 
In A Season Of Dead Weather

by Mark Fuller Dillon

Smashwords Edition

Cover designed and drawn by Tragelaphus.

Copyright 2013 Mark Fuller Dillon

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Lamia Dance

Never Noticed, Never There

Shadows In The Sunrise

When The Echo Hates The Voice

Who Would Remain?

The Weight of Its Awareness

The Vast Impatience Of The Night

Acknowledgements

*****

Lamia Dance

On a cold November night when I was eighteen years old, I went with several students to a run-down movie house, and rediscovered the truth about myself: the truth I had long hoped to conceal.

On that night, when we stepped out of the wind and into the grimy, dark-paneled lobby of the cinema, I was already unsure of my decision to tag along. The need had driven me \-- the need, and a sense of being trapped within the laboratories and lecture halls of university routine. For seven days a week, I studied; I lacked the time for anything else. And I certainly lacked the money; only my scholarship had allowed me to attend classes in the first place; only my grants had allowed me a tiny room in residence and the two meals a day that left me constantly hungry by nightfall. So when I learned about the foreign cinema club and the movie house that offered substantial discounts to university students, I decided -- against my better judgment -- to hide myself within a crowd.

I came to realize my mistake as soon as I entered the lobby with the twenty or so fellow-students. As one of the few unattached people in a crowd of couples, I had felt exposed and isolated on the long walk through the stabbing wind to the movie house; but once in the lobby, I began to feel as well that old anxiety that always hit me whenever I stood on the verge of watching a film. The reek of popcorn butter and dusty carpet, the shadows in the corners, the faded posters sagging on the mottled walls -- everything reminded me of how uncomfortable I had always felt in cinemas. As the others stood in groups and chattered in open, friendly ways, I began to feel like a cast-off anatomical skeleton propped up within a long winter coat.

To conceal my discomfort, I wandered toward a series of smudged glass frames on the wall, where information on the short films to be screened that night was posted. Directors and actors were detailed in page after page of text, but there were no pictures, no mention of storylines, no indication of what the films were actually about. The only clues offered were exotic titles that meant nothing to me. As I stared at one of them -- _Lamia Dance_ \-- I felt the sudden presence of a young man at my side.

"That's a poor translation," he said. "They're not really lamiae. They're something else... something even better."

"I wouldn't know," I said, in a voice far too weak and tremulous. "I don't know a thing about films."

Then I stared helplessly at the faded crimson carpet spotted black with ancient grime and starred with scattered popcorn salt, until I felt him move away from me and back into the crowd.

Finally, armed with ticket stubs,tall cups of soda-pop, and striped cartons of popcorn, the students filed into the theatre. I tagged along and sat hesitantly in a seat right beside the aisle, from where I could see the others ease out of their bulky coats and jackets: beautiful young people, shedding unwanted and unnecessary shields. The man in front of me, having laughed at some comment from his warm and lovely girlfriend as she unwound her scarf, glanced at me, huddled in my thick coat, and said, "You know, you really should take that off, or else you'll get used to the heat... and then you'll freeze on the way home tonight."

I smiled back and shrugged off my coat, pretending that my shields, too, were unnecessary. Yet I wondered how anyone could call a university home. Did he find it so easy there, to blend right in?

For the next few minutes, my stomach trembled from a combination of hunger and the need. I stared at the frozen ripples of dim light on the scarlet curtains straight ahead, at the curved lamps glowing like pale subterranean toadstools on the angled walls, and realized once again how ill at ease I felt in cinemas. I knew the reason why, but whenever that reason bubbled up into memory I turned aside with firm resolve and listened to the clever, relaxed conversations all around me. I reminded myself that I had come here to hide within a crowd; and then the curtains parted, the voices died, the darkness fell and covered me.

A beam of light stabbed the darkness, and a faded blue title card appeared on the screen: _Short Subject_. The man ahead of me turned to his girlfriend and whispered a name or a word that eluded me; it sounded vaguely Slavonic.

Blackness followed; then another beam stabbed out, and letters indecipherable to me, Cyrillic perhaps, crawled across a slowly turning vortex of magenta, scarlet, blue and purple. Despite the apparent age of the print, with its occasional spray of speckles and its occasional flickering scratch, the colours were unfaded, deeply saturated and vibrant. The man ahead of me whispered something about 1940s Technicolor.

With the credits over, the vortex faded to black. Then a faint light appeared: I seemed to float through a black tunnel of forest or jungle growth, through a complex network of leaves and branches writhing in the wind and silhouetted against a crimson glow in the darkness up ahead. The tunnel mouth widened, and suddenly I drifted free above a jagged plain of black volcanic rock beneath a twisting sky of slate-grey thunderclouds. For seconds at a time, the clouds took on a deep crimson glow from a hidden sunset, only to fade once more into lifeless greys. But then a tower loomed above the plain, swelled and lengthened as I raced toward it; when the sunlight struck, the tower glowed like a furnace coal, impossibly present against the blackened sky.

At the base of the tower I began to rise, and passed several storeys wound like the coils of a serpent around a high pillar. Each level bristled with elaborate stone carvings; they reminded me of serpent heads thrust into the sky with jaws agape... and at that point, I began to feel the slow uncurling of anxiety deep in the pit of my stomach: I had seen this film before.

My fear increased as the music crept in, rose above the moaning wind and drowned it out with the deep bass clangour of distant gongs; I knew that music all too well.

By now I had risen to the peak and to a circling, vertiginous view of serpent jaws bristling high above the plain. As the furnace glow of sunset faded, a faint beam of magenta light appeared amidst the forest of carvings: light from a circular opening. I drifted forward until I stared straight down and began to sink within the tower, descending past tier after tier of indigo marble: a series of concentric rings that narrowed like the levels of a stadium as I neared the lowest circle.

And then, at exactly the moment I expected, the sombre hues of indigo marble and deep magenta light vanished in a wild burst of colour that made the audience around me gasp in surprise. The upper surface of each tier was now lit from within like a ring of stained glass, to reveal abstract lines and pinpoints of aquamarine, turquoise blue, violet, and neon pink. The distant gongs gave way to bright clattering rhythms, like shards of glass and crystal falling onto metal plate.

I sank into my seat, torn between fear and the practical desire to conceal that fear -- the same dual response I had experienced when I was shown this film, repeatedly, at the age of five, one year before my parents went away and never came back.

By now I had reached the lowest circle, the arena of this amphitheatre. In the crazed light that rose from the stained-glass floor, I could see five doorways equally spaced within the ring of marble. The music paused with anticipation... until a face I knew very well peered from one of the doorways and swept the arena with a slow, searching gaze. Then the young man stepped with cautious dignity onto the arena floor. In the audience, a few people laughed or tittered, for the man, slim and muscled like a dancer, was completely naked.

I was now beyond anxiety; I felt as if a spotlight had speared and plucked me from the dark mass of the crowd.

As the clattering music burst into new levels of volume and complexity, the man circled the arena in a slow dance that surged into a rapid display of athletic energy. There was nothing effete about him; he moved with the leaps and lunges of a martial artist, driven by increasingly barbaric, accelerating rhythms, lit from below by wild splashes of colour that rivaled the frenzied music. And then --

And then, as he danced, a faint sibilance rose against the music; long, lean silhouettes arced and swayed into view on the tier just above his head. From unseen doorways, the silhouettes emerged to blacken the stained-glass floor of their own encircling tier, to form slender patterns of darkness upon the wild colours. The sibilance increased, became a complex hissing that somehow suggested language without suggesting anything remotely human.

The dancer froze in place, suddenly alert; sweat glistened on his torso as he took several deep, slow breaths. Once again, as I had on many occasions over the years, I wondered if he knew what was coming, if he had any idea of how little time was left to him for breathing.

On the tier above his head, the hissing discussion ceased; a decision had been made. One of the silhouettes dipped a slow, curling length of itself from the upper circle, and then the man saw her; he stood without movement as she lowered herself in coil upon coil to the stadium floor, until she reared back above the sprawling circles of her body to face him.

Despite her vast length, her proportions were graceful and slender, with the lean, concealed power of a boa constrictor. Beneath her cobra's hood, her large head was completely reptilian, with the jaws and upper snout of a python; yet below the neck, her body took on the semblance and size of a human being's, with the torso, slim abdomen and subtly flaring hips of an attractive woman. Her mimicry extended to the breasts, the navel, the pubic mound of a woman; and as this upper body swayed back and forth in slow, sinuous movements, it revealed a perfectly convincing set of shoulder blades, a tapering back and small, rounded buttocks -- yet the rest of her was the long and undivided body of a serpent. Limbless, hairless, disturbingly alien, she remained unspeakably beautiful, and her dorsal scales threw off reflected light with an emerald iridescence.

For several heartbeats, man and serpent remained in place; then the man lunged toward one of the exit doorways. He had almost made it before she sent out a gliding length of coil to block his way. He lunged again, in the opposite direction, and again she uncoiled a length of her long, slender body to block the path. Soon she had blocked all five doorways and forced the man toward the central point of the arena circle. Panting and glistening, he stood in place once more , poised to flee from any movement.

After a pause, the music returned with a softer texture, like metal brushing upon metal in a murky pool of water. The serpent now swayed her upper body with the seductive motion of a woman dancing; her coils began to move in slow spirals of emerald on the stained-glass floor. She gazed down upon her own sliding movements, then raised her ophidian head to reveal impossibly green, impossibly beautiful eyes.

The man spun away with a lifted forearm to block her from sight. Then he launched himself into a dance of his own, a dance of escape from her dance of seduction. Yet no matter where he moved, she seemed to be there first with her gently rocking human curves, her beguiling eyes. With every veer away from her, he found his way blocked by winding coils. Soon he was encircled by rings of emerald that slowly closed upon him.

Finally, retreating from her eyes with his arm again pressed upon his face, he tripped and fell backward upon a slowly writhing mound of coils. As he threw back his arms to break his fall, she thrust her face toward him in a smooth gliding rush... and then she had him. She had him; he stared back at her in panic for a heartbeat, until the sheer beauty of her gleaming eyes overcame him. His rictus of fear became a slowly spreading smile; his body relaxed and settled back upon her coils. She held his gaze inescapably, swayed her head from side to side, and seemed to smile herself when she saw his head turn lazily to follow.

Now entranced completely, and completely in her power, the man lay fully quiescent and fully aroused. She noted this with apparent amusement, and flicked her long tongue at his mouth with playful frequency. Arching her woman's body above him, she rubbed and slid against him teasingly, coaxed his arms and hands to wander as she held him at all times with the fascination of her eyes.

Then she eased herself down and pressed herself upon him -- an embrace without arms -- and began to move with a slow, compelling insistency. The music surged in waves, on and on, until suddenly stopped by the man's helpless cries of release.

Cold sweat stung my eyes.

She lay upon him as his breathing slowed, cradled him within her coils, held his gaze with her own. He smiled up at her, sleepy and defenseless, and slowly turned his head back and forth to follow her renewed swaying. Again, this apparently amused her, and she watched him intently as her movements slowed and finally came to a stop. Then his eyelids fell shut, and with that smile still upon his face, he sagged within her coils, unconscious.

She lowered him gently to the floor, and as his chest rose and fell in sleep, examined him minutely with her flickering tongue. Then she poised her mouth above his head, and began to stretch her jaws impossibly wide....

It took her a long time to swallow him. The pulsing movements of her jaws engulfed his head and neck; his shoulders and torso took a bit more effort, but the rest of him went down her throat with ease.

In the end, she relaxed, uncoiled herself upon the stained-glass floor, and apparently savoured the muscular contractions deep inside her.

Then she glanced toward me; she looked directly at me with a knowing, unmistakable look, and I knew exactly what she meant to imply: This is what you want. This is what you need. This has been your secret, but now the secret is unlocked within your heart at last.

Fade to black.

Sweating in the silence, I was ready for the audience to turn and stare at me, to point at me with dawning awareness. I braced myself for their shouts of discovery, their cries of shock and fear. Yet nothing happened. They whispered to themselves, unaware; they laughed quietly at private comments, without suspicion, without a sense of danger. None of them understood what they had seen; none of them knew what watched them from the night.

When the next film began, I took my coat and slipped away as quietly as possible. I stepped out of the cinema doors to find the world suddenly white: snow whirled beneath the streetlamps, and the wind pierced my back as I set off down residential streets toward the campus.

Every house on every street polluted the night with glowing windows, where men and women moved in silent, inexplicable dances of relationship. At the sight, I remembered the last time I had seen my parents, but then the need arose and blotted them from memory. They were gone, they were finished; they had shown me a film repeatedly when I was five years old, then they had left me with the need and nothing else.

When I reached the university and found myself through force of habit outside the Department of Medicine, I stood alone in the gusting wind and watched the snow arc past me like a storm of eyes -- brilliant eyes, compelling eyes, glinting in the lamplight -- and I knew that I would learn to serve the need right there, with all the tools a scholarship had offered: scalpels for dissection, scalpels for destruction, scalpels like a row of gleaming viper fangs. After years of need, I knew exactly what I wanted.

High above my head, embedded in the caduceus emblem on the wall, the twining serpents watched me and began to writhe.

*****

Never Noticed, Never There

On a wet Sunday afternoon in April, Robert Piedmont left his townhouse on Springland Crescent and never came back. His wife later told police that Robert had seemed unlike himself that day; in the hour before he left, she had caught him staring at her, at the wallpaper and stippled ceiling, as if they had been puzzles to resolve. He said nothing when he slipped into his black raincoat and stepped outside; he ignored her questions, scowled in perplexity for a final moment, then eased the front door shut. By the time she had reached the doorway he was nowhere in sight.

One year later, while packing to move away from Springland and its painful memories, Mrs. Jocelin Piedmont phoned her brother and told him in a quiet, detached voice that her husband was alive, concealed within the house: "I've heard his footsteps on the staircase... his hand reached for me straight through the wall." She had found messages in the cellar, blurred notes on damp paper she could barely read.

Concerned for her mental health, her brother drove immediately to Springland, only to find the front door open and the townhouse empty. Mrs. Piedmont never came back; she had apparently joined her husband.

Unseen, unsensed, unmindful of their absence, the world moved on.

~

When he began to study graphic design in Ottawa, Tom Lighden came to realize just how small a part observation played in his life. From brief, barely-adequate glimpses of the world around him, he had built up a series of mental models that allowed him to navigate between obstacles without stumbling. He could cross a busy road while avoiding cars; he could walk from class to class while totally preoccupied without getting lost. But when asked to draw one of the university lecture halls or his tiny rented room from memory alone, he faltered. The shame of it forced him to study the world with greater concentration. Never again would he trust any impression made at first glance.

He taught himself to stare. He carried scraps of paper with him at all times and drew studies of everyday things: the gleaming gnarls on a maple tree after the bark has peeled away to show the wormlike trails of larvae; the spikes of frost on a window pane, pale and branched like coral; the scintillant, moonlit wrinkling of the water on the surface of the Rideau Canal.

And then, one night in December, walking on a high embankment above the canal on his way to an evening class at Carleton University, he found himself confronted by illusion.

A cold wind scattered dry snow that evening. No skater dared the ice; no plow had touched the fallen snow on the stretch of canal beyond Dow's Lake. The sky was the colour of scorched brass, and the streetlamps along the embankment cast fumbling shadows in the snowfall.

On the canal just ahead, the gateway of Hartwell's Locks loomed above the snow, and crouched before it was a lean, dark figure, stark against the whiteness: a tall man, apparently, gaunt with age, enwrapped in what appeared to be a tight black raincoat.

The man's posture conveyed injury or suffering, so Tom glanced away from the canal toward the empty lanes of Colonel By Drive, hoping for a car he could stop if the man needed medical care. But when he turned back, the figure was gone.

Tom blinked snow from his eyes and stared down at the unbroken expanse of white. How had the figure vanished so quickly? After all, the nearest ramp leading down to the ice was boarded up and blocked with warning signs, right in front of him.

Tom clambered over the boards and descended to the canal. His footprints left deep impressions as he waded toward the spot where the figure had crouched. He stepped carefully and stared in the half-light, but found no previous tracks on the barren snow. Yet something black protruded from the white, as if it had fallen from a coat pocket: a plastic billfold stained with mildew. He found a strip of paper curled inside, but the light was too dim for close inspection. This provided a good excuse to leave the canal, for which he was grateful; in his confusion over what he had seen, he would have spent an hour in search of footprints.

Back on the sidewalk, he held the paper close to his eyes in the trembling light of a streetlamp. Scrawled in partially-smeared ink was an address on Springland Crescent and a name vaguely familiar -- Robert Piedmont.

~

For the next few days he mulled over what he had seen, or rather, what he had imagined. He was convinced that he had fooled himself with a lazy misinterpretation of visual impressions. Yet he was equally certain that he had once heard of Robert Piedmont.

When he mentioned the name to an art history professor with a keen memory for local events, she thought for a moment, then shook her head.

"Never heard of him."

"Are you sure?" he asked, and showed her the slip of paper.

"Robert Piedmont!" she said, giving it a French pronunciation. "Of course I've heard of him."

She then told him the vague story of a man who had left his house one day and vanished.

"It was in the papers for a while," she said, "and on the CBC. I'm amazed you don't remember. It happened right here in Ottawa."

"When?"

"About ten years ago, something like that. Where'd you hear his name?"

He hesitated. Then he said, "Trivia quiz," as casually as he could. In truth, he was too embarrassed to describe his lapse of visual judgment to anyone.

Later that afternoon he pulled yellowing newspapers from dusty library shelves, and found several references to Robert and Jocelin Piedmont. Their case had remained unsolved, even after a decade. He had once been told that people disappeared frequently; the Piedmonts were merely two names on a long and growing list. Yet someone had recently jotted down their old address on paper -- perhaps a journalism student or a true-crime buff. As far as Tom was concerned, the matter was hardly worth pursuing.

Yet his perceptual ineptitude on that winter night troubled him. More than ever, he was set on training himself to observe with complete confidence. He had work to do.

Over the course of that winter he sketched obsessively, and in April he spent an afternoon on Parliament Hill, peering up at gargoyles and steep, copper-green roofs that bristled with ornaments of black wrought-iron. People passed by now and then, enjoying the first clear day after a week of rain. He ignored them, intent as he was upon dormer windows and Gothic turrets, but then someone went by who grabbed his attention.

An old woman with wild hair and a face the colour of an aching bruise stumbled toward him, hunched over, with arms crossed below her throat, with one of her hands clenched like a fist against her breastbone. She wore a tattered shirt and faded jeans as ragged as her hair, and as she approached he saw that her feet were naked on the pale stubble of the lawn.

Worst of all was her expression of extreme pain: eyelids squeezed shut, the corners of her mouth dragged down in a trembling grimace. He had never seen such agony on a human face.

Calling out to her made no difference; she seemed completely unaware of the world around her. He stared at her retreating back until she came to the sidewalk on Wellington Street. When she stepped into the heavy traffic, he cried out and ran to stop her.

Somehow she made it to the other side, while he was forced to wait for several cars to pass. She stood out like a moving scarecrow against the olive sandstone wall of the Langevin building. Oddly enough, everyone she passed ignored her; people walked right by without a glance. That more than anything else angered him enough to cross the street and follow her. When she disappeared around the corner of the building, he hurried to catch up, but on the other side he found himself alone. He had been right behind her; there had been no time for her to slip away.

He stood on the sidewalk and gaped at the blank wall as his memory ran through a scene from the Rideau Canal. It was the first time in weeks he had recalled that figure on the snow. And now, here was another unlikely disappearance.

He had to be mistaken. He must have overlooked something obvious, but wandering up and down the street brought nothing to light. The woman had vanished.

One week later, she returned.

She was back on Wellington Street, limping westward. He squinted in the late-afternoon sunlight and watched her for some time, startled but determined to mind his own business. Yet once again, the disregard of those around her sparked his anger. How could anyone ignore such pain?

Hunched over, with arms crossed below her throat, with one hand clenched like a fist, she passed the Bank of Montreal and the National Press building, then turned left at an alley.

He hesitated, uneasy at the prospect of yet another disappearance, until bright daylight and the crowded street left him feeling like a fool.

When he stepped into the alleyway he was half-blinded by the glare reflected from a long white wall, but he could see the woman straight ahead, a silhouette against the cul-de-sac; he was just in time to watch her slip through the bright wall and vanish.

He stumbled, raised a hand to block the daylight, then saw what he had overlooked at first glance: an open doorway in the wall, half-hidden from his angle of sight. As he approached, he saw that it was nothing but an empty doorframe with broken hinges; peering inside, he found a dim, descending stairway and heard the echoing slap of the woman's bare feet on concrete steps below.

On a day of dazzling sunlight, on the brink of a stairwell without any door to slam shut and trap him, he found it easy to convince himself that everything was normal. So he followed her, treading quietly on the stairs, intent upon her stumbling footsteps in the half-light below. The short flight of stairs reached a narrow landing and continued down in the opposite direction to reach another, where the pattern repeated itself: an ordinary stairwell with cement walls stained by dust and grime, with a flickering fluorescent tube at every right-angle turn -- but a stairwell without exits. Even after ten flights without a single doorway on the landings, he told himself that nothing was unusual, that nothing was wrong, until the sound of her bare footsteps faded abruptly.

He stopped, listened for any sound of movement, then lowered his foot to the next step. Something soft gave way beneath his shoe: a ball of paper, crumpled and damp as if recently clenched within a fist. He unfolded it and found the smeared words illegible except for one name: Robert Piedmont.

Then he noticed that his hand against the paper was a flat silhouette, that every part of his body was midnight black, that the fluorescent tubes were gone, yet the stairs and walls around him stood out clearly with a dim pallour. Startled, he reached out to touch the cement wall, only to feel his hand slide into soft, wet clay.

He wrenched his hand from the wall and saw that everything around him glistened with moisture. The stairs below were shapeless with mud, and impressed upon the ooze were descending tracks of two bare feet.

An acrid stench of dust and wet concrete left him gasping as he stumbled up the sodden steps, but he forced himself to climb faster. He had reached one landing and was lunging toward the next when a night-black figure rushed down and crashed against him with stunning force.

Tom staggered and clutched at the slick wall, while the figure paused for less than a heartbeat. Then, with arms dangling and limp, it pressed forward, driving him back with quick, determined strides. He reached out and grabbed what felt like a raincoat tight against the figure's chest, but his fingers slipped from the taut wet fabric. Finally he tripped, slid against the wall of a landing and fell to the muddy floor.

He shrank against the yielding wall, drew in his arms and legs to protect himself, but the figure stepped over him, turned at the next flight of stairs and continued on its way down. By then Tom was back on his feet and stumbling in the opposite direction.

As he fled upward, the slime at his feet and the wet clay walls gave way to hard concrete. Fluorescent tubes flickered at the landings; dust motes circled in a streak of daylight overhead. He darted through the lean doorway, fell and skinned his fingers on pale asphalt. Clenching his hands, he noted that his sleeves were unmuddied, and sitting up, he saw that his clothes and shoes were dry and unstained. Then he glanced back at the doorway and found instead a blank wall of concrete, dazzling in the sunlight of late afternoon.

He sat there for a long time, paralyzed by a growing sense that his life would never again be the same. He was no longer safe. With neither guides nor signposts, he was now in a bleak new world.

Much later, in his rented room, he stripped off his clothing and discovered a fine grey dust on his feet and on his arms, legs and back where they had touched the walls of the stairwell. His pants and shirt were spotless, but his body was contaminated. Trembling with physical nausea and a more than physical dread, he scrubbed himself thoroughly.

That night he lay on the narrow mattress in his narrow bedroom and stared at sheets of scrap paper, at several hundred detailed sketches that no one else had ever seen, that no one else would ever want to see. As the paper stirred in the draft from an open window, he understood how thoroughly his struggle to perceive had isolated him. He had never been frightened before -- not like this -- and he knew that no one would accept his impossible account of missing people and disappearing stairwells. He would have to keep it to himself. He would have to live with new-found sight, alone, or never live at all.

That awareness drove him out to confront the new morning. On his way to university, he deliberately took the longer route down Wellington Street.

The world seemed perfectly normal in the slanting daylight; and walking eastward, facing the sunrise, he vowed that he would take a close look at the alley beside the National Press building. When it stood just a few blocks ahead, he began to tremble, but he steadied himself by staring at the stone-solid, almost monolithic government buildings, the passing cars and busses wreathed with exhaust in the chill air, the pedestrians in winter jackets on an April Monday that should have been much warmer.

Yet just ahead limped a man with no jacket whatsoever; a man in a blue shirt, a faded blue shirt, a ragged blue shirt with holes; a man who suddenly stumbled, lurched from the sidewalk, and fell beneath the wheels of a passing truck.

Tom would have lunged to stop the man had he been close enough, had there been time. He could only stare at the smear of blood on the road, a smear that lengthened beneath every passing tire, until he realized with a cold shock that no one else had seen the man fall, no one else had seen the blood seeping over asphalt. People walked by, oblivious to sudden death, oblivious to the sudden figures who now surged from nowhere onto the street: figures crouched and hunched in postures of unthinkable suffering, blind to all but the glare of inner pain. Weaving with clenched eyelids and contorted limbs through daylight crowds that never even noticed them, they burst into existence by hundreds, by thousands. They rushed the sidewalk in a blind stampede, forced Tom backwards against a marble wall and finally to the ground. He clutched his face protectively and screamed --

The scream echoed through silence.

He raised his head and found himself kneeling beside a suddenly vacant street. The buildings all around him bled a dim grey light beneath a sky of aching black. He touched his face with cold hands and saw that they, too, were black, like holes punched in the fabric of reality. Pain seeped in to fill the sudden void.

He staggered to his feet, but the sidewalk shifted beneath him. He fell, and when he hit the concrete, his arms burst through like knife blades into seeping clay.

~

On a cold Monday morning in April, the traffic passed over Wellington Street. Pedestrians trudged to work with heads down, intent upon their own concealed anxieties.

Unseen, unsensed, unmindful of their absence, the world moved on.

*****

Shadows In The Sunrise

My shadow on a wall, a sunrise in the western sky, a twelve-hour gap in time: how could I explain these things? And yet I found myself on the mountain road in the light of morning, whereas a moment before I had been crossing the darkened lawn in front of the Rexdale house; I had noticed my shadow moving on the wall -- in the dark of night -- and I had turned to see the maples thrashing in a sudden wind. And then I watched the sun rise on the wrong edge of the world.

But now I stood in the cold light of a normal day. Frostlight gleamed from pebbles on the dirt road and glittered from the aspen leaves that fell around me in the stillness. I was bitterly cold, as if I had spent hours in the cold air... hours passing like a dreamless night. How could I have walked halfway home without remembering the trip? I checked my watch in disbelief: the date and time revealed a sudden loss of twelve hours.

I thought of returning to the Rexdale house but the idea sent a chill through me that was deeper than the morning cold. And it was cold: my face tingled painfully, as if with frostbite. So I continued on my way along the mountainside, then took the road down into the valley toward home. Away from the trees, between barren fields, I felt exposed beneath a cloudless sky, and the feeling remained even after I entered my house and shut the door behind me.

With a fire lit in the woodstove I warmed up quickly, but the cold lingered on my face. I peered into a mirror for any sign of frostbite but found, instead, a network of tiny red sores. At first I thought of measles, but as I examined my face and scalp I saw that every pore was inflamed, as if someone had stabbed at me with tiny needles -- and then I suddenly vomited, repeatedly and helplessly, as if at the physical memory of a long-forgotten fear.

~

The day went by. With winter looming, I had vegetables to can and freeze, apples to store and wood to cut. Yet nothing I did could dispel the sense of strangeness that haunted me like an unrecollected dream. And I was very much alone: my parents had left the house years ago; they were down in the States, where they found life under martial law preferable to freezing to death in a Quebecois winter. "We're not allowed to leave the city limits," they had written, "but the weather's fine and we've got five hundred T.V. channels." That was life in America. Here, I was surrounded by abandoned farms; when the world economy had fallen apart it had dragged down all my neighbors with it. There was no one I could turn to for help.

That night, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the Rexdale house gleaming in the darkness. I had spent a lot of time there over the years, growing up with the Rexdale children as my closest friends. When the Great Deflation forced them out of the countryside I agreed to maintain the house for them, even as the world around it fell apart -- not for the money they sent (which had little value at any rate), but in memory of a time when there were people in my life.

Staring into darkness, I understood that memories were all I had... and I refused to have them poisoned by a mystery.

~

I left early the next morning, walked up the road that climbed the hillside, and followed the winding route below the mountain. The day was milder, but the oblique sunlight, the woodsmoke tang of rotten leaves, brought hints of winter's approach, and the wind stung my healing face.

When I came to the spot where I had found myself the day before, I was tempted to return home. The wind in the pines hissed like a tide retreating on a hidden shore, and the scuttling of the leaves on the dirt road made me think of something dead that struggled into life. A lingering, indefinable dread had seeped through my mind and it darkened everything around me.

The few farmhouses along the route were boarded up and empty. Staghorn sumac and hawthorns had spread across the fields; grey stalks of burdock and milkweed bristled on ragged lawns. I remembered how, as a child, I could see the sparse lights from distant farms at nightfall, or hear the faint barking of a neighbour's dog; these nights, the fields and hills were black, and the silence gave way only to the baying of the wolves.

On the far side of the mountain, the driveway to the Rexdales weaved through a forest of gaunt maples and cedars until it reached the house, a white, one-storey building with a broad bay window that faced a long and narrow clearing. The surrounding woods were bleak: the scarlets and the orange-reds had faded to a dull copper, and the shimmering yellows of the aspen trees were spectral in the slanting light. Yet thanks to my maintenance work, the house felt unabandoned -- an illusion that died as I peered through the bay window at the empty living room.

I studied the house, hoping to spur recollection, but nothing came to me. The western sky, pale blue with a streak of cirrus, brought nothing to mind, even as I waited at the exact spot where I had seen my shadow leap upon the wall the night before. There was nothing here to frighten anyone.

As a child, I had played here many times with the Rexdale children. I remembered hide and seek, with the sheds and the encroaching woods as perfect spots to watch pursuers without being seen. But our favorite hiding place was the cubbyhole below the bay window, with a sliding panel built into the living room wall. If you lay down you could slide right in and close the panel until only your eyes were visible.

And then the shadows on the wall --

What?

As the shadow of a driven cloud darkens the fields and then fades away, something had loomed within my memory and passed me by.

I closed my eyes to the pale sunlight and tried to see the darkness of the night before.

Shadows.

Shadows on a wall.

I felt a sudden chill, the physiological memory of fear. I touched my face and, prompted by a vague impulse, ran my fingers over the irritable skin. They brought to mind the fronds of a plant brushing against me, the sliding touch of wet rope.

Yes... wet rope.

By now I was damp with sweat and my heartbeat raced, yet I could retrieve only the vaguest hint of shadows looming high on a wall, seen from a low angle, as if I were crouched on the ground.

No; as if I were lying on the floor, in the cubbyhole, watching shadows on the living room wall.

I opened my eyes. The day was bright and clear: that alone encouraged me to unlock the front door and step inside.

Daylight shining through the bay window warmed the empty living room, and because I had left the door open whenever I worked outside, the air was neither stale nor damp. Yet I could smell dust as I stooped at the cubby below the window. The panel was open, and I noticed scuffmarks on the dusty floorboards within; had I left them on the night before?

I lay down on my side, pulled myself into the compartment and slid the panel shut, leaving just a crack open so that I could peer at the wall on the other side of the room. Then I closed my eyes and struggled to remember.

Shadows. Shadows on the wall....

~

The sun has already set. I have just put the lawnmower into the shed and I am crossing the yard in the darkness. Something moves at the edge of sight: I look up and notice my shadow on the wall of the house. Then I turn around to see the maples tossing in a sudden squall, and there, in the western sky, the sun is rising.

No, not the sun: a beam of light flickers through the narrow clearing.

My eyes are streaming in the wind but I can just glimpse something moving through the woods: it looks like a wall in motion. No... a scaffolding, a cage, a lattice of irregular shapes and sizes, glowing with purples and magentas as deep as darkness yet somehow visible.

Descending from the sky -- behind the trees, in front, all around me -- wall after wall of glowing lattices, a cagelike framework facing all directions, too complex to take in at once. Diamond shapes, lozenges, a mountainside of spikes, weblike panels set at every angle, greens and blues and scarlets....

I run to the house, slam the door shut behind me and lock it. Then I peer through the tiny pane as tall swaying shapes approach from the light.

In a panic I crawl to the bay window, slide into the cubby and pull the panel shut until I can barely see the shadows on the opposite wall, shadows like the freeze-frame snapshots of windswept trees. Despite the storm they are motionless and I can see their ropy boughs at all angles, every bough divided into two branches, every branch divided into two twigs, every twig divided into two thorns, every thorn divided into two needles \--

Then light flares in the hallway just beyond my vision as the front door crashes open. A shadow bulges on the wall and its wet ropes burst through the crack, fumbling at my face, stinging with a hundred thousand pinpricks --

~

I wrenched open the sliding door and stumbled to my feet. The empty room was warm and sunlit but I had to get away.

Standing on the lawn, staring at the trees and sky, I found that nothing in the everyday world could dispel the cold fear that haunted me. But that fear was absurd. These were not memories. Dreams, nightmares, the fabrications of a mind that would come up with any explanation to resolve anxiety: these I could accept. But memories of actual events? Never.

Yet I found myself scanning the trees for broken limbs and peering at the ground for telltale holes and gouges. When I realized what I was doing I turned away in disgust.

There had to be an explanation for the dazzling light, my wounded face, the lapse of memory. Had I been struck by lightning, had I wandered in a daze till morning? Or was isolation driving me to madness?

Madness. A word I had avoided; there it was.

I noticed the front door gaping wide: in my rush from the house I had left it open. As I went to lock it, that false memory of the door crashing open in a blaze of light nagged at me. Of course it was false. The door was undamaged; nothing had smashed it open.

Then I thought of infinitely branching ropes, repeatedly splitting in two from the size of a limb to the size of a molecule; no lock would keep them out. But that was nonsense.

It had to be nonsense.

Two ravens leapt from the boughs of a cedar; I stood in the doorway and listened to their fading cries. There was nothing I could do but go home.

Hemmed in by the trees along the driveway, I felt naked beneath that wedge of sky; I glanced away from the boarded windows of the farms along the road.

On the other side of the mountain I looked down into the valley and saw my house standing like a target amidst barren fields, exposed on all sides to any shadows that might loom with evening. Yet the darkest were already there, deep inside my head.

~

Winter struck. I tried to focus on daily work, but at night the stars looked down with enigmatic stares.

The telephone and power lines went down in the driving snow that blotted out the world beyond my windows and hissed against the walls in a constant rush of wind. I lived in the kitchen, close to the woodstove. My supplies would last for a long time if I rationed every bite. In dreams I served at banquets, but always woke before I could steal any food.

One day I began the five-hour walk to the nearest village: I had to see if the outside world existed anymore. But visibility faded beyond the length of my arm and I had to give up. I stumbled back through a white cocoon of blinding flakes, terrified that the footprints I had left on the way out would disappear before I could find my way home.

That night I heard my parents in the wind; they called my name with distant raven cries. When I opened the door they gaped at me and fled into the night. Then I woke up, stumbled to the mirror, and flinched at the sight of a stranger's hollowed face.

Last night I heard the silence when the wind stopped. I scraped frost from the window pane and saw moonlight glimmer through a lens of thinning cloud. Eddies of snow swirled across the fields: a thousand shades of white twisting in the darkness. And descending from the ragged sky, spanning the horizon, a wall of scaffolding, a glowing magenta cage sparkling with somber pinpoints of green and blue and scarlet.

Perhaps by now the world belongs to them: a world of shadows, drifting like the snow above abandoned fields, falling like the darkness on forgotten hills, awake and watching in the moonlight; a world that I could recognize but never own. My memory has returned and that, for me, is enough. There will be no spring.

*****

When The Echo Hates The Voice

1

From _An Obstetrician's Memories_ by Marcel Dumont:

Fatigue and stress can also interfere with our work. When I was an intern on extended shifts at the hospital, I often noticed, at the end of a long day, an odd impairment or distortion at the edge of sight, very much like fluttering wings or slithering snakes coursing down the walls. My judgment and competence were never hindered, but I did experience odd hallucinations from time to time.

The worst of all was hard to forget, although I have tried to do so. It hit me on the very day of my first delivery -- an easy, uncomplicated birth that went as smoothly as any doctor or mother could wish. On that occasion, I had known the parents for years: the Bertrands, neighbours of mine in that small town. Their son, Paul, came into this world a fine, healthy child. No doctor could have asked for a smoother, more joyous first delivery, which makes what happened next all the more incongruous.

I had left Mrs. Bertrand and her son in the care of the delivery room nurses, and was about to push open the swinging exit doors when the white hallway beyond one door's circular window pane was blocked by a dark, gaping hole. Startled, I drew back for no more than a heartbeat, then pulled the doors open to reveal something far worse than wings or snakes.

It was, to put it mildly, a giant. The ceilings of that hospital were no less than three metres high; as I pulled the doors open, this crouching being reared back and struck, with its bulging scapulae, the fluorescent light panels overhead. Then it stood there, glaring down at me -- at least, it would have glared, had its eyes been visible; but the sockets were so deep in that lean, hard face, the eyes so recessed, that all I could discern were two black pits confronting me.

You can imagine my shocked surprise. I lunged backward and collided with a nurse. The doors swung shut, blocked the being from sight -- and I knew, at that moment, that what I had seen was impossible; therefore, I had never actually seen it. It was all in my mind.

And with that, I pushed the doors open to face nothing more than an empty hospital hallway.

I glanced at the nurse behind me and offered a weak smile.

"Busy day," I said. The look she returned seemed less than charitable....

2

From the statement of Lucien Boisvert, aged 19:

Don't get me wrong, I'd never say anything bad about Paul Bertrand. But the truth is, he had problems right from the start.

He must have been about five years old when I first met him, one day when my parents were visiting his. He had been sent upstairs for a nap, and we were just about to leave when we heard him scream with what sounded to my ears like real terror. He came running down the stairs at full speed, dashed to his mother... and told her that an echo had stuck its face through the open window of his bedroom. That's right, "an echo". When I left with my parents, I looked up at Paul's window, far away from any balcony or ledge, and thought that anyone who could stick a face through that window would have to be a giant. You know how it is with kids that age: their nightmares are one hundred percent real to them, and the things they say can be pretty wild.

The next time I met him, just a few days later, he stared at me as if I were something he couldn't figure out, then he asked me if I were a voice or an echo. Pretty wild, as I've said. So I told him I was Lucien Boisvert, and I guess that must have satisfied him, because we've... we were friends ever since.

Neither Paul nor I had a brother or sister, so our parents were happy to have us play together. In fact, all throughout our childhood, one of us always stayed overnight at the other's house. I'd heard his parents mention, once or twice, that Paul could never sleep without someone else in his room, and even then there were times when he woke me up in the middle of the night with a terrible scream. He never talked about his nightmares, though -- on the few times when I mentioned the screaming, he went completely silent. There were times, too, when he suddenly looked over his shoulder as if he'd expected to find someone else in the room. Otherwise, he seemed like a typical kid to me.

And not only to me. Paul was actually one of the more popular kids in school, and he thrived on that. There was nothing he liked better than big groups, crowded hallways, lots of people surrounding him. So naturally, he excelled at group activities like track and field... and basketball, of course, always basketball.

Girls were crazy about him. They gave him cute nicknames like "Mystery Man" or "N. Igmatic"... not only for that haunted look that sometimes appeared on his face, but also, I think, for those deep-set eyes of his, like black holes in a lean, rugged mask. And the girls liked him for his drawing skill. He never had to ask any girl to pose for him -- they were always eager to volunteer. For guys like me, hanging around Paul gave us a great opportunity to meet the most beautiful girls in highschool, because they flocked to him.

But at the same time, there were hidden aspects to Paul that I never could figure out. Girls asked him out constantly, which was more than fine with him... as long as he went dating in groups. But I've had girls confess to me how disappointing and frustrating it was for them whenever they tried to talk with him in private. In crowds he came to life, but in smaller groups, and especially with only one other person around, he often became silent and easily distracted, always staring into corners or turning his head suddenly at noises the rest of us could never hear.

There were things he'd never talk about, not even with me. There was one time, I recall, when he and I were doing homework at his place. He was painting a still-life or something as an art assignment while I turned the pages of his sketchbooks and admired those gorgeous girls from highschool. But then I came across page after page of sketches I'd never seen before, all of the same leering, hateful face. Paul had captured something terrible in that face, something that chilled me as I stared at sketch after sketch... but the worst part was the obvious purpose of those drawings: they were self-caricatures. They had to be -- there was no mistaking those hidden eyes in deep, black sockets.

"You know," I finally said to him, "these faces are incredible."

"What faces?" he said, intent on his painting.

"These," I said. "But I'd hate to think what they reveal about your self-image."

He turned at that, stared at the pages... and went completely white. His neck muscles clenched several times, as if he were struggling to speak, and when he finally found his voice, it sounded weak and raw.

"Put those away," he said. And then he stared at me, not with anger, not with annoyance, but with something I could hardly understand. Now that I think of it, I guess he was pleading with me to forget all about it.

So I changed the subject, and he went on with his painting. But I could never quite get over the impact of those sketches; they made me wonder what he saw within himself, what self-knowledge he kept hidden from the rest of us.

After that, he seemed to throw himself even further into schoolwork, art, sports, any activity that kept him in the centre of a crowd. The tallest kid in highschool, he became the best basketball player, the best runner -- he drove himself constantly. He also convinced a bunch of us to train with him after school by running up and down those stairs beside the college... those stairs on the hillside.

Look, there's not much more I... do I really have to go on with this?

Okay. Okay.

Well... he was at the top of his class when highschool ended, and everyone expected great things of him at college. And even though he drove himself harder than ever, I could tell that something was wrong. For one thing, he never actually had a girlfriend. Oh, he had women all around him, all the time, and he loved the attention... but in the end, they always drifted away, frustrated by their inability to connect with him. I'd always supposed that Paul would have a steady girlfriend long before I did. You can imagine my surprise when I succeeded where he failed.

At the same time, he began to seem ill-at-ease even in crowded rooms, more easily distracted, more irritable than ever before. Something was on his mind, nagging at him, but whatever it was, he kept it to himself.

And so... that first term of college came to an end. My girlfriend Claire and I had a late exam, long after most of the out-of-town students had already left for Christmas vacation. Paul tagged along with us and decided to wait around while Claire and I took the exam. Afterward, we were going to meet him at the library, but when the time came, we couldn't find him there. We couldn't find him at the gym or in the art rooms, either. When Claire suggested the pub, I laughed: I'd never seen Paul take a drink in his life.

But in the end, that's where we found him, alone at the pub.

It was obvious, too, that he'd been drinking all throughout the exam. When we sat down at the bar beside him he looked at us, hunched his back defensively, and said something in a voice so hushed and secretive that I couldn't hear a word.

"What's that?" I said.

He clenched his tight shoulders even tighter, and pronounced every syllable as if he were talking to a slow child: "It wants to be the voice."

"...What?"

And then Paul said something like this:

"The echo wants to be the voice. It's resented me since the day I was born. It's been sneering at me all the time, and waiting."

Claire and I glanced at each other with growing unease.

"Come on," I said to Paul. "Let's get you home."

"You'll stay with me, won't you...?"

I could sense the panic welling behind those hidden eyes.

"Sure," I said. "Sure. We both will. But let's get moving."

By that time, the sun had already set. The rising moon was straight ahead of us, dazzling our eyes as we walked through that tunnel of trees on our way to the downhill staircase. I had run along this route so many times before, driven on by Paul and his mania for sports, but now it troubled me to see him so nervous and defeated, so much a prey to something he could barely describe.

He walked ahead of us without a word, his back hunched, his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets. Suddenly he stopped, whipped his head around to the side, and held up a silencing hand.

"Hear that?" he said.

All I'd heard until that moment was the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot, and now, all I could hear was the rattling of stray aspen leaves on the branches overhead.

"Come on," I said. "Your ears are playing tricks on you."

He paused, unsatisfied, then stuck his hands back in his coat pockets and moved on.

Claire and I glanced at each other again, feeling more concerned than ever, but we kept our silence and followed him.

We were just a few metres from the stairhead when Paul stopped again. He spun around to face us. With the moon behind him, he was in shadow, but from the stance I could tell that he was terrified.

"You must have heard that!" he said.

I'll admit, my patience had worn down to nothing. "Paul --"

Then he grabbed me with trembling hands and forced me to turn backward.

"There it is," he whispered.

"What?"

"There it is, look at it. Look at it!"

"Get a grip on yourself! There's nothing there."

He let go, and I turned to see him inching backward, into the blazing moonlight.

"I'm the voice," he said. "I'm the voice, not you." Then he shouted, "An echo's not a voice!"

And with a choking cry he turned and ran in blind panic toward the staircase.

I lunged toward him, but Claire grabbed me from behind. She kept me from falling. She held me steady as I watched Paul tumble like a broken puppet all the way down the hillside stairs.

All the way down.

3

From _An Obstetrician's Memories_ by Marcel Dumont:

I have never lost a mother's child, but I have experienced something equally painful: the death, after several years, of a child I once brought into this world. And sadly, that child turned out to be the first I had delivered: Paul Bertrand.

Although he was a neighbour, just as everyone in that small town was a neighbour of mine, I had lost track of Paul over the years until a nurse told me that he had fallen to his death. To my vast regret, I missed the funeral.

On the next afternoon, I paid a visit to his grave. It was a cold day in December, but brightly sunlit; the wind was gentle, the snow had not yet fallen. The cemetery caretaker pointed out the path to follow; the grave was just beyond a winding cedar hedge.

As I walked beside the hedge, my thoughts were distracted by a deep, low chuckling: an unpleasantly repetitive sound of smug exultation. I puzzled over this anomaly until I turned the corner; then I recoiled at the sight of an impossibly tall figure writhing on the soil in front of Paul's gravestone, rolling on the grave as a dog rolls on the carcass of a rotting animal.

The figure surged to its feet, leered down at me -- and in the shadowed eyes, in the deep black sockets of its face, I recognized that hallucinatory giant from the hospital.

I must have cried out; I certainly stumbled backward and twisted to regain my balance. When I looked up again, the figure was gone. As with any other hallucination, the time between its abrupt appearance and equally abrupt disappearance had lasted no more than a few heartbeats.

For a few heartbeats more, I stared down at the poorly-raked soil in front of Paul's gravestone, and told myself that grief had caused this flashback: grief, and fatigue from long, hard hours at work.

I must have been more tired than I realized, for as I turned and walked away, I seemed to hear once more from behind the cedar hedge that low, exultant chuckling, until it faded like an echo in the wind.

*****

Who Would Remain **?**

After two days of trying to phone her mother, Colleen Lambert was ready to punch the silence. Calling had been the first priority the moment she had been released from jail, and she had kept the phone ringing for minutes at a time. The protest rally continued; the conferences, the teach-ins, the strategy meetings filled the hours on Thursday and Friday; but as time dragged on, Colleen found it hard to focus on politics, and easy to fear that something was wrong back home.

On Friday night she called the Tremblays, the farmers who lived just down the road from her mother's house, and again she let the phone ring for a long time. By that point, she knew that something would have to be done.

And so, on Saturday morning long before daylight, Colleen set out on the two-hour drive north along the Gatineau River to her mother's farm; not even November's first blizzard could stop her. Just beyond a town the size of a stunted church and cemetery, her car struggled up a narrow dirt road into a range of night-black hills. She had spent her childhood there, scaling bluffs of shattered rock and wandering through hollows choked with cedar. Yet now, as the road dipped and climbed through darkness, the land felt like uncharted wilderness. The unlit farmhouses were scattered and few, like outposts on the edge of the world, and the only lights in all these hills were the headlight beams of her car, flickering through tumbling snow.

The dry and powdery snowfall was thinning out at last, and her tires crunched through unplowed drifts without sliding. Against her will, she found herself lulled by the blankness of the road. Yet as she rounded the curve of a low hill, a red heap swept into the light.

She stamped on the brake and watched the heap swerve past her into darkness. Gripping the wheel, she fought the slow, dreamlike skid until the car came lurching to a stop.

Centered in the rear-view mirror, something bulged beyond the red stain of the brake lights. She stared for a moment, half-aware of the rumbling motor and the dragging sweep of the windshield wipers. Then she braced herself, took the flashlight from the seat beside her and stepped out into the cold.

Snow squeaked like Styrofoam with every step \-- a sound that made her teeth ache -- and the night smelled of car exhaust and ice. The flashlight beam, no brighter than a candle flame, settled on a ragged mound of fabric, vividly red beneath a veil of snow. She paced within the tire tracks and studied the mound at a careful distance, then crossed over and thrust the light forward.

A bathrobe, apparently. Nothing but a red bathrobe.

Bending close, peering through the mist of her own shallow breaths, Colleen saw the light reflected from a pair of dead eyes. She clapped a hand to her mouth and stumbled backward. The dim light wavered and picked out the child's feet, bare and yellowed like old ivory. She swept the beam further and saw the line of tiny footprints partially buried: along with her tire tracks, they formed the only trail in sight.

Like Colleen, the child had been heading northward, and if the prints were any indication, not so long before.

She took a deep breath and crouched beside the body, forcing herself to reach out and feel for any pulse on the chill throat, for any hint of vapor from the gaping mouth. Several minutes later, she forced herself to stop. When she pulled the rigid bathrobe aside to check for any wound, the livid pallor of naked skin sent her staggering away.

Leaning on the car, struggling to breathe, she told herself that she could have set out earlier, driven faster. She could have made a difference; she felt certain of that.

At the door she hesitated, torn between responsibilities. Leaving the body there on the road would deny everything she stood for, but moving it might destroy evidence and any chance of finding out where the child had come from. She had no faith in policemen -- in her social activist work, she had been arrested too many times for her to trust them -- but they would have to do.

Staring at the footprints, she wondered what people would find at the other end of that fading trail. A grieving family? A leering face? Or a trackless field in a windswept clearing, where any hope of answers disappeared?

She left the child on the snow, with a blanket from her car spread carefully upon it -- an empty gesture, far too late.

She had to find the nearest telephone. Speeding down the hillside, she thought of the Tremblays. They knew her mother; they had taken up the haying on her land, now that she no longer farmed. Colleen remembered the frustration of trying to phone them earlier that week. They had better be home, she told herself, and repeated the phrase like a song until their mailbox gleamed in the headlights.

She pulled up beside an old Plymouth white with snow. There were no prints on the way to the kitchen and no lights within. No lights came on when she hammered at the door. When her hands began to ache she gave up and crossed over to the barnyard.

It hardly felt like morning. The black clouds bore angry patches of scarlet; beyond these hills the sun rose, but here the night held fast. She hugged herself against the cold and considered the trackless snow and the silent house, the empty yard and the gaping doorway of the barn. Another detail nagged at her: the silence. On a winter's morning, hungry cattle should have made their impatience loud and clear. She braced herself and set out for the barn.

No one answered when she called, but from the entrance, she could hear the massed breathing of an unseen herd. She fumbled for a light switch and blinked in the sudden glare.

Locked in place between stanchions, a double row of Hereford cattle stood in silence. They ignored her as she walked past them down the aisle; each white head pointed, instead, toward another open door at the far end of the building. Beyond, she could see a barren field and a red crack on the horizon that edged black hills with angry light and turned a line of fence posts into bloody spears. Yet straight ahead, the northern clouds remained as black as burnt-out valleys.

She glanced back at the Herefords. Two dozen heads stared past her toward the outer darkness; their breathing filled the barn with hollow whispers.

At first appearance, the field seemed empty, but when she stepped through the doorway she found herself beside a German shepherd poised with a watchdog's tension. It hardly noticed her; it merely glanced her way when she stammered out a quiet "Hello." Ears upright, body braced and ready to lunge, the dog glared at whatever lay beyond that empty field.

Colleen took the hint and watched for any movement. Nothing broke the quiet, yet after a moment she felt a slow stirring in the air, a mood of hushed anticipation. The dead winter landscape concealed life within stillness. In the hissing of crystalline snow through stiff grass-blades and the tidal rush of distant pines, she felt something else: a whisper as final as a fading breath, as revelatory as a moonrise. She felt that she, too, would understand if she stood there and listened for something in the distance, something calling from the northern sky.

Then a cold touch warned her that the wind had heightened; if anything, the temperature had dropped in a moment. Colleen looked around her at the empty field and shook her head. For a moment there, a vague impression had come to her like a half-remembered dream, only to fade away when she tried to recall it.

Turning back to the doorway, she spotted a line of boot prints partially filled with snow. From the side of the barn they trailed along the fence posts into the northern field. As far as she could see in the twilight, there was no returning track.

She looked up to find the dog watching her. When their stares met, the dog jerked its muzzle northward again. Something anxious in the movement -- as if she had caught it off guard at a moment of supreme urgency -- made her hasten through the barn and past the silent house to the shelter of her car.

~

Yet even in the car she felt exposed. The gloom of night persisted, and disquiet nagged at her until she finally swept into her mother's driveway and came to a sliding halt before the darkened house.

Something was clearly wrong. Her mother always rose early and went outside even in the foulest weather, to show the world that her cane was a safety device but never a crutch. Yet today the snow around the porch was undisturbed, the chimney smokeless.

Colleen opened the door onto a kitchen dark and cold.

"Mother?"

She thought of the phone, picked up the receiver and heard the normal dial tone humming in the silence, but that left her with the same troubling question.

"Mother!"

She bounded upstairs three steps at a time to her mother's bedroom. Something smooth and straight almost tripped her up; she groped about on the carpet until she touched her mother's cane.

Weak daylight filled the room when she tugged the curtains open. A heap of blankets covered the bed; she pulled them away and felt her heartbeat stutter in a frozen, dreamlike instant.

Diane Lambert lay with her knees and torso clenched like a fist, fully clothed, with a sweater, insulated socks, even a pair of winter gloves, as if she had dressed to go out before changing her mind.

When Colleen reached down and gripped her shoulder gently, her eyes flickered open.

"Mother? It's me, Colleen."

Her mother frowned. Then her eyes widened as if in sudden recollection, and she turned her head to stare at the wall on the far side of the room.

"Mother, what's wrong?"

Colleen took hold of her mother's head and carefully turned it until they were face to face, but that stare never wavered from the wall across the room: the wall on the northern side.

"Mother, look at me. Damn it, look at me!"

Diane closed her eyes. When she opened them again she seemed to recognize her daughter for the first time.

"The door," she said, with hardly more than a whisper.

Colleen sighed with relief. "You never answered the phone. What's been going on here?"

She drew the blankets back over her mother and tucked them into place. "Look at you, you're shivering."

"Colleen." Her mother scowled, as if a memory had tugged at her. "The door is open."

"The door's closed. But mom, it's winter. Close every door in the house and you'd still freeze. Why didn't you light the stove?"

There was no hint of fever on her mother's face, no sign of illness, and yet....

"When was the last time you ate? Look, I'll warm up something fast, get you on your feet again. And then I really think you should come back with me. I don't want you here on your own."

Diane blinked several times, rapidly, as if something had prompted her. "It's time to go, Colleen."

"When you've had some food, we'll go."

"We all have to go, now. All of us."

Tears welled in her mother's eyes. Colleen stared back, struck into silence. For the first time, she watched her mother cry; it shocked her that tears alone could make her feel so helpless.

"Let me get the food, okay? I'll be right back."

Retreating downstairs to the kitchen, she felt that helplessness increase. A social activist, a fighter, she had stood up to cabinet ministers and corporate CEOs, high-profile legal firms and armed guards at barricades. She had never backed down from any confrontation. But never had she come across anything like this, and with no one to face, no opponent, she could think of nothing to do but flee.

When she saw the telephone she remembered the child. She dialed the emergency code and waited with growing anger for someone to pick up the phone on the other end. Then she went down the list of civic numbers taped to the wall. She tried the police, the operator, the Gatineau Memorial Hospital, the nearest garage, and anger gave way to anxiety.

She slammed the phone back in its cradle and felt the sudden weight of complete silence. What was going on out there? Her mother had no access to the Web, and her only radio was an old AM type that hardly worked in these hills; it was boxed away somewhere. There was no radio in Colleen's second-hand car. So much for any news.

In the meantime, she was freezing. She soon had a fire roaring in the wood stove, a can of soup warming in a pot, and a sense of accomplishment that she recognized as hollow.

She sank into a chair, propped her elbows on the kitchen table, and rubbed her face with cold hands. All the worry and stress had left her feeling weak. But the room was getting warm, and in this quiet moment she had time to cross her arms on the table, to rest her head there, to close her eyelids, if only for a moment. In this quiet moment she could hear the crackling and the hissing of firewood, and in this quiet moment she could hear a voice that called inaudibly from the silence of the burnt-out sky. She walked in a forest alive with the rustling of dead leaves, the brushing of pine needles, the furtive stirring of animals. The door had opened; the time had come for everyone to die. Something spoke to her and said, "If the people were gone, who would remain?" She listened to the furtive sounds and replied, "The animals." When the black clouds in the northern sky took on a hard edge of scarlet, she suddenly understood. "The animals would remain," she said, "the animals... and _you_."

She opened her eyes to darkness and sat up with a start. The kitchen lights were off -- the power had failed. The fire was out, and a cold wind sliced the air. She groped her way to the porch and found the front door open, the snow gusting in from the night outside. She went to slam the door but noticed something on the front step, a blemish on the almost phosphorescent pallor of the snow. Two sets of footprints: hers, from that morning, coming in, the other set going out.

"Mother?"

Upstairs, quickly; an empty bed, the blankets scattered. Then back downstairs and out into the wind. From her car she took the flashlight, and swept its fading beam over the yard. Footprints, clear and sharp, lead out to the driveway and beyond.

With a grating protest, the engine stuttered to life. The world leapt at her in the headlight beams: a swirling tunnel of snow with a line of footprints like holes punched through paper.

The car skidded from the driveway; she wrenched at the wheel until the snow-tires gripped the road. The blizzard had just begun, and with every twist in the road the air thickened with white. She felt something snap beneath the tires and thought of her mother's abandoned cane.

Now the prints were scattered with the flailing of someone on hands and feet. They veered off the road and trailed beside a fence; she could see them at the rim of the headlight beams, and up ahead, a figure threshing in the snow. The car slid and shuddered to a halt.

Her mother hardly noticed her. Dragged to her feet, leaning on Colleen's arm, she marched alongside with mechanical, repetitive strides. Colleen led her to the car and pushed her onto the front seat.

While her mother sat quietly, staring ahead and gasping for breath, Colleen examined her hands and feet. No frostbite: the insulated socks, the heavy clothes, the winter gloves her mother had worn inside the house had kept her alive out in the cold, but without Colleen to make a difference, how long would her mother have lasted?

Snowflakes as dry as salt crystals tumbled through the headlight beams, and the wind piled them into steepening drifts.

"The weather's getting bad," Colleen said. "We can't reach town, and if we get stuck on the road, we'll freeze to death. We'll have to go back."

A crunching U-turn brought her face-to-face with her own tire tracks, the rapidly-fading signs of her rescue attempt. Colleen glowered at the sight , then reached over and clicked her mother's seat belt into place. "But if I have to nail the doors shut to keep you inside, I'll do it."

Skidding down into a deep hollow, she felt the spinning tires chew their way to the road and yank the car forward. The snowdrifts up ahead were smaller and she allowed herself to breathe again. Her fingers ached on the steering wheel; she relaxed her grip and was flexing her hands when someone staggered onto the road ahead of her.

She wrenched at the wheel. The car veered against the wooded bank; in a spray of snow and shattered twigs it scraped and bucked to a stop. Colleen felt herself thrown forward against the seatbelt and just as abruptly thrown back.

In the sudden quiet, she glanced at her mother. Diane stared at the windshield wipers as they rubbed dry snow, slivers of tree bark and pine needles back and forth; she seemed dazed but unhurt. Colleen turned to peer ahead as someone stumbled up the bank and forced their way into the woods.

"He never even saw us."

She pressed the car horn several times, then pushed the door open and stepped into the stinging wind.

"Hey!" she yelled. "Come back!"

The wind struck her eyes, blinding her. At the edge of the road she called between the trees; it was like shouting down a well. Beneath the creaking boughs, she heard wood snap and footsteps crunch -- the clumsy passage of someone heading northward. She called again, repeatedly, until the noises faded and the snow sifting through pine needles made her think of dust in an empty house.

When she returned to the car, she found her mother peering through the window at the northern sky. There was no expression on her mother's face, only that intense, inexplicable stare.

Colleen watched her for a moment, then turned to face the road ahead, and suddenly found herself trembling. She imagined a call from beyond these hills, spreading out above the world like a silent burst of thunder; whatever it might be, she was deaf to it. Then again, that dream in the kitchen: perhaps that had been a tremor, an echo of the unheard voice.

If this were true, then how far would it spread?

She nodded to herself and gripped the wheel.

"I don't care what you have to say," she whispered, and pressed down on the gas pedal. "We're not going anywhere."

~

The blizzard died by morning, and after a day without daylight, the moon swelled and faded behind racing clouds. Colleen watched from the bedroom window while her mother slept beside her; she had slept throughout the day, linked to her daughter by a length of twine. When she struggled in her sleep with feeble movements, Colleen reached for the twine and held it tight, remembering her own dream of the day before.

With the wood stove in the kitchen just below them, the bedroom was warm. Their food would last for several weeks if they were careful. But afterward...?

Colleen had tried the telephone throughout the night, but it was dead. All she could know of the outside world would have to come from here, this seat by the window, and she spent hours watching moonlight flicker on snow.

Then the people passed by.

At first only one figure waded through the fields, but soon another staggered into view, and then it seemed as if the crowd would never stop flowing northward. From this far away it looked almost unreal, this long, slow march toward extinction.

Her mother moaned and shivered, locked within a dream. Colleen thought of her stumbling out to join that march, and held the twine with a firm grip. She could remember times when she had been afraid of coming home to find her mother dead; it seemed to her a terrible thing, to die alone. For the first time, she wondered if Diane had felt the same dread for her; when she awoke, Colleen would have to ask. Death was too final a truth to disregard until the last moment, and facing the reality of another's death after the fact would be an empty gesture, far too late: one that would deny everything she stood for.

Colleen bent at the window, lifted the sash and leaned out into the night. She took an aching breath of cold air, and shouted, "Over here!"

The dying struggled past her, heading northward.

"Not that way! Over here!"

Somewhere, the door had opened, and the call had spread from the burnt-out sky.

"Wake up! Fight it!"

And when the people were gone, who would remain?

"Listen to me!"

The animals would remain... the animals, and you.

*****

The Weight of Its Awareness

As the decades had gone by, Mikhail had come to doubt the reality of the tall blind houses near the canal. They began to seem like rippled images on dark water, like shadows in a twilit dream: he had been eighteen years old when he had first caught a glimpse of their gables and cupolas high above the concealing stone wall, and at eighteen his mind had been unreliable, haunted by a need for hills beyond the map.

Then one night, when he was fifty-five, he awoke and found himself huddled beneath twisted blankets, far away from dawn. He could hardly breathe: an oppressive weight seemed to bear down upon him, and trapped by his confusion, he felt as if the source of that weight were a pair of eyes, as if the mere act of being seen had crushed his ribcage and squeezed the blood from his heart.

After a moment of panic, the sense of being crushed began to fade. Mikhail sat up, waited for his breathing to grow steady, then tossed aside the covers and rose to his feet. He crossed the bedroom and stood before the window, where the darkness outside matched the darkness within. Tugging the bathrobe tightly around his chest, clenching at the fibrous carpet with his toes, he stared at the long array of lightless windows from the apartment buildings that surrounded his.

Nocturnal paralysis, he told himself. A nightmare.

Yet if he had been the victim of a dream, all he could remember was a glimpse of hard, pitiless eyes... and yes, the gables, the cupolas, the high stone wall.

So many decades had come and gone, so many compromises had worn away his confidence and freedom, since that day when he had wandered along the canal to that vague, far-off place. Since then, he had taken dull flat pathways recommended by businessmen, employers, customers. He had served the hopes and expectations of other people, but never his own. Now he thought of pathways never taken, or of pathways buried under time; he suddenly felt old and withered.

At that moment he resolved to settle once and for all the old mystery, to see if the tall blind houses near the canal had been real. At this point of his life, he very much needed for something to be real.

~

He left his apartment at sunrise on that cool, clear day in autumn, and walked all morning on the low embankment beside the canal. At the edge of town the concrete sidewalk gradually crumbled and became a path of dusty clay, and he followed this route beyond the sagging warehouses, beyond the rusted lines of long-abandoned railways, beyond the weed-choked vacant lots and the long-neglected fields, to meadows where clumps of twisted hawthorn and stands of spreading sumac eventually gave way to a dense forest of pine.

At every gust of wind from the pale blue sky, the pines reached out with brushing needles to block his way, and shivers rippled across the stillness of the black water. But he pulled himself back into the warmth of memory; and very soon, he was eighteen years old again.

~

At eighteen, Mikhail had wandered compulsively, and one spring day he had followed the canal in search of something he could barely define to himself, something driven by the needs of a younger man: not a hillside out of fantasy with broken columns and jeweled idols, not a girl out of daydreams with a sudden, shy smile, but something less tangible: perhaps a reason to live, perhaps hope in a future.

He had followed this dirt pathway until it reached a narrow creek that intersected the canal at a right angle. On the near side of the creek, the clutching pines had given way to a thick, writhing stand of cedars; on the far side loomed a wall of grey stone that formed a high barrier along the creek.

Where the pathway came to an end, black steps glinting with mica led down to a lawn that bordered the creek like a green alley. Mikhail descended the steps to the neatly-cut grass, and walked between shaken cedars on one side and high wall on the other, until wall and forest angled outward to form a small, enclosed park.

Here the creek expanded into a shallow pool, an oval of tourquoise-blue cement. Iridescent squares of indigo, purple, and magenta formed an abstract mosaic that uncoiled on the floor like a jewelled serpent, and led the eye down a narrowing channel, where the water disappeared into the darkness of a grilled opening in a wall that brought the park to its end.

He stood for a long time in the warm sunlight and the cold silence. No bird, no insect broke the quiet, and the cedars were now as motionless as any group of trees in a photograph. Beyond the canal itself, there seemed to be no exit: the cedars behind him formed a thick hedge, the outlet beside him was barred like an art nouveau cage, the stone wall before him stretched far above his reach. And up there, just beyond a crowning barricade of intensely white marble, rose a line of houses.

Their high projecting gables, lean mansard roofs like squeezed rectangular bells lined with green copper, dark red-shingled cupolas, bristling rows of black iron spikes on blade-sharp ridges, all suggested the Victorian style known as Queen Anne, all suggested concealed dwellers with a taste for chaotic design.

And the dwellers were truly concealed, for at no point on that long array of upper storeys did he notice any windows. There were settings built for windows -- dormers curved and rectangular, gabled and eyebrowed; ornamental wooden panels bordered with black or jade green shutters; blind arcades of polychromatic tiles that formed glittering unicorns and bright, leaping goats; curved, boxlike or canted structures that bulged from high walls like assertive bay windows -- but no glass, no panes through which any dweller could see or be seen.

Compelled by that strangeness, Mikhail tried to gain a better view, but the stone wall seemed impossible to climb without a rope, and the cedars blocked the other way. Instead, he returned to the canal, hoping to find another entrance. But the wall formed a right angle where it met the water, and lined the canal as far as he could see.

With no more pathway to follow, with no obvious way to reach the tall blind houses, the only place left to go had been the route back home.

~

Since then, the years had passed, devoured by work and by all the disappointments born of compromise. The houses had come to seem like a fantasy, like a dream half-recalled.

But now, decades later, here he was on the dusty pathway... and there was the intersecting creek.

Sunlight burned on the slow water. He blocked the glare with a raised hand and saw the grey stone wall on the far side, and just ahead, the black stairway starred with mica, exactly as he had remembered.

He descended to the well-cut lawn, and found himself at the entrance to the shadowed alley between high stone wall and thick mass of cedars. After a few paces, both fell away; the passage widened, and there, up ahead, was the concealed park.

But now the park was different.

It was no longer empty: the lawn was crowded with tightly-grouped sculptures and statues. Some were formed of wrought iron, green or black; others of marble, salmon pink or white; and a few had been daubed with bold reds that gleamed in the angled sunlight of late afternoon.

For a moment he stood in surprise; then he stepped forward and turned to face the nearest group of statues. He peered at this tableau for what seemed a long frozen time, and felt a growing chill that had nothing to do with autumn.

Before him stood a man of white marble. Life-sized and life-like in all its details, it clutched at the air with hands on which every tendon stood out in ridges of extreme pain. Every tendon stood out on its neck as it reared backwards and screamed in silence at the sky. Its body was contorted with agony, surrounded and pressed in from all sides by three distorted creatures of black wrought iron: diseased unicorns the size of Clydesdales, emaciated, skeletal at many points, yet with slabs of muscle that bulged in brutal exertion as they crushed the man between their shoulders and chests, muscles that clenched like tree roots on their straining necks as they reached down with black teeth to tear at the screaming face.

Appalled, Mikhail turned away, and noticed that the pool was also different. The iridescent mosaic was gone, replaced by a sculpted representation of an undersea floor. In the clear, shallow water, a thick mass of weeds like dark green spears tipped with red lined the bottom of the pool, and partially entangled, partially concealed, lay the supine body of a dead man. Only the arched torso could be seen; that, and the lower part of the head, with its gaping mouth. The pale stone of the corpse had a vaguely greenish hue, a sickly green that looked too convincingly realistic -- as realistic as the long jade form of a sea serpent, coiled in a choking circle around the corpse, and lurking in the weeds for another victim. From its head extended a long, backwards-leaning spike or spine, poisonously red and obviously deadly; its one visible eye peered up through the water with calm reptilian patience -- directly, it seemed, at Mikhail.

The water trembled with sudden ripples: the wind seemed sharper, now, and much more cold.

He turned away, and nearly stumbled into the next tableau. Lean goatish figures of pale stone, tall as human beings and equally bipedal, with insane eyes rolled upwards in each socket, with yellow teeth gaping and shallow jaws red with slick paint, they crouched, lunged at each other with lowered horns or cloven hooves, fought with each other to grab a torn, flayed bundle that one of the creatures hugged to itself possessively with snarling greed: the mutilated body of a human child.

Mikhail hunched himself against the sight and turned away, but every space to right or left confronted him with some new atrocity in stone. And so he peered up instead at the crazed high rooftops of the partially concealed houses; he looked up and saw that every house had windows: from every gable and dormer, black panes glinted like the eyes of a waiting spider.

And then the wind faltered, and gave way to a throbbing silence.

In one angular bay window high above, a casement swung open.

From the darkness within, a head pivotted and squeezed itself into the daylight. Impossibly huge, lean and hairless, it revealed a pair of hard eyes that narrowed at the sight of him, and then glared down with a solar intensity.

Without sound, without words, in a shattering voice that went right to the skull, it spoke to him:

I know you.

I know exactly what you fear.

~

At the ragged limits of the pine forest, Mikhail stopped running, clutched at his ribcage and struggled to breathe. Then he trudged between the wild meadows and the dark canal until he no longer felt the need to gasp for air, until his mind began to function again and the sumacs and hawthorns, the pale autumn grass, the slanting daylight began to seem real.

Yet reality was tainted by the impossible memory of that face, by the spreading cancer of that image in his mind. Trees and grass, dark water and pale blue sky, none of it seemed to matter any more.

"How do I get this out of my head?" he thought, but no matter how far he travelled that day, no matter how dazzling the low sun, how sharp the cold air, he could never shake off the sense of crushing weight within his mind.

~

That night he dreamt of something in a high narrow house. It knew him. It had watched him from the darkness at the moment of his birth, it would watch him from the darkness at the moment of his death.

It knew exactly what he feared.

In the dream, it erupted from the window, spread itself across the sky below the moon, and cast its midnight shadow on the land. It rushed onward like a storm, seeking one particular mind; and then, from the distance of the night, it sensed him: a small thing, a trembling reed before the weight of its awareness.

It lunged at his window, directly at his window.

Mikhail shook himself awake and found himself huddled beneath twisted blankets, far away from dawn. He looked up at his bedroom window, where the darkness outside matched the darkness within.

Clutching at the blankets, he stared into the blackness until the window burst open.

*****

The Vast Impatience Of The Night

In the season of dead weather between the last dry leaf and the first hard frost, on a clear day of cold skies, Janet Richardson found herself enacting the same old rituals in a farmhouse parlour full of widows.

She had been there since morning, after the ambulance had taken Ryan Lindstrom. His wife Rita still remained upstairs, in a closed-off bedroom, and the widows helped as much as they could while their neighbour mourned in drawn-curtain darkness.

Downstairs, with a mug of cold coffee in one hand, a pencil stub in the other, Janet copied telephone numbers from a well-thumbed notepad.

She held up a scrap of paper, and called out, "There's a daughter in Ottawa. Can somebody phone her?"

Mrs. Beacon in the corner nodded yes.

Other widows called out requests of their own: "Can somebody get the horses in before dark? Do the horses get oats, or hay? Has anyone heard from that sister in Montreal? Can somebody stay the night? -- I have to get home, my daughters need supper."

Then Janet glanced up at the pale blue sky beyond the white lace curtains, and realized that she, too, would have to leave.

In the front hallway, she met Annie Seidel coming in from the barn.

"It's freezing out there," said Annie; her fogged-up glasses and red face offered proof. "It's more like winter than fall. Will you be warm enough?"

"I'll be dressed for winter. You have to be, this time of year, when you ride a bike."

Annie wiped her nose and smiled. "Yes, from my kitchen window, I've seen you going past in the evenings. You looked like the ski patrol on wheels. I remember telling Bry--"

She caught herself, gazed up at Janet with apologetic frankness; but Janet replied with a gentle smile and a reassuring touch on the arm.

"It's all right," she said. Then she glanced toward the darkened stairwell just beyond the hallway. "But it's going to be hard on Rita. She'll need a lot of time."

Annie nodded, with a distant look on her face. "You know..." she said, "You know, I always thought I'd miss Piter at night. But no. It's in the morning, at breakfast. It's when I pick up the coffee pot."

With a rueful smile, she turned her eyes to Janet. "I used to fill the pot all the way, but now I never do. There's only me. I'm the only one left."

"I know." Janet felt the need to say more, but after the long afternoon at the widow's house, words failed her.

"Will you be back tomorrow, Jan?"

"Yes, but now I need to get home before dark. My girls are waiting for me."

"At least it's clear out there."

Clear and pale above the gently-stirring moire network of the pines and the white clutch of the aspens, the western sky was a calm pool of late November light. But as her bicycle clattered over the pebbles of the Lindstrom driveway, the northern sky came into view beyond the trees; by the time Janet reached the dirt road, she could see the broad expanse of the Gatineau Hills, the rounded peaks of granite and evergreen tinged with amber from the lowering sun.

This would have to be a fast ride. Home was in a valley far away, and she wanted to avoid the increasing cold of nightfall.

At first, her eyes watered from the sting of rushing air, and she could feel the ache of that air on the circle of her face unprotected by the hug of the ski mask; but soon the warmth of exertion took away the chill, and she began to enjoy the sense of motion.

A tough bike for tough roads: it kept her sane. Every day, after all the farm chores and housework, she had to escape from routine; and every year, after the snow-melt in April to the first blizzard of December, she escaped on her bike. It brought her back to childhood, to the sense of freedom and exploration that she had known during long summer twilights, in years long past.

Thanks to Bryden --

She winced at the memory, but set her jaw, squeezed the handlebars, and allowed the line of thought to continue.

Thanks to Bryden. He had once asked her if she felt regrets in choosing a life that was far away from their old one of city commutes, lab work, and the labyrinth of faculty politics; but no, she loved the farm, she loved these hills, and she was glad they had chosen to get away together. If she missed anything, it was the freedom of those long summer bike rides, and she described them in warm detail.

Then, one morning less than a week later, she had found a bicycle helmet on the kitchen table, and a note that mentioned something new in the tractor shed.

How he had managed to scrape up the money, she never asked; but from that day onward, she rode whenever she could. For her, it was a private joy, but Bryden had smiled whenever she set out, smiled even more when she returned after dark. That was Bryden: always generous, always happy with her happiness.

She took a deep breath of air, held it inside until she felt its cold sting fade, then exhaled slowly until she felt empty again.

Bryden was gone.

And now Ryan Lindstrom was gone, and Rita would mourn for him, just as Annie Seidel had mourned for Piter, just as all the other wives had mourned for their dead husbands.

So many widows.

Cedars passing, now, on each side of the road. Grey, twisted pods of milkweed, shrivelled in the cold air. Blackened flowerheads of dying clover.

Everything died, eventually; she knew this in her bones. Death was merely the cost of having lived, of having built and maintained a tough cell wall against entropy. No life could be permanent, in this universe. Perhaps, in a few billion years, the universe itself would die. How could she resent a universal pattern? And so she felt no resentment.

But she did feel a very human sadness, a very human sense of loss. It was the price that humans paid for belonging in a universe where everything died. Love itself, cooperation, caring and compassion, were successful byproducts of that struggle against a harsh, impersonal universe, and her own love for Bryden, for her daughters, for all the neighbours around her, was a living sign of that old, evolutionarily stable strategy. Love was part of her birthright, coded within every cell of her body, and it showed just how clearly and how fully she belonged in this cold and hard yet beautiful, wonderful place.

Breathing in the chill air, facing the pale blue sky, she felt that it was good to belong here, even if belonging meant death.

She was glad that she had loved. Even if nothing in the universe lurked beyond humanity to care for human beings, humans cared. And so they loved, as fiercely as the years would allow them; and then they lost.

They became widows, all of them.

So many widows.

She was thinking in circles, but she made no effort to stop herself. Perhaps it was a kind of mourning.

On her left, the cedar forest gave way to a long hillside green with tough, late-season grass. The road in front of her dipped leftward to follow the long contours of that hill into a narrow valley far below. But something down there blocked the road and concealed the fenced-in meadows: it bulged on the valley floor like a solid patch of cloud, and it shone with a deep orange hue like a warning flare.

With a slight pressure on the rear brake handle, she coasted down the hillside and stared at the well-defined outlines of the fog as it loomed in the clear light ahead. It looked like a solid form, a deep orange mass, and it was odd enough to make her slow to a halt. She braced herself with a foot on the road, and stared at something she had never seen before.

Was it a cloud, or a barricade?

She would have expected that deep orange hue in sunset clouds far overhead, but never on the ground like this, and never in a deep valley hidden from the sun.

To the right, northward, she had a clear view of the sky, and for the first time she noticed two similar clouds high above the rounded hills: equally defined, equally striking in their deep orange colour. At this time of day, they seemed perfectly normal.

She turned back to face the barricade of cloud.

It's nothing, she thought. Just an odd effect of the light, that's all.

She raised her foot back to the pedal and pushed herself into motion.

But when she entered the cloud, she found herself in a whirling storm of snowflakes. Almost black against the deep orange light, thick and heavy, they swarmed from all directions and struck her with a barrage of soft, wet impacts.

Blinking, struggling to see, she almost fell off the bike in her effort to maintain balance. Then she braced herself on the road, wiped the dripping slush from cold eyebrows, and cupped her hands to protect the naked circle of her face, to gain a better view. But that made no difference: beyond her own body and the limits of her bicycle, she could see nothing but the orange light and the swarming insect spirals of the snow.

She dismounted from the bike, took a firm grip on the handlebars, and pushed forward. With her head down to protect her eyes, she could see how thoroughly coated with soft wet flakes the road had become; every step was now a sliding, fumbling struggle, and the bike resisted every tug.

Again she wiped her face, then glanced forward. The road was invisible; she could only see the rapidly fading lines of a barbed wire fence on the right-hand side, her only clue for direction.

She pushed ahead -- then stopped.

Two figures waited by the fence. Tall and vague, they were almost concealed by the orange light and the tumbling snow... but she could see them.

By reflex alone, she called out, "Hello?"

The figures waited in silence.

She gripped the handlebars, ready to flee. "Who's there?"

No reply.

Squinting her eyes, she tried to peer beyond the rushing pattern of snow, until she suddenly understood what lurked in front of her: a pair of tall wooden posts, thick and strong enough to support a wooden gateway leading to a field... a gateway without a gate.

She released her breath in a sigh that became an awkward burst of laughter -- at the snow, at the light, at herself.

I have to get home, she thought. My girls are waiting for me.

Again, a firm grip on the handlebars, a steady push, a few more sliding steps in the snow. And then she walked out into the final, clear light of day's end.

The road, the fields, the trees that blocked the western view ahead of her, were completely free of snow, and the sky was the palest of pale blues. Behind her, the wall of cloud seemed as completely solid as ever, but its colour was fading. She stood and watched the orange glow turn to stormcloud grey while she brushed the snow from her jacket, then she looked at the northern sky and saw more clouds in the distance, edged with scarlet in the last high rays of the hidden sun, trailing thick veils of snow upon the black hills.

A trick of the light, she thought. Local weather conditions. Nothing unusual.

But she had a long trip ahead, and night was on the way.

~

Within a few kilometres of home, the night caught up with her.

The full moon became an opalescent smear upon the sky, then darkened into black. In the beam of her headlamp, a few random snowflakes drifted and gleamed like dustmotes, then increased to block her view in a blinding tunnel of cold stars.

She stepped down from the bike, turned off the headlamp, and found herself in a bone-grey world with a hint of solid darkness on the left, where the mountainside formed a rampart of ghostly aspen trunks. To the right, open fields vanished into nowhere. The only sense of life and motion came through the trudging of her boots, the sliding unsteadiness of the bicycle at her side, the cold melting kisses on the unprotected circle of her face.

Soon, like a faded sketch in charcoal, a stand of pine and cedar loomed ahead on the right, a sign that she had finally made it to the route leading home.

Every time she followed this road, she thought of steps. From the mountainside, the land extended westward beyond the trees into slanting meadows, then dipped suddenly to reach more level fields, then fell into a region of hills and deep valleys: three steps, with her farm and her daughters on the second.

She was out of the woods, now, on step number one. The snowflakes increased in size and number, and their fumbling touch on her face made her think of wet cobwebs.

At last the roadway dipped in front of her, and she could vaguely sense the level fields that spread themselves below. From this vantage point on a clear night, she would have seen the lights of her house, but now the vaguely phosphorescent greyness concealed everything down there.

Yet far beyond the concealed house, on what should have been the horizon, a flickering in the powdery grey suggested a last orange beam of sunset, half seen beyond the racing clouds. But that was impossible: by this hour, the sun had long vanished.

At any rate, she could hardly trust her eyes. They were stinging from the wet barrage of snowflakes, and thoroughly tired of this pale substitute for light. But home was now fifteen minutes away, or less. She held the bicycle firmly and half walked, half slid to the level ground of step number two.

The open field on her left was a vaguely luminous grey zone without limits, but on the right, a wire fence gave her some hint of geography in this bone-coloured void, some reassurance that the world remained a place where she belonged.

There it was again, that flickering. This time, she could see a pale tower of flame-coloured light, moving slowly but steadily on what should have been the rim of this level step. Perhaps it was a headlight beam from a truck down there, concealed in a valley of step number three.

The beam sank like a guttering candle flame, flickered and faded, then reached toward the sky on the road ahead. At last, the world had a visible boundary, and something was down there, coming up the hill.

A snowplow? She could always hope. Pushing the bike toward the wire fence, she peered at the rising beam. Sometimes, at night, she had encountered vehicles on this road, and she always loved to watch the beams of their headlights rise and then fall, to spread outwards like a fan of light as the cars reached the top of the hill and came into view.

But this time, instead of collapsing to reveal a pair of distant headlights, the orange beam rose higher like a warning flare. It rose into the sky, an impossible height that increased impossibly, and against that ray of light the snowflakes whirled like the burnt-out stars of a dead galaxy.

And then, in a shout of light, a dazzling sunset flamed into being on the road ahead. It lengthened, reached into the sky, became a blinding orange pillar that bent in the middle and pressed itself down upon the road, where it bulged and flexed as another pillar rose into view beside it.

Suddenly, Janet recognized these forms, and knew that she was looking at a pair of huge arms, gnarled and swollen with straining muscles of light. There were no hands: gouts of light resembling drops of molten steel seeped from the ragged stumps.

A third form burst into view, became a scarred, faceless head, extended further to reveal a pair of thrusting shoulders. Like a severely-deformed and wounded child struggling through a tiny window frame, this gigantic being of light reached forward and tried to heave itself onto the road.

At her side, the bicycle fell and hit the snow: a muffled sound that registered vaguely in some tiny, unterrified portion of her mind.

The seeping stumps fumbled against the ground, swept back and forth, until one rose like a tower, toppled like a club, and crashed against the road with a soundless impact, but one that sent the fallen snow leaping and surging towards her. She flinched away, but the shockwave knocked her against the wire fence and whipped overhead, a brief, howling blizzard suddenly there, suddenly gone.

She writhed in the snow, staggered to her feet, looked up in time to see the other monstrous arm crash down upon the road. This time she threw herself to the ground and hid her face from the blast of snow that gusted like a sandstorm above her and beyond her.

Then she stood, ran across the road, stumbled and fought her way through drifts of snow to reach the open field. She looked back in time to see the blinding figure brace itself with both arms and heave itself further onto the rim of the world.

The flame colour was gone, replaced by an intensely painful white bordered with violet: she could feel it like a torch against her face. The source of that pain was bloated and vast, several storeys tall at the shoulders, casting a light that sent wild shadows coursing along the low streaming clouds, yet something that pulled itself along the road like a desperate, crippled child emerging from a pit.

She turned away and staggered over snow, felt the impact of an arm upon the roadway, felt herself hurled to the ground by the shockwave.

Shaking her head, she tried to throw off the dizziness of that impact, struggled to stand in the shifting snow. Then she looked up and found herself in a field crowded with people.

No, not people -- sculptures. They had to be sculptures.

Formed of glittering snow and ice, hundreds of figures stood and faced the aching, blue-haloed light from the roadway. All were perfectly detailed; the closest figures gleamed against the flickering shadows that concealed the rest.

She looked at the nearest faces, and with a jolt of recognition, she knew them.

Ryan Lindstrom.

Piter Seidel.

She recognized others, too: the lost husbands of local wives, their faces paralyzed in stark fear. They seemed to be frozen in mid-scream, in a silent, extended agony of dead time.

Shadows groped across the faces. She turned and saw the bloated arm reaching from the roadway, the ragged stump twisting in the air and dripping hot light.

She dodged and lunged into the shadows between the men. In the sudden darkness, she veered too late and crashed into a solid block of snow. She clutched at the statue, felt the cold outlines of a head, braced herself to run again; but the shadows fled and exposed the face beneath her hands to sudden view.

"No!" she whispered.

She recoiled and fell backwards, fought against the sliding snow to push herself away. She had never seen that degree of terror on a human face, and it was more than she could witness, more than she could bear, to see it on the face of Bryden.

Light exploded in the sky. She glanced up to see the bloated arm plunge like a dynamited tower. A scream rang out, but not her own: the scream of many voices combined into one, that burst from the gaping, paralyzed mouths of all the men around her, from the frozen and the dead, from Bryden.

She rolled over, clutched the back of her head, felt the ground leap at the impact.

And then the snow felt very still, the snow felt very soft.

~

In the long silence and darkness, something began to whisper: "Get up you'll freeze to death get up." It was her own voice, cold and far away within her skull; it was nothing of importance.

Yet all the same her body stirred, and sat up.

The light, the men, the faces hard with agony, were all gone. Even the snow on the field was gone, blasted away by that final impact. The flakes that drifted around her would soon replace whatever had been lost.

When she could finally stand, she limped over the dead grass towards the roadway. In the bone-coloured twilight, the fence came into view, and she could see that her bicyle had been hurled against the wire like a toy tossed aside. Absently, she pulled it upright and then wheeled it beside her down the almost-bare length of the road.

The snowfall was diminishing, and soon the lights of her house broke through the greyness around her. She left the bicycle in the tractor shed, where Bryden had left it, so many years before, and then she walked the few dreamlike paces to the house, feeling nothing at all, nothing within herself but the night and the cold.

She opened the door and blinked in the sudden light, the sudden warmth of her kitchen. Sitting at the table was her eldest daughter -- seventeen, already, no longer the tiny girl that Bryden had lifted and held within his protective, steady arms.

Her daughter glanced up at her, then stared.

"Mom? What happened to your face?"

"My face?"

Janet pulled off the ski mask and felt a sharp sting as the fabric brushed against her skin. She touched her lips and yanked her fingers away at the sudden flaring pain.

Then she turned and looked at the mirror hanging on the wall above the counter, saw the red, blistered circle of skin on her face, the bloodshot scarlet of her eyes.

"What happened, Mom?"

"Did you... see anything, while I was gone?"

"See anything? Where?"

"Outside. Out there."

"No, nothing. What's going on?"

Janet closed her swollen eyelids and saw the night, the snow, the bloated child, Bryden's frozen terror.

"I don't think..." she said, struggling to find the words, "I don't think I belong here any more. I don't think I belong anywhere."

She opened her eyes and saw her daughter's face looking up at her expectantly, with obvious concern but with obvious confusion.

Janet knew that nothing she could say right now would help her daughter to sense the night in waiting. But she also knew that someday, with all its vast impatience, the night would reach out for everyone her daughter loved.

Her daughter: not yet married, not yet widowed, but soon.

All too soon.

*****

**Acknowledgements**

Stories are imagined and written in solitude, but quite often, the resolve to keep on writing is fueled by the kindness of other people. For that reason, I would like to offer my sincere thanks:

To the artist of this book's cover, Tragelaphus, not only for his beautiful work here and on the cover for _All Roads Lead To Winter_ , but for encouragement at a time when I most needed to hear it.

To Barbara and Christopher Roden, and to John Pelan: the first editors to recognize and publish my stories.

To Jim Rockhill, for his wise and patient email conversations about fiction, art, and life, and for his recommendation that I send my stories to Barbara, Christopher, and John.

To Jean-Yves Duperron, for opening the door onto a fascinating world of composers, for his passionate advocacy of music, for his friendship during several dark years and beyond.

And to Terry Gomes, for his wonderful compositions and songs, for his critical reader's mind, for his constant moral support, for having the great good sense to marry Christine Lemire, and for introducing me to her chicken rice with ginger.

*****

"Who Would Remain" (1998). A slightly different version of the story appeared in _All Hallows_ 40, October, 2005, edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden.

"Never Noticed, Never There" (1999) was accepted in 2006 by Barbara Roden for _All Hallows_ , but publication was delayed. With her permission, the story is published here for the first time.

"Shadows In The Sunrise" (1998) appeared in the anthology, _Alone On The Darkside_ (Roc/New American Library, 2006), and is reprinted with permission of the editor, John Pelan.

"Lamia Dance" (Original version, 1993; revised version, 2005) was also accepted by John Pelan for _Darkside_ , but publication was delayed. With his permission, the story is published here for the first time.

"When The Echo Hates The Voice" (2005), "The Weight Of Its Awareness" (2011), and "The Vast Impatience Of The Night" (2011) are published here for the first time.

About the author

A resident of Gatineau, Quebec, Mark Fuller Dillon sets much of his work in that region. He combines local scenery with bizarre events from his own life... and from his nightmares.

He would love to hear from readers, and can reached at markfullerdillon@gmail.com or at his website, http://markfullerdillon.blogspot.ca -- criticism and comments are always welcome.

Also available from Smashwords: a science fiction novella, _All Roads Lead To Winter_.

