 
Monster

William Young

Published by William Young at Smashwords.

Copyright 2011 WilliamYoung

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapters:  
One  
Two  
Three  
Four  
Five  
Six  
Seven  
Eight  
Nine  
Ten  
Eleven  
Twelve  
Thirteen  
Fourteen  
Fifteen  
Sixteen  
Seventeen  
Eighteen  
Nineteen  
Twenty  
Twenty-One  
Twenty-Two  
Twenty-Three  
Twenty-Four  
Twenty-Five  
Twenty-Six  
Twenty-Seven  
Twenty-Eight  
Twenty-Nine  
Thirty  
About the Author

Also by William Young  
The Signal  
The Divine World

ONE

There was blood on Nick Case's tongue. Not much, perhaps just a trace, but there was blood on his tongue. Its sweet taste lingered there for a moment before he swallowed and rolled his head over toward the clock radio. The red numbers blazed in the dark: 3:47. He moved his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pressed the small cut against it, once again tasting a droplet of blood. He blinked hard and stared at the clock before he was conscious of why he had just awoken. The Monster had returned.

He slipped his legs out from beneath the covers and looked over at his girlfriend, Sarah. She was still deep in the nothingness sleep of middle night, her blond hair trailing across her face like moonlight illuminated rivers. He walked into the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the faucet. It was luke warm and seeped into the small puncture on his tongue with a faint sting. He looked out the kitchen window and down the empty street at the closed-up patio of the corner coffee shop: There was no Monster there. Just before Nick awoke the Monster had been standing there, its red eyes burning through the night. Now, there were just white patio chairs stacked in fours and chained to the center posts of each patio table. Of course, the Monster had only been there moments ago in a dream, but the Monster had been absent from his dreams for almost a decade.

The Monster had been a fixture in his dreams throughout his adolescence, fading into less frequent occurrences when he went to college. He had always attributed the Monster to his lifestyle as the son of a military officer and the fact that his family was always moving. In his dreams, the Monster would show up and kill or abduct his friends, but never touch him. It would taunt him from afar or growl at him from the underbrush of his dreams, but never did it threaten him. When he sought it out in his dreams, it always eluded him: It would stand on the horizon and bellow; it would quickly dash across a path just in front of him. Never had it given Nick the chance to close in and confront it.

Nick, when he had gotten older and thought about it, relegated the dreams to the way his subconscious was dealing with the constant upheaval of always moving and leaving friends behind, of never being able to settle down and pursue any one thing for any length of time. The Monster had faded away after he had begun living a more stable lifestyle as a college student, rooted in one place and pursuing one goal. Since graduation, he had never dreamt of it, had chalked that up to finally having taken control of his life. Tonight, though, the Monster had returned, looking for him as it had in so many of the dreams of his youth. When he was young, when his family would move to a new Army post, he would have dreams of the Monster searching for him. Always, the Monster would catch up, track him down and destroy his friends. The Monster was always slow, but it always arrived, and it always destroyed everything around Nick.

Nick took another drink of water and set the glass down, felt his tongue with his fingers, and went back to the bedroom. Sarah hadn't budged. He climbed beneath the covers and looked over at the clock radio: The alarm would go off in an hour.

He awoke with Sarah's hip in his stomach and saw her long arm sticking from beneath her mane of blond hair as she fumbled for the alarm button.

"Jesus, Nick, how long are you going to hit the snooze button?" she said groggily before flopping back onto her side of the bed and closing her eyes.

Nick looked at the clock. It was now just after six. "Shit," he mumbled as he jerked out of bed and walked quickly to the bathroom. Twenty-five minutes later he was hastily fixing a tie around his neck and stuffing his pockets with change, keys and his wallet. He jostled Sarah lightly on the shoulder. Her eyelids slid open and her pale blue eyes stared up at him.

"Hey, I gotta go. I can't believe I overslept. Shit. Bye," he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Time for you to get up, now." She grimaced and he walked quickly through the apartment and down onto the street.

As he turned onto the sidewalk near the coffee shop he felt his cell phone vibrating inside his left pants pocket.

"Damn," he said as he pulled it out and looked at the caller ID. It was the city editor. A man who looked like he had just been jogging was sitting at one of the tables with a muffin and a steaming cup of coffee, his hair moist and his shirt wet in a V on his chest.

"John, it's Nick, what's going on?" Nick said after flipping his phone open.

"Nick, where are you? Is there something we should know?"

Nick looked up and down the street, the early morning traffic just beginning to pull from the curbs and make its way down the roads toward the main arteries that would funnel it into downtown parking garages.

"No, nothing so far. My alarm didn't go off, so I'm running a little late."

"Alright, well call us if anything comes up. Steve said it was a slow night, though," John said, and they hung up.

Steve was the evening cops reporter. Nick was the daylight version of the same job and he was supposed to have already cleared two precincts and called in his early report. Nick's portion of the city was usually pretty calm overnight. A few break-ins, a stolen car or two, maybe a stick-up during a busy week. Never anything dramatic.

Nick walked the few blocks to the precinct house, a two story yellow brick building that tripled as police precinct, fire house and paramedic station. The night's police reports, at least those that had been completed before the overnight cops left for home at 7 a.m., were on a clipboard hanging on a nail on the wall next to a bulletin board of notices, wanted posters and instructions for civilians requesting to see an officer. The overnight desk sergeant, Officer Bob Claypool, was sitting behind the counter reading the morning paper. Not Nick's paper, which came out at noon on a good day, but the city's dominant morning daily which dwarfed his own paper's circulation by a factor of four.

Claypool, his body made more stocky by the body armor beneath his uniform, looked up from the desk and smiled broadly when Nick pushed the door open. "Hey, you are working today."

"Stupid alarm didn't go off," Nick lied again, not certain why. "I hope nothing went on last night."

Claypool shook his head and looked back down at his paper. Nick flipped through the reports and jotted down some notes about a burglary in a nearby mansion in which several unidentified paintings were taken. The spot where the victim's name was listed said "victim requests anonymity." There was no value listed for the paintings. He looked up at Claypool.

"Is there anything to this robbery where they took some paintings?" Nick asked.

Claypool shrugged. "I don't know. What's it say?"

"Not much."

"That's more than I know about it."

Nick wrote down the reporting officer's name, scanned through the car accident reports, and slipped out of the waiting room after fifteen minutes of running through the reports. Claypool was never any help, and Nick had always suspected that he preferred the morning paper's cop reporters to him. Whether the painting heist was anything would depend on if there was anything in the morning paper, but only if its reporter had cobbled something together before midnight when the morning daily went to press. Even if it turned out to be nothing, Nick thought as he walked back toward his apartment to his car, it would be something to track down during the course of the day. Provided, of course, something more interesting didn't turn up at the next precinct.

As he was walking up to his car, Sarah came streaming out of the apartment, her wet hair hanging down against her neck while her skirt billowed out with each of her long strides. He stopped, smiled, and waited.

"No coffee, today, I see," she said, stopping in front of him and pulling her hair back behind her neck. "Didn't you sleep okay?"

Nick shrugged. "I woke up last night around four. I had a nightmare."

Sarah crinkled her eyes together. "About what?"

"The Monster."

Sarah said nothing for a second. "What monster?"

"Remember the Monster dreams I told you I used to have a long time ago?"

Sarah looked away for a second and then nodded. "Sort of."

"Well, I had another one last night."

"Were you up all night?"

Nick shook his head. "Hey, I'll tell you more later. I'm running really late. I can only hope nothing happened last night."

"Nothing ever does," Sarah said, flipped her wrist over to check her watch and pecked Nick on the lips quickly. "See ya later."

"Bye. Have a good day."

Nick watched her cross the street to her car before opening the door to his own. He flipped on the local radio news channel and began listening as he pulled away from the curb and merged into the now steady traffic of bankers, lawyers and businessmen all vying for green lights to usher them into the jam of machines jostling their way downtown.

It was just after nine before he finished his rounds and strode into the newsroom. Normally, he should have been up at five, at the first precinct by six and in the newsroom at a quarter-past eight with forty-five minutes till deadline. Fortunately, there had been nothing for either of the daylight shift cop reporters to write about, so Nick wasn't worried when he passed John's desk, said "Nothing happened," detoured to the coffee pot to fill his mug, and made his way to his own desk.

He turned on his computer and leaned back in his chair, pulled open the copy of the morning daily he had bought at a street kiosk and began quickly scanning it for something he may have missed and might need to work on for the next day's paper. Nothing. No mention of the paintings robbery. He sighed and looked out the window at the sliver of the street he could see. There was just the end of the morning rush hour scurrying for parking or walking briskly towards a building. There was never anything interesting going on just outside his window.

Nick clicked his browser and began scanning the on-line versions of the other daily newspapers in his newspaper's circulation area, although outside of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, his paper made little dent in the surrounding areas. Then he checked Drudge Report and Instapundit to make sure the world wasn't ending, clicked quickly through a dozen of his favorite blogs to check if they'd posted yet, and if so, about what, before flipping over to the paper's subscriber newsfeeds, quickly scanning through the AP's list of stories and deciding he'd read them later.

He flipped open his notebook, checked his notes from the police report on the robbery, and called the station. The robbery had happened during second shift, which wouldn't report until mid-afternoon, but Nick wanted to leave a message for the investigating officer to call him. He hadn't met the officer before, Detective Rich Tagget, and was unsure if he would get a call back. Cops were like that.

He leaned back into his chair and took a sip of his coffee. The Monster. From out of nowhere it had turned the corner in his dream and begun lumbering toward him. He had been sitting on the street corner next to the bus stop waiting for the 61B to take him somewhere -- where? He couldn't remember: dreams are like that -- when he looked up at the dream night sky and realized the street was deserted and the bus would not be coming. And then the Monster turned the corner and walked down the middle of the street, its massive head looking up, left, right, down. Its long arms hung slackly at its side and its fur was matted down. Nick hid behind the bumper of a nearby car and peeked through the car's windows to watch as the Monster took a dozen steps, stopped, and repeated its search sequence.

It took the Monster forever to move down the street toward Nick and he had been afraid to move away from the car and be seen, to be pursued through an urban dreamscape of his own nightmarish contriving. Again. So he had hidden. When the Monster drew close, he had crawled around the other side of the car into the space between the car and the curb, looking underneath the car at the Monster's hairy feet. It had taken forever before the Monster reached the mid-point of the next block, its broad back clumped with fur as if it had just left its own bed. Nick had slipped away from the car and quickly dashed up the street to his apartment. In his dream he had stood in his apartment looking out the living room window at the coffee shop patio and had frozen as the Monster returned to the corner where the coffee shop was, stared at the curb where moments earlier he had cowered, and turned to look up the street. Then the Monster looked up into his dream apartment, its crimson eyes widening for a moment as it cocked its head to the side. And then Nick had awoke.

"Nick, pick up your phone, man."

Nick started. His phone buzzed again and he looked away from his computer screen at Paul, one of the county government reporters, who was half-standing out of his chair so that he could get Nick's attention.

"Newsroom, Nick Case," Nick said as he placed the handset to his head.

"Yeah, this is Detective Tagget. You called?" The detective's voice was mellow and low pitched.

"Hey, yeah. Thanks for calling me back. I didn't think you'd be getting in until later."

"Surprise, I guess. What do you need?"

"I need some information that wasn't on a police report about a robbery. Some paintings were stolen from somebody's house last night around ten o'clock, but that's all the police report says," Nick said.

"Last night? That was yesterday morning. Ten-hundred hours, not 10 PM. We switched back to military time on our reports the other day to keep everything standard. It was getting too confusing to use civilian time on the public reports but military time everywhere else. Mistakes were getting made," Tagget said.

"Oh, well..." Nick said, suddenly chagrined at not having known something so obvious about his beat. "So, what kind of paintings were stolen?"

Tagget was silent for a second on the other end of the line.

"Listen, I really can't give you any more information than

was on the report. Suffice it to say somebody had a couple of paintings taken from their private collection."

"It can't be that big a deal. How can you just put no name, address or anything on a report? I just want to know if it's worth doing a human interest story. You know, a "If you have any information about Joe Blow's favorite paintings, call the police" kind of story. If there is a story," Nick said, sipping his coffee and staring back down at the street through the window. "After all, the incident report is a public document."

Tagget was silent for another moment. Both of them knew that Tagget could make it next to impossible for Nick to get the report, if Tagget wanted to: Public reports and public information were two entirely different things as far as the police were concerned.

"I'll tell you what. Let me give the guy a call, maybe he's changed his mind about it. I'll tell him what you told me about maybe writing a story. If he says okay, I'll get back to you," Tagget said.

"Thanks."

"Yeah, bye."

Nick hung up, grabbed a notebook from the pile on the corner of his desk and stopped to talk to his editor.

"John, I'm going to go skulk around some art galleries, see if anybody knows anything about somebody getting some paintings ripped off yesterday morning."

John looked up from his screen. "Paintings?"

"Yeah. The police don't want to release any information on it, yet, but somebody near Precinct Six got some paintings stolen. They might be valuable, might not, but the victim reported it and requested anonymity and no details about the paintings, so..."

"Have fun," John said and returned to his screen.

The Gallery sat behind a row of picture windows and was framed on the right side by a discount movie theater and on the left by a thrift store masquerading as an antique shop. The gallery dealt mostly with original works by local area artists, but occasionally offered lesser-known works by somewhat famous artists and doodles by famous painters that only name-dropping dilettantes would want. All of the paintings were expensive and none were extraordinary, which caused Nick to quickly conclude where the term "starving artist" was born. The air-conditioned interior was a welcome relief from the early morning humidity hugging the air outside, and Nick stood for a moment in the middle of the gallery slowly assessing the artwork and allowing the coolness to settle on the sweat that had slicked his lower back during the drive from the office. It was only a few more moments before a woman with shoulder-length black hair appeared from around a corner with a much-practiced smile stretched across her lips. Nick guessed her to be in her late thirties or early forties, aerobicized and underfed into the skinny tightness of a fashion model. One look from her at Nick in his loose-fitting blazer and loosened tie weakened her smile perceptibly - no sale here - although she still closed in on him.

"Good morning, how are you today?" the woman asked, stopping a few feet in front of him and letting her arms rest idly at her sides.

"I'm good. You?" Nick said, reaching a hand into his blazer and pulling a business card from the chest pocket. "My name's Nick Case, I'm a reporter with the Evening Times."

Nick stuck his hand with the business card into the gulf between them and let the woman take it. She glanced at it briefly and then cupped it in the palm of her hand, which she returned to her side.

"What can I do for you today, Mr. Case?" the woman asked.

"Well, I was wondering about the local art collecting scene," Nick said, "and I figured the best way to find out who has good collections and who was really into the art scene would be to visit a few galleries and see what they had to say."

The woman furrowed her brow but said nothing.

"Anyway, I was thinking about doing a feature story for one of our upcoming Sunday papers on art collections in the city. You know, who has them, what do they have, what drives them to collect, where do they go to get their artwork, how did they get started? That kind of stuff," Nick said, knowing he was lying and actually hoping she'd bite and offer up the name of a local with a good collection, perhaps even the collection he was searching for. "I don't know what kind of information you'd be willing to give now, but I figured I might as well get out and meet the people who seemed most likely to know."

The woman's smile turned into a straight line and she looked away from Nick at a selection of paintings on the wall to his left.

"Well, that's quite a task," she said, turning back to Nick.

"While I certainly know some people with admirable collections, I don't know that any of them would want me to tell anyone without having first consulted them. And, of course, I'm not sure where you'd want to start. People collect art for an infinite number of reasons, from vanity to love to mere decoration; how you'd want to narrow it down is beyond me. There's no way you could see everything in the area and no reason you'd want to."

"Well, I'm not sure, yet, either. I'm initially thinking people with pretty established collections by artists most people are likely to have heard of. Not the Mona Lisa or anything like that, obviously, but artists who are just as likely to be in a museum somewhere as in somebody's study."

The woman walked over to a pedestal with a vase atop it and pulled off a small business card. She turned where she stood and proffered the card between two long fingers.

"Well, Mr. Case, I'll think about it. Here's my card, should you need anything further."

He took the card and looked at the name, Sophia , and stuffed it into a pocket on his blazer.

"Thanks, have a nice day," he said. She smiled and nodded.

TWO

The rest of the week was much the same for Nick. Mornings were spent in the police precincts or the office, afternoons driving to art galleries big and small. For the smallish size of the city, there were dozens of places trying to be art galleries. They were everywhere. He found them on the top floors of antique shops, in small boutiques on the first floors of downtown high-rises, carved out of living rooms in city neighborhood homes, obscured by awnings in strip malls. Everywhere.

As Friday afternoon spun by on the wall clock at work and he fingered his collection of art dealers' business cards, the givers of such being mostly receptive to his pitch, he still hadn't heard from the police about the stolen paintings. He waited out the rest of the afternoon surfing the Web for information on art collections and art collecting.

He leaned back in his chair and grimaced at the sharp pain that suddenly formed just above his right hip. He rubbed it for a moment and shifted his position in the chair. It dulled a bit, but persisted. He stood up and twisted his body to both sides to stretch the muscles and then massaged the area with his right hand.

"I think you need a drink, Nick," Paul said from the desk nearby. Paul was staring up from his computer terminal with a quizzical look on his face. "Walking through all those art galleries pulled a muscle on you that only a beer can fix."

Nick smiled. "I wish I could, but I've got dinner tonight with Sarah's parents. It's their substitute 30th anniversary dinner, since they'll be in the Bahamas when the real day comes around."

"How long you been living with her, now?" Paul asked.

"Almost two years. Why?"

Paul shrugged. "I was just wondering about the dinner conversation to come." He smiled up at Nick and turned back to his computer.

Nick and Sarah were waiting on a pair of stools in the bar area of La Mela, he with a martini, three olives, and she with a Manhattan, the cherry stem resting on the cocktail napkin and tied in a loose knot. Her ability to tie cherry stems had been one of the major incentives toward his asking her out three years earlier when he had stood next to her during a happy hour with a ten dollar bill, trying to flag down a bartender. As he had stood there, then, waiting for service he had looked down and seen three cherry stems tied tightly and lined up on a cocktail napkin next to her. She had just finished ignoring a business-suited older man's advances and resumed a conversation with a friend when Nick had said, purposely, "wow."

That was the only conversation fragment he could remember from that night, and only because Sarah had, over the last three years, come up with nearly every conceivable way of saying "wow." For a while, during their initial dating months, she would work "wow" into conversations as an adjective, adverb, noun, and verb. He was glad he had not said something even more insipid and uninspired.

"Don't forget that we're picking up the tab, tonight," Sarah said to him.

"Oh, yeah. That's something I'm not likely to forget. Not for a long time," Nick said. "Do they know it's the beginning of hurricane season down there?"

"Don't tell them. I'm sure they're aware of that, they've been going forever."

Nick stood up from his padded bar stool and rubbed his right side. The pain from earlier in the day had stopped, but in its place was a low-level burning tightness. He couldn't feel any stiff muscles, he hadn't done anything to strain one, but something was definitely out of whack.

"What's the matter?" Sarah asked.

"Beats me. I've been sore here since the afternoon. It's weird."

"Too much sitting incorrectly, maybe?" Sarah offered.

Nick shrugged and then nodded his head to the door. "Look, there's your parents, now."

Sarah smiled and stayed on her stool while Nick took a couple of steps away from the bar and gave her parents a little attention-getting wave. Sarah's father, a fiftyish man with salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw and blue eyes put his left hand on his wife's bare shoulder and nodded quickly at Nick. While Sarah's father had allowed what had been a muscular body to soften a bit at the edges, his wife had steadfastly refused to age gracefully. Her hair was dyed a light blonde, a shade or two, Sarah had said, lighter than it had been naturally, and she was thin in the muscular way of a woman who has traded in aerobics classes and Nautilus machines for a treadmill in the basement.

Sarah's father strode up to Nick and shook his hand vigorously with two pumps. "Nick, good to see you again. How are you? Good, I'm sure."

"Everything's good, Scott. How was your flight?"

Sarah and her mother hugged each other hello.

"Eh, flying. You know. It's all just sitting," Scott said.

Nick nodded and turned around.

"Marjorie, nice to see you again," Nick said, accepting the quick hug Sarah's mother gave him. "I hope you saved your appetite and didn't eat the airline food."

Marjorie smiled. "Just a couple of gin and tonics to ease the landing. Which reminds me, dear," she said and turned to her husband, "I could use another about now."

Sarah's father moved toward the bar while Nick stared into his drink. Marjorie and Sarah began the quick chatter of catch-up, a type of conversation possible only by women, with Sarah mostly asking quick questions about the current status of her two brothers and her mother providing short answers. Both of her brothers, the older New York City stock broker brother, Steve, and the younger Baltimore computer consultant brother, Simon, were married. The older one had two kids, an apartment on the Upper West Side, a summer home in the Hamptons and the typical rich New Yorker lifestyle stories that nauseated Nick to hear during the holidays. Simon was easier on the ears, knowing that Nick could care less about the intricacies of computer networks, Web sites, and e-commerce, although Simon's predilection to talk classical music releases with Sarah's father often drained the life from a room as quickly as an assessment of the stock market's most recent performance.

Dinner had gone by easily enough, with the small talk confined to the banalities of daily life at Nick's paper, when it was Nick's turn in the conversation, and the ordinariness of Sarah's parent's early-retirement lifestyle of golf, bridge and cocktail parties. That was, until the after dinner drinks arrived.

"So, we didn't tell you and we told Simon not to tell, either, but guess what?" Marjorie asked as she sniffed her sambuca and swirled the coffee beans around the bottom of the glass.

"What?" asked Sarah in a rushed hush of excitement.

Nick groaned inwardly and turned his attention to Sarah's mother.

"Jill is pregnant," Marjorie said, smiling broadly and looking at her husband. "Three months, now."

"No, way, when did you find out?" Sarah asked.

"Last week. Isn't it exciting?"

Nick smiled. The conversation would turn, soon.

"Oh, my God, that's great," Sarah said.

Scott lifted his glass. "Even though they're not here, let's toast some congratulations."

The four of them clinked their glasses over the center of the table and Nick took a sip of his grappa. The vapors burned his nose.

"One day it'll be you, honey," Marjorie said.

Sarah smiled and, though Nick didn't look, he could tell Sarah's father's eyes were looking at him from some undeterminable perspective known only by men who were fathers of daughters.

"That'll be a great day," Scott said as Nick kept his smile on. Nick looked over at Sarah as she reached across the table and grabbed his hand, pumping softly once and smiling. He put his glass back up to his lips and sucked some of the liquor onto his tongue. It burned.

"You know, if you asked me to marry you, my parents wouldn't put the screws to you like that," Sarah said as she pulled her blouse off and tossed it into the wicker hamper. "Dad only does that because he thinks you should have married me by now."

Nick unfastened his tie as he listened to her.

"He's said so?"

Sarah gave a small shrug with a half-nod. "After all, we've been living together for almost two years."

There was a zip as she undid her skirt followed by a soft rustle as it slid down her legs to the floor. He looked in the mirror on the chest of drawers and saw her standing on the other side of the bedroom wearing only a bra and underwear, both black. Her blond hair washed over the back of her shoulders.

"Two years? Already?" Nick said, feigning sudden realization.

"And you're a year older than me," Sarah said, turning around so that Nick could see her frontal reflection in the mirror.

Nick pulled his tie off and dropped it on the floor. "Well, the man should be at least a little older than the woman he's involved with."

Sarah smiled. "And, you're about to turn thirty," she smiled wider, seeing him watching her in the mirror. "Maybe your biological clock is the one ticking."

Nick turned around and looked at a print of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" that was hanging over the bed's headboard. "I don't hear any ticking. Actually, I think it's stopped."

"You sure about that?" Sarah said, unfastening her bra and walking around the bed. "I know a way I can jump-start it ... if I want."

Nick smiled and took her in his arms.

THREE

I'm stumbling down the street in the October darkness with my roommate Darryl, the stars crystallized overhead in the chill air and just barely out of arms reach. We're on the way back from closing a bar, not the first time we've done so, and I'm relying on Darryl's movements as a surrogate gyroscope to tell me which way I need to lean in order to remain upright, the result being that the two of us weave atop the sidewalk like two jet fighters in a dogfight through the Grand Canyon. Just then Darryl stops and points at a bum on the other side of the road near a half-emptied pallet of boxes of grocery store food. The plastic stretch wrap is peeled back from the top like wilting, translucent flower petals.

As we move closer to the bum, Darryl turns and looks at me.

"I think that's the best-dressed homeless transvestite I've ever seen. Just look at the stovepipe hat he's got on: You just don't see that anymore."

I look across the street and shout: "Hey, get away from that, it's not yours. Go on!"

The transvestite-bum gazes across the street at us, laughs and tilts his hat toward us as if we had just given him a standing ovation for his performance. I shout "Hey!" again and the bum leaves, smiling and taking large, magnanimous steps down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

Just then the door to the restaurant we had stopped near opens and a black couple walks out. They pause on the steps while the man tosses a white silk scarf around his neck and the woman pulls on a pair of leather gloves. Darryl walks up to the man and proffers his right hand.

"How are you doing tonight?" Darryl asks loudly, his voice echoing off the walls and resonating in the thin night air.

"I'm a regular king," the man says as the woman next to him tilts her head a quarter-back and laughs up at the stars.

Darryl turns to me as the couple brush past us. "What's up with your car? Isn't it parked around here, somewhere?"

I shrug and look up and down the street. I had parked it nearby just a few hours earlier.

"That's not the pallet of food we ordered for the apartment, is it?" I ask, motioning across the street with a nod. "I thought we moved it into the apartment."

Darryl just shrugs.

"Hey, is that your green corvette?" the black woman asks, tapping on my shoulder and pointing to a lime green car parked down the road.

"Yeah, I'm a regular corvette guy," I say as I look at my 1968 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight parked alongside the curb. "It was nice meeting you two. Good-bye."

"Bye," the woman says, lacing her right arm through the man's left and walking down the sidewalk.

Darryl and I start walking toward the car when a police helicopter hovers overhead and snaps on its searchlight, first enveloping us in a circle of light before tracing the oval beam across the street and resting it on my car. The helicopter floats above it and the light widens to illuminate it in all its faded lime-green luster. We cross the street and I notice a parking-ticket shaped piece of paper beneath the passenger side windshield wiper. I pull it out and read it as the wind from the helicopter makes October colder than it otherwise should be.

"We protected your car tonight," the note says.

I look at Darryl and then up at the helicopter. "Thanks, I appreciate you protecting my car," I say.

The helicopter turns off its light and flies away.

"What's the note say?" Darryl asks.

I look at my car and notice several dents on the front right quarter panel. "It says they protected my car tonight." Darryl shrugs and begins walking toward our apartment, which is cattycorner to where my car is parked. Then I look back down the street and across the bridge we had crossed just before running into the black couple.

"Holy fuck, it's the Monster."

Standing on the other side of the bridge, barely a hundred yards away, is the Monster. It stands tall in silhouette, perhaps ten feet, and looks menacing from its vantage point just outside the circle of light of a nearby street lamp. Darryl gets a jump-start running while I stare for a moment as it stands menacingly on the other side of the bridge, but then I'm on Darryl's heels. As we reach the apartment building's front door, though, I become paralyzed and fall onto the grass strip between the sidewalk and the front door. Darryl grabs the front door, fumbles for his keys, and turns to look at me lying in the lawn.

"What are you doing? Get up!" he yells.

I can't move. I see the Monster in the distance starting to cross the bridge. Darryl runs from the door and grabs me under the shoulders and drags me to the landing in front of the security door. He gets his keys out, unlocks the door, and drags me into the foyer where he drops me beneath the mailboxes. I can see him panicking as he flips through the keys on his key ring for the one that will open the door to our apartment. I can only stare through the glass security door as the Monster turns onto my street and begins heading toward my building. Darryl gets the front door open and turns to me.

"C'mon, get the fuck up!" he yells.

"I can't. I can't move," I yell back as I watch the Monster walk toward the front door of our apartment building. "I need the scroll. Get me the scroll."

We have scrolls in our apartment that, when read, alleviate fear-paralysis. Darryl, though, is equally panicked as his head jerks between the safety of the apartment and my limp body at the bottom of the landing.

"We only have one left. I can't give it to you because it might get me next, so get up," he shouts as he looks into the apartment.

"Get it, I need it, the Monster will see me here any second," I shout. "If he sees me, we're both done for. Get it!"

Darryl refuses to look at me and I look back through the security door. The Monster is on the sidewalk and lumbering toward the door, its arms barely moving as it strides toward me.

"We only have one left. I need it for myself," Darryl says as he runs into the room and picks up the scroll, unrolls it and reads it aloud.

I look through the door and the Monster staring down at me, its red eyes glowing. It's nearly expressionless mouth almost resembles a grin of

Nick woke up in a cold sweat. He was sitting upright in bed. He looked over at the clock radio: it was 3:17 in the morning. Sarah was sound asleep, turned on her side, her hair fanned out across her face and washing over the pillow. His tongue hurt fiercely. He rubbed his eyes and slipped out from under the covers and went into the living room, picked up the pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and lit one. He blew a geyser of white ghosts into the darkness and watched as they fractured in the moonbeams coming through the slats in the blinds.

Twice in two weeks? The Monster? He sucked deeply on the cigarette and watched its tip glow furiously in the dark, red like the Monster's eyes. He shivered as the perspiration on his body evaporated and he looked into the shadows of the living room for the lurking hulk of the Monster. He looked down at the tip of the cigarette again and tried to concentrate on something else, hoping that the effort would clear his mind of the dream. He thought about the stolen paintings, trying to imagine what they might look like and conjuring images of Rembrandts into his mind. He wondered about the owner and whether he stood and stared at blank spaces on the wall. He looked at the tip of the cigarette and saw the eyes of the Monster.

"What are you doing up smoking a cigarette?"

Nick jerked on the couch and looked over to where Sarah was standing, her hair tangled about her shoulders and her nightgown clinging to her curves.

"Did I wake you?"

"I smelled smoke."

"Sorry."

Sarah walked into the room and sat down on the couch next to him. "What's the matter?"

Nick took another long drag on the cigarette and crushed it out. "I had another dream about the Monster."

"The Monster?"

Nick nodded.

"Are you okay?"

Nick shrugged. "I don't know. I guess. My tongue is sore. I guess I bit it to wake myself up."

"Didn't you have the same dream last week?"

Nick shook his head. "No. I dreamed about the Monster last week, but it wasn't the same dream. They're never the same dream; they're always different. It's always the same Monster, though."

"The Bigfoot thing?"

Nick nodded.

"Anything you want to talk about?"

Nick shook his head. "No. It's just weird that I'm dreaming about it, again. It's been so long. It's weird that I'm biting my tongue to wake up; I used to do that in high school. Sometimes I would wake up sure that I had been screaming -- my throat would feel hoarse like I had been screaming -- but no one else ever heard me."

Sarah yawned and looked over at Nick in the darkness. "Is there something wrong?"

Nick shook his head. "I don't know."

"Are you stressed out about anything?"

"Maybe, I don't know. Nothing I can think of," Nick said, staring up at the grayness of the ceiling. "This Monster used to follow me everywhere I went when I was a little kid, always popping up in my dreams. Seven or eight or nine feet tall with red eyes, sharp teeth, long fingernails and all covered in hair. Sometimes, it was really fast: it would come out of nowhere and take one of my friends off into the woods to his death. Other times, it was extremely slow, sluggishly coming after me as if it were mocking my ability to escape."

Nick shook his head and looked at the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, crumpled like a broken spine worn white by the elements. "And tonight, it was moving slow, coming after me methodically. And Darryl, shit, I haven't seen him since I don't know when. He's probably still in grad school working on a new masters in something. None of it makes any sense to me."

Sarah put her arm around him and pulled him close. "C'mon, let's go back to bed. Tomorrow's Friday and you can forget about everything tomorrow night."

Nick let her pull him from the couch and down the hall. He watched her from behind as the nightgown smoothed itself across her hips and emphasized the curves of her rear with each step. He turned her around when they crossed the threshold to the bedroom and pulled her in close, pressing his lips tightly against hers. She pulled away from him and smiled wickedly.

"A monster, huh?" she said as she moved her hand downward below his stomach. "Wow, scary."

FOUR

Nick picked up the phone half-way through the first ring and clipped out his name into the receiver. "Nick Case."

"This is Tagget. You still interested in the stolen paintings?"

Nick blinked and looked at the keypad on the phone. Tagget? Paintings?

"Hello?" Tagget asked.

"Yeah, yeah, I am. What do you have?" Nick asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the wall clock. It was a minute past eight.

"The owner is Bill Maxell. He lives over on Strathmore Street: 411 Strathmore. He said you can come by anytime today before noon. He thinks the publicity may do a little good at spreading the word," Tagget said.

Nick copied down the phone number Tagget gave, scribbled the address and name below it, and thanked the detective. Nick pulled his sport coat off the back of his chair and slipped his arms into it as he walked over to his editor's desk.

"John, I'm heading out to check out those stolen paintings. I should be back sometime later."

"What paintings?" John asked. He looked up from his computer and stared at Nick.

"The ones that were stolen the other week on that police report with no information on it."

John scratched his chin. "Did the Morning News have anything on it?"

Nick shook his head. "Nope."

John smiled almost imperceptibly. "See you later."

Strathmore Street had once been in one of the more affluent of the inner city suburbs strung out between downtown and the city limits. The street was a river of smooth asphalt unmarred by center lines and bordered by perfect sidewalks and deep lawns that reached back to brick and stone mansions. In the days when steel had ruled the city, these had been the homes of the upper-most crust of management, the wealthiest bankers and the most prominent doctors. Now, though, they were occupied by corporate middle-managers, college professors and lawyers. It still smelled of money as much as the elms that lined the grass strips separating sidewalk from road, but was less storied and retained none of the aroma of power.

Maxell's house was a wide, three-story brown-brick affair with a turret on the left side and a slate roof. The front of the house was awash in red, yellow and blue tulips that blazed brightly against the building's facade and dared the neighbors to compete. Many did, matching Maxell's flower moat with equally dazzling arrays of cineraria, forsythia and agapanthus. Nick pulled his car to the curb and popped out of the door. He popped a mint into his mouth to drown the smell of tobacco from his breath and walked up the driveway and along the cement path to the entrance.

He assumed that on the other side of the door a chime was singing some few notes of a Mozart piano piece while he waited on the stoop for the door to open. Mansions didn't have buzzers or bells, they had chimes, and a man with stolen paintings certainly had a specialized chime to announce the fact there was someone waiting on the other side of the door. The door opened to show a man in a blue blazer, tan slacks and a white shirt, his tie loose around his neck. He was in his mid-fifties, his head topped with thick gray hair, two dark commas above his hazel eyes.

"Yes?" the man asked.

"I'm Nick Case. I'm a reporter with--"

"Oh, yes, come in. Detective Tagget said you'd be out," the man said as he pulled the door open and stepped aside. "I'm Bill Maxell."

Nick stepped into the house and looked around. Vases with fresh cut flowers stood on wooden stands and the hardwood floors were covered with Persian carpets. Nick stopped a few steps in and turned around to watch as Bill Maxell pushed the door shut and turned the deadbolt. The older man stuck his hand out to Nick and Nick shook it.

"Here's my card," Nick said as he reached into a blazer pocket and pulled one out. Bill Maxell took it and set it on a vase stand

"Come, I'll show the study that was robbed," Maxell said as he brushed past Nick and mounted a staircase to the left of the foyer in which they had been standing. The stairs creaked as they walked up. Nick scanned the walls for paintings, but none were anything not readily available from a mall art store and most likely gracing the walls of millions of American and Canadian homes. They arrived on the second floor landing and walked to a door at the end of the hallway and Nick stood silently as Mr. Maxell pulled a key from his pocket and turned the lock open.

"It's just up here on the third floor," Maxell said over his shoulder before clambering up a narrower, steeper staircase.

The study was the entire third floor of the house and had been, in its heyday sixty or seventy years earlier, an in-house ballroom. The ceiling was high and the hardwood floor was polished to a basketball court sheen. A marble bar stood in one corner of the room, the shelves behind it crammed with crystal decanters filled with clear and brown liquids and a full load of glassware. Elsewhere through the room were scattered love seats and groupings of easy chairs surrounding low, glass-topped circular tables. Several of the wall spaces were occupied by framed paintings of people, flowers, and cities by artists not recognizable to Nick. Near several of the copses of chairs stood easels with charcoal drawings or pen-and-ink renditions of naked women.

Bill Maxell walked across the center of the floor, the heels of his tasseled loafers slipping perceptibly from the heels of his feet and slapping the floor a split-second before each step, and leaned against the bar. Nick pulled a notebook from his pocket and clicked his pen to life, scribbled a few quick impressions of the room onto the paper, and walked across the room to where Mr. Maxell leaned against the bar. On his way across the room, Nick noticed four spaces on the walls that had seemed, at one point, to have been home to paintings but which were now bare spots of unblemished umber-colored paint. Mr. Maxell barely moved as Nick crossed the floor, his eyes were fixed to one spot on the wall that was merely paint, and Nick made a mental note to write that fact down after finishing the interview.

"Mr. Maxell--"

"Bill, please."

Nick nodded. "Bill, so what happened here, so far as you know?"

Bill Maxell shrugged and sighed, rubbing his right palm across his brow as if the thought of it all were something too unimaginable to readily discuss.

"They took my Wyeth. My `Dr. Syn.'"

Nick scribbled that down and looked up at Mr. Maxell. "Your `Wyeth?'" Nick asked.

Bill Maxell nodded solemnly. "It wasn't the most expensive of the four, but it was my favorite. I've had it for years. It was the first real painting I ever spent any money on and it was one of those paintings that you know you have to have the minute you lay eyes on it," Mr. Maxell said as he walked to the rear of the bar. He put a glass on the bar, the room echoing for a moment with the clink of glass on stone, and he took a crystal decanter from one of the shelves.

"Do you want a Scotch or something?" Bill Maxell asked, motioning to Nick with the bottle. Nick shook his head. "Yeah, it's a bit early, but," Bill Maxell shrugged and poured his glass a third full, "when you lose something like that, sometimes you need a drink to talk about it. Even this early in the morning."

Nick nodded.

"Anyway, that Wyeth was a beauty. It was different. Just a skeleton sitting in an admiral's coat and staring out the window of some old warship -- the kind that used canons and were sail powered, when naval warfare was personal -- and it just felt so right to look at it," Bill Maxell said, putting the bottle back onto the shelf and looking across the room at the blank space of wall. "I don't know what it symbolized to anybody else, but to me," he said, pausing for a second to take a small sip of the Scotch, "...to me, it sort of said we are all fighting losing battles, all destined to end up dead on the battlefield, all of us wondering what the fight was ever for.

"You know, you could fight with your wife a million times -- who doesn't -- and at the end you'd wonder what all the fighting was for. Did anyone win, or will there just be more fighting between other couples?" Maxell said, taking another sip of whisky. "But, at the same time, and this is what intrigued me about the painting, it also showed that we will always fight, no matter what. That everything is a struggle until the end, and that you should never stop."

Nick was writing furiously and barely paid attention as Bill Maxell walked into the middle of the study and stood there with stooped shoulders.

"Imagine walking into your house to find that the very thing you identify with had been stolen," Maxell said, turning and staring at Nick. "Sure, it's only a painting. It's insured. All that stuff. But, what if you walked home and the thing that you liked to look at for a few moments just to come to terms with everything, what if that were gone?"

Maxell shrugged and turned slowly in place, surveying the room Nick felt sure hundreds of parties had been thrown in just for the sake of Bill Maxell's peace at being with people who could see his art collection. The Maxell identity, as depicted by a dozen dead painters who had never once dreamed a thought that he, Maxell, would own their work and cherish it the way he had.

"But how did the thieves get into your house?" Nick asked, trying to bring the conversation into some sort of question-and-answer format that would give him the information he needed for a story.

Maxell shrugged and motioned to one of the windows in the room. Nick walked over to it. There were no signs of it being damaged or of the sill being pried open, and he noticed evidence of police fingerprint dust. He looked through the window and noticed a large oak tree with a branch that overhung the garage, which was attached to the lower portion of the roof that sloped upwards to the room he now stood in. Nick turned around and faced Mr. Maxell.

"They climbed in off a tree?" Nick asked. Maxell made two barely perceptible nods. "You don't have a security system?"

Maxell shrugged. "No. I'd thought about it. Never in my life have I ever been robbed. I mean, never. No break-ins to any of the apartments I ever lived in; never mugged; never had a car broken into. I guess I just figured it would never happen," he said, bringing his glass to his lips and taking in a small sip. "I'm fifty-three and never been robbed. I guess that's weird."

Nick shrugged and began the nuts-and-bolts part of the interview, pulling information on the different paintings from Maxell and transferring them to his notebook. There was a lot of money in those four paintings, all of which were insured, although Maxell's tale of woe stretched more along sentimental than monetary lines. Nick had spent almost an hour in the study listening to Maxell before he managed to get a tour of the house and an explanation of the other various sculptures, vases, wood carvings and assorted items that Nick wrote off as bric-a-brac, albeit expensive bric-a-brac. Bill Maxell and his wife, she was some sort of computer systems consultant currently in Argentina doing something concerning several polysyllabic computer terms strung together, had spent the better part of their thirty-one years of marriage accumulating what would most likely be auctioned off by their two children in about thirty more years, causing Nick to wonder how much money they had invested in decorations.

The den, as Bill Maxell termed it, was long room with dark oak walls, an expansive fireplace of natural stone, several high-back overstuffed leather armchairs draped with dark cotton throw blankets, and a Steinway grand piano covered with a scattering of music sheets. Nick easily imagined Maxell on a snowy Sunday afternoon seated in one of the chairs, his legs resting on one of the ottoman's and covered by a blanket, listening to his wife noodle around on the piano.

"So, what can you do at this point to track down your paintings?" Nick asked as he stared absently at the esoterica on the walls.

"Not too much. I've contacted all of the art dealers that would likely know anybody interested in the works. The FBI was out here the other day for information on them, too. I guess I just have to wait and see if they turn up. Maybe visit a lot of galleries, too," Maxell said. He pulled up the left sleeve of his jacket, looked at his watch and pursed his lips. "Well, Mr. Case, I've got only a few more minutes before I have to leave, so if you will excuse me, I need to finish getting ready."

Maxell walked across the room and turned into the hallway, motioning for Nick to follow him. They strode down the hall toward the front door and Maxell snapped the deadbolt open. Nick stopped on the threshold, turned around and looked back at Mr. Maxell.

"Oh, by the way, are you going to get a security system now?" Nick asked.

Maxell shrugged and tilted his head. "It's almost pointless now, since the good stuff is gone," Maxell said, "but I don't want the bastards coming back thinking there's more good stuff to be found, so tomorrow I'm having installed the best security system money can buy."

"Don't forget to tell your wife before she comes back and tries to get in," Nick said, smiling and turning to leave.

He wasn't sure, but he could have sworn Bill Maxell scowled.

By the end of the day, Nick had transcribed his notes into the computer and logged a dozen calls to art dealers, law enforcement agencies, and New York City galleries. None of the paintings merited much of a ruffle in the art world, although a couple of people were sad at the loss of the Wyeth painting and doubted that it would appear for sale. The majority of art thefts were done when a buyer was already known. Nobody, Nick was told, was stupid enough to steal someone's collection and put it up for open sale. Someone would notice and that would be that.

The phone trilled on his desk and Nick snapped it off the hook and pressed it to his head.

"Nick Case," he said as he looked over his shoulder at the clock. The end was near.

"Nick, it's Dave, what's shakin'?" the voice on the other end, Dave Kryzcapowicz, asked.

"Not much, Cap, just trying to get out of here. You?"

"Same. You up for happy hour at that place around the corner from your apartment?" Cap asked.

"The Grove?"

"Yeah."

Nick looked at the clock again, it was almost three. "Sure, when can you get there?"

"I'm thinking about four-thirtyish."

"Good, uhhh-yee," Nick said, reaching his hand down to his side.

"What the heck does `uhhyee' mean?" Cap asked, laughing once on his end of the line. "Or was I supposed to say, `domo arygato'?"

"Funny," Nick said, massaging the area just above his right hip. "I keep getting these dull, achy pains in my side."

"Well, you're getting old, that's why. How long 'till your thirty?"

"Fuck off," Nick said and Cap laughed.

"I'll see you then," Cap said and hung up.

Nick looked around the newsroom and the scattering of people in it and tried to stretch out his side while sitting in his chair. Maybe he needed a new chair. Or a back support. "Shit," he said softly while rubbing his side, "I'm not that old."

Happy hour ended at midnight with Nick, Cap, and Sarah stumbling out of the third bar of the night, all of them drunk on beer and Jaegermeister. The happy hour crowd and their suits had morphed into jeans-wearing men and midriff-exposing, mini-skirted women long before any of them had noticed, and when they had, it was too late to go home, change and re-enter the nightclub scene. Cap had called a cab, refusing the offer to crash on Nick's couch and telling him to expect a call around noon for a ride back to his car. Nick shrugged and he and Sarah pushed their way off the curb and down the gray sidewalks toward their apartment.

"How's your little monster feeling tonight?" Sarah asked and giggled as they turned the corner onto their street and strolled past the coffee shop's patio. Nick smiled and looked over at her.

"Tired. Very, very tired."

Sarah raised her eyebrows twice and nodded toward the patio. "A double espresso'd get you up, I'm sure."

Nick grimaced at the thought of a double dose of coffee concentrate and smiled weakly. "I wish, but I'm just beat. And drunk. I'd only be wasting your time."

They tramped up the street and into their apartment. Inside the bedroom, Nick stripped off his clothes and stood on the opposite side of the bed from Sarah, watching as she slipped into a nightgown. When she turned around and saw Nick standing naked she smiled and cocked her head to the side.

"I thought you were too drunk and tired," she said before looking between his legs. "And I guess you still are."

"But I'm all ready for tomorrow morning," Nick said before falling face forward on the bed and rolling over onto his back.

Sarah sat down on the bed and stared at Nick's body. She reached out and put her hand on his right hip and tapped it with the fingers of her right hand.

"What's this?" she asked, pulling her hand away and pointing at a spot on Nick's hip.

Just below the crest of his hip bone was a small, two inch long bulge of flesh that stood out against the rest of his skin. Nick looked down and fingered it for a second before shrugging.

"I don't know, nothing. It's been there since forever. I think it's just fat or something," Nick said as he returned his head to the pillow.

"Are you sure? I've never seen that there before."

"Sure you have. It's been there forever, you just must have never noticed it."

Sarah bent over and looked at it more closely, her blonde hair falling from behind her shoulders and onto Nick's stomach.

"I don't know. I don't think so. I'd remember something like that. I think that's new," she said as she prodded it lightly.

Nick sighed. "It's nothing. I think it's been there forever; maybe it's just bigger now or something."

"Have you ever had it checked out?"

"No. It's nothing."

"I don't know. I'd get it checked out if I were you."

Nick shook his head on the pillow. "Why? It's just a lump of flab, that's all."

Sarah sat up and shrugged. "I don't know, but it doesn't look normal. I'd get it looked at if I were you."

Nick closed his eyes and the world began to spin slowly from the alcohol. "Great. One more thing to worry about."

FIVE

Cap had called the next morning and convinced Nick that a Saturday workout at the gym was a better hangover cure than television. It was Nick's one concession to the new world order of low fat, no cholesterol, anti-red meat, decaffeinated, non-smoking, light beer drinkers. By working out a couple of times a week he figured he justified all of his other excesses and canceled out the complaints of a society intent on making him live long enough to bankrupt the social security system. Cap was, except on Friday nights and the occasional Saturday, part of that world order. While Nick was content to move a moderate amount of iron around his body and appreciate the slight curves that resulted, Cap was determined to sculpt his body into some-likeness of Michelangelo's David. Not that it was working on any level outside of Cap's pectorals and biceps, which were the predominant muscles he concentrated on. For the most part, it was all just sweat and grunting.

"Have a hangover this morning?" Cap asked after they had finished on the bench and were waiting for the lat pull-down machine to become available.

Nick shook his head. "Nope. I can't remember the last time I had a hangover. A couple of year's or so, I guess."

"I had to have four aspirin and a gallon of water this morning just to see straight," Cap said as he put a pin under the stack of weight and sat on the seat. "And I still feel like shit."

"You need to drink more often."

"I need to drink less when I do."

"Sure, then you'll always have hangovers whenever you go past your limit."

Cap grunted and began moving the stack of weights up and down on the pulley system, his breaths loud and methodical. Nick changed the weight for his own set and quickly ran through the repetitions. When he stood up from the seat he felt the tightness in his right side; it felt like there was a warmth beneath the surface. He rubbed his side and tried stretching to either side while Cap did another set.

"What's the matter?" Cap asked.

Nick shrugged as he rubbed his hip. "I don't know, for the last week or so I've been getting this weird feeling right here," Nick said as he massaged his side. "Kind of like I pulled something."

"You should stretch out more before you work out. You probably did pull something and just keep aggravating it."

Nick nodded. "Probably. It'll go away in a little while, though. It never seems to last long or get very bad. Just a little twinge."

After finishing the workout and dropping off Cap at his car, Nick went back to his apartment. He walked into the living room with the small stack of mail -- bills and several pieces of junk mail -- and sat down on the couch. As he reached for the remote control to the television he paused for a second and could hear Sarah in the kitchen talking on the phone. Her voice was agitated.

"You didn't call me all the way from the Bahamas to tell me that, did you?" he heard her say. He sat still on the couch and cocked his ear toward the kitchen.

"Yes, of course, but that's not the point," she said and listened. "No, of course not." Pause. "So what if we're almost thirty?"

Nick screwed up his face and looked around the living room. She was getting the marriage lecture. Again. He heard her walking across the linoleum floor towards the living room and he quickly turned the television on. She crossed through the archway and did a small, quick double take seeing him on the couch staring at the TV. She smiled and tucked some loose hair behind her free ear.

"Well, I'm glad that you're having a good time. Bring me back something, okay?" she said as she sat down on a chair opposite the couch. "Yeah...Okay...Love you, too. Bye."

Nick acted like he hadn't heard anything. "Who's having a good time?"

"Mom and Dad. They went snorkeling yesterday," she said as she dropped the cordless phone onto the carpet near the chair leg.

"Cool," Nick said and nodded his head toward the phone. "You should just kick that under the chair now so that we don't waste anytime losing it."

Sarah smiled sarcastically. "Are we going to do anything today?" She asked.

"Well, I was thinking maybe we'd go to the museum and look at the masters," Nick said. "After I shower, of course."

Sarah looked out the window at the sunshine and blue sky. "You want to look at paintings in a museum on a day like today?"

Nick nodded.

"Why?"

"I want to see what they've got there. Remember that guy I told you about who had some of his paintings stolen?"

Sarah nodded.

"Well, I want to see if any of those artists have paintings hanging there. I also just want to see what kind of paintings make it onto a museum wall. It's been years since I've been to a museum and I don't know anything about what paintings are there," Nick said, standing up from the couch and holding out the remote control to Sarah.

"Couldn't you just Google that up?"

Nick rolled his eyes. "And you're always saying we never do anything cultural."

Sarah had changed before their trip to the museum. Nick was having difficulty looking at the artwork on the wall as she strolled ahead of him, the heels of her calf-high boots clicking on the marble floor and sending his eyes on endless trips up from her boots to the bottom of the pleated plaid mini-skirt that extended just millimeters below the curve of her behind. Above that, a white top curved over her breasts and clung to her stomach before hovering millimeters above the waistband of her skirt. There were definitely better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon than in the museum.

Nick had never considered himself much of an appreciator of art. He thought the majority of the paintings he had ever seen were boring, despite how good they were supposed to be. Landscapes and portraits of dead people were like that. What art there was on the walls of his and Sarah's apartment was all due to her; he was responsible for the overflowing bookshelves and antique typewriters atop them. That other people saw something magical and inspiring in the paint sworls adorning the canvas sheets hanging on the walls of this and other museums was something that he likened to his fascination with Victorian-era literature. It just was something that was ephemeral and difficult to describe to someone on a different wavelength. He didn't actively dislike art, it was just something that didn't electrify the circuitry in his brain. It was a disinterest in much the same way as he had for entomology. Paintings and bugs existed, and that was the end of it.

But Sarah, just a few feet in front of him, was someone much different. She had definite opinions on art and had already explained them to him years earlier before discovering the depth of his indifference. Of course, she hadn't liked many of the books he had given her to read, either. They were far too difficult and contained too many commas, semicolons and ten-letter words to hold her interest past the initial chapter. That she was dressed as she was, knowing that the art in a museum was already something he had not too much interest in, was a very loud silent protest at his choice of a way to while away an afternoon.

Sarah stopped and spun around on the heel of her right boot, her hair swooping out and rolling over her right shoulder in a blonde cascade. "Can we go to the library next?" she said, smiling.

Nick looked her over again, smiled and nodded. "Yeah, whatever you want."

She laughed. "I say we go soon. You're not going to find any of those artists you're looking for in this museum. Maybe in some gallery, but not in here," she said. "Well, you might find a Degas. Every museum has a Degas, I think it's a requirement that they have at least one cartoony surrealist painting. Maybe, someday, they'll add Saturday morning cartoon cels to the collection. That's art, too."

"Maybe they'll just have a cartoon room and run them on giant screen HDTV. Heck, it'd get me to the museum more often if they had the classic Looney Toons cartoons playing in hi-def," Nick said, pausing and looking around the long hallway in which they were standing. Aside from an elderly couple standing before a huge Monet vision of water lilies, they were the only ones in sight. "You're right, let's go. This was a stupid idea. Besides, I can't concentrate on the walls."

Sarah smiled. She took him by the hand, dragged him down the hallways and out of the museum into the late afternoon sun streaming down from the heavens. She twirled in place once for no reason and fixed her eyes on Nick.

"We're free. Now, let's go do something fun," she said, tilting her head to the side and motioning down the wide avenue toward a block filled with shops, restaurants and bars.

SIX

I was running through the woods at top speed, my hiking stick held in both hands as if it were a machine gun, my feet making soft thuds on the moist dirt of the deer path I was following. Overhead, white clouds hung in the azure sky like Christmas ornaments, the sun the star at the top of the tree. The trees blurred by as I juked and weaved around them and popped over fallen branches and small gatherings of dry leaves. I was making almost no sound except for my breathing, which was quick and measured. The Monster was out here, somewhere. I could sense him. Feel him.

I paused beside a fallen pine tree and held my breath. My pulse beat loudly in my head and the wind curling around the trees whispered white noise that blocked out everything but the most persistent bird calls. I took in a long, shallow breath and let it out slowly, trying to bring my adrenaline in check.

From where I was standing I could see the tunnels, two fifteen-foot high cement tubes shoved through a hill so the stream could run undisturbed beneath the railroad line laid above it. On some days, kids from the neighborhood would be hanging out in the pool the two tubes emptied into, a pool we called "the pocket," but today there was only me in the woods. And the Monster.

It was out here somewhere, although whether it knew I was hunting him, I didn't know. Sometimes he was smart, sometimes dumb, but he was always out here. I clenched my fingers around my hiking stick and began picking my way through the underbrush toward the tunnels, avoiding the path that led the easiest way. If he was out here, that's where he'd be waiting, behind some tree that was never wide enough to hide his body, but somehow always did. I jumped off a steep bank and down onto a catwalk of shale that bordered the stream from here all the way to the lake, a mile-and-a-half further downstream.

From where I stood on the bank, the water was thirty yards across and averaged four feet deep. Hovering on the bottom were suckers, bottom-feeding carp that rarely bit on a lure and were no fun to reel in. During spawning season, the salmon teemed in desperation and tried to jump the three feet from the pool into either of the tunnels so that they could continue their journey upstream. I rarely fished anymore.

The water gurgled and bubbled, swirling in small vortexes midstream and stagnating in pockets near the shore. Across from me, a blazing red cardinal jumped from a tree branch and turned hard right downstream, its wings beating furiously against the air. I stared up into the electric blue sky and listened. Then I heard it.

I snapped my head level and looked across the stream. Crunching small sheets of shale with each stride was the Monster, its arms swinging in huge arcs. It wasn't the least surprised to see me standing on the opposite shore fingering my walking stick. It growled slightly, as if in a hurry for some other appointment, and began running. I took off after it on my side, keeping it in my peripheral vision as I stared at the few feet of ground bordering my side of the stream. Every step had to be chosen within a millisecond of lifting my foot, a misstep would tumble me into the stream. The Monster's bank was the better of the two. The woods met the stream with a thin strip of dirt and clay that created the bank, only occasionally turning into the shale that

"C'mon, Nick, turn off the damn alarm," Sarah said into Nick's ear as she jostled his shoulder. "I can still sleep more."

Nick's eyes snapped open and he shook his head. The clock radio was pouring out NPR's Morning Edition into the bedroom. Nick sat up on the edge of the bed and hit the alarm's "off" button. Sarah rolled away from him and draped her right arm over her eyes. Nick's heart was pounding. He gulped in some air and stood up off the bed, visions of the dream stream overlapping with the chest of drawers. He looked at himself in the mirror and shook his head to clear his mind.

"Whoa," he said softly as he walked out of the bedroom toward the bathroom.

After steaming himself clean in the shower, he dressed and headed for the local police precinct to read through the reports. It was a typical morning with traffic dribbling away from the curbs and small, early-morning clusters of people standing near the bus stop signs, many insulated beneath personal-stereo headphones. Nick did not envy them, the people who made up the bulk of the work force, producing actual products or servicing people's needs, hidden from the world in cubicles or in plain view behind cash registers. These were the people who only saw the world as it was presented on television: oversexed and crime-ridden, or solved with humor within thirty minutes and four commercial breaks, ready for another no-consequences episode the next week. Real life, as Nick experienced it, was far more complex and banal. It was strung together by a fabric too few people saw and even fewer examined. Most were content to let one day fall into the next and speed along toward the next vacation or holiday.

Nick stopped in at the coffee shop on the corner and bought a large coffee with a shot of espresso in it. He pulled the copy of the Morning News from the rack and sat down at a table. He quickly scanned the pages, something he normally didn't do until after he'd filed any of his own stories, and sat back in the chair, letting the steam from the coffee rise up over his chin as he held it near his chest.

He didn't feel like going to work today; the night had seemed to pass without sleep, although he knew he certainly had closed his eyes and slipped from the conscious world. This was too many times in too few weeks for a dream he had left behind long ago. The Monster. His job was secure. His relationship solid. His friends certain. There seemed to be no reason for the return of the stalking creature. He took a sip of coffee and stared through the large picture window as a half-dozen people filed onto a public bus and waved their passes at the driver. It couldn't be turning 30 and not being married, only living with his girlfriend. That kind of angst wasn't the haunting kind, it was the stuff of humorous office conversations and late night beers with friends. It was the stuff of romantic comedies.

Even as a kid, though, the Monster had never paid so many visits within such a short period of time. The dreams always stretched out over months and years. It was only the recollection of their similarity that made them worthwhile. It was only the fact that they had been consistent throughout early life that he even bothered to remember them. But why a monster that never caught him? Why a monster he sought out in his dreams? Why a monster he could only ever refer to as The Monster, as if it were the universal incarnation of what monsters were?

He took a sip of coffee and lolled his head against the chair back. There was obviously something to these bad dreams. Something working its way through subroutines in his subconscious, waiting to work its way to the main area of his brain where he could laugh at the simplicity of the problem. Maybe a diamond ring would solve it. He finished his coffee and headed for the precinct house.

Behind the desk, Officer Claypool was talking steadily into the phone, his face loose with the look of exasperation. He paused for a second and nodded silently at what the other person was saying and rolled his eyes. Nick gave him a small wave good-morning and pulled the clipboard from the wall, sat down and began leafing through it.

"You used to be like clockwork, Nick, now you're coming in whenever. Problems with the woman keeping you up?" Claypool said after he put the phone down.

Nick looked up out of the corner of his eyes and drew his lips straight. "Nah, nothing like that. I think I fell off my sleep cycle the other week. Or something like that. Must be because it's getting lighter earlier and staying light longer."

The phone on the desk buzzed and Claypool snapped it up. Nick returned to the reports and flipped through them quickly, looking for rapes, murders, bizarre deaths, and art thefts. Nothing. Just a normal morning. So maybe life on his end of the lens wasn't always as exciting as he liked to think.

He met Cap in the gym for their workout after leaving the office and was none too interested in lifting heavy metal plates. Some days were like that, the feeling that the time lost in the gym really didn't serve any purpose other than vanity. Not, he thought as he looked in the mirror, that he was gaining any type of curvature on his body worth a narcissistic thought. It was also a lame excuse for justifying his lifestyle of barstools, movie seats and remote controlling the television. Sarah might like her station as an acolyte of the aerobicized, but Nick's efforts in the gym were nothing more than a reaction to her intense desire to remain firm, lean and desirable in the eyes of men.

"You know, Cap, I don't think humans were ever meant to be hulking muscle heads," Nick said as he pulled a pair of dumbbells off a rack and sat on a bench. "I don't think we were supposed to develop legs and arms and stomachs. All this working out, I don't know."

Cap huffed out a couple of repetitions with his own dumbbells, dropped them to the floor and looked over at him. "What?"

"I'm just guessing that the only real muscles we are supposed to have are the ones that would develop from hunting wild animals, fighting off rival tribes, and stuffing our gullets until our bellies had a nice anti-starvation layer surrounding them," Nick said.

"Yeah, well, not anymore," Cap said. "You're certainly not getting massive forearms from typing all day, are you?"

Nick shrugged.

"Besides, the kind of guys who still rely on hunting to get in shape are the same guys with beer bellies who have heart attacks dragging their deer out of the woods every year," Cap said as he bent over and picked up the weights at his feet. "That kind of body is easy to get."

They worked out in silence for a while longer before Cap turned to Nick and asked about the pain he had gotten in his side the last time they had been in the gym.

"I don't know what it is. I've had it a few times. Actually, a lot of times. It lasts a little bit and goes away," Nick said.

"Maybe you should get it checked out," Cap said.

"Why?"

"You might have a hernia or something. I wouldn't want to fuck with it for too long if it keeps coming back."

"Maybe I'll just take a week off from lifting and see what happens."

"Maybe you're coming down with something," Cap said, exhaling steadily as he moved the dumbbells. "Maybe it's gallstones or something."

Nick looked at Cap's reflection in the mirror. "Gallstones?"

"Yeah, I think that's where you get the pain. In your side somewhere. I'd get it looked at if I were you."

Nick nodded and sighed. "I don't think I have gallstones. I think I just strained something."

"Yeah, well you could always take a week or so off from here. It wouldn't make a difference on you," Cap said and smiled.

After dinner, Nick sat on the couch drinking beers and watching television while Sarah worked on the computer in the corner of the living room. Nick wanted to make sure he fell asleep quickly, without the dreams that played in the theater of his mind. He wanted to skip the entire show and fall straight into the void of unconsciousness and come out on the other side when the alarm went off in the morning. Sarah had been oblivious to what he was doing until he pulled his sixth beer from the fridge and popped it open. She turned over her shoulder and watched as he leaned against the sink and took a long swallow from the can.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You've been sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching the History Channel all night. Is something wrong?"

Sarah got up from her chair at the computer desk and walked over to the couch, slipped a cigarette from the pack on the table, and lit it.

"You might as well get me a beer while your standing there," she said as she exhaled a plume of smoke into the room. "I don't want to have to notice your beer breath all night long. Besides, I don't think I can stare at this screen any longer. I think I'm starting to see individual pixels."

Nick smiled and returned to the living room with a beer for her.

"Why are you drinking so much tonight?" Sarah asked as she popped open her can.

Nick shrugged. "I've been having a lot of weird dreams the last couple of weeks and I keep waking up in the morning feeling like I haven't had any sleep. I just want to have enough to drink so I can sort of pass out and skip the dreaming."

"Did you have another dream about the Monster last night?" Sarah asked.

Nick nodded and pulled a cigarette from the pack. He lit it and told her about the dream.

"That doesn't sound too scary to me."

"Some of them are like that, where I've got all this courage to chase him down but never get to confront him. They never really make any sense, I guess, it's just weird that they keep coming back."

"Maybe you've got some unresolved problem that your brain is trying to work out in your sleep."

"I don't know what. I mean, I don't hate my parents, I like my job, I love you. What could it be?"

Sarah looked up at him and cracked a smile. "I dunno, maybe it's because you haven't married me but we're living together."

Nick rolled his eyes.

"What, it could be that."

"I don't think so."

"Why?" Sarah took a quick pull on her beer. "You're the one who said you thought you'd be married by your mid-twenties and have a kid or two by the time you were thirty. Maybe your subconscious is remembering that."

Nick shook his head. "Yeah, sure, but that was a long time ago before I knew anything. I feel comfortable."

Sarah dragged on her cigarette. "Maybe that's the problem, you're comfortable but not really happy."

"No, I am happy." Nick said defensively, his words coming out quick and accentuating the 'am'. "You're not saying that because we're not married are you?"

"No, I don't care about that. I mean, I do care, it just doesn't really matter right now."

"Well, you're the one who keeps bringing it up," Nick said as he flicked ashes from his cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table. "I mean, would that suddenly make some sort of difference?"

Sarah shook her head and tucked her hair behind her ears. "Yes. No. Maybe. It would make some kind of difference, but what kind I don't know. We've been living together for almost two years and dating almost three. I don't know that being married would make a difference in how I feel about us or anything like that, and I don't feel some urgent need to have a diamond ring or to be planning a wedding. But, at some point, I want to be married and everything that entails."

Nick took a drag on his cigarette and blurted the smoke into the room along with his words. "Well, I don't know what to say. I just don't feel like it's the right time. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't know what to say about it. It's just something inside me that feels that way."

"Well, if you're waiting for a sign from God or something, you're going to wait a long time," Sarah said, crushing out her cigarette and setting her half-finished beer on table. "I think I'm going to go to bed, now."

She got up and walked to the bathroom. Nick sat on the couch and listened as she brushed her teeth, gargled, and went to the bathroom. During all this he quickly finished his beer and switched it with the one Sarah had left behind, lit another cigarette and stared at the World War Two documentary playing on the television. German tanks were speeding across tall grass on a Russian plain, stopping occasionally to belch fire from their muzzles while the narrator described the proficiency of the Nazi tank crews in comparison to their Soviet counterparts. Sarah walked through the living room without looking at Nick and padded quickly down the hall to their bedroom. Nick shook his head and stared at the tip of his cigarette.

Early talks of marriage had always been in that wistful half-hope of a future together, where either of them would say that they could never imagine being without the other. At one point just a few months after they started living together, he had thought they should just go ahead and do it, but before he had brought the subject up he changed his mind and said nothing. On some level, he knew that part of his hesitation was bound in the knowledge that none of his friends were married, and if he married Sarah, things would be different. Two of his friends from college were in the same situation as he: living with their girlfriends. A couple of tangential friends had girlfriends, but his best friend, Cap, wasn't even dating at the moment, having given up on it almost a year earlier after his girlfriend dumped him. He just wasn't sure he wanted to be the first one to go to the next level, and obtain a wife. He wanted feedback, a test case, information from someone who knew what being married meant, and co-workers didn't count.

Nick shook his head and breathed deep on the end of the cigarette, hoping that the smoke would somehow clear his mind and give him an answer. It didn't. He drained his beer and headed to the bathroom and duplicated Sarah's routine. When he walked into the bedroom he saw Sarah rolled up on the edge of her side of the bed, facing away from center. He stripped down to his boxers, turned off the lights and crawled into bed. He rolled onto his side, facing away from her, and mumbled "good-night." Sarah said nothing.

He awoke staring up at Sarah, her blond hair pulled back behind her head and her bathrobe drawn tight around her waist. The angle was wrong and he squinted as if that would change the perspective. It didn't. He rolled his head to the side and saw the coffee table behind her legs. He looked down and saw a blanket covering his legs and the television standing in the entertainment center against the wall. He looked back up at Sarah.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked, her face full of concern.

"I don't know."

He was in the living room, on the couch, sleeping beneath one of the blankets from the hall linen closet and with a pillow from the bed beneath his head.

"Didn't you come to bed last night?"

Nick sat up and put his feet on the floor. "Yeah. I went to bed in the bed last night." He scratched his head and pushed his hair out of his eyes. "What the hell am I doing out here?"

"Are you sure you didn't go to sleep out here?" Sarah asked again and sat down on the edge of the coffee table.

Nick nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure. I know I went to bed in the bedroom. I don't know how I got out here."

Sarah raised her eyebrows and reset them. Nick looked into her eyes and shook his head slowly.

"This is really weird," he said.

SEVEN

The workday didn't go well for Nick. Or rather, it seemed slip away when he wasn't paying attention, his mind totally focused on his nocturnal wandering the night before. He couldn't remember moving from the bed and was certain he had lain down in the bed next to Sarah, albeit somewhat angrily. Worse, he felt as if he hadn't slept at all and now was constantly visiting the coffee pot to refill his mug. Maybe he hadn't sleepwalked. Perhaps he had gone to the closet after brushing his teeth, pulled a blanket out and made a place on the couch. Maybe he had only gone to the bedroom to get a pillow. He was only mostly sure that he had gone to sleep in the bed. Mostly, but he could remember pulling back the covers and sliding under them, rolling away from Sarah so that his back was toward her.

Maybe he didn't remember that at all, he wondered. Maybe he dreamed that after getting a pillow off the bed. He had been having enough strange dreams the last couple of weeks to make him unsure if a glitch like this in his memory were possible. After all, the moment in question right on the cusp of consciousness, easy to transpose reality to dream and vice versa. And there was the beer to consider. But he hadn't been that angry: In nearly two years of living with her, and quite a few white-hot arguments, he had never not gone to bed next to her.

He turned his chair and stared outside into the drizzle falling from the low clouds which obscured the tops of the higher buildings in town. Outside, people muddled along beneath umbrellas, girded in raincoats and galoshes, everyone eager to slip into the glass and metal and stone buildings from where they could ignore the world until late afternoon. He took a long pull on his coffee and stood up so that he could stare directly down onto the people making their way on the sidewalk bordering his building. Did any of them ever not pay attention and accidentally duck into the main lobby of the paper's building, stare absently at Marsha as she sat at her desk behind the battery of phone lines, and wonder what had caused them to make such turn? Marsha would have just looked at them and smiled until they corrected themselves a moment later and pushed back through the doors into the world.

He winced as the mild pain in his side flared up quickly, trailing a thin line of warmth along the edge of his right hip somewhere just below the surface of the skin. He massaged it for a moment and the pain turned to dull stiffness and spread out into a larger, barely noticeable warm tingling. There was definitely something going on within the sheath of skin that housed his consciousness, and he wasn't sure which was responsible for the turmoil, his brain or his body. He took another sip of coffee and stared up into the bottom of the cloud layer hundreds of feet in the air. Wisps of cloud trailed downward, dangling like tendrils from a jellyfish. The phone on his desk trilled and he moved away from the window.

"Nick Case."

"Hi." It was Sarah, her voice low and soft.

"Hey, how are you?"

"Fine, how are you?"

Nick shrugged and sipped some more coffee. "Tired. I feel like I didn't sleep at all last night."

There was a short pause on the other end. "Are you sure you didn't sleep on the couch on purpose last night?" she asked, her voice non-threatening.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Nick said, still not sure if he was. "I guess I just sleep-walked for the first time in my life."

"Well, I'm sorry about the argument."

"Don't worry about it, it was nothing."

"Yeah, sort of, but... I don't know. I mean, you ended up on the couch after it. Are you sure everything is all right?"

"Yes, listen, we're fine. I don't know what's going on with me. Just stress, I guess."

"Okay, well I'll see you back at home."

Nick nodded. "Yeah, same time as always."

"I love you," Sarah said softly through the phone into his ear.

"You, too," Nick said, looking around at the other desks to see if anybody was near. He said goodbye and hung up and noticed John picking his way around the desks and heading toward his. Nick sat back and waited for him to arrive.

John held up an envelope in his hand and looked down at him. "God, Nick, you look tired. Were you out all night?"

Nick shook his head. "No, just haven't been getting much good sleep lately. I think I'm going to have to give in to napping soon."

John smiled. "Well, I've got something here for you."

Nick groaned inside. Those words were the bane of every reporter's ears, certain to bring on some editor's pet peeve project that was of little interest to anyone except the story's subject and the man assigning it, and often not even the story's subject. Nick made a small frown and waited.

"Since you've been taking such an interest in this art business, and since we don't really have an arts reporter for this kind of thing, I've decided maybe it could be something you could use," John said, pulling a card out of the envelope and opening it. "This Thursday there's a gallery opening for some painter over in Regent Square and it seems to be right up your alley."

Nick raised his eyebrows. "A gallery opening?"

"Yeah, I don't know if there's much of a story in it, but you could go and check it out, see what's there," John said putting the card down on Nick's desk. "If anything, you might just jam some details into the 'Who's on the Town' column for Saturday's paper. Plus, like I said, there might be somebody there who knows something about your stolen paintings."

Nick picked up the card and skimmed it, cocktails, hors d'oerves, the paintings of Josh Sammers, 7 p.m. until 11 p.m.

"It says formal. I hope that doesn't mean black tie," Nick said looking up.

John shrugged. "If it does, get a tux and bring in the receipt." John turned and started to walk away, stopped, and turned on his heel. "That's rent a tux, not buy one."

Nick smiled and rubbed his hip slowly.

After work the next day, Nick drove over to a doctor's office near his apartment. He had spent the bulk of the previous afternoon calling through the list of physicians in the yellow pages until he had found one who was able to take him the next day. When he walked into the office lobby he was disappointed. The ad for Dr. Joel Thurber had indicated he was a general practitioner with the most modern diagnosing equipment and dealt in all manner of common problems with hyper-technical names. The office, though, was a dozen plastic-with-metal-frame chairs pushed up against a wall opposite a television, a few scattered magazines dealing with movie and television actors, a steel door with a magnetic lock and an empty receptionist's booth.

Nick walked across the empty lobby and stood at the counter, looking inside where, in other doctor's offices, a crew of a half-dozen white-smocked women would have been filing, copying and entering data into computers. Here, there were several empty desks, several rows of steel filing cabinets, and a lone, shut-down computer. No people. No sign that the office was ever used. No noise emanated from anywhere but his own chest. Nick loosened his tie and looked around the lobby behind him for some indication that he had not inadvertently come after hours, walked a quick circle on the pile carpet, and leaned against the admitting counter. He stuck his head through the opening and cocked his ear toward the back of the room. Nothing. He backed away from the counter and read the variety of computer-printed signs taped to the wall next to the receptionists counter: "No Drugs Kept on Premises; No Cash Kept on Premises; No Checks, Cash only when services are rendered. Master Card and Visa accepted." He scratched the back of his neck and turned to leave.

"Can I help you?" a deep voice asked from behind him before he had taken his first step. Nick turned and saw a tall, thin man with tightly cropped hair walking toward the receptionist's counter. He was wearing gray slacks, a white short-sleeved dress shirt, and black loafers.

"I'm not after hours, am I?" Nick asked.

The man shook his head. "No, you seem to be the first one. Do you have an appointment?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah, Nick Case for six-thirty."

The man stopped at the counter, picked a clipboard off the wall and ran his finger down it. He nodded and looked up at Nick.

"Okay. Insurance card" he said, taking it from Nick and glancing at it quickly. "That's going to be forty dollars."

Nick pulled two twenties out of his wallet and put them on the counter. "I guess there's no staff in the evening?"

The man nodded. "I'm not usually busy enough on the evening I'm open."

"I guess you're Dr. Thurber?"

The man nodded and took the money off the desk, opened a drawer Nick couldn't see, and put the money in it. "Did you bring any paperwork for your insurance company?"

Nick shook his head.

"Well, I'll give you a receipt and then you can have them send me whatever paperwork is necessary for you to get reimbursed from them," Dr. Thurber said, scribbling across a receipt and ripping a copy of for Nick. "I'll meet you over at the door."

Nick stared around at the bare room as he stood next to the door, waiting for the metal click that would unlock it. This was a strange doctor's office, more reminiscent of something he would expect to find in a depressed inner-city neighborhood and not a working class one. He wondered if he should ask for his money back and call one of his friends and find out who they saw. Maybe he should see Sarah's doctor. There was a sudden click and the door opened inward to reveal Dr. Thurber, now wearing a white smock, standing on the other side of the threshold. Dr. Thurber motioned for Nick to follow and they walked down a short hall into a bright examining room.

Dr. Thurber said nothing and quickly took Nick's pulse, blood pressure, listened to his heart and lungs, and then stood back from Nick.

"Well, you should probably quit smoking, but what did you come here for today?"

Nick touched his side where the lump was. "Well, the other week or so, my girlfriend noticed this lump. I don't think it's anything, I think it's always been there. I mean, I can't remember it not being there, so I just told her that I thought it was just a lump of fat that stored there by my body. She thought it might be something so I figured I'd come in and get it checked," Nick said, wondering if he had spoken too quickly.

Dr. Thurber told Nick to lift up his shirt and pull down his pants so he could see the lump. Thurber pressed it, tapped it, felt it and then stood back and looked at it from a couple of feet away.

"Okay, you can tuck your shirt back in," the doctor said.

Nick leaned back against the examining table.

"Well, that's exactly what it is," Dr. Thurber said and backed up.

"What, exactly?"

"A lump of fat," the doctor said, picking up a file and writing in it as he talked, detailing for Nick the technical nature of the phenomenon. "They're not all that uncommon, actually, and they're not cancerous. Not normally, anyway, and yours is nothing to worry about."

"What do you mean 'not normally'."

The doctor kept writing and looked up. "Well, in about 99.99 percent of these, there's nothing to worry about, it's just an anomalously placed fat deposit your body has stored. In some people, and it's very rare, they can turn cancerous. But you'd notice that right away because it would become firm and start growing.

"Yours is soft and pliant, so it's nothing to worry about. But, if you ever notice that it's growing -- and you'll definitely notice -- you need to go to a specialist right away and have it taken care of," Dr. Thurber said.

Nick nodded and sighed inwardly.

"Is there anything else?"

Nick shook his head.

"Well, if there is, come on in and I'll take a look at it. Until then, you should think about quitting smoking."

Nick nodded and followed the doctor back through the hallway and out the steel door. He walked through the empty lobby and out into the street, looked at his watch and frowned. At four dollars a minute, Dr. Thurber was doing pretty well.

EIGHT

Gage Square had sprung up in what had once been a run down, forgotten part of the city's dead industrial district. In the city's manufacturing prime, the area had housed all manner of industries, churning out as much pollution into the air and nearby river as it did steel and refined materials for the rest of the country. That had changed decades earlier, with factories boarding up with increasing frequency until there was nothing left but soot-covered buildings, broken windows and "No Trespassing" signs. It had only been in the last decade that state and city agencies had acknowledged that heavy industry would not return to life ont those sites and allowed the owners sell amid promises of forgiveness for whatever toxins they had sown in the earth the previous hundred years. Those wastes would be forgotten, left to whatever cleansing action time and nature could devise.

That had led to the quick selling of the majority of the riverbank to developers who believed covering the area in concrete and top soil and turning it into high tech offices, an outdoor mall and artist's community would bring in middle-class leisure money and the patronage of the wealthy. To most people's surprise they were right on both counts, and in a handful of years the rail lines had been ripped up, the factories razed and everything replaced with revolving-door Internet companies, specialty boutiques, trendy restaurants and an art gallery.

Nick normally had little use for the area. It was pricey and catered to a class of people that, even if he had wanted, he could not join as a mere newspaper reporter without inconveniencing a credit card. This was the area where once-were and would-be rich Internet types worked and schmoozed, where client-hungry attorneys plied the bar scene for potential contacts, and the generically wealthy spent Friday and Saturday nights with their wives, not the place where college crowds were found swilling beer and looking for hook-ups. Sarah, on the other hand, loved it. She found the oddity-laden boutiques and the galleries a perfect way to while away a sunny Saturday afternoon with her friends, and many of the items that decorated their apartment had been found in them, purchased with plastic and paid for in monthly installments.

Nick jerked the car into a parking space and stepped out into the evening sunlight. He reached into the back seat of the car and pulled out the jacket for his tux, which he had been told was necessary for the evening, and walked around to Sarah's door. Normally, she'd have already piled out onto the street, but Nick knew from years of dating her that when she wore her finest she expected to be treated as more than just his girlfriend. He pulled the door open and extended a hand inside to her.

"Allow me," he said with a little bit of a flourish.

She took his hand and stepped out. He leaned in close and kissed her lightly on the lips after she pushed the door closed behind her.

"Hey, don't smudge my lipstick," she said.

Nick shrugged. "I couldn't help it."

She smiled and he took her hand for the walk to the Serafim Gallery to see Josh Sammers' latest collection. Sammers, as Sarah had explained to him after he told her of their press passes to the show, was the city's premier artist, which meant he was able to make a living selling paintings to downtown corporations and suburban collectors without having to punch a time clock. All this success, however, had come after a sit-com set decorator had bought several of his pieces and used them in a hugely successful show that had abruptly ended when the cast banded together and demanded salary parity after season three, had been refused and replaced by a newer set of unknowns that the audience rejected. The show and everybody with it was forgotten within two years.

Sammers now worked in themes, and this collection being unveiled tonight was titled "Lost." His first collection, which had gained him some small amount of fame in the local art circles, and a brief appearance at a New York City gallery, had been a collection of thirteen oil on canvas paintings, the theme being "Disciples." The paintings had nothing to do with the Apostles, but had created a back page stir in some art magazines that had allowed him to sell the entire collection over the course of a couple of months to collectors speculating on his future success.

Not that any of that meant anything to Nick. Until Monday past, he had never heard of Sammers and wouldn't have cared if he ever had. Nick, as he reminded Sarah while they were dressing earlier in the evening, was only going to the opening because he had received a press pass that entitled him to free drinks and food. The opportunity to meet some more of the art crowd he was trying to infiltrate for his story was merely a bonus.

The Serafim Gallery had nothing to do with angels. There were none to be found amid the maze of tall white partitions that were placed throughout the room to funnel the crowd this way and that. Like many of the galleries in Gage Square, the Serafim Gallery was austere with pale walls, a hardwood floor and a variety of tables upon which were sculptures, ceramics and other hand-crafted knickknacks considered to be art. Upon entering, Nick immediately set upon the nearest bar for a martini. He handed a glass of wine to Sarah and the two of them submerged into the crowd.

Nick was unsure what to make of the paintings. Most of them were a collage of black, gray, red and green, some of them with no distinct subject and many of them with barely discernible wraith-like figures in some sort of torment obscured by sheets of what Nick assumed to be toxic rain from some science fiction novelist's imagination. After several paintings, Sarah broke away from him to talk with someone she recognized from the art community and Nick headed back to the bar for a new martini.

As he turned away from the bar and pulled an olive off the plastic sword with his teeth he heard his name called out from over his shoulder at a decibel level perfect for piercing the conversational buzz. He turned.

"Nick Case, yes?" a woman Nick didn't recognize said as she walked a few more steps to him. "How are you doing? I wouldn't have expected to see you here."

Nick looked into her gray eyes and then, absently, down the length of her black dress and the slit running up her left leg. He swallowed the olive after two quick chews.

"Yes, hi," he said, pausing to look at her face again and suddenly remembering from where he knew her. "Ms. . How are you?"

"Sophia, please. I'm fine," she said, tipping a small amount of white wine into her mouth. "What are you doing here? I didn't get the impression that you were an arts reporter."

Nick steadied his glass in his hand and nodded sheepishly. "I'm not. My boss figured somebody might as well come and check this out, so he chose me since I've been working on that art collecting story."

"Oh, yes, and how is that coming?"

Nick nodded. "Slow. I don't know a lot about art, so it could be a while. I think I was one of the few people in college who got through without having to take a fine arts appreciation," Nick said, taking a sip from his glass. "It only goes to show you what you never thought you'd need to know can come back and bite you later on."

Sophia smiled and nodded. "Well, I'd heard you'd been visiting quite a few galleries over the last few weeks. Are you becoming a convert?"

Nick shrugged. "Hard to say. I'm one of those people who think art is something I can't do if I wanted to. A lot of what I've seen looks like stuff I wouldn't want to do. I'm learning, though."

"Not enough, apparently. I'm sure another one of those will help you appreciate what's in these paintings," Sophia said, nodding toward Nick's drink. "Have you been out to see anybody's private collections, yet? I know that's part of what you wanted to do when you stopped by my gallery."

"As a matter of fact, I was out to see Bill Maxell's collection just the other week," Nick said, taking a sip from his drink and watching over the brim to see Sophia freeze her expression for a split-second. "Nice stuff, I guess. He seems really passionate about it."

Sophia smiled and set her drink down on the edge of the bar. She opened up a small purse that hung from her left shoulder and pulled out a silver cigarette case, snapped it open and lit a cigarette. She exhaled a thin steam of smoke to her left and closed her purse back up.

"Yes, he does have some nice work," she said after pulling the lipstick-stained cigarette from her lips. "And he throws wonderful parties."

She tapped some ashes onto the hardwood floor. "I'm sure I'll talk to you later, Nick."

She turned and walked away from him into the crowd, her perfectly fitted dress clinging to her curves as she slipped into the crowd. She stopped part way into the mass of people, took a drag from her cigarette, and turned to look at Nick with what he thought was either a dismissive smile or a femme-fatale come-on. He took a deep gulp from his martini and looked around the room for Sarah. She was standing amid a group of people who appeared to be trying to look like artists, each with either long hair, a Van Dyke, excessive sideburns or some added colorful demonstration to the standard black tuxedo. One wasn't even wearing a tuxedo but was instead dressed entirely in black with a bolo where a tie should hang. He nodded and laughed at something and tipped his glass of champagne salutarily to someone Nick couldn't see.

Nick began to walk to the first painting when a disturbance by the front door caught his attention. Just inside the gallery stood Viet Nguyen, one of the staff photographers for his paper, dressed in black slacks, a cotton polo shirt and carrying an excessive bag of photography equipment. He was nodding and talking quickly, pointing around the room and gesturing upwards with his palms. He shrugged and then saw Nick standing behind the man holding the guest list.

"Hey, Nick, they don't want to let me in," Viet said, his voice softening as if he were trying a last pitch for mercy. "John said he wants some photos for the Saturday Who's Who column."

The man with the list turned over his shoulder and looked at Nick suspiciously.

"He's with you?" he asked.

Nick nodded and pulled a business card for inside his tuxedo. He handed it to the man. "Yeah, I'm Nick Case with the Evening Times. He was supposed to come with me, but you know newspapers." Nick made a contrite expression.

The man looked down at the business card and handed it back to Nick. "Okay, I guess it's okay."

Viet smiled and thanked the man. He walked up to Nick as Nick took a few steps away from the door.

"So, who'm I supposed to shoot, anyway? John said it was going to be some high class type thing," Viet said as he shifted his camera bag on his shoulder.

"Fuck if I know," Nick said. "I'm really only here for the cocktails."

Viet looked at his watch and then around at the crowd. "Well, I can only be here for a half-hour then I got to split, so we need to find the important people so I can get out of here."

Nick motioned for Viet to follow him and they walked over to the group of people Sarah was laughing along with. Sarah caught Nick out of the corner of her eye and turned to face him.

"How're the drinks?" she asked before squinting curiously at Viet. "I've met you before, you're -- wait, don't tell me -- you're Veet?"

Viet laughed and shook his head. "Close, it's Viet."

She nodded and feigned slapping herself on the forehead for her faux pas.

"Viet needs to know who the semi-famous and connected are. He's got to take some photos for Saturday's who's on the town column," Nick said.

"Well, Josh Sammers is the guy all in black right behind me, and everyone around him is a local artist," Sarah said, nodding over her shoulder. "And just about everyone else is probably some sort of dilettante or collector, so just about anybody, I guess."

Nick cocked his head towards Viet. "Sounds like good advice to me. I'll tell you if I run into anyone in particular that would be good to get."

Viet pulled a camera out of his bag, slid on a flash and moved behind Sarah to take pictures.

"Well, I'll let you get back to your hobnobbing," Nick said. "I should probably mingle around and see if anyone's talking about that art theft from the other week."

Sarah grabbed his hand and squeezed it once. "I'll talk to you a little later, then."

He winked and turned back to where the walls had been set up for the paintings' display. The first one was large, three feet by four feet, and predominantly gray. There appeared to be dark shadows cast by people not within the frame of the painting, all of them long, slender and coming to points where the top of a person's head would be. In the upper right quadrant was a willowy, off-white person-thing that appeared to be sitting on the ground cradling its head. Scattered across the painting and obscuring everything was what appeared to be a charcoal-gray rain downpour. He took a couple of steps back from the paintings and tried to look at it as a whole, concentrating on no one part.

It didn't appear to have anything hidden in it other than the theme, which Nick thought would have been displayed on a neatly typed index card taped to the wall nearby but wasn't. He tilted his head to the one side and then the other and then took a sip from his drink.

"What do you think so far?" asked an older gentleman wearing expensive glasses and holding a gin and tonic in his hand.

Nick turned and looked the man square on. "I don't know, yet. I'm not sure what it's about. I don't know what feeling I'm supposed to be getting."

The man furrowed his brows for a moment and looked at the painting. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small brochure, opened it up, and scanned the page.

"Innocence, it says here," he said, looking up from the page and back at the painting.

Nick nodded mock-thoughtfully and looked back at the painting. "Well, maybe, I guess."

The man smiled. "My name's Delbert Royallson," he said proffering his hand.

Nick shook it. "Nick Case, nice to meet you. How are you connected to this whole scene?"

"I bought his first painting several years ago before he started made a name for himself on that TV show," Delbert Royallson said, leveling his voice to disguise what he felt must certainly seem as important to the rest of the people gathered there. Nick got the instant impression that Royallson thought it was he who had made Sammers work worth collecting and, as such, was some sort of Christopher Columbus of the local art scene.

"Are you going to buy any of these?" Nick asked.

Delbert Royallson shrugged and took a sip from his drink. "I haven't decided, nothing really reaches out and grabs me. I like most of it, but it'll take a while for something to boil to the top, if anything does. None of his last collection did anything for me, but this one seems different, inspired in a darker, more sinister way."

"How do you mean?" Nick asked.

"This is much different, more abstract than his other stuff, not that it's abstract art of any sort," Royallson said. "It's sort of like he's tapped into something that wasn't there a few years ago. Perhaps an alter-ego. He seems rejuvenated," Royallson said as he turned to Nick and nodded. "It was nice meeting you."

Nick nodded his head back and watched as Royallson ambled along the crooked corridor of movable walls. Nick pulled a brochure off a stack on a low vase stand and opened it to the listing of works. Sammers' work consisted of "Innocence," "Virginity," "Belief," "Trust," "Faith," "Self," "Identity," and several other similar themes. He shoved the brochure into a waist pocket and merged back into the crowd. Sarah was still talking with Josh Sammers except now they were alone and he was bent over slightly with his mouth closer to her ear as if they were exchanging confidences he didn't want overheard. Nick shrugged it off and snaked through the crowdlets of people to where Viet was standing twisting off a lens from his camera.

"Well, Viet, anybody here?"

Viet tilted his head to the side and shrugged slightly.

"Beats me. I never heard of any of these people," he said as he pulled a new lens out of his bag and fixed it to his camera. "I hope somebody at the paper knows. I'm just going to dump them on layout and let them figure it out."

"You might as well have drink before you split; they're free."

Viet shook his head. "Can't, I still have another assignment then I have to get back and soup these up. You have one for me."

"Okay, I will."

Viet clipped out a short laugh and smiled. "A couple more people and I'm out of here."

"See you later, then, I'm back to the bar," Nick said, turning on his heel and striding toward the bar.

Nick took his new drink and reentered the display area for the paintings, walking half-way down the aisle and stopping before a painting that seemed to have a man clutching at his head and shouting with pain or rage while ragged ghosts encircled him. The man was standing in what appeared to be a vacant city lot, the buildings crumbling and the sky a dull, dusty hue of red Nick couldn't quite name. Standing next to him and staring at another painting was a tall, athletic black man with a short, close cropped haircut and the hint of a Van Dyke. His tux appeared too tight at the biceps and the chest, as if it were designed to show off his physique or the closest one to is size in a hurried, last-minute rental decision. The man caught Nick's eye and nodded. Nick smiled and nodded back.

"Hi," the man said, his voice mild and polite. He stuck his hand out and said, "Rich Tagget."

Nick took his hand and smiled. "Nick Case, how're you doing tonight, detective? I don't believe we've ever met."

The man's smile straightened out as he released Nick's hand. "No, we haven't. I'm good."

"Are you a collector?" Nick said, motioning to the walls.

"No, not really."

"Me neither."

"And what brings you out here, tonight?"

Nick shrugged. "Probably much the same thing as you: collectors. I'm just trying to rub elbows with some of them and see if anything turns up."

Detective Tagget paused for a moment and pursed his lips, looking Nick up and down with a very deliberate sweep of his eyes. He slipped his hands into his pants pockets, looked around for a moment and bent toward Nick.

"I'll tell you what. Call me Monday morning around ten and I'll talk to you a little bit about something, okay?" Tagget asked.

Nick nodded. "Sure."

Tagget straightened up and stuck his hand out, again. "Nice to meet you."

Nick shook it and said the same thing. Tagget walked into the crowd and stood near a group of people talking animatedly. Tagget affected an interested look and smiled slightly as another person in the group began talking to him. Nick could see the top of Sarah's head from where he stood, her blonde hair curving down toward the back of her neck. He couldn't see what she was doing or if she was still talking to Sammers, so he started walking through the crowd. As he closed in on Sarah, he could see she was standing in front of a desk. On the other side was Sammers, a box of chalks opened in front of him and a sheet of white paper spread out before him. He was furiously sketching what appeared to be Sarah, drawing quick, thick smudges of yellow and black onto the paper. He looked up at her for a moment, squinted, and turned back to the paper to make a few more additions. He nodded at something Sarah must have said, smiled and put the piece of chalk into the box. He rolled up the paper and slipped it into a drawer on the desk, wrote something on a small piece of paper and handed it to Sarah. She put it into her handbag and took a sip of her wine, said something else and sidestepped into the crowd.

Nick curved his way around the crowd and met her on the other side of the wall-maze. She stopped and smiled at him.

"Having fun, so far?" Nick asked.

Sarah nodded. "You making any contacts?"

Nick shrugged.

"How many of those have you had?" Sarah nodded down to his drink.

"A couple, three, I don't know. They're free, so I'm not keeping track."

"I guess I'm driving."

Nick nodded. "Yeah, prob'ly a good idea."

"How long are we going to stay?"

Nick turned his wrist over and checked the time. "Maybe another half-hour, I just want to mill around a little bit more. And have another cocktail."

Sarah half-rolled her eyes. "Yeah, they're free. Get me a wine, I'll wait here."

Nick returned and handed her a glass of wine. "I'll meet you over by the front door in thirty, okay?"

Sarah nodded, smiled and turned into the crowd. He walked into the crooked row of paintings from the opposite end, pausing to glance at them while keeping his ear open to the muffled noises of the crowd. The conversations he could here were all about car leases, office politics and someone's recent separation. Nick sipped on his drink, staring down through the liquid at the three olives speared on a translucent spike. This is what he had always feared of high society, that it was as banal as every other society, just endowed with tonier locales and heftier bank accounts. There were no average people hefting mixed drinks in this crowd of black dresses and tuxedos. Even he was there only because of the power of the press to spread their names a bit more widely through the social circles that rippled outward from the city, letting the socialites know what the other socialites had been up to elsewhere.

"So, are you planning on dropping by my gallery again, Nick?" said Sophia as she detached herself from a glob of the crowd and moved in front of him.

"Sure, if you think you're up to talking about the art scene and all of that," Nick said, motioning with his drink to the crowd.

Sophia smiled. "Of course, of course. You're not the type, I'm guessing, that would come by again because you saw something you wanted to purchase."

Nick furrowed his eyebrows.

"Just call it seller's intuition. You get a lot of people who just drop in a gallery to see what's on the wall calling itself 'art,' and then snigger about it after they walk out the front door," she said and took a pull from her drink. "Why not come by someday next week after I close for the day? That would be five o'clock."

Nick nodded. "Sure, no problem."

Sophia slipped back into the crowd and Nick checked his watch, gulped down the end of his drink, and walked over to the front door to await Sarah.

NINE

It was dark and I was sitting on a bench at the corner of the park where I eat my lunch when the weather is nice and I want to watch receptionists and secretaries snake by in short skirts. Downtown buildings shot up crookedly into the night, the leftover office lights dotting their sides with squares. I looked around at the empty streets: a few darkened parked cars stood idly on the other side of the road, the traffic lights shifted up and down through their colors, a light breeze rolled a paper cup from a fast-food restaurant along the curb until it stuck in a gutter.

I couldn't remember why I was there. Or for whom I was waiting. So I got up and began walking down the street toward the parking garage I housed my car in when I was in the city. Oddly, all of the buildings seemed baroque or rococo, all of them twisting upwards seemingly higher every time I cocked my head back and gazed at the stars. There was something wrong about them, too, as if they were all the same exact distance in the sky, none of them brighter or dimmer than any of the others. And none of them twinkled.

A freshly-washed cab pulled over to the corner next to me and the passenger window slid into the door silently. The cabbie, a short, plump balding guy with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth, leaned toward the open window.

"Hey, buddy, do you know how to get to the Glockenspiel from here?"

"Yeah," I said as I walked up to the cab and leaned on the open window frame. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I gave him directions anyway.

"Down four blocks, left onto Theresienstrasse, through Rotkreuzplatz, and right onto Gotterdammerung. Three blocks from there, can't miss it."

The cabbie touched his forehead with his finger and pulled away from the curb. I watched as he drove down three blocks and turned right. I ran down the street after him, wondering what he was doing when I heard the grumble. It was a grumble realization -- the grumble of the giant realizing Jack was now in the castle -- loud and reverberating preternaturally off the concrete, granite and glass of the buildings.

"Shit." It was a sound I had heard before: The Monster. "Shit."

I looked around. There was nothing but breeze, darkness and silence. That would change. It always did. I began walking quickly toward where the Glockenspiel should be, ignoring where the cabbie had turned. My upper lip and underarms were moist with sweat from fear and exertion. There was another grumble

"Shit," I said again, looking over my shoulder and seeing nothing.

A few minutes later I was standing on the cobblestone that paved the square, the shops all closed up and the Glockenspiel illuminated by several lights trained on it. There was no one here. No tourists, no police, nobody. The characters on the Glockenspiel stood silently on their mounts as they waited for the gears to click into place for the next movement. I checked my watch, the next movement was only minutes away, and looked around the square again for somebody. Nobody.

Then it roared from across the plaza, a low rumble of contentment and victory. I froze, staring at the silhouette of the Monster as it trained its red eyes on me. It turned its head slowly left and right, and took a single step out of the shadows into the plaza's lights. It stood there as it always did, arms slack at its sides, eyes fixed on me, as if there were no hurry to close the fifty yards between us and rip me limb from limb. It was confident its time had come, even though it never had, even though I was always sure it each time was the time. And then it was coming toward me, a baseball-throw away, panting slowly, letting the fear build up in my throat as my feet melded with the cobblestones. The tall Gothic spires of the cathedral swayed and twisted with the Monster's roar as it began walking across the plaza toward me.

I turned to run, stumbled into the cabbie and fell to the ground. The cabbie looked down at me angrily and pulled his cigar stub from his mouth.

"Hey, buddy, watch where you're going."

I jumped to my feet and looked across the plaza at the Monster as it lumbered slowly toward me.

"Where's your cab? We've got to get out of here." I said quickly.

The cabbie screwed up his face. "Buzz off, I'm waiting for a fare, here."

"I'm your fare, c'mon, let's go," I said.

"Yeah, right, buddy. You don't look like no Princess von Hindenburg to me. Beat it."

From behind me I could hear the solid slaps of the Monster's feet against the cobblestones; could smell the scent of his fur on the light wind that shifted through the plaza. I stood in front of the cabbie and stared him the eyes. He was unbothered, as if everything was as it should be. Then the steps behind me stopped. I looked over my shoulder and there, just a few feet away, was the Monster, glowering down at me, its lips curled upward, its maw a glistening white of teeth and rivulets of saliva.

I grabbed the cabbie and spun him into the Monster's legs and ran as the two of them tumbled to the ground. Above me, the ever-growing buildings seemed to curl in the winds of the stratosphere like the smoke plumes from leaf pile fires dragged by Saturday afternoon breezes. Behind me the Monster roared loudly and I heard the cabbie shout something as I

"Nick, what's the matter with you?" asked Sarah loudly as she stared down into his eyes, one hand on either shoulder and her hair streaming around the left side of her neck like a golden waterfall.

Nick opened his eyes wide and took in a deep gulp of air. "Holy shit," he said quietly.

"Were you having a nightmare?"

Nick nodded. Sarah lowered herself down on him and hugged him before rolling over onto her side of the bed and sitting up.

"This is really strange, Nick. You've been having these a lot. Was it about the same thing?"

Nick told her the dream.

"I don't know what all this is supposed to be about, Nick."

"Me neither. It's just so weird. The Monster never used to come after me like this, like it was trying to capture me or kill me or whatever. It just used to scare the hell out of me and kill everyone else."

"Maybe you should see a therapist."

Nick frowned and shook his head.

"Well, it's two hours before we have to get up; do you think you can get back to sleep?"

"Yeah," Nick said as he slipped out from under the covers and headed out of the bedroom.

"Where are you going?"

"Getting a glass of water," Nick said to the darkness as he walked into the hall.

By ten o'clock that morning, Nick had downed a three-day dose of coffee and was still shrouded in a fog of sleep deprivation. It was difficult to concentrate on anything for very long, his mind easily lost to wandering either through the previous night's dream or some ponderous thought about some mundane object lying upon his desk.

And there was Detective Tagget to call, a wholly unexpected run-in that roused Nick's suspicions about the stolen art of Bill Maxell. Maxell had not been at the gallery opening, something that hadn't occurred to Nick as odd until Tagget had accidentally introduced himself to Nick. Tagget's expression, as Nick remembered it, seemed to indicate that the detective was unsure how much Nick knew about the missing paintings and now Nick thought there might be something more to it. Nick shook his head as he stared out the window onto the street below, wondering why he had convinced himself and his editor that there might be something interesting in the disappearance of a handful of paintings. Now, he wasn't so sure, and wished that he had just written up the theft in the police blotter and forgotten about it.

And just what had that painter given Sarah Friday night, anyway? Nick wondered, remembering her stuffing the small piece of paper into her purse.

He picked up his phone and pressed in seven numbers.

"Dave Kryzcapowicz, how can I help you?"

"Hey, Cap, it's Nick."

"What's going on, man?"

"Can you meet me for happy hour after work today?"

"It's Monday, man. Happy hour is on Friday."

"It's gotta be Friday somewhere, right?"

Cap was silent on the other end for a second. Then, resignedly, "Yeah, where?"

"The Grove, of course," Nick said.

"I'll see you after five."

"Ciao." Nick hung up and flipped through his Rolodex for Detective Tagget's number and dialed. After a quick conversation, Nick agreed to meet the detective at the precinct station at the end of the day.

Nick stared back out the window, making a mental note to remember to ask Sarah about the artist. He would have to make it seem like he had seen the artist drawing her, but not giving her the slip of paper which, Nick thought, must certainly be his phone number. Why would she need his phone number? Nick took a gulp of luke-warm coffee and rubbed his eyes. Why had he drawn her? Why hadn't she said anything on the drive home? And why these damned dreams?

Tagget was sitting on a bench bordering the sidewalk and working on the stub of a cigar when Nick clambered out of his car. Tagget puffed a large cloud into the afternoon and smiled as he watched Nick lock his car.

"You're parked in front of a police station, Case, with a cop sitting on a bench outside. What are you locking your car for?" Tagget said, shaking his head slightly.

Nick shrugged. "Positive habit reinforcement. If I stop doing it here, I might stop anywhere."

Tagget took another puff on the cigar and waved his hand, palm downward, when Nick took out a notebook and sat on the bench.

"No notes. All of this is off the record, for now," Tagget said, taking the cigar stub out of his mouth and pinching it between two fingers. "And off-the-record as in you can't even take unofficial off-the-record notes."

Nick put the notebook away. "What can be so important about four paintings?"

"Well, look, I can't waste too much time, I've got to get home, so I'll just cut to the chase," Tagget said. "What we think we're looking at here is something more than just a couple of paintings being swiped. For a long time, the FBI has been following a group of people who seem to be stealing paintings, counterfeiting them, and then selling them overseas.

"So, it turns out the feds think the operation is based out of here, somewhere, and that this latest theft is part of the operation. But we haven't come up with anything concrete, yet, because this is the first time they've taken anything from around here," Tagget said, rolling the cigar stub between the fingers of his hand and sending a curlicues of smoke into the air.

"But these were small-time paintings, from what I understand of them," Nick said.

Tagget nodded. "Well, the theory is that this operation takes orders for specific works. You were there last night, who knows what somebody wants or thinks is art? I mean, that stuff last night was crap to me, but then, most stuff is."

"But, wait a second, how do you know they're counterfeiting the paintings? If they're stealing them, why not just sell the real thing?" Nick asked.

"They're making money off both ends," Tagget said, stubbing the cigar into his mouth and sucking until the tip glowed red. " "Apparently, they ransom the originals back to the owners after the copies are made. Everything is supposed to be kept very secretive, they let the owner of the original know that the work can be gotten back and they tell him to not tell anybody about the theft. Then, on the other end, after they copy the work, the new recipient knows that he's not supposed to tell anyone about the stolen artwork. Usually, that is."

"What do you mean, usually?" Nick asked.

"Sometimes the counterfeiters act as brokers, pretending to be buyers who can obtain certain works from private collections. They show the would-be buyer an upcoming, as-yet-unreleased auction catalog and say they can get it pre-sale, but the buyer has to act quickly. It's a very complicated, intricate operation," Tagget said. "Sometimes, they claim to be able to replace the original with a fake. There are endless possibilities."

"And what does this have to do with Maxell's paintings?"

Tagget looked Nick in the eyes. "Listen, it was an accident that report was made. It was supposed to be kept secret, but the officer misunderstood what we meant about keeping everything under wraps. He thought we meant to write a vague, uninteresting public report you guys would shrug off. We meant for him to write nothing," Tagget said, puffing on the cigar stub. "Too late, now. What we're asking you is too keep your story investigation low key. Don't press too hard for details about this ring we're looking for. Keep up the story that you're just trying to write about the art community."

"Why? What's in it for me?" Nick asked.

Tagget nodded his head slowly. "Well, you'll be in on the ground floor. This is big, international big. There's major millions involved, not to mention the reputation of a couple of museums, big-time collectors, artists, everything. You'll get the story first, just keep low key."

"So why'd you tell me all of this, then?"

"So you wouldn't stumble across it in a day or a week or a month and write some half-cocked story and cook our investigation," Tagget said evenly. "I can't tell you any specifics, yet, anyway, but you'll understand when this comes together."

"Let me ask you this: you were using your real name the other night, so who are you supposed to be in the art scene?"

Tagget smiled and let out a little chuckle. "Well, nobody asked. I was the only black man there last night, so I guess they didn't know what to make of me, so they just shied away. But I'm supposed to be some rich guy interested in acquiring some art. I'm using my real name so they can look me up in the phone book or on the Internet, if anybody thinks I don't really exist, and call me. No big deal using your real name in some investigations. I don't pick up the phone at home and say, 'Detective Tagget.' I say, 'hello.'"

Nick nodded.

"So, do we have a deal?" Tagget asked. "You stay quiet if you find anything out and we'll give you the story first."

"It's a deal under one condition."

Tagget rolled his eyes. "What?"

"That I can start doing some on-the-record interviews with you and whoever else is investigating this. Only I won't publish anything until you guys say the investigation is over," Nick said.

Tagget puffed on the cigar. "That shouldn't be too much of a problem, but let me check with the team. I can't speak for the FBI, just me."

Nick nodded. "Okay. Thanks for the information, I appreciate it."

Tagget shrugged.

"Oh, hey, what does the Morning News know about this?"

Tagget shrugged. "Beats me, they never saw the report."

Nick smiled back and stood up from the bench. "Fucking awesome."

Nick thanked him, got in his car, and drove home. Thoughts of Pulitzer prizes, copyrighted stories, and an instant leap onto a New York or D.C. paper flooded through his brain as he turned his car through the streets. This was the story that could make his career, maybe send him onto the international desk of the New York Times where he could jet around the globe tracking the important stories of the world. No more one-inch briefs on car thefts or apartment break-ins. No more interviewing grieving parents or spouses about the murder of their loved one. No more sifting through police reports at dawn.

He parked his car and sprung out onto the sidewalk with helium-buoyed steps. What a coup, he thought, to find this story in the muck of daily crap afflicting the city: A story that would be read by everyone with bewilderment and awe; a story with his byline atop it, with readers waiting each morning for the latest installment of corruption, intrigue and subterfuge involving an international art counterfeiting ring; a story that would have the best reporters from papers across the world reading his story for leads; and, a story that would be printed, verbatim, in newspapers around the world. He could visualize his name in stories translated into French, German, and Japanese. He wouldn't even need to clip the story and submit it with his resume when he looked for the next job. Editors across the world would know his name.

He sprung up the steps, waiting for the moment later when he could tell Sarah of his good fortune, of how life in the news business was only a few months from changing to the big time. No more intermediate, second-string daily newspaper with an undersized staff, meager budget and few resources. It would soon be a bag packed in the corner, awaiting a call from an editor telling him to be in Africa or Asia or South America to track down some lead. People everywhere would be willing to talk to him, knowing they could trust him because of how he had handled the art counterfeiting story. They would call him to give him the heads-up information and contact. Him. They would call him from half-way across the world to tip him off and he would tell his editor he was flying to some exotic locale to follow up in person, and the editor would tell him to go for it.

He pulled his tie off and hung it on the rack in the closet as he slipped his shoes off. But what about the piece of paper the artist had given Sarah? What if that guy was in on it? What if he told Sarah and she told him, even if accidentally? What if Sarah was ... he sat on the edge of the bed and stared at himself in the mirror above the chest-of-drawers. What was that piece of paper? A phone number? He pursed his lips as he stared into the green eyes of his reflected self. He'd have to wait before telling her anything. He'd have to wait until he could find out what was on that piece of paper. If it was a phone number, Josh Sammers' number, Nick couldn't tell her about the story.

He grimaced as a sharp hot-flash coursed through his lower right side. It was several inches long and as wide as a strand of thread. He pulled his shirt out of his waistband and looked at the area where the pain was as he massaged it, kneading the skin and wondering what was causing the spasm. After a moment, it dulled into a wider area of warmth. He tried to trace the area that had been the pain, but it started nowhere and went nowhere. It was just below the skin, not deep inside like he thought a gall stone would feel, and ran along the length of the edge his hipbone, just above the fat deposit on his hip.

He should have told the doctor about the pains when he showed him the lump. It would have been nothing, too, but he should have asked for the medical explanation. He had always had pains in his body that seemed unrelated to anything. A spasm in a shoulder, a twitch in his chest, a headache. Whatever. It was just the body doing something, and they never lasted much longer than it took to notice them and deal with the problem. Aspirin, ibuprofen, Ben-Gay, or just ignore it. This pain was just like those, only he was noticing it more now because it seemed to recur more often, but that was because of the gym. He stripped off his work clothes, tossed them onto the lid of the hamper and rooted through the bureau and closet for something to wear to meet Cap at the Grove. He looked at the clock radio, scribbled a note to Sarah, and left the apartment.

TEN

Nick walked past the empty tables in the Grove and pulled out one of the stools standing sentinel by the nearly unoccupied bar. Rob, the thirtyish bartender who wore shirts a size too small to allude to his gym-crafted physique beneath, made a thumb motion to the bottles behind the bar and Nick nodded. Rob knew that Nick drank Scotch whisky and rarely had to ask. The thumb motion and nod were enough to secure a glass.

Nick looked around the barroom while Rob pulled a bottle from the shelf and poured. Aside from Nick, there was fiftyish looking disheveled man wearing a worn dark blazer a few stools down. Nick looked at him for a second. The man's thick, unruly white beard was stained with the smoke of countless cigars like the one smoldering idly in the corner of his mouth. A pint of dark beer, half drunk, sat on a napkin before him. The man nodded and tapped ash from his cigar into the glass ashtray on the bar before turning to a stack of newspapers. On the far end of the bar looked to be a couple of college students waiting for the happy hour crowd to arrive, each with a pale beer before him and a baseball cap on his head. Nick smiled at the conformity of the modern collegian, the boys all sporting baseball caps and the girls with tattoos at the base of their spines, peaking out above their low slung pants.

Rob set the glass of Scotch on the bar.

"What's in the news, today, Nick?" Rob asked.

"Would you believe I didn't read the paper?" he smiled.

"You running a tab?"

Nick nodded.

"Where's Sarah?" Rob asked.

Nick shrugged. "Work. She might show up later."

Rob nodded and walked away, picked up a television remote control and began flipping through the channels on several different televisions, setting each one to a different baseball game, golf match or sports talk show.

"Hey, bud, what's up?" Cap said as he pulled a stool away from the bar and sat down.

"Not much, yet. You?"

Cap shrugged. "I hope some women show up, tonight. I need to go home with someone. Or at least someone's number."

Nick nodded and took a pull from his drink. It burned the back of his tongue. The first sip always did.

"Is she coming, or are you able to flay wingman?"

Nick grinned. "I told her I wanted to talk with you, so if she wanted to come to give me an hour or so."

Cap shook his head. "Oh, well. What's on your mind?"

Rob came over and set a beer down in front of Cap. Nick lit a cigarette and took another sip from his drink.

"Something strange is going on."

"What, with you and Sarah?"

Nick shrugged. "I don't think so, no, although she has been subliminally pressuring me on the whole marriage thing."

"Well, you're almost thirty, you know, and you've been dating her forever."

"Yeah, well, that's not it. I mean, that might be part of it, but it's something a whole lot weirder."

Cap leaned on the edge of the bar. "Like what?"

"Well, I've been having nightmares lately. A lot of them. They're like these dreams I used to have when I was kid. I even had some in college, but they stopped after I finally got a job and started to settle down. But now they're back," Nick said.

"What kind of nightmares?"

"They're about the Monster."

"The monster?"

Nick nodded. "Yeah, when I was a kid I used to sometimes dream about the Monster, this seven-foot tall Bigfoot kind of creature that was always stalking me. It would turn up everywhere and anywhere, but it would never hurt me. Just scare me," Nick said, tilting the rest of the Scotch into his mouth and signaling Rob for another. "When I was little, it used to kill all my friends. It would just come out of nowhere and maul somebody to death or carry him off into the woods. I used to think that it was because my Dad was always moving us around because of the Air Force. My Mom always told me it was just the way my brain was dealing with us moving all the time and leaving my friends again."

"Your mom told you that? How old were you?" Cap asked.

Rob set a new glass of Scotch on the bar and Nick nodded thanks.

"I don't know, I think about eleven or so, but that's not point. They stayed with me all the way through college until I got my first job. Then they stopped. It's been, like, seven or eight years since the last one, and I figured my Mom was probably right and that they had to do with all that upheaval and movement."

"And?"

"And now they're back."

"The Monster?"

"Yeah, for a couple of weeks now."

"Maybe you're stressed out. You just said Sarah's been pressuring you."

"Yeah, but that's not all of it." Nick picked up his glass and took a sip. "I sleep walked the other night."

"You what?"

"Sleep walked. I don't even remember doing it. Sarah woke me up in the morning on the couch."

"So?"

"So? So, have you ever sleep walked?"

"No."

"Me neither."

"So you're stressed out."

"Yeah, but over what?" Nick asked.

"The marriage thing?"

"That can't be it."

"Why not."

"I don't know. I mean, this is The Monster. The thing I dreaded as kid. It was always following me, killing my friends. I even used to have dreams where I'd go hunting for it but never get it. It would be there in the woods, mocking my efforts, taunting me, jumping out from behind trees and growling and then running away. Now, it's different."

Cap took a long drink from his beer. "Different, how?"

"Now it's coming after me."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, now the Monster is coming after me. It's trying to find me. Capture me or kill me or something, but now it's trying to get me. It used to just ignore me, as if I was the butt of its joke and what it could do to my life. The other night, it walked right up to me and would have gotten me if Sarah hadn't woken me up."

Nick looked at the smoldering cigarette in the ashtray and lit a new one from his pack, inhaled deeply and blew a cumulus cloud into the bar air. Nick looked around the bar, the crowd was now hovering around a dozen people broken into three unequal groups. The man with the smoke-stained beard was working on both a new cigar and a new beer as he stared down at the loose leaf paper now strewn across the bar in front of him.

"Still sounds like stress to me," Cap said, finishing off his beer and motioning to Rob for another.

"Yeah, maybe. But it just seems weird, all these dreams, the sleep walking, the pain in my side and the lump on my hip."

"What lump on your hip?" Cap asked.

Nick shook his head and took another drag on his cigarette. "The other day, last week or two weeks ago, I don't remember. Anyway, Sarah looks at me as sees this lump on my hip and says it might be cancer and I should get it checked out."

"Did you?"

"Yeah."

"What did the doctor say?" Cap asked.

"He said it was just a lump of fat and nothing to worry about. Apparently, it's pretty common. I forget the medical term, lapriscopolescomy or something long like that, but lots of people have them. It's just anomalously stored fat tissue. Most people have their fat deposits equally spread out, but not everyone."

"So, it's not cancerous?"

"No. He said in very, very rare instances it can turn cancerous, but he said I'd notice because it would suddenly become very large very quickly."

"What'd he say about the pain in your hip?" Cap asked.

"I didn't think to ask about it," Nick said, pausing for a moment. "I guess I thought they were unrelated."

Cap took a long pull from his beer and looked up at the television before looking back at Nick. "I think it's all stress, man. Just get married." Cap smiled.

Nick made a fake frown. "I don't know. Maybe. It just all seems too fucked up. I mean, the Monster."

Cap looked at Nick blankly and shrugged, as if he didn't know what else to say, having said everything he could that he thought was relevant. "What do you think all this means?"

Nick took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the slow-forming crowd in the bar. "I don't know. I just think it's weird that it's all starting to happen now. Maybe it is stress."

"Yeah, maybe it is." Cap said. "And remember, it's just a dream."

ELEVEN

I wake up the next morning to bright light streaming though several windows opposite the foot of the bed. This isn't my bedroom. The walls are exposed strips of wood where the wallpaper has been removed. In some places, there are scraps of the wallpaper's backing still stuck to the walls. I look to the left and see that the floor is bare, dull hardwood. It is a strangely comfortable, peaceful room. I stare up at the ceiling and run my hand across the short stubble on my face and then through my hair. My hair is now cut short, nearly a buzz-cut, and feels bristly to my fingertips. I had gone to bed with long, shaggy hair.

I sit up quickly on the bed, "How the heck did my hair get cut during the night?"

Sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed is Sarah. Almost. She looks like Sarah but not quite. She is noticeably thinner, skinny like a marathon runner, and has a shorter, different, pooffier haircut which frames her face in a soft, non-threatening manner. She is sitting cross-legged on the floor looking at something: a newspaper or magazine or photographs or whatever, I can't quite tell. She looks up at me and smiles.

"Well, you're awake."

I look on the pillow and see cut hair. I look back at Sarah.

"How did my hair get cut?" I ask.

She looks at me with a puzzled expression and squints for a moment. "It's been cut like that for a long time."

I look back down on the pillow and the hair clippings have disappeared. I run my hand through my hair again and get out of bed. As I pull the sheets back, I notice dozens of Polaroid snapshots of Sarah all around me. I pick them up and look at them. They are photos of her as she looks now, only she's in different outfits and at different places.

"How did these photos get in bed?" I ask.

She smiles and laughs. "You were looking at them last night before going to bed and didn't feel like putting them away, so we just slept with them."

She gets up and gives me a kiss as I sit on the corner of the bed. She is dressed in a reddish-orange sleeveless sweatshirt which is cut-off just below her breasts, and a pair of tight-fitting jeans.

Where am I? Sarah looks like Sarah, but is not Sarah, even though she is Sarah. Different hair, a leaner, more athletic looking body, but the same mannerisms. All of this overnight?

Then it dawns on me: This is two years ago. I've already lived through this moment, been in this bedroom. But it's an alternate two years ago. This reality never existed. Sarah never stripped the wallpaper from our first apartment's bedroom, she had just complained about it for an entire year. She turned down the opportunity to go to New York City for a week to meet with the modeling agency scout who met her and said she'd be a natural. She hadn't found the idea of being photographed for a living as very interesting, and had cut her hair as a way to reinforce her decision not to go. But not this haircut.

"Sarah, this isn't really happening," I say.

"What are you talking about?" she asks.

"I don't know, I remember wondering what an alternate me would be doing, and sort of wishing to find out, and now I'm here, an alternate me, but this isn't what happened two years ago when we decided to live together," I say. "We moved to a new apartment, instead."

She nods.

"I'm not the me you were expecting to wake up. I don't know why I'm here, but I'm not your me."

She understands but doesn't care. It's as if these are trifling details.

"So, the other you will come back, eventually?"

"I think so."

She smiles and kisses me again.

"So, I'm not cheating on you if I'm cheating on you with you, am I?" She smiles widely, lasciviously, and kisses me wetly.

But all of this is too weird, so I pull away, reluctantly, and walk downstairs. There are no walls on the first floor, only a skeleton of two-by-fours and ceiling joists, and the areas which would be rooms are set with linen-covered tables. People are sitting at the different tables eating breakfasts of eggs, bacon and pancakes. They smile politely or say "good morning" as I walk by in my pajamas and out onto the front steps. The landscape of this world is the wrong tint. Everything is too pastel and the clouds floating by have too much mass, as if they are massive cotton balls suspended in the sky by unseen steel cables which are connected to satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The house sits in the middle of a series of rolling fields dotted with trees, and the dirt driveway leads away to a pitch-perfect black highway with neon yellow dividing lines. There is a pleasant, surreal, and scary feel to this world. It's so calm that it feels as if everything is about to change to anarchy, chaos and mayhem at any moment. This is the calm before the storm.

Sarah comes out and sits down on the steps next to me and doesn't seem perturbed I'm not the same man she's used to. I feel like I should kiss her, so I do.

"Do you like it here?" she asks as she puts her hand on my thigh.

I shrug. "I don't know, I've only just gotten here. I'm not sure how I should act."

She smiles the same wicked smile I'm used to my Sarah smiling when she wants to have sex in a public place where the odds of getting caught are steep. She moves her hand up my thigh and slips it underneath the waistband of my pajama pants and begins to stroke me slowly. I look over my shoulder and see that inside, nobody is paying us any attention. They are eating breakfast and talking and ignoring us. Sarah leans close to me and kisses me on the cheek and trails her tongue down the side of my face and across my lips.

"Where are you supposed to be right now?" she asks as she puts her other hand on my thigh.

"To be?"

She laughs and pulls the waistband of my pajamas away from my stomach and looks down. "I think we've got something I can take care of, if you want me to."

Nick shook quickly, a hypnic jerk that felt like he had jumped inches into the air, and opened his eyes. Several inches in front of his face was the bottom of the refrigerator; beneath him, he could feel the hardness of the vinyl floor. He blinked and stared at the refrigerator door, rolled over and looked up at Sarah, who was crouched down a few inches away. Her hair was tucked behind her ears and Nick wasn't sure what to make of her expression, which was a cross between confusion, dismay and nausea. He sat up and looked down at the pillow upon which his head had been resting and then back at Sarah, who was now biting her lower lip. Nick smiled weakly.

"Now, I know for a fact you were in bed last night, because you were passed out when I got home," Sarah said. "But why you came in here in the middle of the night beats me."

"What time is it?" Nick asked, pulling the blanket off his legs and standing up.

"Just after eight."

"Wow. What time did you go to bed last night?" Nick asked.

"About one."

Nick shook his head and walked into the living room. Sarah trailed behind him and tossed the pillow onto the couch. "So I got up sometime after one, got a blanket and pillow, and decided to sleep on the kitchen floor?"

Sarah just looked at him.

"Weird," Nick whispered.

"Maybe you were hungry," Sarah said and smiled.

Nick ran his fingers through his hair. "That's twice in just a couple of weeks."

"Well, I know you were in bed," Sarah said.

"It feels like it was a good sleep, though."

Sarah scrunched up her nose. "And it couldn't have been me, I didn't even get to talk to you last night. You weren't having nightmares, were you?"

Nick shook his head. "No, just your normal dreams, I guess. I can't remember."

"Rob said you and Dave were pretty drunk by the time you left last night," Sarah said.

"When did you show up?"

"About eleven-thirty. I guess you had left just a little bit before, so I just stayed with Tess who, by the way, was supposed to meet Dave."

"She was?" Nick asked, thinking about Sarah's short, Italian co-worker who had a notorious habit of being unable to keep a boyfriend longer than a couple of dates. It wasn't that she was unattractive, just a bore who talked incessantly about the banal aspects of her life and even more about what she had seen on television.

"Well, Dave didn't know about it," Sarah said, getting up and walking into the kitchen.

Nick turned on the television and lit a cigarette while Sarah banged around the kitchen and returned, a half-dozen minutes later, with two cups of coffee. She put one down on the table in front of Nick while he worked his way through the cable system trying to track down Bugs Bunny. She pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit it and sat back into the cushions on the other end of the couch.

"As I see it," she said amid a stream of smoke signals, "you've only got two choices."

Nick turned away from Wile E. Coyote's perusing of an Acme catalog and looked at her.

"Prozac or me."

"Prozac?" Nick asked.

"Well, that's what they'll put you on after you go to see a doctor about your sudden sleep problems," Sarah said.

"And the 'or you?'"

Sarah stuck out her left hand and splayed the fingers wide apart, the cigarette supported in a wide smile and smoke curling up past her right eye and pooling on the ceiling.

TWELVE

Nick had called Sophia after deadline on Monday and arranged to meet her at the bar across the street from her gallery after she closed. Mondays, she had said, were never good for business. In the meantime, Nick had spent the afternoon googling background on her. She was forty-seven, had two children, both married and moved away, and had been divorced a decade earlier after her steel company executive husband, Henning , who was a dozen years older than her, had been arrested on charges of soliciting a prostitute while on a business trip to Weirton, West Virginia. As a result of the divorce, she got more than a million in cash and their personal art collection, which she had leveraged to build one of the city's more impressive galleries. Since then, she had turned up on the society page both city papers more than a hundred times, not to mention this past weekend's edition which featured a photo of her smiling brightly with her arm around artist Josh Sammers.

As he sat in his car outside the bar just before five, Nick stared at himself in the rearview mirror and thought about how to conduct the conversation. He wasn't exactly sure if this should be performed as an interview, with pen and notebook at hand, or if he should just tell her that it was a background-gathering conversation that was, for all intents and purposes, off the record. He looked at the reflection of his tie and straightened it, pinching the dimple back into shape and tightening the knot until it was slimmer. He pushed the mirror back into position and stared down the street: What if she were somehow connected to the counterfeiters?

When he entered the bar he was surprised to see Sophia already at a booth, a wine glass before her, smoking a cigarette. He looked at his watch as he walked toward her, it was still several minutes before five, and looked back up to see her making a motion with her hand to the bartender.

"I'm not late, am I?" Nick said as he slipped into the booth opposite her.

She shook her head and blew a stream of smoke upward. "No, I'm early. What's ten minutes at the gallery? Nothing, that's what. We don't get a rush at the last minute with people suddenly needing something to hang on their wall or stick on a shelf," she said, then added, "almost never, anyway."

The bartender walked over to the table and set a glass down before Nick.

"I take it you drink martini's, so I hope you don't mind that I ordered one for you," Sophia said.

"No. Why?"

"That's all you were drinking the other night."

"I didn't know you were paying attention."

Sophia made a fractional shrug, as if to say she was a person who paid meticulous attention to the details of those who might be customers and that he should think nothing of it, and took a sip of wine.

"Well, I left my notebook behind. I figured we could use this conversation as, basically, a sort of background discussion. Just something where we talk and I see what sticks to my brain and follow up later," Nick said, fumbling his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and dropping them onto the table. He tapped one out and lit it.

"What do you want to talk about, Nick?" Sophia asked.

"The art scene, I guess. Basic impressions about the opening the other night, what openings are all about, who the local artists are, what kinds of people shop in art galleries, that kind of stuff," Nick said.

"You don't shop in art galleries, I see" Sophia said, crushing her cigarette out.

Nick shook his head. "No, I hardly buy anything artish."

"Artish?"

"Yeah, you know, stuff that's sold as art and not as decorations. I don't buy decorations, either. Some, I mean, but not usually paintings or anything. Posters and photographs of things, that kind of stuff," Nick said, lifting his glass and taking a drink.

Sophia smiled. "How old are you?"

"Thirty. I mean, twenty-nine, really, for now, anyway," Nick said.

"Then you should stop buying posters," she said. "Posters are for kids. You're a man. Men buy art, and photographs qualify as art, Nick, so stick to your instincts. If that's what you like, follow your passion. You'll learn what's good – artish -- and what's just snapshots."

"Jesus. I'm almost 30 and know nothing about the art forms I like," Nick said, affecting humor.

Sophia grinned and showed her teeth. "Worried about turning thirty?"

Nick shook his head. "No."

"How long until your birthday?"

"Just over a month, now. Five weeks and a few days. Three days, that is."

Sophia laughed. "Down to a science, I see."

"Well, no, not really. Everyone's just been busting my balls about it, I guess," Nick said. "Sorry, I mean ..."

Sophia made a small wave. "I've heard it before."

Nick, worried that he was going to lose his detachment as a reporter and have to answer more questions about himself, began to ask questions about the art world, starting with why she had opened a gallery. From there, it was easy to get her to talk about the myriad facets of the local art scene, from what she thought was worthless to who she thought was useless. The bartender, through it all, constantly brought them full glasses whenever one on the table was one sip from empty, and after nearly two hours Nick was losing his ability to follow Sophia's winding stories of art scene intrigue and who was being stupid with their money. The information was, as Nick had feared all afternoon while waiting for the rendezvous to arrive, boring. The stories were of the kind that only a dilettante could enjoy, eagerly sharing in the details of someone else's poor taste or financial gouging and smiling at their own sophistication in such matters. With the liquor working through him, Nick had to stifle several yawns.

Sophia excused herself and Nick peeked at his watch. Nearly three hours had disappeared into a martini haze of olives and digressive conversations about paintings. Not once in her narrative had Sophia hinted in the slightest way about anything remotely conspiratorial flowing beneath the dull surface of the gentrified art circles. Nick lit a cigarette and breathed a cloud of disbelief above the table. Sophia slid back into her seat, her lips once again full and dark red, just ahead of another round of drinks brought over by the bartender. Nick sighed inwardly, unwilling to turn down the drink and uninterested in pursuing the world of art any further into the evening. And then he remembered the paper Josh Sammers had given Sarah the night of the gallery exhibit.

"So, what can you tell me about Josh Sammers?" Nick asked.

Sophia stuck a cigarette between her lips, lit it, and tilted her head left a fraction, a motion which indicated she knew a lot and wasn't overly impressed.

About his art or his sex life?"

Nick furrowed his brows and Sophia rolled her eyes in response.

"Well, he's been painting for years. He first tried to interest some local galleries in carrying his work about, oh, fifteen years ago, but he was just a fourteen-year-old with an odd interest in depicting religious themes in rather juvenile ways of protest. It was nothing remotely interesting.

"And then, in his early twenties, he began to show up in the low-rent galleries in the North Hills and Monroeville and places like that. It still wasn't anything too interesting, but he was beginning to handle a brush fairly well, so people began to keep an eye on him," Sophia said. "And then, he came out with some collection that had a couple of local dopes impressed enough to get him a showing in New York City. Well, to be fair, it was a surprisingly dramatic improvement over his earlier stuff, but it still wasn't all that interesting. It was as if he were trying to paint dreams, but ordinary ones everyone has."

"Sort of like the other night's works?" Nick ventured.

"His new collection is better, although still not to my taste. As a painter, his talent has really improved. His vision, though, is still murky," Sophia said. "He should at least paint something he's looking at. He's not good enough to transmit his supposedly tortured soul onto canvas. I'll bet he could do a competent portrait."

"But the guy's famous for his work, isn't he?"

"Please. He got noticed by the Hollywood trend-of-the-moment setters and had a piece used on a set, then a couple of sets, began having sex with starlets and the folks around here started to buy his stuff up just in case," she said. "And now that he's 'famous' everybody has to keep buying his stuff and hyping his work or else they look like clowns. But being famous isn't being good, just look at Kincaid's crap."

"Who's that?"

Sophia waved the air wearily with the tail end of her cigarette and crushed it out.

"The only thing Sammers is good at is luring women to his bed. I hear he has an insatiable desire for blondes.

"Come across the street with me. I have a couple of his paintings in my back room," Sophia said, tilting the last of her wine into her mouth and swallowing it in a large gulp. "I'll show you what I mean."

Nick tried to finish his drink in one swallow, nearly gagged, and took another pull. His head swam quickly as he stood up, then calmed down as he watched Sophia wave a finger at the bartender and stride toward the door. Nick looked to the bartender to see if he was expected to pay, saw the bartender staring up at the television in the corner, and followed Sophia out into the sunset bathed world. She opened the door to her gallery, waited for him to walk inside, and locked it behind them. She put her hand on his left arm and led him through the deep gray of the unlit studio.

She dropped the keys onto a table, flipped a switch on a wall and a couple of overhead lights illuminated several framed paintings leaning, domino style, against the wall opposite them. Sophia walked over to them and pulled out two. She rested them against the wall and stood back, arms folded. Nick tried to shake the martinis out of his head and concentrate on the paintings, each of a nude blonde. One showed a young woman reclining on a maroon velvet couch, her left arm resting on a bent knee, a light bulb in her hand. The other was a woman astride a chair, her arms folded atop the chair back and her chin resting on her hands. She had a detached expression which Nick thought odd.

"You see, he does much better with real subjects, only he never sells these. Usually, I'm told, he destroys them if the girl doesn't want it, which she usually doesn't. After all, who wants a nude portrait of themselves painted in the early morning hours by an artist with whom you've just had sex?"

"So how do you have them?" Nick asked.

Sophia shrugged. "Sometimes, the oddest things come into your hands in the most dull ways. Such was this. He was changing studios a couple of year ago and apparently forgot them. The landlord went in to clean the place, found my card and called me. I still haven't figured out what to do with them."

"Couldn't you put them up in the gallery and sell them?"

Sophia laughed a soft, one-syllable chuckle from just behind him, a puff of air moist Chardonnay-infused air wrapping around the back of his neck. "Not in my gallery, and not until he decides to sell one legitimately; then I can say these were discovered and put them up. If I were to put them out now, I'd be paying lawyers."

Nick turned his head over his shoulder and saw Sophia's blood red lips and dark eyes pointed at him, just inches away. "Can you keep a secret, Nick?"

Nick turned the rest of the way around, looked over her shoulder into the shadows hiding in the corners of the wall, and then back into her chocolate eyes. "What?"

She pressed her lips into his, her right hand curving around his waist and pulling him close. He could feel the press of her breasts against his chest as her lips opened slightly and the tip of her tongue brushed against his mouth. Nick closed his eyes and moved his hands onto her hips and squeezed lightly as her left hand moved up across his stomach and onto his shoulder. It slipped beneath the lapel of his sport coat and she pushed the jacket off his shoulder and down to his elbow. Nick opened his eyes and looked into hers. She moved her tongue the barest fraction to wet her lips, smiled almost imperceptibly, and pulled his face to hers.

There was nothing pretty to the affair. In moments Nick had unzipped the back of her dress and she had let if fall to the ground, exposing her black bra, underwear and pantyhose. A few seconds later she had undone his tie and sent his clothing to the floor, grabbed his hand and led him to a leather upholstered couch he had not seen hiding in the gloom of a shadow. Something inside Nick tried to slow him down on his walk, but when she turned around and undid the front hook of her bra, exposing her firm, medically-enhanced breasts, the swell in his boxers overcame reason and he followed her down onto the couch. There was one more moment, just after pulling off her pantyhose and staring down at her naked, thin frame sprawled on the couch, when Nick suddenly felt both ridiculous and ashamed, but the touch of her toes as they ran up his inner thigh erased those burgeoning doubts in favor of others, and he lowered himself onto her.

And then it was what it always is. Movement and sweat and bitten shoulder blades amid low grumbles, sharply drawn breaths and long exhalations. Nick forgot everything in the trail of her fingernails down his back and the grasping of his ass, lost himself encircled in her legs and the wet kisses on his neck. When it was over and she had come to her own conclusion, Nick rested down on her and felt her body at rest. Her fingers ran small circles through his hair as he stared, from her shoulder, at her now naked lips. He could feel the sweat between their stomachs, pooled near her belly button, just opposite the now-forming lead ball of betrayal.

Sophia turned her head and kissed him lightly on the tip of his nose, her mouth a trace of a smile.

"I have been craving that since last week," she said as she splayed her fingers through his hair.

Nick removed himself from her body and stared down at his limping self, trying to remember at what moment she had produced the condom and from where it had come. It had all been so effortless on her part. And he had enjoyed every second of it until the moment after. Sophia stood up and walked a few steps, naked, to her purse on the table, pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Nick pulled his blazer across the floor and obtained a cigarette from the pack in the inside pocket. Sophia sat down next to him, her breasts standing out firmly despite gravity and age, and blew an exultant stream of smoke into the air.

She put her hand on his thigh and squeezed once. She left the cigarette in her mouth and pulled the condom off him, held it up and looked at the fluid within, and tossed it into a low, circular steel trash can a foot away.

"If you don't call me, you know, I have your card," she said, leaning over to kiss him on the shoulder.

Nick smiled, his stomach suddenly turning into an open pit filled with brimstone. He had used women for just this person a handful of times in his life, but never had he ended it so succinctly, so perfectly. He had always said he'd call, and hadn't.

THIRTEEN

Sarah isn't home to witness your slump-shouldered, bowed head, half-drunk entrance into your apartment. You're sure the shame of infidelity hangs about you like a mist, swirling around your head with the martini fog and dripping onto the floor with each step. This was never supposed to have happened, but now it's lodged there in the immediate past like a rail spike driven into a car tire. You light a shaky cigarette and sit on the edge of the couch, watch it trail white smoke into the air. Maybe you're daydreaming. Maybe nothing happened. Maybe, if you can believe it didn't happen, you can forget it. Maybe.

You stub the cigarette out, walk into the bathroom and strip naked. You turn the shower on and step into the stream. At first. the water's cold and raises goose bumps on your flesh, but then it warms until it nearly scalds you. You look down at yourself and shake your head, unable to believe you could be so easily over-ruled on such a simple, patently established rule. You rub the bar of soap over your body absently, letting the sudsy film be immediately swept away after each pass. No amount of scrubbing will cleanse the inside of you. Stupid, you think to yourself, so stupid.

You look up into the stream of water and close your eyes, letting the thin streams pelt your face and break into thousands of droplets which scatter down your chest and carom off the shower curtain. Is this how you thought it would feel? Is this how it feels for everyone, you wonder? The humiliating shame of knowing you have sunk so low that you can, perhaps, never recover? No, this feeling, you believe, is reserved only for you. It is heavier than that of any other shame-bearing person because it is yours. Before, you used to think you understood how a person could be so easily led astray, and empathized with them while hiding your scorn at their weakness. But now you see the weakness in yourself, don't you? If you can sink so low, then surely everyone can, and you are no better than anyone. No more special than the next man on the street waiting for the bus to arrive. Perhaps, even, you are worse.

But the water will not purify you, and, as you stand there, afraid to sob, you are even further lowered by the remembrance of how much you liked it. How you told yourself that it didn't matter and how it must be good because it felt good. Surely, if you hadn't wanted it, you could have left. Yes, you remember the heave of her breasts and the feel of her legs around you.... So different, wasn't it? So good. And now you regret it. Wish it had never happened. Is that it?

Or is it that you never want to be caught? Is that what you're thinking as you turn your eyes to the drain and watch the water swirl through the small openings? It's Sarah's hair clogging the drain, and you move it with your toe, but can you move this memory to somewhere in the back of your brain? Can you?

You turn the water off, towel the water from your body and walk naked through the apartment to the bedroom. Draped over the chair in the corner are Sarah's work clothes and you wonder how long she was home. What did she think you were doing when you were pressing your lips into this other woman's shoulder, biting at her flesh? Did she think you were sitting at a table, tape recorder rolling, asking questions about the art world? You can only hope. You look at the clock, it is half-past ten and Sarah is still out. If you're lucky, you think, she won't come home until after you have slipped into deep sleep. Then, when tomorrow comes, you can slip into the world and put a full day between yourself and this evening. Do you really think that will disguise the trail? Twenty-four hours?

So you pull on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt and walk back into the living room. The liquor is still heavy in your blood, and the memories of her fingernails scraping along your back are still too luminous to let you sleep now. You get a beer from the refrigerator and walk into the living room. Perhaps a beer will bring the world back into focus. Maybe it will drown out the taste of her mouth or the feel of her probing fingers as they kneaded the back of your thighs. Perhaps it will weaken the tight grasp of her arms and legs as she pressed herself to you at that last moment, shuddering to a climax and sinking into the cushions just moments after you had left a part of yourself within the latex sheath separating you from her.

FOURTEEN

Nick wandered through the next few days as the model employee and the perfect boyfriend. He spent the evenings by Sarah's side on the couch, cradling her head against his shoulder while they watched television, fighting back the inner urge to drink to forget. Or sleep. On Wednesday, for it could not be Tuesday, the day after, he sent flowers to Sarah at work. Not roses, he feared that might draw suspicion, but a mixed bouquet that he thought might look good set on the corner of her desk near the picture of himself he knew stood there. After a tortuous day where he thought his guilt was displayed in a visible aura about his body, he found the feeling began to subside. By Thursday, thoughts of Sophia were recallable only on demand, and he did not demand them. He stuffed them deeper down when some part of his brain requisitioned one of the moments for closer scrutiny.

Concentrating more on the story had been the crux in breaking through the shame. He had dived into the legal system for past examples of art thefts, counterfeiting and the like. He called museum curators and art professors for their insights into whether they thought such rings were common, and how they screened the fakes from the genuine when purchasing collections or examining new finds discovered in the attic of some long-dead ancestor. He concentrated on the fame that breaking such a story would bring.

Through it all, Friday arrived and Monday seemed a lot farther in the past than it had even the day before. And if anything, he knew that he needed to get more drunk this night than ever before.

"Cap," Nick said when his friend answered in his phone in his office across town.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"Duh. It's Friday. Happy hour at the Grove okay with you?" Nick asked.

Cap was silent for a few seconds. "Yeah. Maybe five-ish, but probably closer to six. Is Sarah showing?"

"Yeah, about five-thirty."

"Is she bringing that chic?"

"I don't know; didn't ask. Do you want me to find out?"

"Nah, it doesn't matter. I'll see when I get there," Cap said.

Nick looked up at the clock. It was three, his shift was done, three hours was too long to dawdle in the office. "Oh, well. I'll see you there, then. Try for five, I'll be there by then."

"Well, yeah, if I can, but I've got to close up an account before I get out of here, so I gotta go now if I'm going to be anywhere close."

Nick hung up and stared around the office. Paul was sitting across from him and staring through the window at the building across the street. He looked catatonic.

"Beer?" Nick asked.

Paul shifted his eyes and looked at Nick.

"Beer?"

"Yeah. You done for the day?"

Paul nodded and looked around the office. "Now?"

"Yeah, what are you waiting for? Something to explode downtown?"

Paul furrowed his brow for a half-second at Nick's remark and stood up. "Let's go."

They walked down the street a half-block and turned into a wood-paneled, brass-railing bar popular during Friday happy hours for its strong drinks and secretarial pool crowd. It was empty, now, as the secretaries were still making late-afternoon personal calls and the lawyers and bankers were still in drone mode deep inside high rise office buildings. They took a seat at the bar and ordered beers. Nick lit a cigarette.

"I thought you were going to quit those last New Year's," Paul said, swiveling on his stool.

"I was. I decided then to wait until I turned thirty. It seemed like a better day," Nick said.

Their conversation went nowhere from there, degenerating quickly into discussions of office politics, co-workers and recent unsavory occurrences discovered during the course of their beats that never made it into the papers, the most notable being the county commissioner supposedly caught in flagrante delicto with the Children and Youth Services director by the county's chief clerk. It was a story more repulsive than intriguing, given that the chief clerk would not go on the record and that the two involved were both obese.

After an hour, Nick excused himself and drove to the Grove, parking his car against the curb directly in front of the bar. Nick walked through the near empty bar and slid onto a stool, pulled down his tie and looked down the length of the lacquered, wooden bar for Rob. Rob turned around from the cash register, hooked a thumb at the bottles behind him and raised his eyes when Nick shook his head no and pointed to the taps. Rob pulled a beer glass from under the bar and pointed to each tap until Nick nodded, drew a beer, and set it before him.

Nick took a sip and stared at his reflection in the mirror when the tightness squeezed his lower right hip. He frowned and rubbed it, arching his back to stretch out the area but not dissipating the feeling. He had forgotten about the tightness until that moment and it annoyed him to find it still lurking in his body. He ignored it after a moment and returned to contemplating his beer.

"Is anyone sitting here?" asked a deep, gravelly voice to his right. Nick turned his head and stared into a pair of pale blue eyes framed by a thick, stained, scraggly white beard of man in his fifties. He was dressed in a dark coat and pants and a white oxford shirt, unbuttoned to mid-chest and showing a yellowing white tank top beneath. Nick shook his head.

The man sat down on the stool and faced Nick. "I've seen you here before, no?"

Nick remembered the man, vaguely, as a background face from the crowd, a regular to whom he had never spoken, never nodded toward, never acknowledged.

"Yeah. I live just around the corner. You're here a lot."

The man smiled and stuck a cheroot into his mouth. "Well, I'm here as often as you, on the surface of it."

Nick smiled and handed him a lighter.

"Thank you."

"No problem."

"Do you want one?" the man asked, motioning to Nick with his cheroot.

"No, thanks. I've got cigarettes."

The man nodded and proffered his right hand. "I'm Mordechai."

Nick shook the man's hand. It was rough, cracked and dry. "Nick. Nice to meet you."

"Do you ever do lemon drop shots?" Mordechai asked.

Nick shrugged. "Yes. Not normally, though. Why?"

Mordechai looked past Nick. "Robert, two lemon drop shots, please. For me and Nick."

Rob nodded and busied himself behind the bar.

"Hey, you don't have to buy me anything."

"No problem, I'm not going anywhere tonight. You?"

Nick paused for a moment and shook his head.

Rob set the drinks down a second later, and both he and Mordechai licked the crook of their palms, sprinkled sugar on the moist spot, and slipped the lemon between thumb and forefinger. Mordechai picked up his shot glass and motioned to Nick.

"To discovery," Mordechai said. Nick nodded, dumped the liquor into his mouth, licked the sugar and bit down on the lemon.

"I noticed you rubbing your side: Are you hurt?"

"No, just tension, I guess."

Mordechai nodded, moved his cheroot from one corner of his mouth to the other and puffed out several cotton balls. Nick looked over his shoulder at the rest of the bar; it was still too early for anyone else to begin filtering in for the happy hour buffet of deep-fried, batter-dipped vegetables and greasy pizza.

"You know, I couldn't help but overhear your conversation here the other day," Mordechai said, taking the small cigar from his mouth and rolling it between his fingertips.

"What conversation?" Nick asked, trying to remember when he had last been in the bar.

"Last week. You were talking with a friend of yours about bad dreams you were having, sleeping problems, that sort of thing."

"Oh, yeah," Nick said as he tried to remember the conversation.

"I think you said something about a monster appearing in your dreams since you were a kid. Am I right?" Mordechai asked.
Nick looked at him. "Why?"

"I'm just wondering, that's all."

"Yeah, that's right" Nick said, taking a sip of beer.

"Do you want another lemon drop shot?"

"No, thanks. I'd better not get drunk before my friends show up," Nick said.

"I think you also said something about a lump on your hip, a lump that you just became aware of, right?"

Nick stared into the man's pale eyes and then at the shaggy, smoke-stained beard that formed a corona around his face. Where had this man been last week, Nick wondered.

"Yeah. It's nothing, though."

"But now it's starting to hurt? Or maybe tingle? Yes?" Mordechai said, lifting his glass and tilting a large mouthful of beer into his mouth.

"I think you need another shot," he said, motioning past Nick for Rob to bring two more. "I'm going to tell you something that you're going to find a little odd. The drink will help."

Nick stared at him and then swiveled on his stool to watch as Rob poured two more shots. He gave Rob a questioning look and rolled his eyes back toward Mordechai, and Rob smiled and rolled his eyes in response, indicating harmlessness. Nick turned back toward Mordechai and figured if the old man was buying, he was willing to drink and listen. He'd listened to strange people as part of the daily grind to dredge news stories up from the muck of ordinariness, and someone buying drinks was a bonus. Rob set the shots down and Mordechai began preparing the crook of his palm, indicating that Nick do the same. A moment later and Nick was tasting citrus and sugar.

"Do you believe that humans are the only sentient being on the planet?" Mordechai asked.

"Sentient or intelligent?" Nick asked.

"Sentient. Dolphins and whales and apes are intelligent, to some degree or another, but sentient they're not," Mordechai said.

"Well, I'm sure some people think differently."

"Just about dolphins and whales and sign-language gorillas," Mordechai said. "Doesn't prove anything, though. They're still not sentient."

"Well, then, I'll say yes, humans are the only sentient beings on the planet."

"Why?"

"Well, if there was another sentient species on the planet, I think they'd have figured out how to deal with us so we didn't eat them or ruin their habitat," Nick said, taking a last drag on his cigarette and stubbing it out. He motioned to Rob for another draft. "I also imagine they would have developed some sort of organized civilization, one we humans would have been long-since aware of."

Mordechai nodded thoughtfully and tugged at his beard while puffing on his cheroot. "What if there was another sentient being and it had figured out how to communicate with us so we didn't destroy it or ruin its habitat?"

"What if?" Nick asked back.

"Well, where would it live, do you think?"

Nick picked up his new beer and tipped the foamy head toward his mouth, earning a moustache he wiped away. "Somewhere we aren't, I suppose. Antarctica, perhaps, and remote areas like the Himalayas, I suppose. Perhaps deep under the sea."

"Still, we'd have probably found them by now, right?" Mordechai asked.

"Maybe we have: Bigfoot might not be a myth," Nick said.

Mordechai pulled his cheroot from his mouth and pointed the wet end at Nick's chest. "What if it could live in you?"

"Me?"

"You." Mordechai stuck the cheroot back into his mouth and puffed deeply.

"You mean humans in general, I suppose, don't you?"

"Both. In you, in me, in human beings."

Nick shook his head. "What could possibly live inside a person? Tape worms? Viruses? Bacteria? We know about all that stuff. None of them are sentient."

"Do you know what a symbiont is?" Mordechai asked and took another long drink from his glass.

"A symbiont?" Nick asked, pausing. "You mean a parasite?"

"In a sense, yes, but even though they are parasites, they have beneficial qualities for the host. A normal parasite just lives off a host until the host dies, and then finds a new host. A symbiont lives in harmony with the host, doing whatever it can to ensure both live," Mordechai said.

"I don't know that I've ever heard of something like that, and I know I've never heard of one living off a human being," Nick replied.

Mordechai shrugged. "Of course not. If you were a sentient symbiont, would you want to be discovered by a species like us? An intelligent, sentient symbiont would know that we would institute mandatory screening so that we could find them and excise them."

"So how would they exist, especially now that we know everything about the human body and how it works?" Nick asked as he looked around the room for Cap or Sarah.

"You'd have to assume they are smart enough to disguise themselves within the body so that they wouldn't be detected--"

"As what? The appendix?" Nick said, cutting Mordechai off.

Mordechai smiled and puffed on his cheroot. "As an innocuous lump of fat misplaced on the side of the body, in your case."

Nick jerked on his stool in surprise and screwed up his face for a half-second. "I think a doctor could tell the difference between a lump of fat and a living creature."

"Certainly, but what if the doctor had one in him and the symbiont recognized the one in you and caused the doctor to say your lump was nothing important?" Mordechai asked.

"Now you're talking mind control. How is this a symbiotic relationship? It sounds like one of those secretive half-baked conspiracy theories," Nick said. He looked away from Mordechai, hoping now that either Sarah or Cap would arrive ahead of schedule.

"Not mind control, exactly, and definitely not the government. But what if symbionts exerted influence on your thoughts as a powerful subcurrent that's always flowing just below the level of your awareness. It monitors everything you're doing to ensure its survival and the survival of its species. One of the things it must do, always, is keep your body above suspicion, especially in the age of modern technology. So it keeps its host healthier than most people, it safeguards against diseases and infections that would cause someone to examine a body too closely," Mordechai said, stubbing out his cheroot and draining his beer. He motioned to Rob for another.

"In the process of being a part of your subconscious, it -- intentionally or not -- mingles its mental presence with yours, altering who you are in whatever ways the consciousness of the symbiont gravitates toward. These elements leech into your personality, your habits, the things you enjoy, whatever," Mordechai said, stopping his explanation as Rob set his new beer down.

"What?" Nick asked.

"Let me put it this way: the symbiont keeps you healthier than the average person, much healthier. It has to to survive. It knows what it's up against because it monitors your consciousness and knows the things you know. It adapts your body in positive ways to ensure that it is not discovered," Mordechai said.

"Listen, nothing could hide in your body, alter your consciousness, and not get discovered. Especially if you can tell when it's doing whatever you just said you can tell it's doing. If you can tell, you can get it stopped," Nick said, stubbing out his cigarette and taking another drink of beer.

"If only it were that easy. But what doctor could you tell this to and trust? If you tell a rational, non-symbiont physician you have one of these, he sends you to a psychiatrist. If you go to a doctor who is a symbiont, he tells you that you are being silly and sends you home," Mordechai said.

"What about car crashes or murder victims? They go through surgeries and autopsies," Nick said.

"Yes, they do, but such procedures would always be done by a symbiont, or a relative of the victim would request otherwise, you see?" Mordechai said.

Nick rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Yeah, right, whatever. Listen, my girlfriend just walked in," Nick said as he saw Sarah walk through the front door and scan the darkened bar. "It was nice talking to you."

Mordechai leaned in close and grabbed his forearm. "Listen, trust no one. Don't tell anybody about this, there is more you need to know and not very much time to tell you."

Nick stared at the man's hand curled around his arm and then looked up into his eyes. Mordechai let go and Nick walked slowly across from the bar and embraced Sarah from behind. She turned as he dropped his arms to his side and sniffed the air coming from his mouth.

"How long have you been here?" she asked.

Nick looked down at his watch. "Just over an hour, I guess. Why?"

"An hour? What've you been doing?"

"Talking with some whacko."

Sarah looked over his shoulder. "Who?"

"The guy with the white beard and black jacket sitting at the bar."

Sarah turned and looked back at him. "Who?"

Nick looked over his shoulder. Mordechai was gone. "He must have gone to the bathroom or something. Some older guy, about fifty or so, thick white beard, bad-fitting suit. Smokes little cigars."

Sarah smiled and looked back at Nick. "Yeah, right. Just the kind of person you'd be talking to in a bar."

"Hey, you weren't here; I had to talk to somebody."

Sarah nodded and narrowed her eyes. "What was his name?"

"Mordechai."

She smiled. "Mordechai?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah. I'd have believed you, maybe, if you'd have said John," Sarah said as she put her purse on a table and sat down.

Nick turned and looked back at the bar. Mordechai, his beer and the empty shot glasses were all gone. He looked back down at Sarah and then back to the bar.

"I'll get us some drinks.".

FIFTEEN

I'm walking down one of the side streets near where Sarah and I live. Here are the homes of the younger professional couples, blue collar workers and elderly people who have lived here since it was a working class neighborhood three decades ago. Some of the streets are still cobblestone, the city having opted not to pave them for reasons nobody knows, but bicyclists want explained. Sarah is on the other side of the street keeping pace with me as we scout for houses with "for sale" signs planted in their front yards. It's fall and the leaves are just beginning coat the lawns with specks of auburn, saffron and gold.

"Hey, over here," she says, her voice clear in the morning air.

I look over and she is standing, arms akimbo, next to a small sign that says "open house today." I look both ways and cross the street. There is no traffic at the moment because everyone who would be driving is currently in church. The rest are reading the paper, drinking coffee and contemplating Sunday afternoon football games. Sarah is gone when I reach the other side, and as I look around for her I notice the front door of the house is open. I walk across the lawn kicking up the fallen remnants of spring's rebirth and listening to the crinkles and cracks they make under my shoes.

Inside the house, shafts of light are staked through the windows into brightly glowing squares on the floors and furniture. I listen and hear nothing.

"Sarah?" I call out, hushing my breath to listen.

"I'm in here," she says back. Her voice seems to come from everywhere.

I walk through the living room and pick up a few of the framed family photos scattered on mantels and end tables. Though the family depicted in them is large, only one woman is common in them. She ages more in each photo as the quality of the photographic paper improves. In one very sharply focused picture she is alone on an easy chair holding a Yorkshire terrier, her face a determined smile. When I enter the kitchen, the woman is sitting at a round wooden table with a mug before her and a soggy tea bag resting in the bowl of a teaspoon. She smiles as my feet slap against the linoleum floor.

"You're here for the open house?" she asks, smiling and tilting her head.

I nod. "Yes, have you seen my girlfriend? I think she's in here, somewhere."

"Oh, I'm sure she's in one of the other rooms by now," the woman says, lifting her mug for a sip. "Why don't you look around? I'm sure you'll like it."

"Okay," I say and walk out of the kitchen through a door leading to a dining room. I stop and look around at the highly polished table and the high-backed chairs.

"Sarah, where are you?" I ask in an even, but loud tone.

"I'm in here, now," she says.

"Where?"

Nothing. At the back of the dining room is a small hall leading to the right, and I follow it to a door which opens into the back yard. I look around and see a garage at the back of the yard. The windows on the garage are dark and dusty, and the door doesn't look to have been pulled open in years. It would take a couple of weekends to get that back into usable shape, and with winter coming it would have to wait till spring. I walk across the back yard and turn to look back at the house: the blue on the back side of the house is pale from years of facing the rising sun. Just to my right is a square of cement about ten feet on a side. Set directly in the middle is a rusted iron door which has leached rust into the cement around the frame.

I pull the door upward and the light from the morning sun streams around my shoulders and down the staircase, creating an elongated shadow of myself with a small balloon head. At the bottom of the steps I'm surprised to find that the chamber is bathed in gray light that reaches into the corners, apparently all of it squeezed in through the open door above me. The floor is a low pile carpet in apartment tan and the furniture is velour-upholstered davenports and wicker chairs. Against the far wall, ensconced between a pair of lamps, is what appears to be a sarcophagus, a seven-foot long, three-foot high construction of smooth marble. I look back over my shoulder, suddenly expecting the iron door to slam shut and the room to be bathed in a crimson glow, but there is nothing but silence and gray light.

Next to one of the lamps is a lectern with an open register upon it. Reading the names I recognize most of them to have been from the same family. I pick up the pen and sign the next available space, take one last look around, and leave the underground chamber. The door makes the barest of noise when I let it drop into the frame. I head back into the kitchen and the woman is now rinsing her cup in the sink.

"So, you saw where Edgar is, now?" she says without looking over her shoulder.

"Edgar?"

"My husband," she says and nods at the cement square visible through the window above the sink.

"Uhh, yeah. I guess I did," I say, looking around the kitchen. "Has my girlfriend come down?"

"Down from where?" she asks as she grabs a towel and dries the inside of the tea mug.

"Isn't she upstairs?"

"I don't know who you're talking about," she says as she sidesteps to a cupboard and pulls open a cabinet door. She places the cup onto a shelf and turns around. "You'll be okay with people coming over to visit Edgar and me, when we're gone, won't you?"

"What?" I ask. "Where's Sarah?"

"I only ask because it's a term of the sale. If you want to buy the house, you have to be okay with our relatives coming over to visit us. I'll be down there with him when I'm gone and I guess the kids will want to come over once in a while," she says, staring at me.

I look over my shoulder and make a half-turn toward the doorway. "Sarah, are you in here?" I call out.

"You can look at it as a joke. As my husband always used to say: You can't expect to buy an old home without some skeletons in the closet," she says and snorts out a small laugh.

"I don't know that I'm going to buy this house, but

"Nick, wake up, dammit," Sarah said angrily.

Nick shook his head and rolled over toward the buzzing clock radio and tapped the alarm off. "When did you switch it from the radio to buzzer?"

Sarah shook her head angrily and fell back onto her pillow. "Jesus, Nick, what the hell's going on in your head that you can't wake up to an alarm anymore?"

Nick looked over at the clock. "I guess it's Monday."

Sarah rolled onto her side away from him and pulled the sheet up over her head. Nick rubbed his eyes, slid out from the covers and trudged across the apartment for the bathroom. After dressing and downing a cup of coffee, Nick walked back into the bedroom, flipped on the overhead light and announced in a firm, loud, nearly-devoid-of-anger voice: "Time to get up: It's Monday."

He then turned, stepped through the living room and banged out the front door and spilled onto the street.

Officer Claypool drank his coffee in silence while Nick flipped through the previous night's wrongdoings and acts of stupidity. Two public drunks, one vandalism, an abandoned car set afire: nothing of importance. Nick shook his head and turned the pages of the accident reports, barely letting the fender benders register. He hung the clipboard back on the wall.

"Hey, wait a second," Claypool said as Nick moved toward the door.

"What?" Nick asked quickly.

"Another bad morning, huh?" Claypool said with a slight smile as he rounded the corner of the desk and walked up to Nick. He held a brown manila envelope out. "Detective Tagget dropped this off for you."

Nick looked down at the envelope and took it. "Thanks."

Claypool shrugged and turned around. Nick went back to his car and drove it several blocks before stopping at the edge of a nearby park. He turned down the radio and picked the envelope up from the passenger seat and ripped it open. A yellow sticky-note was attached to the top sheet of paper.

"Do not let anyone know you received these reports. Against policy. Call the NYPD white collar crime unit and ask for Lt. Derrick Morgan. Tell him you want their releases on art thefts."

Inside was a stack of police reports. He checked the first and last one and saw they covered the previous seven months. He scanned the top couple in the stack, each detailing stolen artwork from one area or another. Nick didn't recognize very any of the stolen paintings, but the reports, which he recognized as the ones not publicly released, listed the insured value of the paintings, their owners, from where and when they were stolen, and how the case was resolved. None were solved.

Nick looked at the loss figures on a couple of reports and whistled: some were several million dollars. Most were of just one or two pieces. In many cases, the work had been returned after a few weeks. There was no mention on any of the reports of ransoms being paid for the return of any of the paintings. Nick stared out the window of his car and smiled. This was the way he imagined it was done at the New York Times or Washington Post: someone in a high place giving out just the right information at just the right time.

"Big city, here I come," Nick said, shoved the car into gear and tore through the city streets for the newsroom.

He walked up the steps to the city room with his head high and his spirits buoyed by dreams of instant fame, Pulitzer prizes and a spot on the investigative reporting staff of a premier paper. He crossed through the room and stopped at his editor's desk. John made a few keystrokes and looked up at him through his glasses.

"Got something for today?" he asked.

Nick shook his head. "No, but I need to talk to you after deadline."

John nodded, yawned, and resumed staring at his computer screen.

Nick walked over to his desk, pulled out the stack of files and began reading. The top reports were all from a half-year ago. Each detailed a theft of a painting from some wealthy collector. In each case, the painting was returned and the case closed. One of the paintings that had been stolen, a Pissaro, had been valued at just over $3 million. Nick sighed and drank deeply from his coffee. His phone rang.

"News room, Nick Case."

"What's wrong with you, Nick?" Sarah asked, her voice a hush in his ear.

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. You can't sleep. You can't wake up. You sleep walk. You're starting to drink almost every night. And now you're storming out of the apartment in the morning like it's my fault you can't wake up," Sarah said, her voice flat.

Nick swiveled on his chair and stared out at the crowds working their way off buses and down the street.

"Me? I don't know what's wrong with me," he said softly, "but you don't have to be a jerk about it in the morning. I can't help it I'm not sleeping very good, but you don't have to bust my balls about it."

"Is there something wrong? Is there something I should know about?"

Nick stared blankly at the facade of the building directly across the street and took a sip of coffee. He looked over his shoulder but no one was paying attention to him.

"No, everything's fine," he said. "I just had a weird dream last night is all."

"About the monster?"

"No. Just a weird dream. I'll tell you about it later. You were in it."

"Are you sure there's nothing wrong, Nick? You're acting strange anymore."

Nick licked his lips and stared down at the stack of police reports on his desk. "No, I don't know. Listen. This isn't the place for me to talk about this--"

"Is there something to talk about?"

Nick rolled his eyes in frustration. "No, but this isn't the place or the time for it. I'm fine, I'm just, ... I'm just having bad dreams. That's all. Listen, can we talk when we get home?"

Sarah sighed on the other end of the phone. "I guess so... hey--."

"What?"

"I love you," she said.

Nick flicked his eyes to either side to see if anyone was around. "I love you, too."

They said good-bye and hung up.

Nick set aside the police reports and dialed information for New York City, obtained the appropriate police bureau and asked for Derrick Morgan. He was put on hold until a generic public affairs officer came on and Nick explained what he wanted, saying that he had heard about some art thefts in New York City that matched the same characteristics police he knew found. After a half-an-hour, and three more officers, Nick was told that whatever reports they had would be faxed to him by the end of the day. Nick hung up the phone triumphantly and looked at the wall clock: it wasn't even 10:30 and he was pulling the first strings that would tie his story together. In a week, maybe two, he would have enough to write the story and sit on it until Tagget gave him the go-ahead. Surely, things had to be close or Tagget wouldn't have tipped him off. Everything was in his grasp, all he needed was to begin lining up the local sources for interviews and background.

And then he saw Sophia leftover's name listed atop a police report filed at one of the city's precincts. Two months ago she had had two Josh Sammers nudes stolen from her studio. Their value had been estimated at two-thousand dollars apiece, and each had been returned just weeks ago and the case closed as solved, stolen property returned. The investigating officer had even written at the bottom of the report that the thieves "either had a guilty conscience or couldn't fence the product." Nick rolled his chair away from his desk and stared out the window, desperately wanting both a drink and a cigarette.

"Hey, Nick. You wanted to talk after deadline?" John said from next to him.

Nick turned and looked past John's waist at the news room and the other reporters who were either on the phone, typing, or engaged in conversations over coffee. His stomach sank.

"Never mind. I thought I had something, but it turned out to be nothing," Nick said, looking up at John and loosening tie.

John raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "That'll happen."

Nick watched as John walked back to his desk. Nick swiveled his chair and looked through the window. Outside, pedestrians were crossing sidewalks and office-workers were heading for early lunches. Nick shook his head and swore under his breath as he called up Google and typed in Sophia 's name.

"What the fuck did you just get yourself into?"

SIXTEEN

Sarah had already come and gone by the time Nick arrived home from his after-work gym session; she had left a note on the coffee table saying she wouldn't be back until later in the evening. It was a brief note. Too brief, Nick thought as he held it in his hand while pouring himself a glass of Scotch in the kitchen. She normally wrote more. This merely said she'd be out until later. He tilted the glass toward his mouth and tasted the smoky burn of the whiskey as it lapped over his tongue.

He sat on the couch in the living room, lit a cigarette and pondered the translucent brown liquor in his glass. There couldn't possibly be enough Scotch to blot out the dreams, the lump on his side, the pains in his gut, his infidelity and the bizarre theory that an alien being lived somewhere inside him. Could it merely be that he was turning thirty soon, unmarried, living with a woman to whom he was not wed? Worse, what was on that piece of paper that artist gave Sarah? Nick took another sip from the glass.

He looked down at the note Sarah had left behind. What if she were out with Josh Sammers? What if Josh Sammers was somehow part of the art conspiracy and, when it was finally exposed and written about in the competing paper, it turned out that both he and Sarah and been unfaithful to each other with people involved in the conspiracy? There would be no awards, no hiring by a major national paper. No joining an investigative team and jetting around the globe. He would most certainly be fired, possibly prosecuted, and lose Sarah as well. It was just too Byzantine to consider, the branches of his sudden entanglement twisting and turning into each other until the trunk of truth was lost.

There was no way to suddenly confront Sarah with all this, to tell her about his investigation and his infidelity and then ask her if the paper given to her had led her astray, too. What if the paper had been nothing but a doodle? What if she were only out with a friend in need of sudden consolation? His sudden outpouring would certainly ruin everything and he would end up alone, without Sarah. He had to wait, see where the threads led, find out if he could be implicated in the conspiracy. Maybe, he thought, no one was keeping track of Sophia leftover's every movement. When indicted, maybe she wouldn't mention anything.

But it would come out in trial if he wrote about it. Somehow, she would tell someone she had slept with him. If no one else but her knew about it, though, he could deny it. It would be easy to lie about it, say he had merely interviewed her in a bar and gone home. Maybe mention he had gone into the gallery and seen the two Sammers paintings. He could deny everything else. Nobody else had been there. He went back to the kitchen and refilled his glass. Through the kitchen window he could see the coffee shop patio. It was crowded with caffeine-, cigarette- and chocolate-crazed patrons. He took a sip from his drink and stared at the distant scene and the people looking for a late afternoon boost to get them through until bedtime.

"Oh, god, this can't be happening to me," he said as he looked through the window.

He went into the bedroom, stripped off his gym clothes and sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear. The room, with the exception of a few small framed photos, had been decorated by Sarah. It was her inner sanctum, not his: the place she retreated to after they argued; the place she felt comfortable within. To him it was just a bedroom, except now it seemed to represent, in a floral motif, everything he held dear about her. Her softness, her scent, the way she always seemed in bloom. His room was down the hall in the spare bedroom turned study, a room crowded with bookshelves and his personal computer. A room with bare walls and a dilapidated chair he refused to replace because he had had it so long he couldn't bear to throw it out. The new desk chair she had gotten him last Christmas was sitting before her computer in the living room, left there the very day he assembled it. He shook his head at the thought. The joke that day was that she had bought him a gift for hesrelf, even though he knew that was untrue. He hated his chair, had often complained about how uncomfortable it was, and then had turned down a chair in which he would have sat more comfortably. He never complained anymore.

He filled his glass again and went back to the living room, picked up the phone and dialed.

"Hey, Cap, it's Nick," Nick said as he stood in the living room, receiver in one hand, glass in the other, looking out the windows at the final moments of the sun's descent.

"What're you, drunk?" Cap asked. "You're slurring your words."

Nick looked at his glass. "Well, maybe. I'm drinking on an empty stomach."

"You just got home from the gym an hour ago, what's the matter? Is everything okay?"

Nick stared at the last shard of crimson on the horizon.

"Yeah, I guess. I just feel weird."

"About what?"

Nick looked around the living room. The television was a blank screen, the stereo silent, and the bookshelves made no effort to help. What could he say?

"Can you meet me tomorrow after work? I think I need to bounce some things off somebody."

"Well, sure. Are you sure you don't want to talk now? You sound like you've been drinking a lot."

Nick looked at his glass. "No, not tonight. I just need to sit around and think."

"You sure? I can come over, now."

Nick looked out the living room windows at the now inky sky. "Yeah, I'm sure. Tonight, I just need to pass out and forget about this nonsense."

"What? Are you worrying about turning thirty?" Cap asked, his voice light.

"Yeah, sort of."

"Well, then, get drunk and I'll talk to you tomorrow. I'll call you, okay?"

"Yeah, call me."

Nick hung up and tilted the last third of the glass into his mouth -- the Scotch filled is cheeks but no longer burned -- and swallowed. He walked toward the bedroom, dropping the empty glass on the carpet in the living room. It was nine o'clock and Sarah still had not returned.

SEVENTEEN

So, this is what you thought life would be like, Nick? Easy, pat, understandable? You thought you were different than the other six billion people on this planet just because you were you? What were you thinking? Look around: all those people you see every day do exactly the same thing you do. They all succeed. They all fail. They all think they're caught up in things too extraordinary to detail. Everyone, Nick, thinks they have a life like no other life. Pity, isn't it, to find yourself succumbing to the same old plot lines?

And don't you find it odd, you, a newspaperman, to be caught up in one of those sordid webs about which you so like to read and about which you wish you could write? But, obviously, you're just like everyone else. The same hopes and dreams, strengths and weaknesses. Too bad.

And what of that paper given to Sarah? A phone number? Perhaps. Maybe an address? Has she already met him for dinner, drinks and, well... Nick, you trust her, don't you? You want to marry her. Almost. Usually. Sometimes. Well, what do you want? Sophia ?

You almost made it through this one, almost managed to forget what had gone before, to disentangle yourself, to pretend things were different. But webs are sticky, and this one clings to the bottom of your soul.

Now, of course, you must begin to deceive.

EIGHTEEN

Nick awoke to the alarm, shut it off, and called in sick. At the point where his spine connected with his head two railroad spikes had been driven through his skull and were intermittently charged with electricity. He guzzled two glasses of water, a matching number of aspirin and trudged back into the bedroom and slipped beneath the sheets. He was nine-tenths of the way to sleep when Sarah tapped him on the shoulder three times.

"Huh?" he asked groggily.

"You're supposed to stay up after turning off the alarm, not go back to sleep."

He kept his eyes closed and rolled his head over toward her. "I called off today. I need to sleep more."

"A half-bottle of Scotch will do that to you," Sarah said, rolling out of bed and leaving the room.

He re-awoke three hours later, the bed sheets tangled around his legs and two of the four pillows pushed onto the floor. He pulled on his clothes from the night before and shuffled down the street to the corner coffee shop. The patio was empty and he was glad for the solitude. It went well with his triple-shot cappuccino, dwindling hangover and swelling self-pity. Soon, the patio would close and the people he stared at from his kitchen window would huddle behind steamed-up windows. He looked up at the window, drew in a sigh and expelled it.

"Nick?" a burred voice questioned from his right. "Nick, well good-morning."

Nick twisted his neck and looked up into the stained beard of Mordechai. He was wearing the same black jacket and pants, only today he had a worn, faded blue silk scarf wrapped around his neck and tucked beneath the lapels. Nick smiled weakly up at Mordechai he put a thick hand on the back of one of the chairs and pulled it away from the table.

"You don't mind if I join you, do you?" he asked, pausing now that the chair was fully dislodged from beneath the table.

Nick shook his head no and motioned for him sit.

"Aren't you supposed to be at work?" Mordechai asked as his hands searched through an interior network of blazer and shirt pockets, produced a thin, rectangular box of cheroots and filched one from within. He did another series of first-base coach signals before producing a pack of matches.

"Not today; I took off."

"Ahh," Mordechai said, nodded once and put flame to the end of his thin cigar. "So, have you thought about what we talked about?"

"No," Nick said, sipping his coffee and wiping a thin moustache of froth from his lip.

"Yeah, I know what you must have thought afterwards. That I must be some sort of drunken psychiatric out-patient in need of booster shots," Mordechai said.

"Something like that."

"Yeah, it's weird to find out about. Nobody ever believes right away."

"I'm sure some of us never believe," Nick said.

Mordechai smiled. "Well, no. If you've got one, why wouldn't you believe? I mean, you can see it, sense it, feel it. No big mystery there. The people who don't believe are the ones without one, and they only don't believe because, hell, who'd tell somebody a story like that? Besides, you don't want them to find out. I mean, I don't want to be a government experiment, do you?"

Nick stared past Mordechai's shoulder at the traffic pausing at the red light. A woman in a blue sedan was applying lipstick and looking in the rear view mirror.

"No, I guess not," Nick said flatly without looking back at Mordechai.

"Do you have time?"

"For what?"

"To come with me up the street to the bookstore. I want to show you something."

Nick rubbed his eyes and looked into Mordechai's stained beard. He shouldn't go, he knew that. He wasn't up for the agitation, but something inside him urged him to go.

"Sure," Nick said.

Nick sat at a table inside the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Murray Ave. sipping coffee he had purchased from the coffee bar while Mordechai pawed over a bookrack near the science and history shelves. Nick couldn't see what Mordechai was specifically looking for, but imagined a selection of books on the paranormal, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. He drummed his fingers on the wooden table top and stared at the customers flipping through magazines nearby. Mordechai strolled over to the table and set down a stack of books, an eclectic collection of anthropology, history and what looked to be fiction. Nick straightened up in his chair.

"Like I think I started saying the other day, these symbionts take time to develop in the body. It takes them decades to mature and reach consciousness, a moment I call the `Awakening,'" Mordechai said. "It depends on the person, of course, but from what I've been able to determine the average symbiont becomes awake sometime around a person's 30th birthday, give or take a half-dozen years."

"Uh-huh," Nick said.

"Now look in here," Mordechai said, pushing a book across the table and opening it. "In this book is a collection of what this author considers to be the world's most influential persons. If you read through this, you'll find that most of the people suddenly became so-called geniuses near their 30th birthday, give or take a few years."

Nick frowned and looked down as Mordechai flipped to a page and tapped it. "Look. Jesus, of course, revolutionized religious thought but was essentially a nobody until he turned 30," Mordechai tapped the page's illustration of Jesus. "Look through it and you'll see the similarities."

Nick turned a few pages, skimming the names from the section heads and finding most of the people to have been religious leaders, statesmen, philosophers or inventors. He stopped on one and scanned the passage quickly. "This one on Leonardo Da Vinci doesn't say anything about his age when he suddenly turned brilliant, it just lists what he did and what it led to."

"That's not the point, you have to research their biographies to figure out which ones have similar age patterns for their success," Mordechai said.

"What about child geniuses like Mozart?"

"What about them? I never said everyone with a symbiont became a legendary figure. Nor did I say that every legendary figure had a symbiont. Not everybody that's good with math is a scientist, some are mere card counters," Mordechai said curtly. "You have to look at a preponderance of evidence, though, and then you have to look within to understand what the symbiont is doing to you."

Nick nodded and turned his palm upward to indicate Mordechai should continue.

"Listen, if what you said to your friend in the bar is true, then you definitely are in the early stages of the `Awakening' and you have to understand what you're up against. You don't want voices in your head you don't understand and psychologists can't squelch; you have to learn how to deal with it," Mordechai said.

"How's this going to help?" Nick said, nodding toward the books.

"By telling you what can happen, you can try to control it. You have to get in touch with what the symbiont has to offer and channel that into your own life," Mordechai said. "If you look into these lives, you can find out what undid them, what aspect of their humanity couldn't keep up with the silent demands of the symbiont. They have helped people immensely, but often that help has tormented the human part of them."

"What about an example from modern times?" Nick asked.

"Like Earnest Hemingway, perhaps? Blossoming young writer becomes genius re-inventor of American fiction just before he turns 30. He goes on to redefine prose and turn out, well, a variety of awesome and mediocre novels. But the voices were always there, he called them having a case of the Black Ass. Eventually, it drove him to ever increasing drinking and, ultimately, stays in mental institutions and suicide," Mordechai said.

"How do you know it was a symbiont? Did you ever meet him?" Nick asked.

Mordechai shrugged and shook his head. "No, I never met him. But I've studied him and I know it to be true."

Nick looked past Mordechai at a young woman in her late 20s flipping through a copy of a woman's magazine. She brushed back some strands of her chin-length auburn hair and looked up from the magazine and stared at Nick and smiled. Nick smiled back and looked at Mordechai.

"What did it do for you?" Nick asked.

"It turned me from just a hack violinist into a symphony player," Mordechai said. "Until I was in my early twenties, I was just an average, run-of-the-mill violinist earning a living as a cobbler in my father's shoe shop. And then, one day, it happened: My fingers raced and my bowing sharpened to a precision no amount of practice had never brought me near."

"So that's why you're not famous in any way I'd know about," Nick said sarcastically. "Still playing?"

Mordechai shook his head. "No, I stopped ten years ago.

"Why?"

Mordechai shrugged. "Well, that was the extent of my career, I guess. My symbiont isn't talented enough to make me great, just good, I suppose. Nobody really knows the full extent of how the relationship works. Sometimes, they don't work out at all, slowly driving both minds toward insanity."

"Like your Hemingway example of greatness?" Nick said with a smirk to his voice.

Mordechai stroked his beard. "Yes, perhaps."

Nick was taking some entertainment from the expedition to the bookstore and the questioning of Mordechai, although he wasn't sure if his questions should be mocking in tone or serious.

"How many people do these things drive nuts?"

"Who knows? There are some who think all of the insane are failed mergers, but no way to find out without ultimately exposing the symbiont presence."

"That's quite a convenient dilemma you've got there with your symbiont-thingies, isn't it? You've got all sorts of theories but no way to prove anything or, rather, the only way to prove anything is the surest course you can't take because it would expose the things to everyone. I got that right?" Nick said.

"Listen, Nick, I wouldn't have even bothered to tell you any of this if I hadn't overheard you telling your story about your strange lump," Mordechai said, leaning in close. "What you've got happening to you is a typical failure to integrate. The symbiont's location is off, which is why it's showing where it is, rather than embedded deeper. If this continues ... nothing good will come of it."

"Well, Mordechai, my coffee is empty and I think I'm going to head on home for a shower and maybe a long afternoon with my PlayStation," Nick said, standing and stepping away from the table.

"No, Nick, please. I have much more to tell you, and if you continue down this path it won't go well for you," Mordechai said. "Your human side will fight against the symbiont, and you'll become an alcoholic or drug addict."

Nick sighed slightly and looked past Mordechai at the woman. She was now sitting on an easy chair at the end of one of the magazine racks and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. She saw Nick catch her glance and smiled quickly before turning her attention to the magazine on her lap.

"I thought you said these things were beneficial to you. If they drive you insane or to addiction that doesn't sound too good," Nick said.

"Yes, they are beneficial to your physical body in that they keep a large number of debilitating illnesses, diseases and cancers from invading it. If you become an alcoholic, the symbiont keeps you from liver failure, somehow, but the alcohol wears down your mind until it's dull, as any drug would," Mordechai said, his voice full of weariness. "Which is the whole point: Two consciousness working in the same space can be difficult to manage. So, you see, they must merge. The symbiont must be awoken."

Nick motioned to the books. "I thought you said there wasn't anything written about symbionts."

"There isn't."

"Then what's with all these books? I mean, I'm not going to believe these bugs exist just because you say a lot of famous people must have had them because of some odd subset of similarities," Nick said. "I'll bet if I go home, I can find hundreds of web pages with all sorts of wacky details about these so-called symbiont organisms."

Mordechai shook his head and looked down at the table. "Do you remember when I asked you if humans were the only sentient species on the planet?"

"Yeah."

"And I told you that humans were, with the exception of this symbiont creature."

"Yeah."

"What if I told you there had been another sentient species on the planet?"

"Like what?"

"A being almost exactly like man, but not human."

"You said gorillas weren't sentient. And not dolphins or whales, either."

"Whales and dolphins are just sea mammals. I'm talking about another species that arose around the time of Homo Sapiens but was not us, not human," Mordechai said.

"What?"

Mordechai pulled an anthropology book from the stack and slid it across the table. Next to it he put a novel. "I'm talking about Neanderthal man."

"Huh? What are you talking about? Neanderthals are on the evolutionary chart, I've seen it. They're right there next to Cro-Magnon man or something like that," Nick said.

"Evolution is a scientific theory, Nick, not a scientific fact. There's no absolute reason to think that one species mutated into the next. That's what the scientists used to think. Now they think something else. They think Neanderthal man was an entirely different branch, not human, like us, coming from a certain chain of beings, but a different, intelligent, sentient being that coincided with humans for a brief period of time long ago," Mordechai said.

Nick looked at the books before him and then at the auburn-haired woman flipping through different magazines. His head swam.

"Okay, so some scientist thinks that and writes a book about it. What does that prove about these symbiont things?" Nick asked.

"It proves they can exist, one; and two, why they won't let anyone know of their existence," Mordechai said.

"I don't know if it proves either."

Mordechai tapped the books. "You've got to understand this, and I know it sounds extraordinary, but you have to listen and believe: If symbionts are real -- and they are -- then they certainly learned how to stay alive, and that was definitely not something Neanderthal man learned in his dealings with humans," Mordechai said. "Current research indicates that the Neanderthals were wiped out by Homo Sapiens in an ongoing battle for dominance of the food. Rather than cooperating, humans killed off another sentient species so that we could take over. It only follows that we would do the same if symbionts were exposed.

"Think about it. The symbionts were here to witness the tenacity of our species for ensuring we are at the top of the pile. Neanderthal man created musical instruments and tools, only he wasn't equipped with the brainpower of his Homo Sapiens neighbors, and was wiped out by them," Mordechai said. "It only stands to reason they'd stay quiet."

"So, that's why everyone with one of these has kept quiet? Because they don't want to be examined by scientists and doctors trying to find symbionts?"

"Essentially, but it's more complicated than that. They'd have burned you at the stake as a witch or sorcerer in the past. Today, you'd die on an operating table or in a psych ward," Mordechai said.

"But what about affecting the way I think? Wouldn't I detect something else trying to change my mind about things?"

Mordechai smiled. "I suppose some people hear voices."

"So what good does it do for a symbiont to take over a body and then send the host to a psychiatric hospital?"

Mordechai shrugged. "It would do none, although I'm sure it happens all too frequently. But that's not what I meant when I said it influences your consciousness."

Nick looked around the book shop for a moment, using the rows of shelves and pile carpeting to bring him back into the real world. Mordechai continued.

"What it does is enhance some portion of your personality. If you were a good leader, it would make you better. If you were a great artist, it would make you a master. If you were a poor athlete, it would make you a good athlete. It all depends on the character of the symbiont," Mordechai explained. "Like humans, they are sentient, intelligent, and gravitate toward certain things as dictated by their personality."

Nick sat back down and stared at Mordechai. Something didn't make sense and Nick had figured it out.

"Okay, so how do they reproduce? If one of them is in me, male or female or whatever, how does it reproduce and get its offspring into another body?"

Mordechai shrugged. "To know that, you'd have to be able to study them. And since they don't want to be discovered, they don't allow that to happen."

"How convenient. And how did you come by all this un-findable information?"

Mordechai tapped his head. "I have on in me. It told me."

"I don't know. I only know that you can tell when one is reaching the Awakening. But if you don't know it is being awoke, you can't do anything about it," Mordechai said and stood. "Read those and you'll understand a little more. I have to go, now, but I'm sure we'll talk again very soon."

Nick looked up at him. "Wait. Why are you even bothering to tell me this? What's the point?"

Mordechai placed his palms on the table and leaned in close to Nick. "You are about to go through the `Awakening.' You need to know you are not going insane and there's not going to be anybody out there who'd believe you if you told them what was really happening to you. There are no people out there to help you. Remember that."

"What about you?" Nick asked.

"What could I do?" Mordechai said. "It's not like giving birth. It's not physical, it's mental."

"One more thing," Nick said quickly. "Can it be stopped?"

Mordechai stood up and shook his head. "No, but alcohol, narcotics, pills, ... all of that can be used to keep it subdued, to stunt its growth, but never fully, and probably not all the time. You have to sleep, you know, and your dreams are not always just dreams. Sometimes, they are messages from deep within you."

Mordechai turned and shuffled away from the table, looking down at the girl with auburn hair as he passed. She looked up at him and then over at Nick, smiled quickly and returned to her magazine. Nick pulled at the pile of books and one tumbled from the stack toward him. It was a book on dream interpretation.

NINETEEN

Nick had spent the afternoon wandering down his neighborhood's streets trying to process why he was even allowing himself to consider Mordechai's version of how life on planet earth really worked. He had sat silently for over an hour in the cemetery several blocks from his apartment, staring at the rows of acid-rain stained tombstones jutting out of the grass. Had anybody beneath the ground ever faced a dilemma similar to his? The silence of the graves only allowed him to think more about his problems, both real and imagined.

After Mordechai had left him in the bookstore, Nick had flipped through the dream book and found nothing on the topics of underground mausoleums, duplicate realities or, on a whim, symbionts. There had been a reference to monsters, though. To be chased by a monster meant bad luck in the future; to kill a monster meant just the opposite. There was nothing on being eternally stalked.

There in the afternoon sunlight, sitting on a bench in the middle of a sea of gravestones, his problems were neither more solvable nor less threatening. He had tried to bring tears to his eyes in the hope that a good cry in such a forlorn location would cleanse his spirit, but the most he could bring up was a plaintive sigh which made him feel pathetic. He smoked another cigarette and walked back to his apartment.

He walked in the front door with the mail and stopped short when he saw Sarah sitting on the couch reading a magazine. He looked down at his watch, she was home almost two hours early, and dropped the mail on the coffee table. She closed her magazine, lit a cigarette and licked her lips. Nick smiled weakly and sat down on the chair opposite the couch.

"So, do you want to tell me what's been going on the last two months?" Sarah asked, her voice calm and firm with no hesitation between the words.

"What do you mean? Nothing's going on."

Sarah tried not to scowl. "You were certainly going to tell Dave something. He left three messages on the machine today asking for you to call him so you could meet when he gets off work. What can you tell him that you can't tell me?" Sarah asked, taking a quick drag on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out quickly. "Are you having an affair?"

"No," Nick said quickly, instinctively, and then wondered if he had answered too quickly. He drew in a breath. "No. It's nothing like that."

Sarah let out a little of the tension that had been bunched up in her shoulders. She ran a hand through her hair and pulled it behind her head. "Then what is it like, Nick? All of the sudden you're having nightmares; you're drinking all the time. For Christ's sake, last night I come home and find you passed out, an empty glass on the floor and an almost empty bottle of whiskey sitting on the kitchen counter. That's not who you are, Nick, so something must be going on."

Nick stared at her and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, wondering why Dave hadn't called it. It was off. He shook his head a millimeter to either side and turned his cellular phone on, and set it on the table. Sarah had come home early for this conversation and he owed her some sort of an explanation. Just which one, he wasn't sure.

"It's not going to make any sense."

"Try me," Sarah said softly.

He stared out the window behind her and at the branches on the tree, wondering how to string some sort of sense into a stream of stories that intersected crazily and in ways he wasn't sure he believed connected. There was no way he could make sense to her of how his nightmares were rooted in a parasitic life form living inside him and trying to gain a presence in his consciousness. And then try to connect that with an underground art counterfeiting ring he was investigating and had become unwittingly connected to by having sex with one of the suspects. Well...

"I guess it just has to do with, well, you, us, my job, our life, I don't know," Nick said, the words jumbled as they came out. "This is hard to explain."

Sarah leaned forward on the edge of the couch. "I'm listening."

So Nick concocted a story so close to real he could almost believe it. He was nearly thirty, living with Sarah, afraid for some unknown reason to get married -- "And I do want that, Sarah, I do" -- just as he was working on what could be the biggest story of his career. And then he explained the art theft ring and how he had stumbled onto an investigation and gained the confidence of the lead investigator but that he couldn't print anything, yet. He told her that added extra pressure because he wasn't sure what the competition was up to and, stringing his fantasies closer to reality, what it would mean to them if he broke this story and was able to get a much better job somewhere else only to find out that she wouldn't want to move with him. So his future possible success came backward in time to disrupt his relationship now, making him a little bit more afraid than normal to go the next step because he wasn't sure what it would do to the relationship in the future. After all, he said, she had the job she always wanted and he was only working at one of the lower rungs on his career ladder.

"So I guess that's just causing all these weird nightmares because I haven't been able to talk about it because I've been, I don't know, too unsure how I could talk about it and make sense of it. I still don't think I have," Nick said, pausing, wondering if this moment also gave him an introduction he had been seeking, "and then..."

Sarah tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "And then, what?"

Nick shook his head slightly.

"What?" she said softly.

"And then, well, I saw," Nick pursed his lips. "Well, I wonder, been wondering, what that artist Sammers gave you that night. I mean, he seemed so interested in you and it seemed like, I don't know, like you were flirting with each other and he gave you his number or something and I thought, maybe, I don't, well..."

Sarah smiled and let out a small, barely audible laugh. "What? You thought I was going to have an affair with Josh Sammers?" she asked, obviously amused.

Nick shrugged.

She smiled wider. "You are nuts. The last type of guy I'd even date, let alone cheat on you with, would be some semi-talented, over-confident artist who is well known for his sex addiction to blondes. Really."

"So, what did he give you?"

"His number, but only because I told him my boss was interested in buying one of his pieces for the office."

"Oh," Nick said plaintively.

Sarah walked over to Nick and knelt on the floor before him. She reached out and took his hands in hers and stared up at him. "You don't have to be afraid of what I'm going to do. I'm going to be here. I love you," she said and smiled.

Nick smiled and stared back down into her eyes. Somewhere he couldn't pinpoint on his lower right side, a small tingling burn fanned out across his hip and, for a moment, he thought he heard someone deep in his brain calling him a liar.

"Listen, I've got to go meet Cap for a couple of beers," he said, standing up and walking back to the bedroom. He returned a moment later and looked around the room.

"Have you seen my wallet?"

"No?" Sarah said and shook her head.

"Shit. I wonder if I left it on the table at the bookstore," Nick said as he spun a slow turn in the middle of the living room and scanning the flat surfaces.

"Was there any money in it?" Sarah asked.

"No," Nick said flatly. "Do you have any cash? I'll use my passport if I need an ID."

"Your passport? I didn't know you had a passport," Sarah said.

"I went to Spain five years ago," Nick said abruptly. "I showed you the pictures, remember?"

"Oh, yeah, you getting laid in Barcelona," Sarah said. "I remember the pictures: You and some girl with dark hair. I forgot you had a life before me." Sarah reached for her purse and pulled out a twenty. "You're not going to get drunk, tonight, are you?"

Nick smiled. "Not on twenty dollars."

And then he sat on a barstool and told Cap the same altered story he had told Sarah, once again he was unsure why he had omitted the entire portion with Mordechai and intra-body alien life forms. He knew why he had omitted Sophia , but he thought he should have spun a humorous story out of the meetings with Mordechai. Yet, he told no one. Now, after four beers, he found himself sniffing contemptuously at the notion he would sleep with a woman other than Sarah, feigning indignation that his fidelity could ever be called into question. He didn't, though, go so far as to denounce of the possibility for fear that a too strenuous denial would somehow strengthen the case against him.

"Well, I don't know what to tell you, but just hang in there. It sounds like you've got a good story -- and I won't tell anybody about it, so don't worry -- and who cares about this thirty bullshit?" Cap said and tipped the last of his glass of beer into his mouth. "You'll figure all this out, it doesn't sound like all that much; you're just exorcising some sort of last-minute demon is all."

Nick took a final drag on his cigarette and stared into his friend's eyes for a moment, half-wondering if Cap had somehow inferred something about his dreams and hip pains, and then crushed his cigarette into an ashtray.

TWENTY

Officer Claypool was peeling a banana when Nick walked in the next morning and pulled the clipboards off the wall. Nick sat down and flipped through them quickly, barely interested in the fender-benders, petty-thefts and noise ordinance violations he found detailed in the glib prose of policemen. Who cared if "the actor then proceeded to flee on foot" or if "the driver of vehicle one stated that she did not see the other vehicle as it exited the parking garage"? Not him, that's for sure. He had more important things to worry about, and first among them was the man with the smoke-stained beard.

"Hey, do you know anything about a guy whose first name is Mordechai? He hangs out around this area of town a lot. He's always in The Grove drinking, has a scraggly white beard and always wears the same clothes," Nick asked Claypool after hanging up the clipboards and walking up to the desk.

Claypool smiled while chewing on a bite of banana. "Oh, yeah, Mordechai Romanov," he said as he chewed, showing pulpy white clumps of banana between his teeth. Claypool swallowed and looked down to peel his banana further. "Why?"

"Just wondering. I've seen him around a lot and just wanted to know his story."

"Why don't you ask him? Ain't that your job, to ask people questions?" Claypool asked and bit another section of banana.

Nick shrugged. "Yeah, and I'm asking you, I guess, and it seems you've heard of him."

Claypool nodded. "Sure, everybody around here knows him. Used to be in the symphony; now he's just a drunk. Every once in a while, we get a call from some lady at a bus stop or someplace telling us he's being a nuisance. He's mostly harmless, though."

"Mostly harmless?"

Claypool swallowed and tossed the banana peel into a nearby trash can. "Yeah, well, he's never done anything but annoy people with his beer breath and conspiracy stories. He's never done anything to anybody."

"What kind of conspiracy stories?"

Claypool shrugged. "Hard to say. I talked to him once a couple of years ago after he started talking to some lady in a diner who kept asking him to go away. He didn't, so I walked over to ask what the problem was and he just told me some mixed-up story about there being forces we didn't understand that were controlling our lives," Claypool said, his voice level and bored. "Same old crap you always hear. Vast right wing conspiracies, neocons, stuff like that. I just escorted him out of the restaurant and finished my lunch. After all, he wasn't hurting anybody, just annoying them, and there's no reason to arrest nobody if they're willing to leave when you ask."

Nick was silent for a second and then said, "Oh."

Claypool laughed. "Why, what did you think about him?

Nick shook his head. "I don't know. I heard he was an interesting character with a lot of stories and I was just wondering whether it was worth it to talk to him. I guess not, if he's just a nut."

At the office, Nick immediately called up the paper's archives on his computer and scanned for hits on Mordechai Romanov, but the computer archives only went back ten years and came up blank, so he had to go downstairs to the library and pull manila folders from steel filing cabinets. He shook his head in disbelief for a moment, wondering how his paper's owner, a winner in the Internet bubble scam, hadn't bothered to get around to digitizing the rest of the paper's archives. It took actual time to pull files, riffle through the paste-and-clipped articles within, and find articles mentioning Mordechai, but he found them. The most recent one was from eleven years ago; it was a lengthy interview with him after he had played his final concert with the symphony and had been allowed by the conductor to perform a solo, the only one of his symphony career, as the night's final performance piece. For the most part, the article related his anecdotes as a partying violinist who loved to go on tour, the hidden inference being that he liked to bed women from foreign countries after a night of hard drinking. The photo accompanying the article was of a much different Mordechai. He was lean to the point of skinny, his hair a thick black tangle, and he was dressed in a tan blazer, his neck protected by an ascot. The only thing similar to the Mordechai Nick knew were the eyes: They stared out from the page with a pale urgency of desperation which sharply contrasted the bright smile flickering across his lips. It was impossible to miss, the duplicity of the look his face gave off: on the one hand flippant and cocksure, on the other the weight of a state secret.

After that last entry, the computer showed nothing. No arrests, no performances, nothing. Before that, it was all mundane reports or interview-blurbs about the violin section. Until he came across an article done in Hungary decades earlier while the reviewer was touring with the symphony through Europe. It was a slice-of-life article: what the musicians did when they were between shows, what the conductor ate for dinner, what the crowds coming to the performances were like. Fluff. But buried deep in the article were three paragraphs about Mordechai, who was then 32-years-old and in his fourth year with the symphony. Nick scratched his head as he reconciled the age of the man then and how he appeared now and wondered how he could possibly seem so young while certainly being more than seventy.

There, though, in the article, mid-way through it, the interviewer had come across Mordechai slumped against the steps of the concert hall in Budapest the morning before the show and, apparently, though it wasn't stated in the article, awoke him. Nick thought the passage oddly worded:

"A tour like this can work oddly on a performer's psyche. After the strain of several weeks of nightly performances, Mordechai Romanov, a second-section violinist, was found sleeping on the Budapest Concert Hall's front steps the morning before a performance.

After being awoken, a chagrined Romanov explained his odd choice of sleeping accommodations: `God knows that I owe this position to more than just the fear I wouldn't wake up on time for tonight's performance,' Romanov said. 'But sometimes the voices in your head will make you do crazy things to make you perform at your peak, and this is just one of them.

When that voice talks, I listen, because it's gotten me to where I am today. Without it, I'd be fiddling for dimes on a corner somewhere or cobbling in my father's shop.'

And with that, Romanov tipped his fedora back over his eyes and returned to the dreams that had obviously roused him from bed or tavern and brought him to such a poured-concrete reality."

Nick didn't much like the author's prose. It smacked of an over-achiever incapable of matching his words with the grandiose visions he saw in his head. The quote, doubtlessly gathered from a Mordechai only a few hours removed from a drink, seemed to back up, in some uncertain way, his contentions about their being voices, symbionts -- something -- guiding his career and making him what he otherwise would not have been. Could he have known, then? He must have known something, felt something, having only been on the symphony a short time and, apparently, amazed that he had ever gained the ability to play with one. But Mordechai had told Nick that just a week earlier.

Because of that, Nick found himself checking the computer files for references to symbionts. He found none. In fact, the word symbiont had only been used once in the paper during the thirteen years in the computer files, and that reference was nine years old, and then only in reference to pilot fish and sharks in an article on a marine biologist. Nick wasn't even sure if it was used correctly.

Bleary-eyed, Nick pushed himself away from the computer terminal and stared blankly at the ceiling tiles. He had come into the reference library to check on art thefts but had immediately been sidetracked, thinking the chase would lead nowhere. It had, but now he was tired of staring at the screen and hungry after having missed lunch. There was no sense in any of this. He knew that. Why he had searched through the files on Mordechai instead of trying to figure out how to get himself out of his potential art-scandal dilemma befuddled him. He could only rub his eyes in disbelief and hope the investigation would never come to him. Even if it did, he had done nothing illegal. Or had he?

Thinking about it was a jinx. He closed his eyes and tried to think about Sarah only to be interrupted seconds later by his editor, John Holcombe.

"Nick, some woman's been calling for you all morning and I'm tired of telling her you'll call her back shortly. She's holding now, can you take the call?" John asked, although it wasn't really a question.

Nick swiveled around in the chair and looked up at John. "Sarah?"

John shrugged. "Maybe. She's called about five times and I'm the only one in the newsroom and I'm tired of writing you notes to call her back, especially when I knew you were in here somewhere."

Nick nodded and stood up. "Yeah, transfer it my phone."

Nick wanted to vomit, but knew that wasn't an option. When he answered and heard Sophia on the other end, feelings of repulsion and lust coursed simultaneously through him.

"Nick, I've been wondering what you're up to. You haven't called," Sophia said, her voice cool and calm.

"I've been busy. You know how it is. Well, maybe you don't. I am still working on the story, though," Nick said, trying to make his voice light.

"So, what have you found out, so far?" Sophia asked.

Nick furrowed his eyebrows at the question and sucked in his lower lip. "Nothing," he said nonchalantly, "I haven't had any time. It's been kind of busy normal stuff."

"So, when can I see you again?" Sophia asked, her voice losing it's edgy curiosity and waxing seductive. Nick felt himself get instantly aroused at the question and shook his head to clear his mind.

"Ummm," he said, knowing that wasn't the best thing to say.

"Oh, Nick, come on," she said softly, her words burred with intention. "I could be your secret confidant. Your inside informant ... your deep throat."

Nick shook his head and rubbed his forehead. This isn't how he ever imagined an affair continuing, with the woman calling him at work and dropping double entendres, especially not a wealthy, older woman with better things to do. He didn't know how an affair would have continued, he had never even thought of how one started, but here she was, on the other end of the phone, beckoning him. And he knew he wanted it as badly as he knew he should resist. He should say something definitive against the possibility or, at least, something sufficiently hazy enough to buy him some time to steel his resolve.

"How about next Monday after work?" he said instead. "I get off around three, usually."

"I'll close up here at four," Sophia said. "An hour early, just for you."

Nick closed his eyes, licked his lips quickly and said just one word before hanging up.

"Wow."

TWENTY-ONE

There was a full moon overhead turning the black night purple and I could make out Orion, Cassiopeia and the two dippers juxtaposed, a wild melee of constellations drawn out more starkly than mere Greek imagination. The wind blew straight up from the ground, inflating my pant legs and lifting my bangs into the night. I turned around and tried to focus on the world, but too many things were shifting in and out, at first seeming far away but then, after a blink, being at arm's length. When had I been drinking? Nearby a red neon sign blazed "Bar" above a white, nondescript wooden door.

A newspaper box was chained to a nearby street lamp and I walked over and knelt down to read the date on the paper but couldn't find one. The headline, all in bold, black letters, read "THE END IS NEAR." I dropped my hand to my side and felt the hilt of my sword in its scabbard. I looked up and down the deserted street at the dormant automobiles; across the street in the playground a swing tangled and untangled and tangled again in the upward wind while the slide and monkey bars stood quietly.

The bar door burst open and Sarah tumbled out. She was dressed in a blue business outfit, her hair piled high in a bouffant. Her briefcase followed her out the door a moment later, arcing high through the air and crashing onto the pavement in spray of white papers that immediately took flight and swirled in the air. She looked up from the ground, her eyes wide with fear, her palms scraped and bleeding.

"Nick, oh, Nick, we've got to get out of here," she said frantically.

"Where do we have to go?" I said calmly.

"We have to go, Nick, help me," she pleaded. "I broke one of my heels and I'm no good at running without shoes."

"Run to where?"

"Away. Please," her voice dissolved into sobs and she shook her head. For a moment, she warped to the other side of the street and then she was back in front of me. It was as if I had looked at her through the wrong end of telescope for a moment before turning it back around the right way.

"Okay, but where? Where are we going?"

There was a rumble in the distance that soon washed over us, making it impossible to distinguish from it originated. Sarah began to cry. I stood up, curled my fingers around the sword's hilt and looked down at her.

"C'mon, what do you want me to do?"

The rumble turned into a deep, throaty chuckle in four-four time and I reached down, grabbed Sarah's jacket lapel and pulled her to her feet. Mascara ran down her cheeks in thin, black streams and her eyes were surrounded in dark puddles. I laced the fingers of my left hand through her right hand and pulled her along behind me as we quickly walked down the street.

"Oh, Nick, where are you taking us? Is this the right way?" Sarah asked. "Why didn't we leave when we should have?"

"We're leaving now, baby, c'mon," I said and led her along.

And then a sewer grate tripped me and I sprawled on the street, smacking my chin on the pavement while my sword clanged noisily against the asphalt. There was blood in my mouth and I let it drool out as I lay on the street. There was a shriek behind me. Sarah's voice. I rolled over to see her over the shoulder of the Monster as it ran down the street with great bounding steps. I sprung up and raced through the shadows after them as the Monster turned a corner into darkness. I pulled the sword from the scabbard and charged along, sword held out like the Olympic torch. I turned the corner moments later and saw nothing but a short alley, dumpsters and a wall at the end. No Sarah. No Monster. No sound. No wind. Only darkness and quiet.

"Sarah," I shouted, my voice echoing off the walls.

Then a shadow blackened the area where I stood and I turned to see the Monster. Its red eyes glowed menacingly, its breathing was loud and raspy, its breath stale. The Monster flung a paw out and knocked the sword to the wall and it fell with the clatter of a handful of coins dropped on a tin plate. I backed down the alley and the Monster took one step and stopped and placed its arms akimbo, cocked its head to the side and growled.

"Sarah," I shouted again, looking up to the tops of the buildings hemming him in. If only I could leap three floors. "Sarah," I shouted again.

And then the Monster was on me, grabbing each shoulder and lifting me up to its eye level, its jaw gaping wide as

"Wake up, wake up, for God's sake, wake up," Sarah said urgently, her arms on his chest as she shook him into the mattress.

Nick stared at her darkened form and swallowed hard, feeling a dull pain on his tongue and tasting blood in his saliva. His back was covered in sweat and he stuck to the sheet beneath him.

"Are you having another nightmare?" Sarah asked.

Nick took a gulp of air and nodded. "I, ... I dreamed the Monster had gotten you and I couldn't get you back."

Sarah tucked some hair behind and ear and bit her lower lip. "You were tossing in bed and mumbling my name over and over."

"I was screaming."

She touched his chin with a finger. "It was just a dream, shh."

"But it got you. I was trying to get you out of somewhere when it came out of nowhere and got you. Took you away and then when I caught up to it, you were gone."

"I'm right here," she said softly.

"But it took you. And then it grabbed me," Nick said, sliding up and sitting against the headboard. "It took you and there was nothing I could do. I had a sword, even."

"Shh," Sarah said. She leaned forward and put her arms around him and kissed his cheek. "Nothing happened; it was only a dream."

Nick nodded and swallowed hard, his saliva thick with phlegm and blood. "I need to get a drink of water."

Sarah nodded and he walked out of the room, poured a glass of water and sat down in the living room. On the coffee table sat a bottle of Scotch, half empty, and a glass. He shook his head, remembering he had been drinking, lightly, he thought, as he and Sarah watched television. She had herbal tea. Not even Scotch had helped, tonight, he thought.

And the Monster had touched him. Lifted him up and shaken him. He took a sip of water and lit a cigarette. What would it have done had he slept another ten or fifteen seconds? Killed him in his sleep? Unloosed the symbiont fully into his consciousness?

He dragged deeply and shuddered. He pulled the waistband of his boxers to the side and stared down at the lump on his side, it appeared no different, and wondered if it were only a lump. It had to be just that -- a doctor had said so. Just a lump of fat placed asymmetrically. He pressed the lump with his index finger: it was soft and malleable like the layer of fat just above his hip. There was nothing to indicate it could be anything other than ordinary flab in an odd place.

"And these dreams can't possibly have anything to do with anything," Nick said in a stream of smoke aimed at the ceiling.

He walked back into the bedroom and smiled at Sarah. She was sitting up against the headboard, her head laying lazily against it and her eyes half-closed as she fought off sleep. She smiled sleepily back as he slipped beneath the covers.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked.

Nick shrugged and then nodded. "Yeah."

She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Well, let's get back to sleep; we've got to be up in a couple hours."

Sarah turned out the lamp on the nightstand and Nick closed his eyes. Moments later, Sarah shook him awake.

"Nick, phone. It's work."

Nick sat up and took the phone as he looked for the clock radio. It was just after four.

"Hello?"

"Hey, sorry to wake you, Nick, this is Lee Bittner," the voice said. Lee Bittner was the overnight copy desk chief whose additional duty was listening to the police scanner and dispatching sleepy, often drunk, reporters to crime scenes, water main breaks and bad highway accidents. Nick grimaced.

"What's up?" Nick asked.

"There's a big fire about a mile from your place. On Strathmore Street. Sounds like a residential house or something," Bittner said. "I've already sent Viet there, so he'll meet you. Call me if it's anything so I can set space aside."

"Yeah, sure. Thanks," Nick said, handing the phone back to Sarah.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A fire. Somebody's house is burning down and I get to go ask the people how they feel."

Twenty-minutes later he turned onto Strathmore and saw a half-dozen fire trucks parked helter-skelter on either side of the road, their red lights twirling maddeningly. He parked his car at the police line, showed the police officer his credentials, and walked down the sidewalk toward the burning house. Neighbors wearing bathrobes and sweatpants lined the yards on the opposite side of the street, their arms folded as they looked on with bewilderment and sorrow. Then Nick realized it was Bill Maxell's house that was spouting yellow flames into the night. He stopped and stared at the smoke pouring from the roof of the house. In the front yard several teams of firemen aimed hoses at various points of the building, the streams of water splattering the roof and jetting in through broken windows. Videographers from the local news stations hovered about, training their cameras on the fire. Nick looked around for Maxell and didn't see him.

Nick pulled out his notebook and walked closer, spotting Viet crouching next to a tanker truck and aiming his lens along a hose and over the back of several firemen. He walked over and stood alongside him.

"How long you been here, Viet?" Nick asked.

Viet looked away from his camera, keeping it pointed at the house, and scrunched his nose. "Eh, I don't know. Half hour, maybe."

"See the owner anywhere?"

Viet nodded. "He's talking to some cop. I got a couple of shots of him bawling his eyes out a little while ago. Good stuff. He's over there, I think," Viet said, tilting his head toward a police cruiser at the end of the row of fire trucks.

Nick walked over and peeked around the fire truck. Leaning up against the hood was Maxell, a blanket thrown over his shoulders and his arm wrapped around a thin woman with graying hair. They stood expressionless, staring up at the flames as if hypnotized. He took a deep breath and took the last few steps.

"Not exactly how I thought we'd meet again," Nick said as he stepped over a hose and stopped a few feet from Maxell.

Maxell looked at him. It took a second for him to recognize Nick.

"Nick Case, hello," Maxell said, not moving. "No, I never expected this." He paused for a second and added, "This is my wife, Susan."

Nick licked his lips and looked over at the house. There would be no saving this house; the flames curled out of every window and the flowers lining the beds along the base of the house had already dried out and burned.

"Do you know how it started?" Nick asked.

Maxell shook his head. "No. One minute we were sleeping, the next minute the smoke alarm was going off. All of them were going off. We just jumped out of bed and ran outside. Everything was already burning. Everything."

"Who called it in?" Nick asked, turning off his feelings and slipping into journalist mode. It was easier to ask questions this way, pretending to be a figure rather than a person. The only way to ask about someone's pain was to purposefully detach oneself from empathizing with it. He was always amazed, afterward, anyone answered.

"Stan Conner from across the street called. He said he heard an explosion or something that woke him up. He told me he just looked out the window and saw our house burning and then saw us run out into the front yard."

"No one else inside?" Nick asked. Explosion?

Maxell shook his head.

"What about your paintings? You don't have sprinkler up there, do you?"

Nick saw the woman's shoulders drop and her head tilt down as he asked.

"No," Maxell said, tears filling his eyes as he looked up at the top of the house. "They're all gone, now. All gone."

Nick stood silently next to them and stared up at the flames. After a few minutes he backed away from them and began searching through the crowd on the other side of the street for Stan Conner, who, when found, described the early moments of the fire, of the windows being blown out and glass fragments flying out like shrapnel.

"Do you have your cell phone handy?" he asked Viet a few minutes after leaving Stan Conner.

The firemen had the fire under control and the flames were slowly shrinking back into the house as the eastern horizon relinquished black to gray.

"Yeah, in my bag. Here," Viet said, pulling the phone from his camera bag and handing it to him.

Nick called the office and spoke with Bittner, telling him to hold some space for photos and a story on the fire of a local art collector whose collection was destroyed. Bittner wanted to know how long it would be and they haggled for a while over the length before Nick, growing agitated, told Bittner to enlarge the photo if he didn't write enough copy. By now one of the fire crews was rolling up its hose while the another continued to spray the roof while a third crew had moved inside the front door.

"Hey, I gotta go. Good stuff, I think," Viet said, stuffing his camera into his bag and walking down the street to his car.

Nick looked around and saw that the Maxells had gone. The crowd on the other side of the street had also dwindled down to an assortment of housewives and older children preparing to go to school, all of them catching the last moments of the tragedy across the street. He jotted a few more notes and turned toward his car to find Detective Tagget standing in front of him.

"Well, good morning, detective, how are you?" Nick asked.

"Why am I not surprised to see you here?" Tagget asked.

"Just a coincidence. I live close by so the overnight editor called me. And you?"

Tagget smiled a thin straight line. "Just trying to find out what the latest twist in the story is. And, this is off the record, this is quite some twist. Who'd have thought?"

Nick looked over his shoulder at the smoldering house.

"What do you mean?" Nick asked.

Tagget cocked his head to one side and shrugged. "It'll be interesting to find out if they really lost their paintings in this fire," Tagget said, pulling a cigar from the pocket of his blazer and lighting it purposefully. "I mean, with such a totally devastating fire, who'll ever know if what's in the frames on the third floor was what was really there three months ago? Not me, not you, not an insurance adjuster."

"You think they just burned their own house down?"

Tagget shrugged. "Who the hell knows? But you have to admit, it's pretty odd that a guy who lost some paintings to thefts a couple of months ago now loses everything, his whole collection, to a fire."

"It could just be bad luck."

Tagget took a deep drag off his cigar and blew the smoke up into the brightening sky. "Nobody's luck is that bad. Somebody's setting somebody up to take a fall and I can't wait to find out who the sucker is."

TWENTY-TWO

Nick had written about the fire and it had appeared on Page One, above the fold, with two color photos. It was a story the morning paper wouldn't have until the following day, and then the reporter would be forced to come up with a different angle, which Nick had made even more difficult for his competitor by mentioning, in detail, the works of art stored on the third floor. He felt good when he saw the first copy of the paper, his byline high on the page beneath the headline for any passerby to see in a vending box. Tonight, the television news would be following up on his story.

That had also had turned up the heat on his investigative piece, and John had taken him into the conference room for a lengthy discussion about what that story would contain. John was inclined to believe this would certainly tip off the morning paper because it was too messy a situation. Someone, somewhere, would say something that would have their reporters off and running, chasing the same story and possibly scooping it. After ninety minutes, Nick had become demoralized, certain that his story would come apart and he would have little to write about but a stand-alone news article detailing, briefly, the arrests of the members of the art theft ring.

And that had sank his ship, or at least breached it, letting saltwater into the lower decks, as he left work that afternoon and walked toward the parking garage where his car sat. If the other paper caught up to him, his story would be worthless. Few people would care to read a rehash of the morning paper's take on the events, and the six o'clock news programs would be using the morning paper as their reference, not his story. At that point, it would be pointless to write much of an expose on the investigative process and detail the background of the suspects and how they operated. The upcoming week would be a morass of long days and intensive interviews; John wanted the outline to each of the stories by Friday with as much flesh on the bones as Nick could muster.

He turned a corner and shuffled along the sidewalk, ignoring the mid-afternoon crowds darting into stores or idling at bus stops. Nick stopped mid-way down the block and turned to look through the glass window of a jewelers. Laid on beige velvet just beyond the security glass was a variety of gaudy watches, tennis bracelets and diamond rings. He stepped up to the window and peered down at the few rings slipped over cloth-covered cones: a sapphire, a men's onyx dress ring, and a few diamond engagement rings. The sun beat down on his back and exhaust billowed up from a bus departing the curb as he looked down at the crystallized carbon gems set on gold bands.

Inside, the air conditioning was a relief from the late summer heat and he noticed his arm pits were clammy when he put his hands into his pockets. A woman in her early fifties, her fingers littered with gold and gem-encrusted rings, floated down toward him on the other side of the counter as he tilted his head downward.

"I see you're going to make some young lady very happy," she said, her glistening lips parting into a broad smile and showing her bleached teeth.

Nick stared at her teeth for more than a moment and then looked into her eyes: her lashes were thick with mascara and clashed against her pale skin, giving her a Gothic look that wasn't helped by her loose-fitting black dress.

"What?" Nick asked, his voice not fully forming the word.

The woman kept her smile and drew {to a stop opposite Nick. "So, this is your first time, I see."

"First?"

She nodded. "Yes. Your first time in a jewelry store to look at diamonds. That'll make it easier for both of us, since you're probably not ready to buy today."

"Easier? Maybe, I don't know," Nick said, glancing back down through the case at the rings lined up rank and file.

"Well, you're looking at engagement rings, so at least we both know where to start this conversation," she said, her smile still boisterous. "If you would like to look at one up close, just ask."

Nick looked up at her as she took a step backward and leaned against a counter set into the wall behind the display cases. This didn't feel low pressure.

"Are they returnable?" he asked.

The woman kept her smile, though it diminished slightly when she furrowed her eyebrows at Nick's question.

"Aren't you going into this in the wrong direction?" s(tm)he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"That's normally one of the last questions you're supposed to ask, although most of you never do," she said, crossing her arms and tilting her head to the side. "But, yes, they are, within thirty days of purchase."

Nick nodded his head.

"Why diamond?"

The woman shrugged an almost imperceptibly. "It doesn't have to be. We sell a few rubies now and then, but mostly diamonds. It's tradition. They're beautiful. They're the hardest substance known to man, meaning they're durable. Those are characteristics you want in a marriage."

Nick nodded.

"How long have you been dating her?" she asked.

Nick looked down into the case. "About three years, I guess."

"Have you two talked much about getting married?"

Nick looked back up at her. "Some. Nothing in particular."

"Do you know what kind of ring she might want?"

Nick made a small grimace. "Are you supposed to know that? Doesn't it ruin the surprise?"

She smiled. "Honey, getting married isn't supposed to be a surprise. When and how you give her the ring is supposed to be a surprise. You really don't want to surprise her too much with what kind of ring you get her, she's got to wear it, after all."

Nick drummed his fingers on the glass top, leaving partial fingerprints behind. "Yeah, I guess I'm not trying to shock her."

The woman smiled as Nick turned and pushed through the door and stepped back into the hot afternoon. He looked around at the people moving along the sidewalks and wondered if they knew where they were going, if they knew who they were, or if everyone was just waiting for the next surprise to come along.

TWENTY-THREE

Nick was half-way through his first drink at the Grove waiting for Cap and Sarah to arrive when Mordechai sat down next to him. Nick had sensed in his soul that such an occurrence was likely and turned on his barstool to face him.

Mordechai ordered a pint of Guinness, took a drink and wiped the foam from his beard. Behind him, Nick noticed a young woman with chin-length auburn hair and soft brown eyes. She looked over just as Nick was staring at her and she smiled a quick, polite smile. Nick smiled back. Mordechai looked at Nick and smiled oddly.

"I wouldn't have thought you'd smile to see me. Not yet, anyway," Mordechai said.

"I was trying for a wan, 'I knew it' kind of smile," Nick said, covering his glance at the woman with a lie.

Mordechai clipped out a laugh. "Oh, you'd better practice, then. It seemed more like a "hi, how're you doing' kind of smile."

Nick's stomach sank. "I read about you in the paper the other day."

Mordechai pulled a cheroot from somewhere in his blazer and lit it. "The other day? Hell, I haven't been in the paper for years."

"It was written years ago. I just read it the other day."

"Checking out my story, huh?"

"Listen, I don't know why you chose to tell me this story, but I know you've told other people."

Mordechai squinted and inhaled.

"The cops know you as the crazy guy in the neighborhood who goes around telling stories about aliens or something like that."

Mordechai puffed smoke into the air. "Only something like that. I get drunk once in a while, you know. At my age, I can say anything. As a drunk, I can say more. Nobody believes me, anyway, and sometimes you feel the need to tell somebody something about the truth. Nobody ever believes, though."

"I don't blame them."

"But you believe."

Nick shook his head. "No."

Mordechai stared intently at him. "You'd better believe. You don't want to go crazy denying it. You need to begin to deal with it now, before the Awakening."

Nick finished his drink and ordered another. "I'm going to be nice about this and ask you just to stay away from me. I've had enough of your stories and half-baked ideas about this symbiont stuff and intelligent species."

"Nick, you're making a mistake thinking I'm a nut. I'm not. I'm like you."

Nick waved him off and took a sip from his new drink. "No, you're not. But I'm going to end up like you if I pay attention to this shit, so I'm not."

Mordechai puffed on his cheroot for a moment. "The dreams are becoming more frequent?"

"No."

"Yes, there is something. You're afraid of something. It's getting closer."

"No."

Mordechai lifted his glass and took several deep gulps until the glass was half empty. Nick looked past him at the woman who had smiled at him earlier. She was staring at him with her brows knitted together, looking as if she were wondering what he and Mordechai could be talking about. She smiled brightly when she caught Nick's gaze and mouthed "hello" to him. Nick responded by rolling his eyes at Mordechai and she mimed a small laugh.

"Nick, you need to be careful, now. During the Awakening everything can go haywire, especially if you don't understand it and don't work to control it. You can't fight it. You can't beat it. If you don't know where it's guiding you and you resist too fiercely there's no knowing what will happen," Mordechai said.

Nick excused himself and went to the rest room. When he returned, Mordechai was gone from the bar and Cap was sitting at the bar next to the girl with the medium-length auburn hair with whom Nick had been flirting. Nick sat down and picked up his drink.

"Nick, man, what's up?" Cap said.

Nick shook his head.

"This is my brand new friend Kara," Cap said, motioning to the girl and making introductions.

"You look familiar; have we met before?" Nick asked.

Kara smiled and shook her head. "I don't think so."

Nick shrugged.

"Who was that guy you were talking to?" Kara asked, her eyes locking onto Nick's.

"Just one of the regulars. He's quite a character."

Kara shrugged. "Seemed like a weirdo from where I was sitting."

"Yeah, he's that, too," Nick said, looking around the bar to see if Mordechai had reappeared. "He has a neat trick of disappearing, too."

Kara took a sip from her drink and stared over the rim of her glass at Nick, her deep brown eyes penetrating his and causing a tightness somewhere deep inside Nick's chest. It was the look one gives someone from across a room when one wants to let another know of an instant physical attraction. Nick's stomach hollowed out for a moment and he tipped some beer into the vacuum.

Hours later Nick was sitting on the side of his bed, the room spinning slowly counter-clockwise around him. Sarah was brushing her teeth down the hall. He could hear the water running in the bathroom and was wondering why the room was spinning clock-wise. There didn't seem to be a reason for it, unless it had to do with the Coriolis effect on swirling toilet water because of the hemisphere, but he couldn't decide which way the water swirled in the northern hemisphere and whether rooms would swirl similarly. Sarah walked into the room.

"You're not going to be sick, are you?" she asked.

Nick shook his head.

"You know, getting drunk all the time isn't going to stop your nightmares."

Nick looked up at both of the Sarahs that stood in the doorway. They were wearing identical cream colored nightgowns which fell to the knee and accentuated their breasts and hips.

"What're you talking about? We went to happy hour."

"Hours."

"Yeah," Nick said. He rubbed his forehead hoping to clear his mind.

"Nick...Nick, you're not under that much stress that you have to drink every night."

"I'm not, am I?"

The two Sarahs walked around the end of the bed and sat down on their side. For a moment they merged and then separated into a Siamese twin joined at the shoulder.

"Maybe we need to take a vacation and get away from here for a while. We haven't taken any time off from work in seven or eight months. It might be time."

Nick shook his head and jumbled the two Sarahs into the corners of the room. "Can't. I've got to finish the first version of my story by next Friday. John wants to see where it's going."

Sarahs shrugged. "It doesn't have to be right away, but soon. Maybe you can get sometime off when you're done with this story, maybe just a few days, but I think we need to get away from this. You're letting everything get to you and it's wrecking you."

Nick sniffed out a laugh. "Hey, maybe we could take the week of my thirtieth birthday off. It's only a few weeks away," Nick said as he lay back down on the bed and pulled the sheets up over his body. "That way, we could go out and get really drunk the night of my birthday."

Nick closed his eyes and was out.

TWENTY-FOUR

Welcome to the new world, Nick, I'm glad you've been preparing for it. Here, you see, nothing makes sense. Try, if you want, but you can't. This is the world where random chance and bad luck intersect just when you need status quo. Isn't that the way it's supposed to be, though? It makes for an interesting life, you have to admit.

Let's see, what have you got on your plate? A rendezvous with Sophia on Monday, the rough draft of a story due on Friday, Mordechai increasingly warning you of the Awakening, and your thirtieth birthday just nineteen days away. Wouldn't want to be you, not with your girlfriend becoming more and more upset with everything you do.

Maybe you should have another drink, friend, it makes Sarah's barbs less painful. And doesn't it make Mordechai's stories more -- or is it less -- plausible? After all, drinking worked for Mordechai. He thought he was possessed by an intelligent parasite and he got to play in the symphony. Of course, now he's little more than a step away from being a drunk. Or, maybe he is a drunk. But then, who cares when your seventy?

And here you are, ready to stumble into another new week on the heels of another drunken weekend. Days disappear quickly that way, don't they? They're just gone. And the voices seem more bearable, don't they. Just shrug them off, ignore them, or, if you dare, talk back to them. Let them know what you think. Do you know what you think?

If only you'd gotten married a year ago when Sarah first brought it up, then maybe you could be worrying about when to have children and where to buy a house. Your life wouldn't have been any different, you know. The same old hum-drum police reports and fires. Maybe all of this would make sense, then. You'd have grounded yourself. But maybe you want to leave. Maybe the foundation is what you fear and all this is a convenient excuse to end it all and start over. Isn't the beginning always better than the middle of a story? It's so full of hope and promise, just like the meeting of a new woman and the first kiss she gives you. Just like Sophia, yes? Or the woman from the book shop or the girl at the bar who caught your eye. Oh, wouldn't it be exciting to start again? But here, in the middle, with everything nothing but doldrums, you need something to shake it up.

And you wonder why the Monster is back now, after all these years?

TWENTY-FIVE

Monday hadn't worked the way Nick had hoped. He had awoke hung over, a half-bottle of whiskey fading from his blood and the throb in the back of his head not eased by aspirin. There had been work: endless phone calls and interviews, endless promises to keep everything out of the paper until afterwards, and still making little headway. He had written little in the afternoon and was relieved the competition's story on Maxell's house burning to the ground had merited only a photo with a outline. Perhaps their editors had seen little use in churning out a story on what looked like just an ordinary house fire.

After work he drove to Sophia 's gallery, it's lights off and the sign on the doorway flipped to closed. He sat in the car and smoked a cigarette slowly, letting the smoke billow in front of him and bunch up against the inside of the windshield. Inside of him he felt two urges playing out, one deep in his groin hungering for fulfillment, the other a half-dozen inches higher, twisting in knots as he thought over the consequences. There was both no going in there and no turning back. And then there was a pain, fierce and burning in his lower right side, a sharp line of heat a millimeter wide and a foot long, stretching from his hip to his pelvis. He grit his teeth and sat up off the seat cushion, trying to stretch out and take some pressure off the area, but it did nothing.

He turned the engine over and drove back to his apartment, massaging his side in-between shifts of the gear lever, wondering what the consequences of not showing up for the rendezvous would be. He could always tell her, tomorrow, when she called, that he had not felt well. That would be true enough. He didn't feel well. Not in mind. Not in body. Not in spirit.

At home, he stripped off his tie and fell backward onto the bed, rubbing the lump of flesh below his right hip in the hope that would ease the pain. The pain was already fading into a dull, wide sense of pressure. He had to get this checked out, this was not normal. It had to be gall stones. Everything had to be something. There was knock on the door. Nick stood up, looked at the clock, and rubbed his side some more. Then, another knock and Nick walked to the door and pulled it open.

"Nick, hello," said Mordechai on the other side of the threshold, his hat held in his two hands over his belly.

"Mordechai," Nick said, keeping the door only partially open. "How do you know where I live?"

Mordechai shrugged and tilted his head apologetically. "I live in the neighborhood, you know. You end up knowing where your neighbors live."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing, really. I just wanted to see how everything was coming, to see how you're doing," Mordechai said, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. "I've seen you out in the bars a lot, getting drunk a lot. Especially last Friday and Saturday. I wanted to know if the dreams were getting worse."

Nick frowned. "No, I'm fine. I'm not having any dreams that nobody else wouldn't have. I'm not really in the mood to talk to you right now."

Mordechai tilted his head down and sucked in his upper lip. "I wish I could explain So you to could understand."

"I understand everything I need to," Nick said quickly. "What you tell me makes no sense and I'm not interested in hearing any more of it. So, please, if you'd just go."

"But, Nick, you're time is near. I can sense it in you."

"Wrong. The only thing you should be sensing in me right now is that you should stay away from me. Good-bye," Nick said and closed the door. He flipped the lever on the dead bolt and sat down on the couch, listening as Mordechai's footfalls sank down the steps leading out of his apartment building.

There was a jangling of keys and the door opened. Sarah dropped her brief bag over the chair set up in front of the computer terminal, turned into the middle of the room a gave a little start.

"What are you doing home?" she asked.

Nick looked up at her and smiled weakly. "I live here, remember?"

Sarah grabbed a hair band off the coffee table and pulled her blonde mass back into a pony tail. "I thought you were going to be late, tonight."

Nick had forgotten telling her that and just shrugged. "The interviews didn't work out the way I thought they would, so I didn't really have anything to work with. I imagine Thursday and Friday will be long days, though."

Sarah nodded and walked down the hallway into the bedroom. She returned twenty minutes later, after much banging around in the bedroom, wearing a tight-fitting knit top and a pair of black hip-hugging pants that flared slightly at the bottom. Nick sat back against the cushions and looked up at her.

"Well, I didn't expect you home for dinner, so I made plans to go out. I hope you don't mind," she said as she buckled a watch onto her left wrist. "My boss wanted to meet Josh Sammers to talk about some art for the office and he asked me if I wanted to come along, so I said yeah."

Nick nodded. "Yeah, fine. No problem."

Sarah looked down at her watch. "Gotta go. I'll see you later tonight."

She was out the door and Nick was back in the silence of the living room, the sounds of the outside neighborhood trickling in through the screens. They were all the normal sounds: errant horns from rush hour coagulations, a siren warbling from afar, the back-up beeping of truck somewhere nearby. He slipped out of the apartment and began walking the streets of the neighborhood. The sun showered orange and red into the sky and the air was laced with coffee aromas from the neighborhood cafes. He wandered aimlessly for a while, wondering what would happen for not showing up to see Sophia and whether Sarah's boss was involved in the dinner with Josh Sammers. With all of the duplicity he had been perpetuating, it was perfectly logical that could be up to the same thing. She had, after all, gotten Sammers phone number. And what was that paper Sammers had stuffed in the drawer?

Nick turned more corners and kept a look-out for Mordechai. He was sure Mordechai was around, watching him, waiting for another chance encounter so he could further explain the mystery of the symbiont. There were too many strings twisting together at just the wrong time, forming a rope that led somewhere not too far ahead. He stopped into a liquor store for a bottle of whiskey and headed home, the stars now glittering feebly through the city's light pollution.

TWENTY-SIX

I'm sitting on an large chunk of ice in this ice floe staring into the mist. I can't see anywhere, the fog is both thick and wispy, floating around like small effervescent ghosts where it's not too close to me and forming an impenetrable wall just a dozen yards away. The ice chunks around me are small, each the size of a VW Beetle, and they bob up and down with the motion of the water. But it's not cold, which is weird. The chunk of ice beneath me feels like plastic, as if I'm on a sound stage filming a scene for a 1940s disaster epic, only without the camera crew set up nearby. In my hand there's a narrow cylindrical container made of plastic, a straw sticking of the top. Inside is a golden liquid that oozes slowly when I tilt the container.

I can't remember where I've seen this place before, but I can remember a debate on the quality of the fog: is it as thick as peanut butter or pea soup? I can't hear anybody having this conversation, I can't hear anything but the rhythmic lapping of the water against the edges of the ice chunks and a weird, irregular splashing sound that resembles a forceful "swish."

I put my hand in the water: it's warm. When I pull my hand back out and touch the ice, the water dripping from my finger tips beads up without melting the ice or freezing to it. I slip into the water and clutch the container to my chest as I kick through the water. I open my eyes and I can see dozens, hundreds, of ice chunks floating above me, all of them separated by channels of water. The water is murky yet translucent, the kind of deep blue you get when a camera crew is trying to let the audience see the action underneath the surface but still trying to give the impression the people in the water can't see very clearly. I can see clearly, but not more than a twenty or thirty feet. I'm almost to the next ice chunk when I feel it in the water, an arrow of terror jetting directly at me from somewhere in the murk. I quickly and pop out of the water and scrabble onto the next section of ice.

In the water near where I had just been, a dorsal fin streams by, cutting the surface of the water into a thin white foam before it slips beneath the surface. I take a sip on the straw, drawing in so deeply that my cheeks collapse, and am rewarded with a small amount of honey. Just then a splash erupts from the water and a large shark slips onto an ice chunk about ten feet from me. It sits there basking and doesn't seem to notice me.

I sit on the ice chunk for a long time, staring into the fog and trying to make something out of the misty wraiths that separate from the surface of the water and float into the indistinguishable background. Hours pass. Or minutes. Who knows? The shark is sleeping, so I slip back into the water and swim quickly to the next ice chunk, popping out of the water onto it just seconds after leaving my prior spot. The shark hasn't moved. I have another taste of honey and slip back into the water.

There's an explosion under the water. I can hear it behind me, a muffled kersplunk that sends fear though every pore in my body. I kick furiously and slip up onto the next ice chunk just as a large gray shape arcs past the spot where I had been only seconds earlier. I take another long draw on the straw for honey. Where did they tell me to take this container? I can't remember. Somewhere.

The shark pops back out of the water onto a nearby ice chunk and rolls an eye in my direction. It's staring at me as if sizing me up, as if I were different than it expected. Maybe it didn't expect me to have a container of honey. Maybe it wants the honey.

And then it talks to me in my brain.

"I only eat seals, you know," it says, it's gills ruffling slightly. "I don't eat people."

I stare at the shark and say nothing.

"You don't have to be afraid. You can swim in the water if you want," it says in my head.

And I'm in the water quickly, kicking and pulling with my free hand for the next ice chunk. I reach out of the water and grab it just as I hear another loud splash. I'm out and on the ice, heaving mightily, as the dorsal fin slices by and sinks beneath the water. I suck more honey and stare into the murk above me. The shark pops onto another ice floe and looks at me as if it were only kidding.

"Sorry if I scared you," echoes from within my head.

"I'm not scared," I say quietly. I'm not scared, which is odd. I should be. And where am I taking this honey?

"Nick, Nick, what are you doing?"

Nick looked up into the blazing light above and saw Sarah towering above him, her hair tucked behind her ears and her bathrobe drawn tightly around her waist.

"What do you ... What?" Nick asked. He was on the bathroom floor lying on his back, his legs twisted to the side and jammed against the toilet bowl and the shower tub.

"Are you sick? Did you throw up?" Sarah asked. She stood tall with her arms folded below her breasts.

Nick shook his head and fumbled around on the floor. His left foot had fallen asleep and tingled when he put pressure on it.

"Obviously, you didn't go to work already," she said, her voice sour. "How long have you been in here?"

Nick swallowed and sat on the edge of the tub. "I don't know."

Sarah clenched her jaw. "Do you even remember when you came in here?"

Nick looked up at her but didn't move anything other than his eyes.

"Well, get out of here. I have to shower. I'm not going to be late for work over this," Sarah said, her posture still tall and angry.

Nick stood up and went to the kitchen, made coffee, and sat in the living room waiting for Sarah. She strode down the hall in her work clothes and into the kitchen, made a commotion of filling a travel cup with coffee, and returned to the living room. Nick sat up and pulled a throw pillow over his legs. Sarah shook her head once.

"We're going to have to talk when I get home. This has got to end, Nick," she said, looking into his eyes for a moment and then through the window behind him. "I don't know what the fuck's wrong with you, but I don't want to put up with it any more. There's no goddamn reason for you to drink yourself unconscious every night and then stumble around the apartment in your sleep."

She fumbled her keys out of a pocket on the blazer she wore and clenched them in her fist. "Just, please, don't do anything until we've talked. We've got to straighten this out. Okay?"

Nick nodded and watched as Sarah turned and left.

By noon, Nick had let the answering machine pick up four messages from his editor and one from Cap. He had spent the morning draining a pot of coffee and filling an ashtray as he thought about what would happen at five-thirty when Sarah came back through the door. There was no way to explain this. None. Just after noon, he pulled the unfinished bottle of whiskey from a kitchen cabinet and had a drink. Then another, until the afternoon had transformed his worry into a sense of melancholy. Funny, he thought, how whiskey can erase a day.

"Well," he said to the empty room as he stubbed out a cigarette. "No use sitting here all day."

He went to the bedroom and dressed. As he finished tying on his shoes there was a knock on the door. He sat up on the edge of the bed' and scratched his stubble, puzzling over who would be visiting at this time of day.

"Mordechai, I should have guessed it would be you," Nick said as he pulled the doorway partly open.

"Listen, Nick, I need to explain something to you," Mordechai said flatly.

"I told you 'no'," Nick said.

Mordechai cocked an eyebrow: "You've been drinking, Nick. Are you sure you're alright?"

"Mordechai, get out of here, I don't have time for this," Nick said. And then Nick saw someone move off to Mordechai's side and he stuck his head part-way into the opening to look. There were two other people there, Officer Claypool and Kara from the bar. "What's going on?"

"Nick, please, just let us talk to you. You'll understand," Mordechai said.

Claypool stepped forward as Mordechai stepped sideways. Nick slammed the door shut. A second later, the door shuddered in its frame.

"Nick, open the door," Mordechai said loudly as the door banged loudly with another thrust from outside.

"Shit," Nick whispered as he leaned against the door, drunkenly fumbling for the deadbolt knob.

He was too late. The third try threw the door open and Nick stumbled backward while Claypool tumbled to the floor and struck his head on the coffee table. Mordechai stood on the other side of the threshold for a second and gave Nick a flat, passive look before stepping into the room. Nick ran down the hall and slammed the door to the bedroom shut as he ran around the bed, lifted up the window and floundered through the frame onto the fire escape. He banged his elbow against the iron railing and looked in through the window as Claypool pushed open the door and ran into the bedroom.

Nick took the fire escape in bounds, praying he wouldn't miss a step, slip to the bottom and crack his skull. At the bottom he took a glance up and saw Claypool struggling through the frame. Nick turned and sprinted across the backyard, the metal fire escape ringing loudly behind him under Claypool's weight as Nick turned down the alley behind his apartment. He glanced over his shoulder quickly as he paused at a cross street for a bus to lumber by and saw Claypool pumping his arms madly as he ran, Kara coming along behind him. The bus whooshed by and Nick was across the street in a full run, his lungs burning and the back of his head throbbing. He tore through backyards and across flower gardens, ignoring the occasional housewife or group of children that stared wide-eyed at him; the cop behind him would soon fill in their imagination with the appropriate answers.

He burst through a low hedgerow and headed directly for the cemetery gates across the street. Once inside, he dashed for the nearest group of headstones and slid to a stop on the ground, quickly rolling onto his belly and crawling behind a granite tombstone, his head whirling with alcohol accelerated through his system by exertion, the world whirling madly. It was only seconds later when Claypool hurdled the hedges and came to a quick stop in the middle of the street, his head moving in a slow arc as he looked from one side of the street to the other. A moment later Kara rounded a nearby corner and came to a stop alongside Claypool and they began talking quickly as they scanned the area.

Nick's heart beat loudly in his ears and he sucked the thick saliva from the inside of his cheeks and tried to swallow, afraid to spit. Something had gone wrong somewhere in his dealings with Mordechai, but Nick couldn't figure out how it had come to this, how he ended up on his stomach in a cemetery while a cop searched for him. It couldn't be because of symbionts: Mordechai couldn't have gotten a cop to come to his house for that. Not unless Claypool believed Mordechai's story, which didn't seem to make sense. Claypool had always seemed like a guy with his head on straight. And what about Kara? How did she fit in?

But it couldn't be the art ring had caught on to him. Not unless they were far more devious than Nick had even imagined, and he hadn't spent too much time imagining what kind of sub-plots they might be capable of running. From his position behind the tombstone, it didn't make too much sense: An international art theft ring concocts a story about beings that live in the human body, employ a seemingly eccentric ex-symphony violinist to use the story to obstruct the reporter's efforts to find out about the story and, just to be sure they're safe, manage to have one of their members seduce him. If that were true, what were they doing to the law enforcement personnel investigating them?

Nick took deep breaths to calm his breathing and watched as Kara and Claypool split apart and walked in opposite directions. Claypool disappeared behind a house more than a block away while Kara strode quickly down the street and away from him. Nick waited a few more minutes before getting up and quickly walking deeper into the cemetery, pausing to look over his shoulder for a sudden appearance by one of his pursuers. He paused in the middle of the cemetery and sat down to think out a plan. He had to call Sarah and let her know what happened. He had to call Tagget to get some help. He wished he had been more receptive to Mordechai so things might not have arrived at this stage. He wished he were thirty and married and living a normal life in a small home snuggled somewhere in the comfortable suburbs, complaining of rush-hour traffic and inviting married friends over for dinner and Trivial Pursuit on Saturday nights.

He started back through the cemetery. Twenty minutes had passed and he was sure Mordechai would be gone from his apartment by now. A hand grabbed his shoulder and turned him around quickly and his other shoulder exploded in pain as he crumpled to his knees. Kara stood above him and grimaced as she drew her right hand back into a fist. He lurched forward into her knees and rolled quickly away from her as she stumbled and fell onto her back. Sharp pain erupted on the back of his head as his hair was pulled. He swung his left arm madly, the back of his hand slapping her face loudly. He spun quickly and grabbed her forearm and squeezed tightly to make her release his hair. She did, and kicked him in the side of his chest.

He crab walked quickly backwards as she jumped to her feet and came toward him. He bumped into a grave marker and rolled away from it onto his feet just as jumped at him. She caught him unevenly, her shoulder brushing past his thigh as she spun by; he punched downward into the small of her back. As she tried to stop, her shoe skidded on the grass and her legs slipped upward into the air. For a moment, she was suspended in the air, arms and legs splayed wide in an X, but soon she fell, her head clipping the edge of a tombstone and she fell to the ground unconscious.

Nick looked wildly around for Claypool or Mordechai, certain one of them had to be nearby. There was nobody. Nick began running through the cemetery, dodging tombstones and sprinting down the car path toward the cemetery's gates. He slowed as he got to the sidewalk and began a brisk walk down several side streets, quickly looking over his shoulder every dozen steps to see if he was being followed. He found a cab letting an elderly woman out in front of an apartment building, let her pay her fare and slipped into the backseat.

Nick sat in a bar near Cap's apartment the rest of the afternoon, sipping beers and trying to stay sober while hoping he would get drunk, pass out and awake to find this had been just another dream. There had only been unemployed middle-aged men and retired mill workers in the bar as the day slipped by, and none of them had pried their attention from the baseball game on the televisions at both ends of the bar. His mind had raced for answers all afternoon: repeated calls to Sarah's office and Detective Tagget had gone unanswered. Doubtlessly, both of them had by now called his apartment and his office trying to track him down and were wondering what was going on. At least, he was sure that was what Sarah would have done by now. Tagget, well, that could be a different story.

After the work day ended, Nick left the bar and walked the few blocks to Cap's apartment, buzzed him and looked over his shoulder. There was nobody there.

"Well, Nick, you must be in a pretty bad fight with Sarah," Cap said as Nick walked in through the door.

"Why?" Nick asked.

"She left a message on my machine telling me to tell you to call your machine. She sounded really pissed. Did she kick you out of the apartment?"

Nick slumped his shoulders. "Probably. I don't know."

"What's going on?"

Nick shook his head. "I wish I could say. She's been pretty pissed at me the last month or so."

"About getting married and all that?"

Nick nodded. "Partly. Mostly. I don't know. It's just been tense. She was really pissed off this morning before she left for work."

"How did you get grass stains all over your pants?" Cap asked, taking a few steps back and looking at Nick. "Are you alright?"

Nick looked down at his knees and the large green and brown smudges ground into them. "Bad fall."

Cap shrugged. "You're not drunk, are you?"

Nick shook his head. "No, but I think I need to be. Things are just way out of control," Nick said as he walked across the room to the phone.

The message she left for him to retrieve was short and angry. She didn't want to know the reason he had toppled over the coffee table and knocked the mattress off the bed, but she was sure it was because he had spent the afternoon getting drunk and was afraid to be around when she got home. She was also sure he'd show up at Cap's and that he should stay there until she called him. And then there was this: "Nick, I don't know what's happening to you all of the sudden; you're not the same person you used to be. I think you really need to see someone if you want this relationship to continue. You're drinking too much and you need to get yourself back together."

Nick hung up the phone and rubbed the tingling in his lower right side. He looked up as Cap loosened his tie.

"I think it's time to get drunk," Nick said.

They had sat quietly through the first drink, Cap sipping a beer while Nick tipped large swallows of whiskey into his mouth. Confusion reigned.

"So, what's going on with you and Sarah?" Cap asked as Nick motioned to the bartender for more drinks.

Nick shrugged. "I think she's having an affair."

"Sarah? No way," Cap said. "With who?"

"Whom," Nick said.

"Whom, then?"

"Some painter."

"You sure about that?"

Nick shrugged and shook his head. "Not a hundred percent ..*. maybe not even fifty percent. It just seems like it."

"That's why you're having problems, lately?" Cap said and flipped a few bills onto the bar toward the bartender.

Nick stared up at the ceiling and shrugged. They said nothing for a while.

"Can you be touched in a dream?" Nick asked as he slid his empty tumbler across the bar.

"What do you mean?" Cap asked. "While you're dreaming or in your dream?"

"Can you feel someone touch you in a dream?"

Cap shrugged. "No. It's just a dream," Cap said. "I don't think I've ever been touched. It probably has something to do with not being able to die in your own dream. If you do, you're supposedly going to die in your sleep. Being touched probably has something to do with that, like a corollary or something."

Nick slid some money across the bar when the bartender put a full drink in front of him. He sipped it and pursed his lips.

"So, what would it mean if you were touched in a dream?"

"I don't know. Nothing, probably. How would... you feel a touch in a dream? It's all virtual reality in there, only it's super-definition 3-D with color graphics," Cap said. "I don't even think you dream in first person, I think you just get to watch someone who looks like you do what you want them to do, like you're moving a joystick or something."

Nick swallowed deeply and lit a cigarette. "I was touched when I was about four or five," Nick said, drawing deeply on his cigarette, "by a witch."

"Huh?"

Nick nodded. "I was little, I dreamt a witch opened the window to the trailer my family lived in, crawled through the window and knelt beside my bed. I can remember staring at her while pretending my eyes were closed -- I was too scared to open them -- and she reached out and pinched my cheek right here," Nick said and touched his face.

"You felt yourself get pinched?"

"Yeah. I got in trouble the next morning because I wet the bed. I was supposed to be over that, that's why I'm sure it was a real pinch ]I felt."

"Only in a dream?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know, man, that was a long time ago. You could be getting things mixed up. Maybe you were remembering being pinched by a person in a witch costume on some Halloween when you were little and you're getting it mixed up with something else from back then," Cap said. "You can't expect to remember anything from when you were that young. It's almost like you didn't exist, then, nobody remembers their childhood very well. And if you really think it was a dream, well, who the fuck knows, then?"

Nick drew smoke from the cigarette. "Are you saying that the what I remember isn't real?"

"Yeah, basically."

"What about yesterday? Doesn't yesterday exist the way I remember it?"

"Can you remember every second of it? What about all the seconds that so closely resembled other seconds in your life you ignored them, like brushing your teeth or something? Do you remember every time you brushed your teeth, or is your memory just using stock footage of tooth brushing whenever you think about the last time you brushed?" Cap asked and raised his glass for the bartender to see it was empty. "And just because you remember brushing your teeth doesn't mean you did it, either. You've done it so many times you just expect yourself to have done it the night before, even if you can't prove you'd did."

Nick downed his whiskey and slid the empty glass to the bartender. "So, reality is whatever you think it is at any given moment, unverifiable and forever open for argument?"

"For argument's sake, yeah," Cap said and shrugged. "Dreams and memories are similar, it's your word against yourself, only it's the presence of other real people who can verify your memories that make them real."

"And you don't think you can be touched in a dream?"

Cap took a sip from his freshly arrived beer. "No. Why would your subconscious need to feel something?"

"But you can touch a paralyzed guy's leg and he won't feel it, even though you're actually touching it. Just because he doesn't feel it doesn't mean his leg's not being touched," Nick said.

"It does if his eyes are closed."

Nick swallowed half his whiskey and grimaced.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I'm running down a deer path in the woods near my parents' home and the light is cutting through the trees in diagonal shafts of translucent honey. Ahead of me is Danny Porter, yodeling as he takes great bounds over the fallen trees intersecting the path. We are moving effortlessly, as if we and the forest are one being. This is the way I always dream it, that I am the master of this small world surrounded by the ever-encroaching housing subdivisions. Soon, too soon, these trees will fall to the bulldozer and this deer path will be cemented over to allow suburban mothers to push the strollers carrying their newborns.

But now it is still trees and moss and super-real sunlight and Danny and I are racing with unnatural speed toward "the Pocket," a swimming hole at the bottom of the railroad trestle in which great big carp lie motionless. It's a short run to the edge of the cliff and Danny is there a twenty seconds ahead of me, slowing to a jog and taking several great bounds along the edge of the cliff as he looks below to where the pool of water is. He raises his right hand aloft and twirls it clockwise before springing off his left leg and into the air. He hangs there for a moment in the buoyant air, drawing his legs up to his chest and clasping his arms around them. His hair stands on end and the world stops as my legs pound the soft earth.

In a moment, he's gone. He slips through the air and below the horizon of the cliff. We've done this a million times before and I slow to a stutter-skip, half-running, half-galloping, as I close the distance to the edge, giving Danny time to clear the middle of the pool. And then I'm out into the middle of the air, my hiking stick tumbling outward end-over-end as I become a cannonball and plunge downward into the middle of "the Pocket."

"Two ball in the corner pocket, no bank," I shout as I plummet, leaving me just enough time to gulp air before crashing through the surface.

You don't think it has anything to do with your life, do you? These dreams and this monster that haunts you, you can't believe they mean anything other than that they are dreams? But you do, and this is all some mess you've created. And you did it. Not Mordechai. Not Claypool. Not Sarah. You drank the alcohol. You had the sex. You compromised your story, your integrity. If you're seeking madness, does a symbiont in your body co-opting your life make it somehow better?

And back through the surface I pop, shaking the water from my hair as I paddle to the side and clamber onto the wet shale. Danny's gone and the sun is setting. It couldn't be this late, there should be hours of sunlight. Odd, but my clothes are dry.

"Come on, we've got to get back, it's getting dark," George says from the side of the creek.

He's standing there talking to Hans. Hans is smoking a pipe and blowing smoke rings. We start hiking the edge of the creek, sticking to the shale that juts out of the cliff like steps.

"Watch out for the drop-bears," George says over his shoulder as we leave "the Pocket."

The drop-bears can be anywhere. They hide in the trees waiting to pounce on your head. You have to be careful. And alert. Hans is just ahead of me, between me and George, and he slips off the shale into the creek with a loud splash.

"Shh, Hans," George hisses.

Hans shrugs and walks back to the edge of the creek. The sun is now gone and the stars are out. It's much too late to be in the woods, and we are all walking fast. At night, the trees can be anything, impenetrable walls or lurking serial killers. They hide everything. We round the corner and George raises his hand for us to stop. Ahead, dancing around a fire, is a coven of witches. They are chanting.

"Shit, we can't go back," George whispers.

"We can't go that way," Hans says, pointing at the coven as they move around the bonfire. "The warlock will have a sword."

George nods and looks at me. "We have to go up."

Up the shale wall fifty feet. In the dark.

"You first," George says to me.

I put my hiking stick down. I'll have to get it tomorrow, when it's light. I've climbed this cliff a hundred times before, though never in the dark, so I'm hoping I'll remember where the handholds are. I begin, and soon I hear George behind me. I'm halfway up when I hear Hans.

"Oh, fuck," he says loudly amid a din of crumbling, crashing shale. A second later there's a large splash accompanied with the tinkling of hundreds of pieces of shale collapsing into the water.

"Climb!" George shouts.

That would be good advice for you to follow. You've dug yourself into a deep hole. If only you had the truth to get yourself out. If only you knew what the truth was. If only you believed it. But you think everyone is lying to you, so you are lying to yourself and everybody else. Small lies, yes, but it really doesn't matter, now. Look where you are. Trapped here with no escape but the truth, and afraid of the truth for what it will do to your life.

It would be easy to see a shrink, wouldn't it? Work all this out. What these dreams are. You could find out what they mean, if anything. You could get your life in order, laugh at your stupidity and beg forgiveness from Sarah. You could apologize to John for screwing up your story, it might not matter, in the long run. It's not too late. You might even be able press charges against Claypool, Kara, and Mordechai, if they were ever even really at your apartment. What a story you could have for the paper if you figured it all out.

And there's the Monster right in front of me. Saliva dripping from its maw as it heaves breaths. The moon is diamond shaped through my tears as I stare at the Monster, wondering whether I can run. My legs won't move and I have no scroll. I can't tell where I am; with every blink the scenery changes: I'm in an alley, or a baseball field, or atop a sand dune.

The Monster grumbles and comes forward, raising its arms and flexing its claws. I can feel them as it grabs my shoulder, ten points of pain digging into my skin through my shirt. If only I could run again, I could escape. Find a new place to live, get more time to stabilize my life. The Monster lifts me high and rumbles a low growl, words, almost

"Nick. What the fuck?" Cap said, the sole of his foot resting on Nick's shoulder. "Wake up."

Nick blinked and looked around: He was lying naked in the hallway outside Cap's bedroom door, curled-up like a sleeping dog.

"I think I'm in trouble."

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cap had gone to work convinced Nick had merely had a weird nocturnal drinking event. Cap had laughed, shaken his head and left Nick the spare keys to his apartment before leaving. Nick sat in Cap's living room watching cable television and drinking coffee, having already called in to the office sick. He was sick, Nick was certain of that. What he had, though, Nick couldn't begin to recognize. It couldn't be schizophrenia, because he remembered everything. Nor did he seem manic-depressive or psychotic, although he wasn't quite sure how they would manifest themselves to himself. Weren't psychotics little more than deranged killers? That wasn't him.

He walked over to the picture window and stared out into the gray morning and the light drizzle settling on everything. There was little traffic on the street below Cap's window, and the pedestrians who moved along the sidewalk were all shrouded from the heavens by umbrellas. The umbrellas looked weird from above, colored igloos that bobbed up and down as they moved by. Nick guessed they didn't offer very much protection on a day like today when, instead of a direct assault from above, the water atomized into the air and swirled in from everywhere on any available gust of wind.

Nick stepped away from the window and stared into the living room. It offered little comfort despite the overstuffed couch and chair. Inside this room were things that weren't his; there was nothing to pick up and prompt memories. There were only things to wonder about. He dressed and left, leaving the spare keys behind on the coffee table. His side twinged and he ignored it, concentrating instead on the beads of water that alighted on his cheeks and eyelashes. He caught a downtown-bound bus and stepped off it a block from Sarah's office building downtown. He stopped to look at his reflection in a window, fixing his hair as he stared at the hollow image of himself, and noticed a middle-aged black woman staring at him from the other side of the glass. He smiled weakly and scuffed his way toward Sarah's building, uncertain of what he would or could or should say.

He rode the elevator up and shuffled down the hall. Through the glass doors he could see the receptionist talking into a phone, her head bent down. He had gone through those doors hundreds of times to meet Sarah and escort her to lunch, but it had been months since the last time and now he was afraid of the other side. His stomach knotted and the pain in his side smoothed into a dull ache. He turned and headed back to the elevator.

He sat in the bar across the street and ordered a Bloody Mary, checking his watch to see it was only mid-morning. The oppressive gray outside blocked out time, made it meaningless, in much the same way it obscured the tops of the buildings. He sipped his drink and thought about how to try Sarah's office again. Maybe it was too early, maybe he should wait until she leaves for home at the end of the day. Maybe he should just go back to the apartment and wait to see what happened. Call Tagget and have him meet him, explain it all and see what the response was.

"Aren't you a little young to be drinking all by yourself this early in the day?"

Nick looked across the bar at the bartender, a fifty-ish man with graying hair, a mustache and a potbelly. Nick looked around the bar at the others: Three men, two drinking beer and one with a beer and an empty shot glass riding sidecar sat at the bar stools to his left; on the other side of the bar a woman, perhaps fifty and wearing too much make-up, pondered a glass of translucent red liquor.

"It's one of those days, you know," Nick said, sipping his drink.

"What kind? You get fired?"

Nick shook his head and winced a little at the pain in his right side. "No. I'm just visiting a friend for the week and his boss called him in for the day. Add to that the rain, and there's just nothing to do."

Nick was on his third drink when the woman sauntered over and sat down next to him. Nick looked at her out of the corner of his eye and ignored her while she fished a cigarette out of her purse, lit it and turned to face him.

"So, are you one of us?" she said evenly.

Nick shivered and looked at her over his shoulder. "What?"

"I said, "Are you one of us?'"

"No," Nick said, shaking his head once.

"Sure you are. Look at you: here in a bar in the middle of the morning. You're just like me," she said, tapping ash onto the floor, "except my name's Naomi."

"Naomi?" Nick said, his voice low. He tapped a cigarette from his own pack and lit it. "Actually, I'm just here because I don't have anyplace better to be, right now."

Naomi smiled widely, showing two rows of perfect teeth. "Yeah, me too. You don't mind if I join you, do you?"

Nick held in a sigh and shrugged.

"So, where you from?"

"Why?"

"I- heard you say you were on vacation or something. Where you from?" She asked, sucking deep on her cigarette. "Or are you going somewhere on vacation?"

"Going?"

Naomi tapped the bar and Nick looked down to see her finger resting on his passport.

"Oh, yeah. I lost my wallet, so I carry that for ID," Nick said.

"Where'd you lose it?"

Nick smiled and looked in her eyes. They were violet.

"You have violet eyes. I didn't think anybody really had violet eyes."

"Elizabeth Taylor has violet eyes."

"That's what they say, although I've never thought to look at them to find out," Nick said.

"What? Have you met her?"

"No."

"How would you look at them, then?"

"She's on the cover of magazines all the time," Nick said.

Naomi shrugged. "Oh. I don't have much time for magazines. They're all filled with bullshit, anyway."

Nick nodded.

"So, where you headed to?"

Nick looked down at his passport and then at his watch. "Just across the street. What about you?"

Naomi tamped her cigarette out and finished her drink. "I think I'll stay here for a while, then who knows? You need someplace to go for the afternoon?" she said, looking up at him with her violet eyes, her expression neutral.

Nick felt the burning in his side flare up quickly and then vanish. "No. I think my buddy's going to get the afternoon off from work, so I should be fine."

Nick pushed a few dollars across the bar and tipped the last of his drink into his mouth. The edges of the world had softened during the morning and the knot in his stomach had gone. Naomi grabbed his forearm lightly as he stood up from the stool.

"Well, if you're friend's busy, I'll be here for a couple of more hours. Come back."

Nick nodded. "I will. Thanks."

Nick walked outside into the gray and stared up into the mist, letting it slick his face. He threaded his way across the street through the traffic huddled up before traffic lights and began walking down the block toward Sarah's building. He wasn't sure how to apologize, but he was sure apologizing was what he had to do. He turned into the small plaza leading up to the front of the building and saw Sarah push through the revolving glass doors, stop just a two steps out and open an umbrella. Seconds later, Josh Sammers popped out of the revolving door and ducked under the other half of Sarah's umbrella. Nick's stomach sank and the world listed. He walked quickly toward her as she and Sammers walked slowly beneath the umbrella. Sarah looked away from Sammers for a moment and saw Nick coming and she stopped, her eyes narrowing slightly.

"So, this is what it is?" Nick said, staring deep into her eyes. "And you said I was the problem lately."

Sarah screwed her eyes up for a moment. "What?"

"Yeah, I'm the problem, all right. How many dates have you been going on with him? I'm the one with the relationship problems and look at you: exchanging numbers and going on dates," Nick said quickly, wiping the moisture off his brow.

"Nick, listen," Sarah said, taking a step forward as Sammers, his eyes wide and shoulders slack, stood still. "You've been drinking," Sarah said curtly, shaking her head. "For Christ's sake, Nick, you've been drinking."

"No, that's not the problem, that's just a symptom," Nick said. "Now I know what's going on."

Sammers took a step forward and raised his hands, palms outward to deny aggression.

"You shut the fuck up," Nick said quickly, pointing at him as if he were holding a revolver at his hip. "I've seen your fucking so-called pictures of naked blondes that you only painted so you could fuck them, and she's just supposed to be another one. Maybe you should just get the hell out of here."

Sarah gave the umbrella handle to Sammers and closed in to a few inches of Nick.

"Listen, Nick, you've been drinking. Maybe you've been drinking all night and morning, I don't know, I don't care. Right now you had better just get out of here. You're making an ass of yourself and I don't want people--"

"To what? To think that you're just another of this guy's sluts?"

Sarah slapped him full across the cheek, the repercussion fading quickly into the mist. "Get out of here before you say anything else."

Nick stared at her and looked at Sammers and then clutched his right side as it erupted in a hot flash of searing pain. He took a step backward and looked back at Sarah, her face drawn tight and her lower lip trembling, and nodded.

He pushed through the downtown lunch crowds, hunched over slightly to his right and massaging his lower waist as he muttered curses under his breath. Around him, people gave way and let him pass unhindered, no one willing to challenge him for right of way on the sidewalk. The mist turned to drizzle and began to soak through his clothes, chilling him and making the pain in his side more noticeable. He stopped at a bus stop bench and sat down on its soaked surface.

"It looks like I've fucked up this life pretty damn good."

He sat on the back of the bus with the other presumed derelicts, only it was he who reeked of alcohol, sweat and rainwater. Outside the bus window, the world zipped by in two and three block increments between lurches to and from the curb. The people on the bus seemed pallid, lifeless, different than they should have been after a summer of sun: To him, they seemed less, somehow, than he. Less alive and more docile, unaware of the world in which they traveled. The pain in his side faded as he stared out into the drizzle and watched the drenched world.

This was what he was offered? He sniffed loudly with disgust and shook his head as he thought about it, the endless weeks of work for the small periods of vacation. The short weekends filled with errands, chores and -- at some point -- boredom? Marriage, children, house shopping, and a pension? A better job with the same exact routine? Another birthday ending in a zero and marked with a humorous card about the aging process? This was it? Waiting in the rest home for the monthly hour-long visit from the kids and grand kids? That was a future?

He slid down in his seat and looked at the others riding the bus, most of them staring blankly outside. He assumed their thoughts were about getting wet and staying dry, what was for dinner or on television that night. Such small thoughts.

He stepped off the bus at the stop near his and Sarah's apartment and walked along the sidewalk until turning into the Grove. He pushed into the air-conditioned darkness and took a seat at the bar. The bartender walked down toward him and cocked his head to his side. Nick knew him but couldn't remember his name.

"Whoa, you must being having a bad day. What can I get you?" the bartender asked.

"Whiskey, up," Nick said as he felt through his jacket for his cigarettes. He lit one and looked around the bar.

There was a thunk and Nick looked up at the bartender. "Have you seen Mordechai, lately?"

"Who?" the bartender asked.

"The old guy with the beard that's always here."

"No. Never seen him."

Nick nodded and took a large swallow from the drink and shuddered inside as the alcohol burned down his throat. For a moment, Nick thought he could see through the bartender, as if the bartender had momentarily become a hologram. Nick shook his head.

Maybe there was a way to explain all of this to a psychiatrist. Maybe it was just a chemical imbalance in his brain. Or maybe a sudden accumulation of moments all coming together at the same point that was what was shaking him up. The doctor had told him the lump on his side was only fat tissue. Perhaps he was letting his imagination run wild with the pain he thought he felt in his side. Couldn't that be kidney stones? And, of course, he was turning thirty, soon. Time to get married and make an honest woman of Sarah, if he could ever reconcile this.

"A symbiont," Nick said to no one and took a sip of his drink.

How had that ever entered into the mix? A little creature living in his body, helping him out, somehow, altering his thoughts and enhancing something in him? What? But, then, why had Mordechai, Claypool and Kara come after him? Or had that not happened, too, but merely been some drunken hallucination. Who cared if Neanderthal man had been wiped extinct by Homo Sapiens? What did that mean? There was no sense in it.

You're losing it, Nick. You need to relax.

"I'm fine," Nick said.

"What's that?" the bartender asked as he leaned against the shelves holding the liquor bottles.

"I said, 'I'm fine,'" Nick said.

The bartender nodded and walked farther down the bar, folded his arms and stared up at the baseball game playing on a television mounted on the wall.

Are you sure? You've nowhere else to run and have explained nothing to those who could let you in. How can that be fine? Is the whiskey helping? Is this bar your safe haven?

Nick looked around the bar, moving his eyes slowly through the shadows. He shook his head sharply. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and shivered as he felt the cold of the air-conditioning work through his wet clothes.

I'm sitting on the stool when Mordechai approaches, only it's not the same Mordechai with the stained beard and black jacket. This is a new man in his role, sent over by central casting to be more viewer friendly. He sits nearby and pushes tobacco into the bowl of a pipe. His eyes are soft and he has a concerned look on his face as he stares over at me while matching his pipe.

"Do you need any help?" he asks, his voice soft and mellifluous like a BBC broadcaster.

I shake my head, "No, I'm fine."

"Hey, man, are you alright?" the bartender asked, supplanting the old man's voice and leaning over the bar.

Nick jerked from his stool and fell onto the floor of the bar, the world spinning crazily for a moment and then jerking into position.

"Whoa! Are you okay? Are you hurt?" the bartender asked, leaning forward across the bar and resting his weight on his outstretched arms.

Nick looked up at him from the floor and then scanned the room. Nobody but him. Nick stood up slowly and smiled awkwardly at the bartender. He pulled out the contents of his back pocket and slid a few bills onto the bar. He stared at his passport, last used six years ago on a two-week backpacking trip though Spain, downed the last of his drink and headed out into the drizzle, certain he had to become somebody else, somebody nobody would look.

TWENTY-NINE

They had been backpacking up the road in the summer heat all day when they stopped in the small village and sat at a table in the cafe's patio. They ordered bottled water from the waiter and spread a small, Australian-folded map out on the table and hunched over it. The waiter returned with their water, some glasses and a small bowl of fruit, mostly grapes, and left them.

"I don't think that's where we are," the woman said. She was in her mid-twenties, her long dark hair pulled back in a pony tail and her shoulders, exposed by her tank top, were dark brown from days or weeks in the sun.

"Of course it is," said the man. He was roughly her age and tanned on his face and forearms.

"Just because that old guy said to come up this road doesn't mean he knew where we wanted to go. Look at this town," she said, waving her right arm out behind her. "There wasn't supposed to be an ocean view. Are you sure you got your Spanish right? Maybe you really asked for the location of the nearest restaurant."

The man looked up from the map and out at the rolling blue water a couple hundred yards away. On the beach, a scattering of people sat in isolated clumps beneath large umbrellas and watched the small waves roll ashore.

"My Spanish is just fine," the man said, pulling a few grapes from the bowl and cramming them into his mouth at once. "That's not an ocean, it's a sea."

"See, we are lost," she said.

"Maybe the map's wrong."

She shook her head and smiled. "I don't think so. I think that man told us to go the wrong way."

The man chewed as he tried to look apologetic, a maneuver which resulted in grape juice trickling out the corners of his mouth. He wiped them onto the back of his hand and looked down at the map.

"There's really no wrong way," said a man sitting at the next table over.

The couple looked over at him. He sat in the shadow of the umbrella stuck through the center of his table and was slowly pouring a green liquid from a bottle over a spoon and filling a short glass with the result. He was wearing cut-off khaki pants and a blue oxford button down shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the shoulders. His arms and legs were deeply tanned and run down to sinewy muscle and bony joints; his blonde hair was long, almost ragged, and cascaded haphazardly over his shoulders

"Excuse me?" the woman asked.

The man at the table pushed his hair over his shoulders and lifted his drink to his lips, tilting some of the green liquid into his mouth. He put the glass down and looked at the couple as they stared at him. He pulled his hair back, slipped a hair band around it to make a pony tail, and adjusted his sunglasses.

"You can get there from here."

The couple looked at each other and then back at him.

"You don't even know where we're going," the woman said.

"Don't need to. I know where you are," he said, taking his glass and the bottle from the table and walking over to where they sat. "May I?"

The man at the table nodded.

"You see, you're only lost so long as you don't know where you are and where you're going. I know where you are; you know where you're going," he said, taking another sip from his glass. "Therefore, you're not lost."

The man sat down and slid their map over to himself and looked down at it. He turned it ninety-degrees each way and then set it so north pointed directly away from him.

"Well, this is where you are," he said, putting his finger down next to an empty spot on the map.

"That's nowhere," the man said.

He cocked his head to the side and furrowed his eyebrows. "I'm sorry, my name's Klas."

"Klause?" the man asked.

He shook his head. "No, Klas."

"That's a strange name," the woman said.

"It's just the wrong end of a name, that's all," Klas said.

The woman looked at him. "I'm Emily."

"I'm Peter," the man said, "and you're still pointing at nowhere."

Klas looked down at where his finger rested, looked over his shoulder, and then back at the map.

"Well, you're there, though," he said, smiling. "Ever think you'd be nowhere?"

"What?" Peter said.

"Well, this is the town's center, so you're in the middle of nowhere. Oddly, you're not supposed to be able to get here from there," Klas said, smiling more. "Are you planning on staying long?"

Peter and Emily looked at each other and then back at Klas.

"Listen, we're trying to get to Reus," Peter said. "Are we anywhere near there?"

Klas looked out at the ocean and sipped at his drink. "Oh, yeah, twenty or so kilometers. Thirty, maybe. It's just up the road."

"So, where are we, now?" Emily asked.

"I just showed you."

"You showed us a blank spot on the map," Emily said.

"Well, your map is too big a scale to show a tiny place like this, but you're here, so you know it exists," Klas said. "Or, maybe you don't."

"Huh?" Peter said.

Klas shook his head softly. "Nothing. A joke. Just because you don't know where you are doesn't mean you aren't there. And here you are."

Peter looked at his watch and then up at the horizon before turning to Emily. "Maybe we should just crash here tonight," he said.

Emily looked at Klas. "Can we make it there by sunset?"

Klas looked at her and noticed her eyes. They were dark brown with the high gloss sheen of polished mahogany veneer, not the stock brown issued off the rack to most women. He shrugged. "Depends how fast you can walk, doesn't it?"

Emily rolled her eyes. "Are you always this difficult?"

Klas reached over and tapped the back of her hand. "You wouldn't want me to tell you something I didn't know, would you?"

Peter interrupted. "Is there a place we can stay for the night?"

Klas leaned back, pursed his lips and stared out at the rolling surf.

"My place," Klas said. "It's free."

"Aren't there any hotels?" Peter asked.

Klas looked over his shoulder at the two dozen buildings lining the one side of the road, the sole evidence of civilization. On the other side of the road was beach.

"No, but you could knock on doors for a while; I'm sure someone would let you stay. I'm sure Emilio and his wife would, if you told them I sent you," Klas said. "But you'd still have to sleep on the floor."

Peter and Emily looked at each other in doubt and despair.

"So, you two are just out hiking around the country for the summer?" Klas asked.

"Yeah, just for a few weeks," Peter answered.

"Heading for Barcelona, then?"

"Yeah, that's where we leave from. What about you? What are you doing?" Emily asked.

Klas shrugged and stared into her eyes as he lifted his glass to his lips and took a sip.

"Hard to say," Klas said. He pulled out a thin box of British cigarettes, took one out and lit it. "Sometimes, I take tour groups out on day trips when some group of Americans or Japanese are foolish enough to buy the add-on excursion. I also do the translating for Taylor Forsmythe when he's in town, which isn't too often now that the government has named this an archeological preserve, meaning Forsmythe can't level everything and build his resort. I do some research, now and then. Mostly, though, I hide."

"Hide?" Emily asked.

Klas shrugged.

"So, how long have you been living here?" Peter asked.

"I don't know. A while, I guess."

"Too much absinthe along the way?" Emily asked, her mouth turning up into a snicker.

"Or not enough," Klas said flatly.

"So, what kind of tour do you lead?" Emily asked.

"Ahh, it's nothing, just a trip out to the tent town where you can meet some archeologists digging up some million year old settlement. This would've been a beach front hotel by now if some rock hounds hadn't unearthed some bones and clubs and stuff from some ancient battle," Klas said. "Some scientist is trying to prove that humans wiped out a rival, non-human species that lived in the area."

"What kind of species?" Peter asked.

Klas shrugged. "Neanderthal man. Or, maybe it's Homo Erectus. I don't know, I haven't taken a group out there in more than a year."

"I thought we descended from them," Emily said.

"So did I," Klas said and took Peter's bottle of water and poured some into his glass. "Some scientists think we may not have been the only intelligent, sentient species to live on this planet. Some believe we, well, humans, wiped our competitors out to preserve human dominance of the local food chain."

He pulled a sugar cube out of a pocket in his shorts and set it in a spoon he rested across the top of his glass. He lifted the bottle and poured the liquid over the cube until it had dissolved. He looked up at them.

"I can never remember if I'm supposed to pour the water or absinthe over the sugar cube," he said, capping the bottle. "It tastes the same, though."

"So, what are you researching?" Peter asked.

Klas took a sip. "Monsters."

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each of them sipping their drink and staring off into space. Emily motioned for the waiter and the man appeared. She ordered a beer and Peter followed suit. Klas smiled.

"It's been a while since I've had someone to drink with who spoke English. I find when I'm drunk I think in English, not Spanish, so I end up having to translate myself into Spanish after having already spoken in English. It makes for a very confusing evening. I end up not knowing who I am."

Their beers came and they sipped them. Emily bent down and loosened the laces on her hiking boots and pulled her feet out, setting them in the sunlight on the terra cotta stones.

They ordered food and more drinks and sat on the patio until the sun set into the plain behind them while they talked absently about Emily and Peter's hiking trip, Klas's observations on the small village and its people and avoiding, constantly, what Klas was in the country researching. Whenever they tried to ask a question about his research, he would immediately change the conversation to a different topic. They tried endlessly, sure that he was really monitoring the archeological dig for some ulterior purpose but never getting a reply from Klas other than he was a mere tour guide.

Klas looked over at the sliver of sun as it dipped below the horizon into the hills, a palette of colors spreading up until turning to indigo where the sky met the ocean horizon to the east. Klas tipped a large amount of absinthe into his glass, skipping the sugar cube, and dripped a few drops of water into it, turning it murky. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and stared at them with water-color green eyes.

"I'll have to be going, soon. It's getting dark," Klas said, his voice slurring as the other two sat silently.

"Aren't we staying with you?" Emily asked.

Klas nodded. "Yes, sure. My door is never locked; there's nothing in there to steal and there aren't any thieves around for miles. It's right down there," he said, pointing to a building near the end of the row that lined the street. "It's the first door you come to. Just come in and set up camp."

"You don't mind if we stay out a while longer here?" Peter asked.

Klas shook his head. "No, although Carlos will let you know when he wants you to leave. But, if you keep buying, he's likely to come out and join you, especially if you buy him some drinks."

"Who's Carlos?"

"The man who's been bringing our drinks all day. He owns this place," Klas said.

"Do you get up early to go somewhere for your research?" Emily asked, looking at her watch.

"No, I go to bed early and hide," Klas said, his words slurring into each other.

"Huh?" Emily asked.

"Monsters come out at night," Klas said, lighting a cigarette and gulping down a large swallow of his drink.

"Are you going monster hunting?" Emily asked, suppressing a smirk.

Klas shook his head.

"No," he said and paused, pondering the tip of his cigarette. "The Monster does the hunting, not me."

Peter furrowed his brow for a second and leaned forward. "Are you keeping a log of your nightmares?"

"Oh, no, these aren't nightmares," Klas said softly as he stared up at the stars. "But I do record my encounters, when they occur."

"Why? I mean, if they're only dreams, why bother?" Peter asked.

Klas inhaled deeply on his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. "This dream lives, it has a life of it's own. If I talk too much about it, it might figure out what I'm up to before I figure it out. The absinthe keeps it from coming out at night," Klas said and looked away before adding: "Usually."

Emily slouched in her chair and sipped at her bottle of beer. "You're writing about a recurrent dream you have? That's your research?"

"No, I'm researching a being that lives in dreams," Klas said, tilting the last of his drink into his mouth and swallowing easily.

Emily and Peter looked at each other over their beers and then at Klas.

"I don't get it," Peter said.

"What if those scientists out there are right? What if human beings did kill off the other species like us? I mean, it's not that far-fetched, we still try to kill off portions of our own species and we already dominate the food chain," Klas said, lighting another cigarette. "What if there was something that had evolved and lived inside of us? Wouldn't we try to kill that off, too?"

"So you're trying to find out if there's some kind of creature that lives in our dreams?" Peter asked.

Klas shrugged and stood up. He pulled out a fistful of money and dropped it on the table without counting it.

"Yes," he said staring momentarily up into the inky, star speckled night.

"Imagine: what if your dreams could live, only it's you who won't let them?" Klas said, his words nearly incomprehensible. "Wouldn't you want to know about that species before some scientist devised a way to kill it off with some sort of injection?"

It would be the ultimate story, the story that could make a career, the story that would have editors from around the world calling him for the exclusive, translating his story into every known language. It would be }his byline above the story: By Nicklas Case.

All he needed was to be able to write about its psychology first, to prove it could be so. Then find a doctor who could prove to the world what he harbored within himself. If only he could find a doctor he could trust to remove the lump from his hip without killing him in the process. If he could only figure out what the Monster wanted from him, what it would give him, before it took over.

Absinthe and an altered name would only keep the world at bay only for so long. Soon, they would be coming for him, with medication and white jackets.

But what if this was what the Monster wanted? To drive him to drink to the point he could no longer write his notes and craft a story about its existence? What if it yearned for the psychiatric ward? What if it lived on psychotropic drugs, alcohol and sex? What if it was ambitionless? What if it knew he wanted to expose its species and was now letting him do the exact thing which he thought would keep it suppressed but, in actuality, would ensure its survival? Who would believe a drunk?

Klas nodded good-night to them, stuck his cigarette between his lips faded into the night, smoke trailing around his head in locomotive engine puffs as he walked along the darkened cobblestone street leading to the door he had earlier pointed out as his. And then he kept walking.

THIRTY

Klas scrambled along the hillside in a low crouch, his face and hands caked with dust and lips chapped from a morning under the blazing sun. He dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled up to the crest of the hill and peeked over, staring through his sunglasses at the archeological dig a quarter-mile away. He could see land sectioned off in squares of twine, red flags sticking out of scores of the squares.

He wriggled on his belly below the crest and slipped his backpack off, pulling from it a pair of binoculars and a canteen. He took in a mouthful of water and held it in his mouth for a second, letting it seep into his tongue and wash over the inside of his cheeks. He capped the canteen and looked around behind him, checking for one of the security guards who occasionally made walks of the perimeter. He was alone.

He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and squirmed back up to the crest of the hill, dust floating up and again sticking to his lips. He looked through the binoculars at the dig site, scanning across it looking for the workers with small spades and brushes. Earlier that morning, he had seen the workers moving stretchers away from some of the squares, putting what looked like skeletal remnants in neat piles near one of the tents. He hadn't, though, been close enough to get a clearer look at the remains and had worked his way all morning to this closer point, the last hill before the terrain descended into a large depression that stretched for a mile or two away from him.

He slipped back below the hill and pulled a notebook and pencil from his pack and began sketching out the dig site from his new perspective, noting the tents and the irregular shape of the excavation area. He drew in small flag symbols where he remembered them and noted in which squares the men at the site were working. He crawled back up to the top and spied on the camp again, adjusting the focus of the binocular lenses on one of the closest squares with men in it. He could make out little for several moments as two men crouched with brushes, their backs to him. When one of them moved he could see a skeletal head, its cranium large, thick and protruding forward above the eye sockets. The other man moved aside and began brushing something else, and Klas could see that much of the unearthed skeleton was blackened, as if it had been burnt. He put the binoculars down and drew a quick sketch of the head, making a notation alongside it that the skeleton appeared charred.

He scanned the area behind him, again, checking for the khaki uniformed men wearing ball caps and carrying small machine guns. None. Perhaps it was too hot for them; perhaps they had grown tired of patrolling the area and never finding prowlers. Klas took another drink from his canteen and squirmed a little further forward on the hilltop.

He searched through the binoculars for the tents and came to the scattering of skeletal remains next to one of them. They were divided into three groups, with the bones of two piles neatly lined up, small tags attached to the larger bones. There appeared to be no indication that the men at the site were trying to reconstruct the skeletons at the moment, rather, they were merely cataloguing where the bones had been found and arranging them by the color of the tag. The skulls were too small to make out distinctly, appearing as little more than bony orbs and loose jawbones.

Several men walked in front of the pile at which he was looking, set down a new set of bones, each bearing a sky-blue tag, and moved off with their litter. They set it down on the ground and one of the men began tossing the bones unceremoniously into the pile. Klas squinted hard through the binoculars, sure that the bones in the pile were charred, burnt by some long ago conflagration. The men picked their litter from the ground and moved out of his view and Klas wished he had stronger binoculars as he stared at the unmarked jumble of femurs, ribs and skulls.

Klas wondered why they weren't cataloguing the burnt bones, why they weren't carefully stacked. He had never seen any other archeological digs, but was sure such the haphazard care of the items uncovered wasn't scientific procedure. After this dig was over, the entire area would become a large hotel resort, and Klas wondered if this were some archeological way of hastening the process of excavation by separating the useful artifacts from the unrecoverable ones.

He held the binoculars with one hand as he reached for his notebook and pencil, dragging it closer to him and setting it near his chin. He picked the pencil up and began sketching out the piles, peeking quickly through the binoculars for details. He scanned a few feet to the right and saw a pelvic bone, burned like the rest. And then he saw it, there on the right side of the bone, a deep cleft as if someone had tried to chop open the bone. He looked at a different pelvic bone and saw the same thing, only it appeared as if this one had had a hole hammered right through it.

Klas licked his lips and raised his eyebrows at the pile of hip bones and wondered at the various wedges and holes carved in them. His heart beat faster as he wrote a note to himself in his notebook, drawing a crude pelvic bone missing a wedge of bone on the right side.

Another pair of men bearing a litter walked up to the pile of charred bones and dumped their load unceremoniously on top of it. A third man walked up to them and motioned to a pickup truck parked nearby. The other two men nodded, one of them looking down at the charred pile of hip bones and rubbing his chin. The third man then pointed out to an area below Klas's field of vision, sweeping his hand from the left to the right and then circling an area with his index finger.

Klas crawled down from the slope, his heart beating, certain he was onto the biggest story the world had ever seen. He looked around for a patrol, saw none, and packed his things quickly. His side burned hotly, singing a call of the dead, a song that demanded redemption, survival. If only he had a camera.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.

