes solitary trips to explore remote locations free of the restrictions of team work. His mind moves unhindered through the past, perceiving the nuances of communities that lived by beliefs untenable in the twenty second century, yet whose impulses persist in the human psyche. Max knows the links are vital and unbroken but the memory of man is brief, condemning him to the tragic treadmill of forgetfulness and fear.

This time his trip coincides with his rebound from a ruined relationship. His responses are coloured by misery; the face of Natasha, the woman he has left, flows in fragments through the land - her eyes shine from the oval leaves, her profile lies in the lilac hills that ring the plain.

Max begins to descend. He concentrates on his work. How had the Kyanote handled life? They left no written record, their homes comprised low walls, small rooms, few tools and utensils. But there were larger sites with the remnants of elegant arches and floors on varying levels - all on hills overlooking the sea.

Stones scatter as Max slides down the precipitous path. How many feet have walked before him between town and temple? What were these people's rituals and their grasp of the wider world?

Then he sees the mouth of a cave, gaping like an oracle in mid pronouncement. He approaches its ominous entrance and steps inside, assailed by dankness and a watchfully perceptive presence. He treads tentatively through the litter of stones; grey, white and intercepted here by sapphire blue, like stray drops of the dreaming sea among glinting garnet.

The rattle of stones beneath his feet is a sharp announcement of intrusion from an alien concept of life, violating the listening presence sealed profoundly in the past.

He hears gently running water and sees a dim stream winding towards him through the stones. On it float dark fronds, lifted and lulled by the water. Nearing, he sees these are strands of black hair. They flow from the head of a woman with closed eyes. He bends, touches the face; terracotta brown with the feel of solidified flesh. The eyes open; blackly startled, and, barely perceptibly, the sensuous mouth moves.

Max lifts the head. It is heavier than a human head. Then he sees it is attached to a large pot; the seductive neckpiece of an everyday vessel; its pale mottled surface enhanced by a band of gold.

The woman sighs; the texture of her face softens, her eyes begin to appraise as Max gently supports the back of her head. He gathers the floating hair and carefully stands the vessel on the stones beside the water.

As, speechlessly he looks, the woman changes; she had gazed with the darkly ponderous face of a Greek heroine. Now she has the slightly slanting eyes and tiny mouth of a discreet Chinese, which in turn melt into the ritually made-up face of an ancient Egyptian.

"Who ARE you?" At last Max is able to speak.

" Moha. What is your will?"

Again Max is speechless. Finally he utters, "That you tell me what you are."

"I'm ancient will, bewitchment, possibility. Do you believe in what man conjures from fancy, finding fact too bitter?"

Max hardly knows. He still warms to legend and the folklore of people whose lives he has unearthed, but only as flights of the muddled mind or symbolic of social circumstances. Magic, as an authentic force in a scientific world, is surely untenable.

As Max watches, Moha again begins to change. Her features soften to become those of a young woman whose nature and place in time are unguessable yet essentially feminine. A lily-like flower flutters in her hair whose colour, in which long strands of black remain, has lightened, as though more aptly part of the pale pot. She looks at him compassionately.

In a low voice she says, "When man lost the need to believe in magic, he relinquished a vital part of himself. But you meet with the evidence of it every time you find a piece of the past. I think you understand."

Max sits on the cold ground and an uncanny light gathers from dim corners of the cave to shift across her face. The animation of her strange eyes and the movement of her mouth are in curious contrast to the motionless pot.

"I suppose you are some enchantress and liable to grant wishes," he says, attempting a smile.

"Of course. But better than that, I can indicate what you should consider doing next. You could choose the wishes. But they would apply only to yourself. If instead, you seek a certain object and in perceiving its past, identify with it, you will be metamorphosed within it into the means of showing man, for the first time, how to live. Until now his irrationality and fear have prevented this."

"You make me sound like some latter day god in charge of folly and potential," he says.

"If you wish. Those with your sympathies are rare. But, as in every good fairytale, which is what you have stepped into, you will have to overcome obstacles on the way to prove you are worthy of this opportunity."

"I feel humbled, but like the hero in any folk tale worth recounting, tempted to take it on. Why are you...?" Max indicates the pot.

"I was made with others \- one was found in another cave on the island - by a potter rejected by his woman. Whenever he made a pot its neck became that of a young woman and her head took shape from the malleable clay. I remember his hands. They were gentle and trembled as he formed my face. Then he whispered to me - words of love and longing as he caressed my eyes and drew a pensive finger across my mouth."

Max raises an arm and reaches for Moha's face. But his hand passes through the flesh which has turned from terracotta to ochre and, teasingly, her eyes dance.

"I am not for you. Only my words may influence you," she laughs.

"Tell me what I must do," says Max.

"This is an island of many facets. It is older than even I can imagine, rising from the sea through a mist that moved before the first millennium of man. It has seen him come and go and in its flora and fauna lie the echoes of his failure, from duplicity and vindictiveness to greed. There are spirits despoiling the vegetation that have fed on his rotting flesh and gnawed his bones. They have crept from the earth, the water and trees, defying the sun that cannot subdue them with its heat and revelling in the darkness that cloaks their malignancy. And they have learned to spawn illusions. They will beset you every step of the way."

"But I shall go. What do I hope to find?"

"Beyond the green river with its malevolent fish, the mountain where rocks stir with degraded spirits and the path that passes through trees whose leaves shield elements of loathing and scorn, you will find a great house high on a stark red hill. It is built of moss agate - that marvellous stone carved with hills, trees and running water. The house will shift, riddled with reflections, but its entrance lies within a transparent rock. Find this and go inside.

"You will be bemused by passages of marble and walk many unproductive ways. But do not succumb to the breeze that weaves through the illusory stone. Do not lie by the appearance of appeasing water. Walk until you find a lofty room laced with a fretwork of branches and flowers. At one end on a table of lapis lazuli you will find a box made of malachite. Open it and fate will do the rest."

The woman trembles as the light dims. Her eyes close, her mouth is motionless. Her hair fades as she is absorbed by the air. The pot shifts too; expanding, contracting, then dissolving.

Max sits on; desolate and afraid. But the intensity of Moha's presence remains, confirming his mission, like some fanciful trial from the fairytale to which she had alluded; a venture through imagination and wishful thinking.

Is he hallucinating? He is missing Natasha. He sees women's faces everywhere. Yet he IS here to explore the island. Why not seek the river, the mountain, the path. He might at least discover more artefacts. But of what use are they if, like Moha, they vanish?

Stiffly, he gets up and gropes back to the mouth of the cave. Darkness envelops the island, punctuated by small, suffering sounds. Night creatures? Preying spirits? Max finds a path and walks towards the soft sound of running water The river? He walks steadily. Yet the sound draws no nearer. It teases and laughs beneath the moon; a wayward element in collusion with the night.

Then, between two trees \- he sees the river - green by day, now winding like a silver snake, animated by the moon, its surface shot with blue, green, lilac and red. Max slides down the hindering bank.

The water is alive. Fish leap, dart and slither; colours collide. The mouth of a mottled fish with agitated wings, gapes open and in seconds, consumes numerous smaller fry. The mouth snaps shut. The fish's gimlet eye fastens on Max.

"Voracious, voracious!" The words spin through Max's mind. Is this a symbol of one of man's inherent failings Moha spoke of? He is suddenly hungry. As the great fish flaps placidly upstream, Max scoops handfuls of smaller fish and crams them into his mouth. They are sour and the bones block his throat.

Yet, hunger strangely satisfied, he is pitched into another dimension of voracity. A hunger enters his head, his limbs. He sees Moha's cool eyes. He feels the face he could not touch. Is this voracity acceptable? A passing hunger of the flesh and feelings - not the desire to insatiably possess, to insist on excess, to impose, with wanton insistence, on others.

Max's need conjures a woman - her skin curiously fish-like, her mouth like that of the flying fish, voraciously opening and closing. She lies beside him on the steep slope. He covers and kisses her but her mouth will not be satisfied. Her tongue, with serpentine insistence, penetrates his throat. Knowing that to continue his mission, he must resist, he struggles to thrust her off but she clings with the clamminess of dark river water; her small, sharp teeth nipping the soft flesh of his mouth.

He is torn between voracity - maddened by her harshness - and the need to break free. He musters strength to repel her, but, inhumanly, her long hands immobilise him. She smells of dying fish. Her breasts, pocked with sharp-edged scales, press through his thin shirt. Max cries out; a high-pitched protest from another world. The woman pauses. Max throws her off. Then she has gone.

Dazed, Max is clutching the wet weeds of the river bank. He sits and stares at the water. The fish still dart and dive. Then, at his feet, Moha, now wholly woman, stretches - a nakedly languorous bridge - across the heaving water. There is laughter in her eyes, a smile on her lips.

"Come, cross me!" she whispers.

Tentatively, Max steps over her face, to rest one foot on her elegant neck.

"Won't I hurt you?" he asks.

She laughs. "No."

He cannot feel her body beneath his feet. Yet he is suspended over the water while the fish flash, leaping and snapping. He treads softly along Moha's stomach; flawlessly rounded in the moonlight and down her outstretched legs to her pale, pointed feet resting on the other bank.

He turns, and before he can speak, her body dissolves, until only her laughing face remains. Then that too fades, leaving her hair to grow and wind, like a path in the moonlight.

Longing suddenly for human contact, Max moans softly, then continues along the path which begins to rise with obtrusive rocks that shed small stones to slide beneath his feet. He slithers and feels the brushing of some mean intent. Thin laugher moves mockingly through the bulbous rock.

Max is reassured by the soft hair under his feet, but the mockery shifts like conspiracy through the rugged rock strata. He feels a small snatching sensation, as though sharp-nailed hands are reaching for his clammy skin. He weaves out of their way, sliding on Moha's hair and aware now of trees glowering above the rocks, their great green leaves tortuously strung on a maze of black branches.

Max bends to finger Moha's hair. It slips through his hands with the moisture of mountain weeds. The laughter in the rocks rises and something grabs Max's arm, pulling him sideways into the cold substance of stone.

He is dazzled - surrounded by slabs and fragments of tourmaline; the mineral of courageous colour - glowing layers of pink, blue and green and with it, the refined red of spinel interjecting like diluted drops of blood and the transparent blue of aquamarine; the flow of enchanted water through base rock.

And perched on ledges are ethereal pots in clear rose quartz, peridot and diamond-like danburite, terminating in the heads of wryly smiling women. None is as lovely as Moha, yet Max feels he must have them all - a shimmering and ageless harem.

He hears the soft, unsavoury laughter within the rock from which the minerals are suspended. Yet he reaches for the woman who smiles on a pot of pale green peridot. He touches a strand of fine hair, but withdraws, with a sudden insight of rejection and pain should he be tempted. With difficulty, he resists another of the gently ironic women, forcing his gaze to the ceiling - a sheen of moonstones like the surface of a suspended stream, flowing endlessly, ahead.

Max experiences the consuming urge to possess. He does not care to whom the minerals belong. His usual instinct to enter into and enjoy, but not to covet the artefacts he finds, is supplanted by this base and insistent desire. He wants the women and the minerals' extravagance, their implication of wealth and power.

Debilitating wars and intimate catastrophes caused by the need to covet, painfully possess him and he is filled with self disgust, vying with a reckless cunning; sentiments that in his former life stirred occasionally beneath the cover of convention, but were dutifully suppressed.

Resolutely, Max turns and fixing his gaze on the rough ground, retraces his steps. The laughter, as though deflated by his resolve, dies and, when he again looks askance, he sees the women sinking with the insubstantiality of dream, into their pots that in turn melt into the minerals of the rock wall.

Before him, the rock dissolves and he steps out onto the path, where Moha's hair lies passively, as though waiting for him to overcome his aberration and resume his search. Splinters of danburite cling tenaciously to his skin. He brushes them off into the undulations of Moha's hair where they scatter and shed white light in addition to the moon.

Dawn turns the breathing bulks of rock to grey reality, draped by the copious leaves of the curious trees. Max, with no conscious need for sleep, food or drink, walks steadily on. Sunlight probes the motionless leaves, spilling pools of pale gold onto Moha's hair. Max sees it winding now through sharp peaks of shattered rock; lonely pinnacles placed as though in a chess-like game by some calculating and hidden hand.

He climbs for an hour - hot yet hopeful, and finally emerges onto a wide, windy plain. The thorny ground cover, exposed to the sun is punctuated with fragile flowers; lilac, blue, vermilion; their minute faces bravely raised to the luminous mountain light.

He follows the curves of Moha's hair to the edge of the sunlit plain and looks down an almost sheer drop into billowing cloud. A glaring white path winds with crude intent between the thorns and a stunted variety of the large-leaved trees. Moha's hair has vanished.

Is this the island he saw from the hill? When was it? Yesterday? The day before? Where are the grey boulders, the carpets of small stones, the trees that shone with blue-green leaves? Evidence of the Kyanote? The island has undergone metamorphosis; the backdrop for enchanted encounters, challenges, the beautiful and grotesque.

Max slithers down the path. Moha whispers, "I'm here!"

He takes heart. The path pulls his feet downward. The trees, that had seemed small from above, begin to reach upwards, obstructing the sun. The huge green leaves of the previous night grow again and seem to connive on the lacework of black branches.

Max realises, that for some hours, he has not thought of Natasha. Not surprising, considering his singular mission and the women of water and precious stone. Yet he no longer sees her face in the foliage, or tilted in the hills. His mind is crystal clear. And the Kyanote rest in the past where they belong. He is beguiled by the glaring path, listening for Moha to whisper reassurance, intent on his curious quest.

Perhaps, in reality, he is scrambling through the grey boulders and carpets of stones, blind to the starkness of his surroundings and damaged emotions. He may be about to collapse from lack of food, sleep and water, while this fantasy unfolds in his head.

But he flounders on. The huge leaves, their conniving done, pull apart and murmur with intimations of the loathing and scorn of which Moha spoke. They seem a deliberate discouragement, as though they would thrust him back into the real world and thwart his discovery of the malachite box.

He waits for Moha's whisper but hears only the malicious movement of the leaves. Then he perceives a woman, poised on the path. She might be spun from sunlight and laughs as the bright air weaves round her faultless limbs.

Max is mesmerised. Surely this one can mean no harm. But as he nears her, she turns and runs lightly away as the path curves deeper into the trees. Max hurries, calls out. She pauses. When he reaches her he finds a woman of pure sunshine in his arms. It floods his sour mouth, his weary limbs, his muddled mind.

This cannot be a temptation to be resisted he thinks vaguely as he floats, swinging the weightless woman along the harsh path. Perhaps she is a solace for suffering. She still laughs as she in turn lifts him and seduces without the familiar aid of flesh. The satiation is on a spellbound plane.

She weaves away from him. He does not want to lose her. He follows, running now as she gains speed. He is dazzled by the brightness of the path, but as he turns a corner, sees the woman swept up by another man; charged with menace and dark as the trees' bark. The woman turns her lovely face to Max. Still she laughs and is borne away. around another bend. Max follows but when he turns it too, man and woman have disappeared.

"Duplicity!" he thinks. That time he had not resisted. Instinctively he knows Moha had conjured the man to preserve him. And now he knows that obsession with another would not only entail voracity and duplicity but would destroy his own identity. That had almost happened with Natasha. Then she, too had chosen someone else.

The path winds out into the open. The slope now is less steep, the sunlight softer.

Beyond a plain, thick with the small flowers stirring in a light breeze, Max sees the stark red hill. It rises sheer from the flat land; portentous and unreal. And on its summit, stands the great house; its luminous walls alive with the movement of fern-like trees rooted in undulating land. Max knows the moss agate is, in fact, translucent chalcedony.

On his trips he has explored the rudiments of geology and marvels at the illusory impression of captured growth. The house throws off arrows of sharp sunlight as though signalling its magical significance.

Max walks the last length of white path. Moha's faint whispers rise from the rippling flowers. Her words are inaudible yet he senses assurance. He reaches the foot of the red hill. The path abruptly ends. The surface of the slope is slippery and Max can barely find a foothold. But he perseveres and finally begins to slowly climb, concentrating on each exacting footstep, oblivious of the wandering wind, the sun whose strength has waxed again, his past, present and undefined future.

At last he reaches the great house. He is dazzled by the shifting surfaces; the trees that might be murmuring in the wind; elements of landscape that breathe, yet are cold dream delivered by chance and sealed for ever out of reach.

Max remembers Moha's words: "The entrance lies within a transparent rock." He walks round the deceptively fluid walls. Then he finds the rock overlooking the other side of the valley.

Its surface yields like water. Max steps inside the house. Silence. A long passage of white marble runs ahead. Large pots composed with care from precious stones stand at intervals along the walls and between them, the floor is lined with coloured tiles alive with echoes of mythology.

Max walks resolutely forward and is uneasy when a light breeze like a tender hand begins to steal along the passage, fingering his hot forehead and prompting strange sensations. He remembers Moha's warning not to succumb to its suggestiveness, although he fails to see what harm he can come to here.

The passage ends, opening onto an indoor lake, surrounded by more tilework and pots of large-petalled plants. Great flower heads also float on the still blue water. Exhausted, Max longs to lie at the pool's edge and let the breeze play over his overheated skin. But he recalls how Moha warned: "Do not lie by the appearance of appeasing water."

Regretfully he passes on, into a second passage of marble, tinged as though by tentative dawn, with more pots, of pink kunzite and pale blue topaz and a floor of tiles where complementary colours effortlessly meld. As though his true existence lies in another dimension, his footsteps make no sound.

Eventually, he reaches the lofty room, where numerous black branches spread and intertwine along the walls and floor, hung with huge pale blooms. And at the end of the room Max sees a massive table of dark blue lapis lazuli. On it stands the malachite box.

He steps through the foliage that softens like moss beneath his feet. As he nears the table, he sees the green-ringed "eyes" of the malachite gazing at him with an intensity that is unnerving.

He knows this is merely the mineral's shell-like formation but he knows too of its illustrious past - enhancing the castles of Russian Tsars, panelling pretentious walls and inlaid on precious goods. From malachite, ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans coaxed jewellery, amulets and eye powder. In the Middle Ages it was thought to cure vomiting and to protect against witches. This superficial knowledge, gleaned on his travels, moves swiftly through Max's mind as he reaches the marble dais bearing the table and box.

Max pauses before the dais, then slowly climbs the shallow steps leading to the table. It seems to grow as he approaches - an extravagant support for the glowing green box.

The "eyes" intensify, extracting Max's wary essence. He reaches a dubious finger to the smooth surface of the box. He feels a shiver of response and steps closer. The swirling malachite baffles and diverts, but he searches for the line where the lid rests, running a finger near the top of the box until he discerns the rim. He pushes it up. As though awaiting his intrusion, it slowly rises of its own accord.

Inside the mineral shines; composure replacing watchful agitation. The box is empty, yet emanates a pervasive presence.

"Climb inside!" Max hears Moha's whisper like a small breath of wind.

How can he get inside a box this size? As though listening, the box slowly begins to expand, the green "eyes" stretching in relentless vigilance. The movement stops when the interior is big enough for the body of a man.

Max cautiously climbs in. As he crouches on the cold mineral, waves of the past begin to wash through his mind. Hands, rich with rings, caress the box. An opulent sleeve brushes the surface, and the lid, which Max had left half open, is quietly closed.

He feels the pride and possessiveness of the box's owner. Was it a man who inherited or amassed his own wealth? Perhaps even a Tsar?

The box emanates indifference, as though confident of its worth; coldly evaluating centuries of uproar and despair.

Max grows numb. He does not try to rise. Moha's pale face appears; smiling encouragement.

He feels a change within his flesh; a freezing of the blood and vital organs. His heart slows, muscle solidifies, fluids cease to flow. His brain works on, striving to perceive, keep pace.

Then that too numbs and he is steeped in darkness.

The great house, conjured by Moha to protect the malachite box and confirm the significance of its presence, breathes a barely perceptible sigh. And Moha, grown tall and white as the marble of its diminishing walls, stands briefly by the great blue table and touches the lid of the box with her long and lovely hands.

Darkness falls. The house is drawn silently into the depths of the high red hill, to relinquish marble and precious stones to the spirit-ridden earth. The table too breaks softly into fragments of lapis lazuli, that sink and combine with coarse soil and sand.

Only the malachite box \- reduced to its original size - remains; auspicious on one of the grey boulders of the original island.

Pierre, a young archaeologist, with an interest in geology, has come to the island in search of a legend; the woman-headed pot. He is darkly intent, with rapid reactions and an inexplicable conviction there is truth in the tale.

The pot stands - runs the tale- in a cave in the north of the island. It has powers of local and universal relevance and once led a man on a dangerous and undisclosed mission.

The legend had been breathed by Moha into the languishing minds of men and Pierre is the first prepared to probe it. Like Max, he is instantly drawn to the cave where Moha waits and, when he finds her, like Max, he is beguiled. But, unlike Max, he is not obliged to suffer the temptations of a quest.

"Look into my eyes!" urges Moha.

Pierre happily complies. Within them, he is borne through a blur of foliage, flowers and fluid rock, to the malachite box on the boulder. Its lidless eyes still gaze, focused on the stone-scattered fields.

Pierre is apprehensive yet compelled by curiosity to approach. He grasps and carefully lifts the lid. Inside lies a large black stone with a reflective gold surface, like a mergence of night and day, sunlight and black cloud, against the green base of the box.

Pierre knows the stone is more than a geological discovery. Before even touching it, he senses its quality of patience and completion and the essence of a man who was transformed, became one with the past and relinquished the rest of his life for some vital revelation.

Pierre reaches and picks up the stone. Faintly, it vibrates.

"Warm it in your hands!" Moha whispers.

Pierre moves his practical hands over the stone, coaxing warmth from its smooth surface. As it discharges a slight shock, he perceives with overwhelming insight, how to realise without aberration, the simple yet elusive ways of the world that generate content with the commonplace and creation from inner comprehension.

"Take the stone. Let those who lead men warm it in their hands," says Moha, materialising as a woman of firm flesh and blood.

"They will have no choice but to comply with it. But the novelty of contentment will of course wear off. Those who hold the stone will not deviate, but not everyone will have that opportunity, and just as I am the prisoner of a pot made by an unhappy man, so the millions of men who have been shown the secret at second hand, will grow bored and resort again to the trap of chaos and catastrophe. Then I shall no doubt have to free myself once more and devise some other means of diverting them from self destruction."

"Why do you feel responsible?" asks Pierre.

"I think it is because of the unhappy potter who made me. He never knew contentment and like many men became obsessed. He probably died of a broken heart."

Pierre is about to touch her white limbs, convinced his personal contentment lies within reach. But she sighs, softly compresses her fluid body, then vanishes in the dew-drenched dawn.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

The harpies are holding a convention; a huddle of web-like wings, folded against the stiffening evening breeze; a forest of skinny legs and cruelly clawed feet, while their wild hair, strewn with the texture of sea-weary weed, lifts lazily from bony shoulders.

"Too many survivors – not enough done-for!" screeches the tallest harpy in a voice like a Sirocco. She is referring to the hapless sailors who have the misfortune to meet a harpy as they ply the Seven Seas.

"I'm launching a contest!" she shrills. "The first one among you to drown fifty sailors will be granted a holiday on Snarg Island among the washed up sailors' remains - an exclusive menu I think you'll agree, to be remembered for the rest of your immortality."

Snarg is a bleak block of deserted rock in the midst of the measureless sea which otherwise yields only the remains of dead fish and weak-muscled mermaids – poor pickings for harpies.

A murmur of approval moves like slow waves through the crowd. The harpies begin to preen their lank hair, which turns, with the light of the full moon, to seductive silver strands. Their bony bodies fill out with womanly flesh, their faces gain innocence and an eagerness to please. Their great wings are neatly folded, seeming harmless in the night shadows.

One by one they leap from the rock and splash into the contemplative sea. They streak in different directions; lovely legs skimming the lacy froth of great waves, their eyes alternately sly and suffused with tenderness.

Sailors on watch dream or fight against sleep as they sail the world's wide seas. They see dolphins, great fish and scavenging gulls, then reach eager arms for the lovely women who weave through the moonlit water.

Are they mermaids? Angels? The sailors do not care. They merely yearn to surrender. Some sailors dive overboard to grasp the harpies and drag them back to their boats, but they are pushed by fine hands that gain uncanny strength, under the waves, until the breath leaves their bodies and they are sucked to the sandy bottom where wilful currents bear them to Snarg Island.

Some sailors are briefly caressed and sung to by voices of unearthly persuasion before vanishing with howls of horror in deep water.

Bill Ramsbottom, who comes from a dastardly and distinguished line of seamen – pirates turned legitimate in the last century - takes the middle watch with seasoned resignation on the rusting cargo vessel bound for South America.

He whistles and watches the implacable sea speared with moonlight, calculating days and hours of drudgery until the end of the voyage.

He rubs his eyes in disbelief as a beautiful woman with slender arms outstretched, rises naked from the sea and calmly climbs the companionway onto the ship. She sits casually on a coil of oily rope, raising great grey eyes to Bill's pale blue ones. Then she sings; a wistful melody of love and longing, floating on the quiet night air and enveloping Bill with the conviction of a living dream.

He pinches himself and recalls in a flash the harlots and wandering women of a thousand ports. Not one can compare to this beauty from the sea. She stops singing and again stretches her arms to him. He leaps up and runs into them, kneeling by the rope to clasp her cold white shoulders. She tumbles from the rope and draws him to her, until he is dizzy with desire and delusion.

He is about to ask her where she comes from, when she lifts his considerable weight off the dirty ship's deck, bearing him like a feather to the port side She is about to fling him over, when she pauses and looks again into his terrified eyes and puts him squarely down on his flat feet.

"I'm not going to drown you!" she announces "I want to know about humans, mortality and worldly women. Take me on your voyage and on across lands we know only in mythology."

Bill blinks. "Who the hell ARE you?" he exclaims, fear vying with yearning. The harpy has no answer.

She knows her nature and her dark intent, but these have no tangible identity. She knows weak-witted man, but has no idea that in HIS mind she is a potent piece of mythology.

"Call me Callisto – the old name for a lovely Aegean island," she commands.

"Callisto!" Bill rolls the word with satisfaction round his tongue. And holds her close to his grimy chest.

The middle watch passes – each moment, usually so tedious – charged now with enchantment of man and a malevolent spirit transformed.

At dawn Callisto stretches, glides towards the port side and says, " I can only come to you at night Bill. I'll see you after dark!"

Bill nods, numb with protracted pleasure. "O.K." he mutters, his voice stolen by the rising wind.

Callisto slips overboard and with four long strokes, is gone.

She reappears that night – a lovely woman still – and she and Bill lie entangled on the heaving deck.

Bill feels a sharp pain, like the plunging of a needle in his leg. Callisto struggles to tuck her long claws away, but the biggest one is caught in Bill's shin.

"Sorry Bill," she says, stroking his unshaven face. Bill is curious and in pain but he pretends not to have noticed. He had known since their first meeting that Callisto was not of his wearisome world – from which world she comes he may never learn.

The following night she spreads her formidable wings and flies onto the deck. She speedily folds them away and Bill sees only a slender beauty longing for love. But Jake, a surly able seaman has seen the wings and the woman whom he fears is an illusion.

He spies on the couple as night after night, they lie among the greasy ship's gear. He is in collusion with the owner of a seedy circus that trundles its lack lustre acts across Europe. Whether this creature is real or a water- borne enchantment, he will have her to exploit for easy profit. He will net her and from South America, arrange for transportation to Antwerp where his cohort lives. She will have to be hidden within the cargo in the hold.

The following night Jake watches the couple until dawn, then, wielding a great herring net, inadvertently left among the ship's equipment, he sees Callisto sidle to the edge of the deck and prepare to slide into the sea. He flings the net over her and drags her, screaming to the open hold.

Bill leaps at Jake but is no match for the burly able seaman. Jake knocks him out and secures the net around Callisto. He drags her down the companionway and wedges her behind four chests of China tea. She has stopped screaming – with no sea water for so long her unearthly strength is sapped and she crumples like a used piece of paper, unable to move a muscle of her magical body.

Each time Bill tries to descend into the hold, Jake is there. "If you touch her, I'll do for you once and for all," he threatens.

Bill considers taking action on their imminent arrival in port. But he does not even see Callisto unloaded. Jake is deft and devious. Callisto is on an Antwerp boat before the cargo is touched.

The shabby tent flaps in the wind off the frozen river in a bleak expanse of eastern Germany.

Inside Callisto shivers in a great tank of salt water. She has been impelled to revive and, as the circus master drags her out, she instinctively opens her huge wings. She flaps them to get dry, then subsides in despair. Klaus, the circus owner yells across the tent," Oh no you don't! Get up, come out and fly across the field!".

He is wary of this otherworldly being that Jake had delivered, but, hearing him talk of her flight on board ship, is resolved to cash in on the phenomenon. He shrinks though from the sharp claws he has noted on her bird-like feet.

Callisto starts to weep, then feels malicious stirrings within her frightened flesh. She runs through the wet grass and launches unsteadily into the drizzle. Her great wings work with growing strength against the wind until she is circling the field like an airborne boat in full sail.

"Good! Tonight you do that in the Big Top!" shouts Klaus.

Callisto hears the raucous band strike up as she balances on a silver drum inside the enormous tent.

"NOW!" yells Klaus in her coiled ear. He steps back.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" he declares, "Behold the amazing Callisto – creature of mysterious myth and magic!"

Callisto is furious as she hears a deafening roll of the drums. Her wings spread wide, her claws fully extend. She lifts her legs behind and takes off into the fetid air of the circus tent. The whirr of her wings and the rush of wind they create, causes many in the audience to hide their heads in their hands.

Her eyes – evil now and glittering with spite, focus on a middle aged man in the third row. She swoops and plucks him effortlessly from his seat. He wails as he is carried across the ring and out of the tent. Callisto swings him viciously across the field to the frozen river, into which he is heedlessly dropped, the thin ice breaking on impact and the black water closing silently over his head.

Four more men are plucked and dropped before she flaps away over the town and out to sea.

Klaus shouts and gives chase, but does not even near the big-boned harpy winging with intent across the winter waves.

Bill, still in South America, dreams of the lovely woman who ruined him for all others and cannot believe his ears when he hears the wistful song Callisto had once sung to him. He looks up and, against the full moon, sees a creature with widespread wings and enormous claws swooping towards the quay.

The song soars and the creature slowly descends, shrinking with fluid grace, until she stands beside him. Her wings are softly closed, her muscled body wavers into that of a woman. Bill seizes her to him. She stops singing and lays her lovely lips on his which taste of salt and dry despair.

She knows immortality as a harpy is no longer hers. She has chosen human frailty and its drear destiny. And she is wholly happy.

So is Bill. Her cruel claws remain a danger and disappointment until Bill arranges for a fearless manicurist to visit once a week and file them down.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mariel sits stiffly in the damp grass. The fast fire of talk between Raoul and Denis grows distant, as though drawn into dream. Mariel, like the woman in Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe, has undressed - not to please the men, but to enjoy the feel of fresh grass and the play of a tentative breeze on her skin.

Diana had not undressed but - bored with the self conscious discussion about the god Pan in mythology exchanged between the men - had wandered to the murmuring mill stream.

Mariel hears a man's cough - muffled yet apparently from the dense growth nearby. She turns towards it and reaches for her dress. But she sees no one. Is he hidden in the hawthorn hedge or behind the whispering larch?

Her dress in one hand, she rises and, unnoticed by the others, slips away. She finds a gap in the hedge. The smell of hawthorn is overridden by rankness.

Then she sees, stretched in the grass, a grotesque being with a leaf-encrusted beard, small horns protruding from his tousled head and the hairy legs and hooves of a goat. His crumpled face is serene in sleep. Had he coughed before succumbing to siesta?

Mariel gasps. One of the creature's eyes quivers and opens. Jerking upright, he gives a shout, so sudden, Mariel steps rapidly back and overbalances.

"You woke me!" the creature accuses in the rasping voice that might belong to someone twice his size. "It's noon and you woke me!"

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know you were here!" Mariel's voice is thinly apologetic.

"Never wake a kallikanzaro in the middle of the day!"

"No, I'll be very careful in future," says Mariel, clutching her dress to her and feeling like Alice meeting a cantankerous character in Wonderland.

The kallikanzaros were small beings populating the countryside with lascivious satyrs in the wake of the great god Pan. They were said to kidnap the unwary. The creature closes his eyes and settles back for more sleep.

Having listened for an hour to the discussion between Raoul and Denis, Mariel assumes the kallilkanzaro is catching up on sleep lost while seducing nymphs at night. She pulls on her dress and sinks into the long grass, unable to leave this mythical misfit who is surely a figment of her over-active mind.

Real or not, he is a small version of the devil as the Pan cult developed like that of the witch cult in north west Europe.

He was decried for disrupting everyday life; from causing women to miscarry to turning cream sour. If real, what is he doing disrupting life now? He has long been banished from men's minds.

Suddenly the kallikanzaro wakes, sits up again and, turning his misshapen face to assess Mariel with piercing green eyes, croaks, "Feathers or lead?"

"What?" Mariel mumbles, convinced now she is a latter day Alice beset by the nonsensical demands of a sun-induced dream.

"Answer!" insists the kallikanzaro.

"Feathers!" Mariel ventures, preferring their light inference to ponderous lead.

"Wrong!" shrieks the kallikanzaro, who answers "right" or "wrong" according to whim. "Now you are mine!"

He scrambles up; his bent goat legs quivering. His creased face is lit with lust.

Mariel backs away and turns to run, but her dress snags on the hawthorn hedge and she falls to her knees.

She is aware of a sour goat smell as the kallikanzaro reaches for her with horny hands. He grasps her waist and swings her to face him. He puffs foul breath in her face, then dexterously, bends her over and mounts her. He grasps a long piece of hawthorn with which he whips her buttocks and instantly, Mariel's smarting body lightens and lifts from the ground.

The kallikanzaro jolts on her back, whipping her into faster flight and with her arms spread, she speeds through the late day. The sun lowers in the west as they fly south over the lush woods and rivers of France. They skim the red cliffs of the Estoril and turn east towards Greece.

"I will show you the conquests of my great ancestor Pan - take you back to the days of Olympus, when Hermes fathered him on the nymph Dryops," boasts the kallikanzaro.

Flapping hard, yet untiring, although smarting from the whip, Mariel asks, "Who was Dryops? And who are YOU?"

"My name is Paniski and Dryops was the mortal whose flocks Pan tended," replies the kallikanzaro, "The nymph fled in horror when she saw the baby."

I'm not surprised, thinks Mariel.

"Hermes wrapped Pan in a hareskin and took him to the gods on Mount Olympus. They loved him."

No accounting for taste! Again Mariel keeps her thoughts to herself as the Greek islands float like fragile ghosts below. How many are haunted by kallikanzaros? she wonders. Does anyone manage a normal life between miscarrying children and chasing the lesser Pans from the cream?

Mariel is aware of the backward whirring of time and flies through air that, as the sun sets, might be spun from fine gold, unmarred by man's pollution. There are hints of indefinable mystery and magic, drifting as though seeking admittance to men's minds; the subtle stuff of mythology in the making.

"There she is!" She is roused by Paniski pointing with his stick - meaningless since she cannot lift her head. But as they dive towards pine-clad land, she sees a naked young woman being chased by a larger, grosser version of her kallikanzaro.

"Pitys the nymph!" sighs Paniski.

Mariel feels for her. She is a svelte being of shadow and fluttering vegetation, darting nimbly through the resinous pines. She squeals as she flees, glancing back to see Pan still bounding behind. She reaches the edge of the murmuring pines and with a great sigh, conjures arboreal desires and whirls until she has metamorphosed into an elegant fir tree, her needles still twitching from the effort.

Pan halts and looks around, bewildered. Thrusting through the trees, he curses, then howls and shuffles off to find other nymphs loitering by dusky pools.

Mariel feels a brief passing of time.

"There's another - Syrinx!" cries Paniski. This nymph, exuding grace and provocation, stands in the sun on Mount Lycaeum. She sees the lustful vegetation god wake from his afternoon sleep and bound in her direction.

Off she runs - as though borne on air. Pan pursues her to the banks of the River Ladon where she decides enough is enough and turns into a shivering reed. But Pan is not fooled. He has seen the transformation and reaching her, plucks her and whittles her into a herdsman's flute.

"If I can't play with you, I'll play on you!" he tells her, coaxing a melancholy tune to which the other reeds respond with softly sympathetic murmurs.

"He didn't have much luck!" observes Mariel.

"Oh, he made up for it by enjoying lesser nymphs by night," retorts Paniski. "But Echo was another he yearned for. See, she is over there!" Again Paniski meaninglessly points with the hawthorn stick. Mariel hovers, feeling frustrated for Pan and herself in this ludicrous position. She tries to buck off Paniski, but he clings like a limpet and whips her again.

Resigned, she watches Echo's evasive tactics. This nymph has a different talent. She vanishes.

"Echo!" calls Pan, distraught.

"Echo!" comes her disembodied voice from several directions. Pan is baffled.

"He was luckier with others," says Paniski, having left the vital conquests until last.

Mariel sighs at the infinite arrogance of the male; god, man or beast.

"Eupheme - the nurse of the muses," breathes Paniski in awe.

Wearily, Mariel looks down on this ill-fated creature being bedded in the convolvulus by Pan.

"She bore him Crotus, the bowman in the zodiac," Paniski informs her. "But I must tell you of Pan's greatest love. Now if I could aspire to her!"

Mariel feels affronted. What's wrong with a mortal? Not that she has the slightest desire for intimacy with Paniski.

"Selene! No mere nymph \- a goddess!" breathes Paniski.

Mariel looks down yet again and sees the goddess - glowing with unearthly translucence on a flat-topped rock. Pan has covered his black goatish self with a pure white fleece. Now he crouches and Selene climbs onto his back. He carries her nimbly over the rough ground.

"Why can't you do that?" objects Mariel. "Why am I carrying YOU?"

Paniski laughs - brokenly. "Because I'm the degenerate afterthought of the great god. I am the pathetic dross of minds that suspected the reality of Zeus and Hera's hierarchy. They deliberately relegated and multiplied me until I was little more than an irritation - the equivalent of a tricksy conjuror compared with a magician of genuine power. I reverse expectations. What can I do but tamper with petty intent with whoever I meet in the woods or is foolish enough to wake me at noon?"

Mariel shivers. If those nymphs foiled the great god, surely she can rid herself of this paltry successor?

Pan and Selene vanish into an olive grove.

Mariel is whipped again. "Stop that or I won't move!" she protests. Paniski digs his dirty nails into the sun-burned flesh of her neck, then rips her thin dress from her shoulders. The pieces flutter into the sunset - fireshot fragments like an unacknowledged S.O.S.

She flaps on, frightened now, away from land, over the darkening sea.

"I have an island!" says Paniski, "I have twenty nymphs at my beck and call, but you will be my first choice. The flesh of mortals is sour but rouses me. Mortal women seldom find me. You did well. There - my island is waiting!"

Again he points with the stick. Below lies a strange land; white rocks shot with rose marble are ranged in a protective rim by the sea. Inland, cypresses and pines are planted in a peaceful patchwork and hung with blindingly blue convolvulus.

"It's beautiful!" Mariel has to admit.

"It rose from the sea in the days of the great Pan but it's invisible to all but us - and my nymphs."

Mariel is afraid. Will she be a permanent prisoner? They descend. The smell of the pines envelops them as they touch the rich red earth.

Paniski clambers from Mariel's back and grasping her hand, leaps through the fallen pine needles. They leave the trees and approach the rosy rocks. The sun has almost set, bathing them in a last light like the embers of a faerie fire.

Recollections of the lithe nymphs fleeing from Pan give Mariel courage to consider a similar evasion. But, being incapable of transformation, she is doubtful of her success.

They have reached the mouth of a cave.

"Come!" Paniski grins and pulls her in after him. Dimly, she can see the rugged walls seamed with purple veins of amethyst. She stumbles over jagged ground as the cave grows dank and airless.

"You have a lovely island. Why are we here?" she asks Paniski, dubious about beating a rapid retreat through the dark.

"Wait!" Paniski drags her on. "Look!" They have reached a large chamber lit by reflective red stones. Laid in the shape of a large flower Mariel sees six naked young women strewn with the gold and purple blooms and long leaves of a plant that has improbably rooted and now climbs and clings to their pallid flesh.

"My nymphs!" announces Paniski.

Mariel looks closer. "But they're dead!" she whispers, as though her voice might violate their dreamless sleep.

"They served me well," sighs Paniski, "But they were frail - made of dawn, dew and delicacy. Their lives are not long. Don't worry. I have others."

Mariel looks sadly at the motionless nymphs, deprived of water and woods, the exhilaration of fresh air.

Briefly Paniski drops her hand to rearrange the long legs of a nymph whose face is hidden in her limp black hair. Mariel turns and runs. She lurches over impeding rocks, grazing her knees as she stumbles and cutting a hand in reaching for the wall.

She hears Paniski's shout of rage, reverberating with magnified malignancy through the cave. She hears his clattering hooves. Fear forces her on. She sees a distant pool of light and reaches the cave's mouth. Night. But a bright moon shines and countless stars are flung against impenetrable black.

She hears Paniski close behind and races to the white sand below the rim of rocks. She follows the frothy waterline, her naked flesh lit as though on an elaborate stage set, by the moon.

Another shout from Paniski. Even the rocks seem to stir at the crude intrusion and the sand utters small silver sounds of distress. Paniski is almost upon her.

Mariel remembers Pitys willing herself to become a pine tree. Unfitting on the shore. But a fish! Mariel thinks hard of gills, scales, the dexterity of being one with water. Her head spins. She feels her flesh. No scales. Her feet pound on through the sand.

Then she is in the sea. The salt water draws her out and under. She has no hands to feel flesh. Her will has won. She is a fish, flashing vermilion and blue scales beneath the moon. Faintly she hears Paniski still shouting on the moonspilt beach.

Mariel wakes. She is lying - her dress still clutched in one hand - by the hawthorn hedge. It is late afternoon. She hears Raoul and Denis still droning on about the great god Pan. "Of course he was the only god to die off," says Denis. "The news was told to an Egyptian sailor, although there is some dispute about this."

As well there might be! thinks Mariel, recalling every nuance of her dream. There is a muffled cough on the other side of the hedge. She freezes. Then, as the leaves rustle and stir, she flees to join her friends. To hear, with relief, Pan put pedantically in his place.

BACK TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

The scream carried from an unknown source, rending the bamboos' wind-stirred ranks. Loel froze in the noon heat. She dropped her knife onto the parched ground. The scream died.

Now only low wind worried the pennants of bamboo and she resumed her cutting. An alien instinct prevented her investigating.

The bamboo, monopolising a hot land languishing for rain, undulated over hills once dense with trees, then overgrazed by sheep. Grass and grain were rare now. The climate had changed; man's abuse of fossil fuels inducing a rise in temperature in some areas, heavier rain elsewhere.

In the wetlands, reeds were cultivated along interlaced canals. Bamboo and reeds were the basis of the new economy and were widely exported.

Loel and Aidan lay in long shadows. Skin on skin. Suspended in the cool air of late afternoon. Loel's hair splayed like flame about her on the ground. Her green eyes gazed beyond Aidan's shoulder through the whispering green ranks.

She closed her mind to Rae, the man with whom she lived. She was not fundamentally unhappy. But through the suffocating seasons, her life lacked anticipation. She craved change.

Aidan, darkly intense and prone to pessimistic introspection, held her loosely in a place where anyone might pass; the danger enhancing their liaison. Yet Loel was oppressed by guilt.

Since the old economy had collapsed, everyone in the lean new world was guilt ridden. The collective guilt arose from the failure to prevent climatic change. The narrow subsistence replacing consumerism bred fantasy and frustration and personal lives palled with no opportunity for enterprise.

The new counsellors talked. Like the priests, their predecessors, they had the gift of the gab. Yet primitive fear infiltrated ordinary lives; a suspicion that some force outside man's control, should be appeased to ease humanity's plight.

The old religions were dead. Even fundamentalists had lost faith. Only the counsellors moved between communities and reported unrest to the provisional government.

The indulgences - from cars to excessive burning of fossil fuels - that had led to the collapse, were now illegal. Everyday tasks were long and laborious.

Some resorted to painful penance, echoing the masochism of the lost religions. Processions filed through the night; people obsessed with flagellation, fasting and other ingenious means of self abuse.

Loel woke. There was an acrid smell of burning. Rae still slept. She moved swiftly to the window. Their low built house stood on high ground overlooking a soft sea of bamboo.

This was consumed with flame, the burnished and demented tongues spitting in allegiance with a brisk wind.

"Rae!"

The man woke and was instantly beside her. Their livelihood licked the night sky.

By day the blackened fields lay lifeless in the sun. The community of four hundred people encircled the desolate earth and linked hands as though seeking consolation. Opposite, Loel saw Aidan, his eyes closed as he too moved, sealed in shock.

The slow movement of the circle was some salve to the people who had lost their livelihood in a time bereft of compensation.

And as they moved they began to chant; hesitantly and low, then with more conviction. It was an instinctual invocation, drawn from a dimly glimpsed past charged with fear and the irrational hope of deliverance.

Now the people lived on scant reserves. No rain came. The communities of the wetlands, who also grew rice and a limited range of vegetables, sent supplies to the former bamboo growers, but ceased when they could no longer feed themselves.

Loel and Rae grew weaker; Rae growing ghostly; fair hair absorbed by the palor of a skin he had never fully exposed to the sun. They stayed indoors to conserve strength. Sometimes Loel saw Aidan wandering over the blackened land. He seemed lost and did not dare look up at her window.

Was the fire the result of the tinder dry conditions or a punishment for the people's former negligence and their current deviations? There was no decisive government to reassure or aid recovery. The people could only look inward and they feared what they found.

The scream came again one hot, unyielding night. It consumed the darkness with protracted pain. Loel and Rae lay motionless. The scream was inhuman yet embodied the anguish of man, with the diverse and now decimated species with which he had shared Earth. It belonged to no one and everyone. When it ceased it left a silence so profound Loel and Rae clung close like abandoned children in the dark.

Beyond the devastated fields a few plots of bamboo remained. They were jealously defended. Yet a month after the fire, Loel saw six people carrying stripped canes to the centre of the ravaged field. Repeatedly they stacked them, left and returned with more.

The community watched in silence. Apprehension chilled the sunlight. No one dared discover the purpose of the stacking.

In the wetlands further north the people succumbed to a nameless fear. They began cutting reeds and, although unaware of what the southerners were doing, carried these by mule to the south.

The southerners paused in their cutting as they saw the mules approach. Their drivers walked in dream. Glazed eyes met those of the southerners who moved towards them as though directed by some unseen force. Instinctively they helped unload the reeds.

"What's going on?" asked Loel, watching with Rae from the window. Slowly, in the centre of the field the people began to build with the stripped cane and reeds.

On the ground a massive leg took shape, the cane curved horizontally and laced with vertical lengths. Reeds, with intermittent gaps, were then passed horizontally through the canes.

Another leg was made. Loel left Rae and ran to the field, fascinated and afraid. She saw Aidan carrying canes. "What are you doing?" she asked him. The man, unshaven, his dark hair unkempt, turned to her blindly. He did not reply but bore his canes like an automaton.

By noon the body was built. And before nightfall, the arms and horrifying head. All worked as though spellbound, unseeing, silent, directed by some secret source. They moved with chilling deliberation.

Throughout the night the wicker man lay on the black ground. Bulky and alien. Moonlight whitened his unwieldy limbs and a face embodying ignorance.

Loel woke to hear people heaving in a concerted effort. At the window she saw them slowly lifting the wicker man upright and securing his feet to the ground. He was massive; a hollow monarch of the blundering mass. A low wind whined through the reeds and silently the people dispersed.

In the first light of day an uncanny calm pervaded the field. The wicker man towered; a panic-prompted masterpiece of irrationality. And as he stood, his shadow lengthened like a sinister measurement of time ticking inexorably away.

Then Loel saw a woman pushed and pulled by two dreamstruck men towards the wicker man. Her worn dress fell away to reveal stark ribs beneath sallow skin.

As she neared the wicker man she groaned.

"Adultress!" The word shouted by the man who held her right arm, struck Loel like cold steel.

The woman, now naked, was thrust into a gap in the reeds where she lay trapped and half exposed to the searing sun.

Some minutes later a man appeared, dragged by four others, moving as though possessed. He too was forced to climb between the reeds.

Now six people bore a ladder across the field which they leaned against the wicker man. Horrified, Loel could not move a muscle.

Involuntarily she gasped as Aidan reappeared, this time shepherded by four more men. Briefly he glanced at Loel's window to see her face frozen in disbelief. She could not take her eyes from his progress to the wicker man. Slowly he inclined his head as though in acknowledgement and made no objection as the men thrust him into the canes.

What had possessed the people? Not everyone was compelled to participate. But those who did not were powerless to intervene.

Rae turned to her. It was a deliberate gesture. She felt his eyes; accusingly unfamiliar.

"Come." His voice was alien and low. He took her arm.

"Where are we going?" Loel instinctively resisted. Resolutely he steered her from the room.

Outside two more men and a woman were being bullied towards the wicker man.

Incredulously Loel felt Rae moving towards them.

"There's your Aidan," said Rae, pointing to the trapped man.

"You knew?"

"Of course. Everyone knew." Rae pulled her roughly across the ground. He forced her up the ladder and into the suffocating reeds. He turned on her eyes that brimmed with pain.

Unable to move, Loel felt her limbs grow numb. She could barely breathe. She could just see between the reeds. Victims were still being pushed and dragged towards the wicker man.

Where was Aidan? She heard people groaning and straining. The canes creaked. But she did not recognise Aidan's voice. One arm and her lower legs that were exposed soon burnt in the sun.

Dusk fell. No more people came to the wicker man. Then across the field Loel saw the bobbing light of torches. They multiplied, moved nearer. There must have been more than a hundred.

The people were led by Rae. As he reached the wicker man, Loel, half conscious, saw again in his eyes the outrage and hurt. He turned from her to face the crowd.

"We are gathered here to appease the earth," he said. "We have abused the natural life that let us live. We have abused each other's trust. We have relinquished responsibility. When our fields burned it was a retribution. Now we must make good our misbehaviour. This is our sacrifice."

He raised his hands. The torches leapt as though with anticipation in the dark. The people advanced.

"No!" Loel screamed as the first torch touched the base of the wicker man. The flames caught with a crackle and spat through the bone dry reeds and licked the supporting canes. The heat began to rise to where she lay. The people beneath her screamed in anguish. It was the manifestation of the premonitory scream. Loel thought she heard Aidan's voice.

Briefly she saw Rae, facing her again, the flames like demons in his eyes. She smelt burning flesh and felt the searing of the fire. The billowing smoke filled her lungs and mind.

The fire that fled along the limbs of the wicker man finally flowed through his primal face. The head stirred, lolled momentarily, then fell with an expression of shocked surprise to lie like an indictment at the people's feet.

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Stephanie draws the red hot bowl from the furnace. She has blown it, giving birth to another child of beauty and visual illusion. She stands tall and square-built with the lungs of a man, essential for blowing the iron that gives her glassware lucid life.

She has cooled her molten embryo, blown it according to her will and thrust it into the furnace to soften. Now she spins the bowl on the rod so it will flatten by centrifugal force into the shape of a bowl.

She sees it emerge; glowing rich red, still consumed by fire and withdraws it, bearing it with the care given a newborn baby, to her stool. Lifting her shears, she trims a gently curving rim and then flares the bowl's lip. The vessel is complete.

She places it with the other bowls on her bench. Sea blues and greens swirl with the ochre and reds of rich earth, the clear cerulean of summer sky, the russets and greys of cold moorland.

Each bowl is an offspring of clear identity; vivacious, pensive, brooding and capable of constant change; liquidity that has not marked her own life. Proud of her talent, she has promoted it and won acclaim. She has travelled, exhibited, carried out countless commissions. She believes she is fulfilled. But she has relinquished close relationships. And the children of glass that will carry her name, are mercurial and mute.

Weary now, she rises, pinning back her black, heat-soaked hair, and walks through the workshop to her simple living space in the converted London warehouse.

She picks up the letter of invitation to visit Murano, the glass blowing centre of Venice; to try her hand, to lecture, to exhibit. She is forty now and visited Murano when she was twenty six, awed by the craftsmen's expertise and flair. She decides to go again.

The plane lands with a jolt. Stephanie disembarks and goes straight to her hotel near the Grand Canal; a graceful conversion from a former palace. She gazes from the elegant arch of a window over an intricate wrought iron balcony. Waterbus sirens, klaxons and engines shatter the peace of the late summer evening, yet she is drawn through the tumult to the past. She absorbs the lace-like tracery of mellow stone, rising, as though held softly aloft by some spirit of the deep canal. The stones are stained by centuries of insidiously lapping water, yet glow, quietly indestructible in the dying sun.

Stephanie turns back into the appropriately florid room. A small bowl stands on the bedside table. Murano glass. She lifts it with respect, slowly turning its blue and gold reflections in her hands and is lost in its elusive layers.

In the morning she checks her bowls have arrived for a show in a nearby gallery, then wanders by the water, whose motion is so similar to the shifting shapes of fine blown glass.

A gondolier touts for her custom. She declines. She wants to walk; to feel the past beneath her feet, to touch sun-warmed stone and pause to gaze into the water.

It does not smell sweet, yet it holds the essence of long years, flowing beside the footsteps of the merchants who were a law unto themselves; a few families with wealth and supercilious conviction, ruling this rare oligarchy.

And beside it too, have walked the craftsmen, shopkeepers and beggars. The placid canal has murmured and lapped as they passed, self-absorbed, taking the water for granted.

Stephanie stops. She leans and looks into its darkness shot with intermittent shafts of sun. On the slight shifting of the surface, she sees the shivering contours of a woman's face. Slowly, it gains identity. It is her reflection; square, decisive, yet the eyes unlike hers that she believes convey a conviction of fulfilment. The reflected eyes are desolate and look with dark deliberation into hers.

Disbelieving, she steps back and when she moves again to the edge of the canal, the face has dissolved. Not even a reflection of her existence. Stephanie walks away, chilled in the dappled sun, no longer part of the sinking city's past.

The churches push fragile fingers into the infinity of blue. Inside Stephanie finds stiff Madonnas grasping babies who gaze with the perturbing wisdom of old men. Not lovable. Yet Stephanie looks long at their improbably moulded limbs, feeling the warmth of flaccid flesh.

She leaves the third church she has explored, glowing like an island of filtered light; remote from reality. The streets are now too hot and she avoids looking at the water.

The hotel is indifferent and cool and the glass bowl glints in the low light seeping from behind the blinds. Apprehensively, Stephanie touches its icy surface and dares to look down . Her other face; accusing and distraught, swims in its undulating depths. Then a stilted Madonna and child pass across its face like a thin skin that dissolves in the fickle layers of blue and gold.

Stephanie shivers, takes a shower. She lies down, determined to rest and banish her delusions. Tomorrow she will visit Murano.

The day is cooler. Soft cloud punctuates the bland expanse of sky. Stephanie feels restored. She will converse and again be beguiled by the glassblowers' skill. She recalls how the furnaces were moved from Venice to Murano in 1291 to prevent the hazard of frequent fires. The glassmakers were justly proud of their art, claiming their vessels were so delicate they broke if touched by even a hint of poison.

The craftsmen formed a council and minted their own money. But they were prisoners. If one left to practise elsewhere, he was pursued and murdered by community agents. But by 1600 the recipes for Venetian glass had leaked. They reached Bohemia where the prices undercut those of Murano. The craft there declined. Now Stephanie regrets the comparatively clumsy wares made to please tourists.

She arrives at the glassworks and steps into her element, where quiet finesse is still sometimes forged from leaping heat.

She is welcomed and joins the craftsmen, shaping an elegant goblet, and impressing the men with her exceptional lung capacity. She feels the vessel grow, respond; another embryo to swell her fluctuating family.

The goblet is pale blue shot with turquoise; a lilting pool of coalescing colour. Stephanie waits for it to cool. At last she reaches to gently touch its surface. Her fear of self revelation has fled, replaced by the sense of an imminently gentler disclosure. Faintly, through the eddying blues, she sees the dark face of a child. He is not a prematurely aged Christ. He is tousled, sharp-eyed. And lost.

Stephanie withdraws; disturbed yet stimulated and intrigued. Who is he?

She takes her goblet and bids the craftsmen goodbye. She heads through the dust for a nearby cafe and orders a soda with ice. The sun is shining fully now; keen shafts dispelling the alley's gloom. She unwraps the goblet and sets it on the half shaded table. The coalescent blues flash with intermittent spears of sun and, as Stephanie sips her soda, she glimpses again in its depths, the face of the lost child. She is compelled to turn and to her right, leaning on an overflowing litter bin is the boy in reality; grimy and poorly dressed, his head on one side, surveying her with sharply appraising eyes.

"Buon giorno!" she says hopefully. He is sullenly silent. "Would you like a drink?" she musters her rudimentary Italian and offers the glass. But he is looking at the glinting goblet. Afraid he might grab it and make off, she curves her hand protectively round its rim.

"Come and see!" she encourages, retaining a firm hold.

The boy sidles up to her and reaches a dirty finger to touch the pale flow of turquoise and blue. "Bella!" he murmurs, genuinely impressed and showing no sign of covetousness.

Stephanie tries to find out more about him but her Italian is inadequate. She talks to the cafe proprietor, who speaks some English, and learns that Giorgio is an orphan who struggles to survive on the street and cannot be trusted.

Stephanie recalls her other face, lying in want and accusation in the water, in the hotel bowl and in the symbol of motherhood in the Madonna and precocious child. Giorgio is flesh; troubled, no doubt truculent and untrusting, yet waiting to be shown a way out of his circumscribed world.

Stephanie says goodbye and reluctantly leaves. She must lecture that evening and her exhibition opens the following day. She moves through the events with a dream-like sense of some issue unresolved. Giorgio. She is haunted by his face; knowing yet unknowing, and his instinctive appreciation of the goblet. Three days later she returns to the cafe in Murano. Giorgio is still there. Stephanie smiles and buys him a lemonade. He takes it, looking suspiciously into her grey eyes, assessing the square-built woman who might have been a man, yet has a softness his life lacks.

Suddenly Stephanie knows what she must do. She begins to make inquiries, to discover if she might adopt Giorgio. She is met with a tangle of bureaucracy and bewilderment that anyone would be so vehemently drawn to a back street boy.

She suspects no one cares whether she takes him or leaves him to his fate, but the authorities claim to go through the motions. She waits in Venice. She looks fearlessly at the bowl on the hotel table and sees her other face; softening, the sad eyes beginning to forgive. The Madonna bows her head as though in acknowledgement and even her child seems vulnerable.

Finally, word comes that she can take the child, if he is willing. She hurries back to Murano and with an adoption agent seeks the boy by the cafe. Ingenuously he grins, as though he had known she would return.

At the hotel, Giorgio sees the bowl and the goblet that Stephanie has placed beside it. She urges him to lift them and look closer. And from their rich depths rises the ghostly image of woman and boy, gaining substance in the perpetual motion of soft colour.

**Thank you for reading this book - which I hope you have enjoyed. If you would like to read my other work, please visit this link tosmashwords.com.**

Author's Note

Linda Talbot writes fantasy for adults and children. She now lives in Crete and as a journalist in London she specialised in reviewing art, books and theatre, contributing a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British Surrealist and writing about art for Topos, the German landscape magazine. She has published "Fantasy Book of Food", rhymes, recipes and stories for children; "Five Rides by a River", about life, past and present around the River Waveney in Suffolk; short stories for the British Fantasy Society, and stories and poetry for magazines.

Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com

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