 
An Unkillable Frog

By N.J. Smith

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 N.J. Smith

ISBN: 9781476423524

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For my father

"Paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be" – Physicist Richard Feynman

They dug well that summer. An entire trench system took shape upon the hillside they had claimed. It was scaled down for ten-year-old boys, of course, yet every parapet and dugout proclaimed their intent, belying the fact only bracken-banks troubled the cool valley sides opposing their position. At places, their digging had far outpaced their speed in design. There, the trenches became tunnels-in-waiting, with a random few graduating to fully fledged bunker-hood. The earth here was red clay, easy to work and forgiving of mistakes. They could have asked for no better place in which to carve a playground for war.

Three competing plans for the trench complex were literally intertwined in the labyrinth of narrow passageways. Like worms in the corpse of a giant they bored and burrowed, the sinuous galleries tumbling into each other. An early attempt to map it had been abandoned. To do that would require a map in "at least three dimensions," as Jeremy had put it.

As no single blueprint had been followed, the trench was a beast with many mouths. Each of these dusty throats seemed to whisper to the boys under any touch of wind, their hollows speaking a language thick with lost meaning.

This, they thought, was a compound to repel all enemies. The trenches extended perhaps a hundred metres from the pine plantation, down to where a natural gully began. Jeremy drew a line in the dirt here with his spade.

"This is the final line of defence," he said. "If we wanted, we could dig down across the gully and to the road. You all know we could."

"It's a long way, Jeremy," said Nathan.

Jeremy either ignored him or was lost in the vision.

"Nothing could stop us. We'd go under the road, down through the reserve until we got to the school. Right through the playground, circling the whole thing."

The boys looked down at the distant school roof. Ian smiled, saying:

"Yeah. That would be good. And I'd put traps through the whole thing."

Nathan knelt and mashed a beetle absent-mindedly with a stone.

"Are we putting in any traps up here?" he asked.

"We should vote on it. I don't think we need to," said Ian. He looked at Jeremy.

"Maybe we reserve a single trench for traps. Like a test bay. It would be stupid to put traps everywhere."

Nathan's voice was rising in excitement. "But if we trap everything, right, then we'll expect it."

The other two looked at him.

"It would be like training. So if an attack came we could retreat -"

Jeremy and Ian spoke in unison:

"Fall back."

Nathan corrected himself with an embarrassed smile.

"Fall back. If we had to fall back we'd slow them down."

The other two boys said nothing and contemplated the tactical possibilities of traps. Ian was in favour of a spiked log, suspended from between two trees, which would swing murderously free upon its release by an unwitting victim. His description of the destructive power of such a weapon was punctuated with screams and the mimed piling of guts back into his abdomen. After several minutes of this he looked up hopefully from the forest floor, his last death spasms subsiding. Nathan looked wistfully into the trees.

"A lot of little kids come up here too, Ian," he said. "If we slam a spiky log into one of them, there'll be trouble."

This image - a clutch of smaller children spitted upon the trap's barbs - took hold in all their imaginations simultaneously and they fell to the ground laughing. Nathan could not help but think of them being crushed by the dozen as might a rolling pin swatting flies.

Jeremy put his arm around Ian, pointed to the shadows under the pine trees where a shaft of afternoon sun caught the turned earth. His voice was a whisper.

"Look over there. We've repelled their first attack. Nathan is stuck in the forward lines but he's not dead yet. He's got a sharpened entrenching tool and he's making them pay for every inch!"

Nathan ran ahead, his stubby legs scrambling up the gully flanks. Ian bolted after him, shouting.

"Ian sees that Nathan is in trouble. He sends a heavy barrage of grenades into the middle lines!"

Jeremy bolted last but easily beat his friends to the edge of the trench rim.

"Only Jeremy is brave enough to join Nathan in the brutal hand to hand fighting!" he picked up a stick and swept it around like a bayoneted rifle as he ran.

A cloud of purest silver slid over the sun, sweeping the shadows up under the trees. The wind, which had not troubled the boys for the whole day, gusted for a moment. Pine branches whipped and sighed; red soil rose swirling into the air. The trenches took on the quality of a stage as the dimming light washed over the earthworks. It seemed that there was a crescendo of sound just behind the wind, a lion's roar that did not end. Running and diving amongst the ramparts, the boys could hear it better; when they stood still it faded to nothing. Ian picked up a pine cone and hurled it far.

"Don't let them get to the reserve trench!" he yelled.

A broad line of soldiers was advancing towards them across the valley. Nathan stood at the lip of his foxhole and aimed a Sten gun. The cloud above thickened. Ian saw their enemy grow in number where gloom lay in pools under the tussocks of grass. Jeremy leapt up beside Nathan, and the pair unloaded their weapons down into the ranks of their foe. It seemed that the soldiers were emboldened with the sun's departure; the khaki ether of which they were constructed solidified. Ian called to his friends but was not heard over the cacophony of battle.

Later, Jeremy suggested that the other boys should be killed and he would make a last stand with his bayonet in the Command Bunker. The other two protested loudly, until Jeremy pointed out that, of course, they could have their turn. Ian advised that he had secreted a line of satchel charges in a ring beneath the bunker, and that he would detonate these at the critical moment of enemy infiltration, with a resultant bloody devastation he described breathlessly. Nathan demanded to be slain by an onslaught of tanks. A few minutes' searching turned up a hollow loglet he thought to be an accurate replica of a bazooka.

"I have had both my legs blown off already," he said from the ground. "But Ian left me a whole box of ammo before he was run over."

Jeremy piped up.

"Strictly speaking, Nathan, you are not run over by a tank but crushed, because its tracks don't move when it's on top of you."

Nathan aimed his bazooka intently at Jeremy's face and squeezed the trigger.

"OK, Ian had been crushed. Jeremy, you went to check on Ian but were shot."

His friends assumed their roles. Nathan yelled out a banzai mantra of "Take that you bastards!" and a favourite line he had read on the lyric sheet of a Heavy Metal album that belonged to his brother:

Bathe in the lead-corrupted stream of your life's blood!

The boys played for hours, their yelled commands and shrill death screams echoing up into the pines where the sun' glow slowly broadened into an orange splay of dusk. Nathan loved the twilight. A remnant of day still glowed on one horizon, yet night was already claiming the sky's opposing corner. Stretching one hand towards the west and the other eastward, Nathan looked directly above him. The sky above was beyond his powers of description. Each second he watched, its texture thinned as light leached from the atmosphere and the world's true nature was revealed through incremental shades of darkness. When night had finally settled upon the hill, Jeremy bade them to crouch on their haunches at the perimeter of the earthworks.

"We have sniper rifles now," he whispered. "Silenced German ones with rubber guts that are quieter than a mouse. Full night vision too. We can see them but they can't see us."

Taken with this concept, his voice rose in tone:

"They are sending in troops to probe us, but we're seeing them way off. We are waiting for the sure kill, though, until we can see how scared they are. But we don't care. We have to defend the position."

His voice softer now.

"We have to defend the position."

A night bird began a song of crisp lamentation. The moon seemed on an invisible string tied to the ruined oak atop their Command Bunker, its attendant stars dull, their cold intensity muted in deference to the boys' own. Nathan knee-rose and assumed a firing stance forged in long study of war movies on gray Saturday afternoons. Ian whispered:

"I am going back to my normal rifle, Jeremy."

"Don't," his friend hissed. "If you give away our location we're all dead."

Ian nodded and raised his weapon again.

Jeremy was wise in these things.

He was on the Web until late most nights, lost in the arcana of battles fought long ago. Ian knew the starting point for his obsession coincided with his first real taste of bullying. Until then the anti-Jeremy operations had been covert, as he smilingly described it. Then war was declared. The trio had friends among the fringes of their class within the chess players and proto-geeks. Jeremy disdained these social connections.

"Why bother? If the rest hate us, let them hate us. Let's give them their target."

Needless to say, this philosophy invited only further scorn.

His every attempt to deny the bullies their prize failed. Being the lightest out of the three, it was Jeremy's fate to be regularly tossed in the school dumpster amid the apple cores and waxed lunch paper. Yet even his tormentors grew to have a respect for him. Jeremy did not name them, even after he landed hard in a garbage-free area of the waste container and the destruction of his glasses tore a gash in his cheek that took three stitches to close. He explained to the doctor that it was merely play gone awry.

After that the beatings lessened in duration and severity, but never intent. In the caste system of ten-year-olds, even those who were spat on by girls for amusement were grateful for Jeremy. He was neither the shortest nor the fattest. And there were other kids whose glasses appeared cut from the same stuff used to contain killer whales at aquariums. But Jeremy simply greeted his attackers with a smile every morning, and this they could not abide. Nathan and Ian were tolerated by the bullies, but offered no real sport. Nathan was merely another Fat Kid in a smorgasbord of targets of opportunity.

Ian's dysfunction was, in the opinion of his classmates, indeterminate. Their feeling that he was afflicted by some inherent wrongness was itself enough.

The next day, Jeremy put Nathan in charge of Deep Tunnelling and Countermine Procedures. Jeremy had examined this to him thus:

"In World War One they could only _entrench_ -"

A slow smile crawled upon his face.

"I love that word. _Entrench_ to a certain point, and past that the artillery would smash them like bugs in a matchbox. They then decided to go deep, to undertunnel the enemy's trenches and get them that way."

Nathan thought on this a moment. They had brought up with them a spray can of deruster, and he misted the blade of his shovel with it.

"What is they were down there now?" he said.

Jeremy nodded.

"They could be extending galleries left and right to cover our flanks. Then, at a per-arranged time, their forces break through the earth to the surface."

Nathan's small brow furrowed with worry.

Talk of impending attack seemed suddenly ludicrous to Nathan. The very fabric of night was warm and aromatic; only the slow designs of dreams could be woven there. From the sports ground near their school rose the shouts of soccer players. He closed his eyes and imagined them as the battle cry of an invading army, but failed. That sound was too infused with joy.

"We would be over-run before we knew it!" he said at last.

"But that will never happen, Nathan. Not while we control this hill."

"No," Nathan said, and scuffed the spade into the dirt.

His frame was what his relatives would earnestly call "Chubby." But they would never know the power to lacerate encompassed in that single word. Its mere derivatives were no less scourging. Nathan had borne these and many others all his short life. Here, up on the hill with a pine-scented breeze filling his lungs and fresh-turned earth beneath his sneakers, they had never happened. Or at least, the location of these affronts was obscured by a screen of trees he wished could fill the entire valley below.

And in the undergrowth would run many-fanged things dripping claws for of all the things in the world to occupy his time, nothing pleased Nathan more than the imagining of beasts.

Those of history and even legend were not sufficient to satiate him. The dinosaurs were the merest shadows of the animals that crowded his mind by night. On long hot school afternoons Nathan uncoiled great monsters down the classroom length; think stands of envenomed stingers nestling next to gullets lined with eyes. His stare focused at an infinitesimal point many miles distant. When like this, the other children would nudge and snigger, for it was not unknown for a silvery strand of drool to alight his lips and hang there.

But the boy was not daydreaming. Nathan _knew_ that a blossom of jaws rent the world's heart.

Even now he imagined he stood astride the back of some vast-bulked sea creature. His job was to harvest hunks of lardy meat from it. A whole team of fleshcutters laboured alongside him, singing work songs praising the swiftness of their blades. He bent to his task, seeing veins spurting orange blood where water escaped the enclosing clay. His wound ate deeper into the animal's flanks until Ian appeared before him.

"Jeremy has found something," Ian said.

Their friend was crouched in a shallow pit as though his hands and feet were held fast there by cement.

"Lads, we have not worked all this time for nothing," he paused for effect, as they knew he was wont to do. "I think they must have mined here years ago, way before that -" he waved a hand dismissively at the encroaching suburbia - "Was anywhere near here." With that, Jeremy brought his fist down hard, the rock clasped within causing a metallic boom when it landed.

Nathan rushed in and almost bowled his friend over. Ian crouched at the pit mouth like an insect studying its prey. Jeremy had uncovered a square metal hatch, his grimy fingers gripping the handle like they were sucked to the gray steel by some force unknown to man or nature. Ian spoke slowly with measured tones.

"It's getting _really_ dark. We should leave this and come back tomorrow. We don't want to end up like Jake Sattler."

Nathan winced. Jake Sattler had been before their time, but the manic frenzy of his digging was equal parts inspiration and cautionary tale.

Jake's obsession had run to stockades and barriers within the glades nearby. These had risen like the palace of some wood demon until his ambition overcame his rudimentary engineering skills in spectacular fashion. The resultant collapse had crushed his left leg beyond all recognition and imbued the forest with a mythic appetite for the zeal of boys, one their present construction sought to conquer.

"Ian is right, Jeremy," he said. "Crawling around in there like maggots is pretty dumb."

Jeremy shook his head and knelt in mock supplication.

"Please God; spare me from friends with the hearts of little girls."

Nathan giggled. Ian shrugged, rose and scrabbled off in the undergrowth nearby. Nathan's hands now joined Jeremy's and they heaved in unison. The hatch creaked once, half-heartedly, and sprung open.

"Stand back!" ordered Ian, and his friends quickly complied when they saw the large stone he bore in both hands. It disappeared into the void and the boys were rewarded with a satisfying crunching sound, as if it had smashed into a bed of ice.

"Okay," said Jeremy. "Tomorrow is going to be a big day. Ian, we need you to get a torch. Nathan, if you can get a piece of thick rope or even better a rope ladder."

His friends murmured assent, their eyes shining in the dusk. Ian looked at the hatch and voiced their mutual thoughts:

"This is going to be _great_."

Nathan's brother Scott had a ritual he observed every time he bought a new CD. Or to be more precise: a series of rituals amounting to a sacrament of Heavy Metal. The favour of the dark gods in whose dominion he was held thrall was not easily won nor retained. They demanded unwavering devotion. He would drag his speakers to the window and slowly rack the volume up to a level just below that sufficient to blow them. This point could only be aurally noted by an experience gained by painful experimentation.

These were Scott's third pair of speakers, the first two sacrificed to the Metal Gods when his untrained ear had over-estimated their capacity. With the speakers in place, he sat in the backyard to let the sonic onslaught envelop the trees and lawn. Even the brightest summer sun would seem drained; the very rays unable to penetrate the billowing black noise below. Scott's favourite band, Pathogenic Demise, was his companion this afternoon. His lips followed the lyrics printed on the CD cover depicting a corpse in a biohazard suit wielding a bloody axe:

"The slain will rise in hills of gore

Your cities cauterized by flame

In crimson torrents blood will pour

You dare not speak my name!"

A double kickdrum hammered steadily under a maelstrom of guitars, a malevolent landscape he knew well. This was his sound; this membrane of discordant music he wished could become his totality. The chorus of a new song rose and Scott stood, listening for the words. In a few seconds he had them and bellowed in unison.

When Nathan arrived home from the hill a few hours later, he found his brother headbanging atop a crude pyramid of lawn furniture and empty beer cans. He smiled and ran to where two lengths of thick plastic tubing lay. Scott halted his head mid flight and fixed Nathan with a furious scowl.

"Your Ninjitsu skills are still untested, my brother."

Nathan threw a pipe up to Scott.

"Yet you will still die!" he growled in his best Samurai-movie voice.

"So be it!" snapped Scott and vaulted from the furniture mound to swing the tubing down in a hissing arc. The younger boy stepped in expertly and met Scott's belly with his own weapon. Rising to his feet, Scott groaned in pain.

"You have given me my death wound, young pup. But I am not in my grave... yet."

Nathan brought the sword above his head in a two-handed grip.

"Defend yourself," he spat.

The pair fought until the Mohican skull on Scott's black T shirt was sodden with sweat. Skin had been struck from Nathan's knuckles in several places but he still came on, despite Scott's advantage in reach and size. His brother had taught him well. Finally Scott reversed the sword and pretended to impale himself upon it.

"We're on our own for food, buddy," he said. "Dad called but he's caught up."

Instinctively, Scott scowled and spat at his lie. _Caught up_. He placed his hand on Nathan's shoulder for a moment, a gesture of apparent tenderness belied a moment later by a judo throw that sent him tumbling into a flower bed. Nathan's laughter was extinguished by Scott's wrestling drop that swept the breath from his lungs.

Jeremy and Ian ran their bikes slowly through the dark, the lights tracing a glow of sickly yellow among the pine trunks. The uniform spacing of the plantation was always unsettling at night, the black galleries arching away at right angles wherever you where.

No imagination was required to see spectral shapes flitting past at the end of each gloomy avenue. Jeremy would speak softly of his personal nemesis, pairs of disembodied mannequin legs. In nightmares they hunted him, in packs that circled with a fluid, implacable grace. Ian had grown fierce when his friend revealed the terror to him.

"Jeremy, we would just climb a tree. They've got no hands, right? What can they do?"

That had unsettled Jeremy even more. The legs would not be troubled by a lack of hands. To pursue him up trees they would merely stride with their precise motion onto the trunk and continue upward towards him as if glued by each step. Ian would have none of it.

"Then we'd get hammers or something and smash them! They're just plaster or wood!"

His fear had not diminished, but he was gladdened by Ian's loyalty. That quality was never in question with his friend. Although none of the three had yet warded off a season of beating, Ian's scowl was sufficient to reduce their tenure. It was a visor he could drop upon his face at will, a powerful armour against the victimhood that enveloped them daily.

Ian pressured Jeremy to join his favourite game: Bad Ways To Die. It was a sport of which they never tired. They competed for the rest of the journey down the hill, their small voices raised in exited talk of painful death. When they broached the road that encircled the forest the pair observed their other custom: speeding down the hill without brakes. Existence was now hyper-real: the blast of the cold air, sheer velocity bringing the black asphalt up towards them in a hissing rush, the low thrum of the tyres in their ears. Ian yelled in gibberish to the wind; Jeremy looked behind for a moment and saw dozens of the mannequin legs clattering after them. But their pace was superior, he knew. He and Ian were drawing away further with every revolution of their wheels. Tonight they might crowd the abyssal void beneath his bed, waiting with resolute intent for the moment to attack.

That would be hours from now. At this perfect instant of wind and night, nothing could catch them.

Jeremy did dream, of their school library at night cast in a beige pallor. At the windows was a pure state of blackness so profound, it was if the library sat on the bottom of a sea of liquid onyx pressing against the windows at a thousand tons per square inch. The book stacks were familiar, yet arrayed in a concentric pattern. Their layout was now as a stone circle from the Neolithic age. Nathan tried to navigate the ring towards the centre, but seemed to be always a turn away from his goal. The titles of books passing at side grew increasingly outlandish: _Great Italian Hunters of the 16th Century, Gibbon Breeding for Beginners, The Walnut in History_. The structure of the dream broke down then, as it is wont to do, and the carpet beneath his feet became desert sands. Each book stack floated above the dunes in perfect suspension, clanking gently.

The next morning saw the three assembled at the hatch. Their normal session of play amidst the trenches had been forgotten. Nathan had quickly reconstructed a barricade that had fallen with the night's wind; Jeremy had waved him on with annoyance. His face was easy for his friend to read: _Come on, we have work to do_. Jeremy's plan was meeting with sullen resistance from Ian.

"We should smash everything with rocks first," he said. "There could be snakes down there."

Jeremy was a study in frustration. "That's stupid," he said flatly. "There's no snakes. What there could be is a secret. Think about that for a moment."

Nathan's voice was low.

"Ian, it could be _anything_. The army used this place during the war, my dad said. It could be bombs."

Rock impacting on a high-explosive warhead brought a smile to Ian. Seeing this, Jeremy spoke quickly.

"Or guns, Ian. Secret storage for Sten guns."

The mythic lure of the Sten gun It was the minimal expression of a firearm, being merely barrel, magazine and rudimentary housing: an embodiment of brutal functionality. This purity of intent was understood by the boys on a primal level. On gloomy Saturday afternoons, when the commando movie was the violent sun around which their imaginations were locked in orbit, it was the abrupt and commanding bark of the Sten that laid the Nazi scourge low. All that was required to construct a replica was two sticks, one smaller than the other, and a hammer and roofing nail. Ian was the proud owner of a deluxe model with an improvised stock and silver paint.

Jeremy broke their reverie with his customary correction.

" _Armoury_. An armoury."

"Then let's find out" Nathan said. Peering forward, he saw a Kraken lying dried by countless ages in the gray dust of the pit before them. Its great eye would be crusted shut in sleep. Its tentacles would like line the cavern walls like veins, tremoring with excitement at their approach. After centuries of slumber, its thirst for blood -

Ian shouted a curse at him, the one involving his mother that always made him smile in spite of himself. He whispered a greeting to the pit-beast and waited while Jeremy outlined the plan.

The teamwork they had formed while entrenching was in evidence all that day. Ian and Nathan deferred naturally to Jeremy's leadership, as was their nature. But when working they were a true collective. Within a half hour they had gauged that the space below them was 10.45 metres deep. While that was an appreciable height, it did not daunt Jeremy.

"Rope ladder. My uncle has a rope ladder, I know it."

"Ten metres is -" Nathan was unfurling their length of measuring rope. "This far. I don't think those things go that long."

Ian ceased making a noose with their spare rope and nodded in assent.

"Well then, We tie the ladder to a rope with knots in it then. Commando-style."

Ian and Nathan started as if struck by a thousand volts at the mention of that world.

"Yes," said Ian. "I'll go down there." His eyes were beyond argument.

"OK then," said Jeremy. "Let's get that ladder."

The next day, a little later then it was then, Ian was being slowly lowered into the pit. His mission had been delayed by an extended game of Grenade The Bunker, reluctantly sanctioned by Jeremy, involving the hatch opening and several dozen pine cones.

Now Ian was inching down, the lower half of his body inside the void. They had tied a smaller rope to him, with pen marks at meter intervals. A part of Nathan he did not necessarily like anticipated the wet crunch of beak-like jaws upon his friend's midsection; they would drag him screaming from the hatch but only his torso would come, pumping blood. Jeremy looked away from Ian for a moment to the sky. Rain had threatened that morning and the blackening clouds had that baseless foreboding he hated.

Were it in his power, he would train the mirrors of a thousand orbiting satellites to bathe the forest in eternal light. For a moment he thought he saw an owl swooping between trees, but he could have imagined it. Like the emotionless clatter of the mannequin legs, Jeremy was afraid of the Owl's eternal glare. He knew if there is a Hell, it is full of hungry, fat owls the size of phone boxes.

Ian swung his torch around in small increments he imagined would indicate to any waiting in ambush below that he meant business. But his beam played upon only metal bulkheads on his sides, and below was blackness.

"How much of the measuring rope have you let out?" He yelled upwards.

A pause, and then Jeremy shouting back that he was two metres above the pit bottom. Ian slowed his descent. He knew that a good commando would have his trench knife at the ready, its razor edge probing for the neck of a sentry like a viper seeking prey. Then his feet were on the ground. Ian felt light spots of water patter to his head. Looking up, he saw his friends staring at him through a column of light diffused by weak rain. He was surprised that with no reference to indicate their relative distance, Jeremy and Ian's faces looked within his grasp. The boy sucked in a deep breath and knelt. Under his shins, the ground was cold and gritty. His torch beam crept to the walls, casting jagged shadows from a low mound before it.

He stood and walked cautiously forward. The mound was heaped coal; he yelled this fact upwards. Exploration of the pit yielded nothing further: not a single ninja nor jaguar made the cavern its lair. A half hour later, he lay beside the hatch exhausted.

"Nothing else," he gasped. "All that work for nothing."

"Give us a look at the coal," Nathan said.

Ian fished in his rucksack.

"I got a nice chunky bit," he offered.

The piece of coal was the size of a large man's fist. Ian placed it at the centre of their attention on a tussock of grass.

"Get the hammer," commanded Jeremy.

Ian narrowly beat Nathan to their improvised toolkit and returned with a claw hammer. Jeremy began to say something, but Ian's fist was already on its downswing arc. The coal lump shattered noiselessly, followed immediately by a gagging intake of breath from Ian. Amidst the black dust - apparently the remnants of its home - lay a green frog. Ian dabbed the prongs of the hammer upon the frog's head and was rewarded with a single coughing gasp. Jeremy was in a high state of nervous excitement.

"Do you guys know how _old_ this thing must be?"

Ian's finger replaced the hammer resting on the animal's spine.

"It must be a thousand years old," he wondered. "It has been trapped down there or something."

Nathan's voice was gently scornful.

"That's impossible," he said. "How could it live in rock?"

"Coal," corrected Jeremy.

Ian's voice was breathless: "Suspended animation. They hibernate for years like that. Maybe this one just forgot to wake up like that guy in the story."

"Until we woke it up," said Nathan, tentatively touching the frog.

"We can take it to a lab or something and they'll pay us for it!" exclaimed Ian. A single muscle in the frog's back twitched suddenly and Nathan flinched away. His friends laughed and punched him lightly.

"Ian, they'll never pay us. What they'll do is take it away and then cut it up or something."

"Vivisect," said Nathan quickly, in a move to redeem himself.

Jeremy scowled at Nathan, his annoyance in plain sight.

"OK then," said Ian, "We need to keep this secret. We keep it as a pet and don't tell anyone."

It seemed that the silence of the forest was palpable for a moment, a lost second where the birdsong died away and the soft wind was stilled by their pensive thoughts. Instinctively, Jeremy looked around. Nathan regarded the coal bunker's hatch with longing.

_We should just throw it in back in and forget we ever found it,_ he thought. _It's not something cool like a baby dragon or a giant spider egg._

That image gave him a delicious shiver down his spine. A vast, silky cocoon, bigger than their heads. They would discern a pulsing within, many limbs fighting to escape the enclosing sac. He looked at the frog again. It was a smooth green, uninterrupted by stripe or spot. Its bulbous eyes regarded him coolly. Nathan decided it would give them some sport after all.

"Let's feed it," he said.

The boys collected a glossy black menagerie of bugs and spiders, at which the frog merely stared.

"I think it's in shock," Jeremy said with an air of knowledge.

Ian prodded a luckless beetle to the rim of the frog's mouth.

"Come on, you _must_ be hungry," he sighed soothingly.

Bored at the frog's inactivity, he produced a magnifying glass. When the clouds thinned to expose the sun's weak face, he angled it carefully over the bugs to gain an optimal burning vector. But the insects were lucky that afternoon: the focused corona of light was sufficient to merely warm their backs rather than put them to flame.

Their decision on who would take custodianship of the frog was lengthy and not without controversy. A throwing competition was vetoed, in recognition of Nathan's admitted lack of skill with the pine cone. Short straws, with its aura of commando heroics, was Ian's suggestion. It was the one they adopted.

And so Nathan found himself walking home, with the frog occupying a snug corner of one pocket.

His father was gone for the weekend and the house was slowly filling with Scott's friends. Nathan always enjoyed these nights. They seemed to always be in Springtime, Friday afternoons when the music blasting from the windows of their house would reach him on a breeze just tainted with the scent of blossoms. Inside, Scott would be holding court in a kingdom of beer and amplitude. To Nathan, Scott's friends seemed as a race of warrior giants. Amongst them he was less a mascot than a talisman.

Like him, they were deemed outcast at an early stage. They had grouped in a tight cadre, raising the standard of defiance from within the grim citadel of their music. Nathan had grown up with the name of every doom-laden band: Crucifuge, Blunt Trauma, Chromatic Death.

To turn a room of Scott's friends to laughter he merely had to repeat a lyric, his nervous voice tripping over the words describing mutilation and vengeance. They would arm-wrestle with him and pretend to lose, which Nathan loved. He would ask to see every new tattoo that crawled across their arms and suggest new designs. The sun that was his father's praise, on the rare occasion it could be felt, fell on his upturned face without warmth. He looked to Scott as an agent of intercession between himself and his father's love.

"Did dad say where he was going?" he asked, raising his voice against the music.

Scott fake-punched his brother, making him flinch and smile at the same time.

"No, but he said for us to both be cool."

"I've got something to show you" Nathan said suddenly, and rushed upstairs. He returned with a shoebox whose lid he lifted with a magician's flourish. Inside, crouched amidst a thicket of newspaper, was the frog. Scott looked in.

"You need to give it some water. It'll die for sure like that."

Nathan nodded. He wanted desperately to reveal the story of the coal, but he dared not.

"Does it always look at you that way?" asked Scott. The eyes that shone upwards from the box looked more feline than amphibian. They blinked occasionally, but their icy touch did not waver from his face. It was a look of pure knowing, unadulterated by fear or timidity. Before Nathan could stop him, Scott had scooped the animal up, opening his jaws wide as if to swallow it. The frog did not struggle. Eyeball to eyeball, it matched Scott's gaze. Finally, his brother laughed.

"It's a weird little thing. Have you given it a name?"

"No," said Nathan.

Scott said nothing, and threw back his beer.

Nathan spent much of that night watching the shoebox beside his bed. He had placed a bowl of water and some dead crickets inside for the frog. In that imagined the animal undergoing a slow transformation as he slept, awakening to a thousand-year hunger for flesh no dead bug could match. Its green skin would mottle and blister to a landscape of putrescent sores. Orbs of thick pus would fill its eye sockets. The shoebox would split under its expanding bulk, as it became something monstrous and ravening that spilled across his bed towards his sleeping form in an avalanche of teeth.

When Nathan did sleep, he dreamt of a long beach under a gray sky. He found himself in the cold ocean beyond a line of surf. A wave was rearing above him like a vast blue awning. With inexorable momentum it receded upwards to fill the sky with water, forming a jewelled cavern beneath. Now lying on wet sand, Nathan glimpsed the sun dimly though a translucent sea-roof. The sapphire-hued tunnel constricted, rolling into itself with a cataclysm of foam. Nathan dove into the wave's thick flank and was pummelled forward with its violent motion. Then the surf sucked back over him to surge up into another precipice of water. He ran from the onrushing waves for the rest of the night, an unwanted destiny grasping at his heels.

That was the last weekend before school began again. There was a determined edge to the digging now, a desire to expand the galleries as far as they might dare. Jeremy placed the frog on a small cairn on the command bunker to observe. Nathan stole glances at it, perched on a stone like a tiny Buddha. Its impassive eyes took in everything. They finished their lunch beneath its seat, and Ian gave voice to the thought that crowded their minds.

"Will we take it to school? We could hide it in our bags in a locker or something."

"Okay," said Jeremy. "But we need to keep it safe."

Ian drawled a stick in the ground pensively.

"It's not very cool, though, is it?" he inquired. "Just a frog."

Jeremy smiled.

"All we were lucky enough to find is just a frog. I'm sorry it wasn't a lion or a dinosaur, I really am. But that frog is like a billion years old, remember."

Nathan hefted a pine cone and aimlessly sent it skittering to the rear of their earthworks.

"It's a pretty good secret, Ian," he said in a reassuring tone. "It looks just like any old frog but we know it has special ..." He squinted with effort. At once Jeremy leapt the trench to stand beside his friend, whispering triumphantly to his face:

"Attributes."

Nathan stood mutely for a moment, then shoved his friend with a laugh.

"Attributes," he parroted, using a teacher's pet tone.

The trio finished their lunch with no more talk of school. They could feel the last free hours roaring over their heads like an artillery barrage. This knowledge fuelled their final burst of work that afternoon and the next day. Jeremy finally linked up their reserve lines with their forward observation posts; Ian completed an escape tunnel to their flank that dipped down lowest towards the road. Nathan added crude bridges to the whole network, constructed of nailed branches.

Late on Sunday, they indulged in rock rolling, a passion they had resisted for weeks. A meter-wide rock, prized from its socket in the earth, wrought a fearsome swathe through the forest as it crashed down the hill. At times it would bound at head-height over the stubby bluffs. When it struck a pine trunk square-on, the resulting impact would roll a thick boom down towards the houses that scattered birds up into the sunlight. Risk and reward were deliciously balanced in this enterprise, for unleashing a destructive force that was dependent on mass and the sureness of gravity was to toy with a minor demon. Each rock would began its irresistible tumbling momentum, and in their minds a voice would say with perfect clarity:

There it goes, and nothing can stop it.

There was a rush then, a liberating feeling of handing their future over to the whims of fate. The rocks crashed down until the sun had sunk too low and shadows arced from the tree-tops to claim their hill. The boys went home then to await sleep and dreams of falling rocks.

The next morning, school loomed like a battleship glimpsed through fog, gray and foreboding. Jeremy saw his fingers tremble as he stuffed books into his bag. He put himself into Commando mode as best he could. A plane interior formed in his mind, with rows of camouflaged soldiers. A sergeant was saying:

"When we hit the ground, you find cover and stay there. If you are caught out in the open, you get in the mud and start crawling until you can find a position to return fire."

Jeremy nodded to himself.

_"What kills a lazy soldier?"_ barked the Sergeant.

"Shape, Shadow, Silhouette," responded Jeremy quickly.

He finished packing his bag with black wings of fear unfurling from his shoulder blades, a canopy that kept the morning sun from his upturned face.

"Shape, Shadow, Silhouette," repeated the boy, and the enveloping wings parted a little.

He repeated these words as a mantra all the way to school while keeping a steady patter on fence palings with a stick pulled from a branch. Slowly, he saw the street drop away and the hedgerows of Normandy seep into being from the passing houses. His stick ceased its rhythmic sound and Jeremy saw it was now held fast by the encroaching foliage. Shell craters gaped in the road, issuing gray smoke. Jeremy could glimpse his Sergeant on one knee up ahead, looking back and smiling. He gave the thumbs up, and the Sergeant waved him forward with his Sten gun.

Over the break from school, Nathan's tormentors had graduated to the term "Fat boy." Ian could hear those words clearly for half a block as he free-wheeled his bike down the crest of the hill behind their school. Nathan was walking, head bowed, with three boys goosing his back. Ian was downcast. He had hoped to meet with his friends before classes started. They would debrief on the current status of the frog and plan to meet in the library later. Now, Nathan was probably withdrawing deep down to where his inner monsters could console him. The real world would hold little appeal for the rest of the day, Ian knew. Cursing, Ian skirted the school perimeter until he was sure he was safe and then drove his bike hurriedly inside once the bell rang.

By mid-morning, the three friends were uneasily sharing a math problem. Nathan was moodily regarding the floor while Ian and Jeremy talked. Their schoolwork was soon completed by Jeremy and placed aside.

"We head for the far playground at lunch and hang there. We'll need to be quick out of the door though," said Jeremy.

Ian considered this for a moment.

"They'll still come looking for him," he said. "Maybe not us, but definitely Nathan. They were like vultures picking on a dead thing this morning."

Although he could hear this quite clearly, Nathan made no attempt to speak, his thousand yard stare terminating deep within the earth below.

"OK, there's that big tree down beside the workshop," said Jeremy. "We get down there via the hedge, in the shadows."

Ian nodded. Waves of rain were steadily washing over the library roof. Ian glanced out the window towards their hill and smiled. He knew their drainage works in the trenches would hold. There was a vacant lot next to Ian's house and they had spent a day hauling plastic pipes from there up to their position.

_If our defences wash away in the first rainstorm, then we will have failed, and all this work will have been for nothing,_ Jeremy had said to them gravely. But thanks to their preventative work, water would now be spouting into the ferns below their trenches rather than scouring them from the face of the earth. Ian nudged Nathan to tell him this but his friend did not respond.

Their lunchtime plan failed. The trio were spotted and chased down without difficulty, their every evasive manoeuvre effectively countered by skilled pursuers. To Jeremy, it seemed that the rotation of the world was slowing. Rain droplets could be seen pulsing in mid-air. Ian was quickly pinned by two boys; another pair of arms grabbed Jeremy in a crude half-nelson. Paul Forster - the Arch-Inquisitor of this afternoon's session of torment - was saying something to Nathan, alternating his words with shared laughter amongst his friends. Every sound that reached Jeremy was discordant, like fairground music heard from under water. Nathan's head was bowed. His dark hair fell away from his forehead in rain-slick bangs. He was hit then, once in the belly.

Rather than doubling over, Nathan merely clutched at his pocket frantically. This resulted in him being held down and a perfunctory search, from which Paul rose with a single triumphant fist raised high. Jeremy felt his throat tighten. Their frog peeked warily from between Paul's fingers. A piteous wail issued from Nathan and he fought hard against the restraining arms. Forster's eyes shot down to the ground and he seized a small rock from under the hedge. Holding this aloft in his left hand, the animal in his right, he enacted a pantomime to emphasize the absolute inevitability of the coming union: frog and rock, frog and rock, frog and rock. Nathan almost broke free as Forster dangled the amphibian before him for a final look. Jeremy shut his eyes and heard a wet smack a few moments later, then another and another.

The bastard, Jeremy thought. He should have just killed the thing, he didn't have to splatter it.

He opened his eyes again and saw the exultant look on Forster's face dying as Jeremy watched. Finally, a frown settled there. Paul rose and seemingly did not notice the rock slip from his grasp.

"The fuckin' thing won't die," he said.

His use of that word caused a giggle from his retinue which he silenced with a glare. There was a single croak from the frog. Nathan finally stood, his captors entranced by the frog's slow progress across the wet grass. Its soft body was undented, a very paragon of frogginess. Then something quite unexpected happened: Ian shook himself free also, snatched up the frog and mashed it with the rock against the anvil of his palm. Then he dropped the small green object and planted a sneaker heavily upon its head. He knelt, gave Nathan a smile, and held up the frog by a single leg; it flipped about in space, as unscathed as before.

Nathan's voice was odd then. No anger in it, just a matter of fact tone that their teachers employed when describing the due date of an assignment.

"This frog is unkillable."

His eyes were fierce beneath the wet hair. Nathan could feel his fear transmute to a cold righteousness. The frog's heartbeat, sensed through his fingertips, was steady and slow. This was the antithesis of his own, which had begun to hammer with fear as he was caught and had not yet begun to slacken. High above, weak sunlight had broached a halo of clouds . Where light touched the frog's eyes, they glinted with something unknowable. The air was sharpened by a post-rain coldness. Jeremy walked over and stroked the amphibian's back, awestruck.

"He was smacking that rock down as hard as he could, wasn't he?" he asked.

Ian nodded silently and spoke directly to Nathan.

"I wasn't taking a chance just now. We already knew it was ... unkillable."

Jeremy frowned, saying:

"Isn't it immortal? Unkillable just means you can't kill it right now, but maybe you can in the future."

"Unkillable," Nathan said with a grim finality.

His friends looked at Ian, for there was intense deliberation behind his eyes.

"We need to test it," he said simply.

Jeremy nodded and the two boys looked at Nathan. It was he whose attachment to the frog was clearly the strongest. In the conflict between the obvious scientific interest and the potential loss of their pet, Nathan's natural curiosity won out.

"Okay," he said. "But even if it can't die, I don't want it to suffer too long."

Jeremy and Ian agreed and they remained warily on guard until the lunch bell rang again.

The incident with the frog conferred on them the status of semi-untouchable. This was a welcome development. Nathan was the recipient of a perfunctory round of "Fat boy" every morning, but this was a surgical strike compared to the carpet-bombing he had endured previously. Ian was bolted in his locker one afternoon, but went without struggle. If he was entirely honest with himself, he appreciated to have his place in the social pyramid affirmed. It was not a matter of his dignity surrendered to them. Like every bullied child, Ian understood that this was the eternal way of things.

Tears and pleading would not dissuade his tormentors. For that matter, nor did his acceptance; but it certainly saved time for everyone involved. Jeremy's heart sank at least once every day, when he found himself alone in a classroom with a closing circle of smiling boys. After the frog renaissance, he almost forgot his destiny was not his own, that the Paul Fosters of the world had his suffering never far from their thoughts.

Later that week, the boys assembled at Nathan's house. His father had a small workshop which they had quickly converted to a crude laboratory. Nathan was whispering platitudes to the frog while Ian and Jeremy assembled tools. Finally, Ian motioned for the "Test subject", as he required them to call it, to be brought forth.

"OK, the drill first," he said, and they set to work.

Nathan held the animal steady while Ian whirred the electric drill to life. It descended with a dreadful certainty until it met the soft skin, gave infinitesimally, and with a yelp of shock began to machine the tip apart in spinning silver whorls. Ian relaxed his finger on the trigger and felt sweat form on this back, despite the workshop's slight chill.

"Okay," he said. "That's pretty cool."

There was a natural groove in the frog's lower spine and Ian had Jeremy steady a chisel there while he whacked its end with a mallet. The tool did not leave a mark, nor did the frog flinch. Nathan looked anxiously into its eyes but they indicated nothing. Ian swallowed hard. Jeremy felt like the realm of the impossible, the place where he let his imagination run, had supplanted the real without him noticing.

Amid his rising excitement, he knew that things would not be the same for any of them.

They opened the bench vice wide and Ian slotted the frog inside. Ian was about to turn the handle when Scott said from behind them:

"What are you sick little bastards doing?"

Scott felt a wave of anger. Jeremy, whom he liked, had enthusiastically talked to him before about guns and explosives. He had gone outside to make sure they were not trying to construct a nuclear device. But torturing animals was unexpected and shocking.

"It's fine," said Nathan, who was smiling. Scott wanted to hit him then, and fought the impulse.

"No Nathan, it's not fine. Your little friends can get out of here and then we are going to have a long talk, my friend."

Nathan looked downcast. Jeremy felt his elation peak. Freeing the frog, he picked up a saw from their tray of testing implements and readied it over the frog's throat.

"Watch this," he said, and they all did.

Later, Scott drove them through the streets. He had not spoken much since he had seen the saw drawn over the frog's thin neck without any ill effect. The boys had then enthusiastically shown him the amphibian was proof against crushing, piercing, burning or laceration. He thought in a rush: _It's a mutant gene or something. The thing's skin has some extra enzyme, whatever_. This explanation was the rock to which he would tether his mind.

Like the boys, his misgivings about harming the frog were quickly over-ridden by curiosity. They had eventually doused the frog in lighter fluid and set it to flame. The thing was still hot to the touch after they had quenched it in a bucket of water. It still had the same beatific expression, the wide mouth almost suggesting a smile. Scott killed the engine and looked a each of the trio in turn.

"Guys, we have to be real quiet about where we're going and what we're gonna see."

The boys nodded solemnly. Scott smiled.

"You've used saws and drills. I know someone who can see just what this little sucker can take."

Jeremy's tone was almost boastful, repeating a phrase he had picked up in a WW2 movie; the cocky prisoner taunting the Gestapo:

"Do your worst."

They were at the house of Scott's friend Blackie. Blackie was a former army sergeant, a few years older than Scott. Where Scott's tattoo was small and high on his arm, Blackie's whole body was a riot of ink. Nathan took a strange pride in noting the garland of skulls he had seen on Blackie's wrist was now intertwined with a barbed wire cobweb at his elbow. This joining had been his suggestion.

Blackie's house was divided into two zones: living quarters above ground and a bunker belowdecks. The bunker seemed to serve a dual purpose, both as a shrine to Blackie's love of weaponry and the centre of his devotion to The Carpenters. Karen and Richard beamed down from tour posters and framed album covers while Blackie snapped open a khaki metal case. He looked askance at Scott.

"Kids are cool, yeah?"

"Yep," replied his friend with a nod.

"Okay," said Blackie, and produced a huge rifle which he promptly set to field stripping. Jeremy and Ian flew to the table immediately and began to question him frantically. Nathan fished the frog from his pocket and examined it again.

"You'll be fine," he said. "Don't worry about a thing."

The frog opened its mouth slightly and looked at the rifle. Green-lit by a bench lamp fringed in camouflage netting, Blackie's glare was that of the eternal hunter.

"Right, this is a bolt action fifty cal. This round will penetrate light vehicle armour. Forget about brick walls and shit. As for frogflesh ... well my brothers, I would be saying your goodbyes," he said.

He had provided strips of woven tape to secure the frog and it was a quick matter to tether it to the wall of sandbags that covered one side of the bunker.

"Put these in." Blackie handed out violet earplugs with a smile. Their excited muttering fell to the floor and was lost. Ian shot Nathan a smile.

The weapon fired, a whumping detonation the boys could feel through the plugs. More smoke than Jeremy would have thought likely issued from the wide-bored muzzle of the rifle and hung in the centre of the room. Blackie was ejected the spent casing, which spun out wide and to the floor. He then said the word "Clear" loudly and motioned the boys forward.

Nathan ran.

From halfway across the room, he could see that the frog was unharmed. Indeed, it was even moving slightly against its bindings. The bullet was another matter. Its brass jacket lay shredded on the ground, and all about were strewn its tiny metal innards in a fine powder: a massacre of ordnance.

Ian and Jeremy fist-pumped the air and whooped.

"Unkillable!" they shouted.

Blackie stood regarding the slain bullet for a moment before retreating to the shadows . Scott peered closely at the frog and hesitantly touched its skin.

"It's not even breathing hard," he reported.

Nathan smiled. Unkillable.

He high-fived his friends and reached to untie the animal.

"Grab those plugs again, lads," said Blackie.

Concentration marked his face as he methodically snapped shells into a shotgun by the table. Although wanting to protest, Nathan stayed silent. He knew they had already transformed Blackie's conception of the universe in a way he dare not guess. Blackie ensured the firing range was clear and emptied the shotgun's magazine at the frog in a rapid succession of blasts. After a quick inspection of his target, he whispered his astonishment in an elaborate series of curses. Then he turned and spoke to the trio.

"Where did you find this thing?"

Ian said "The river" before any of them could answer.

"The river," he repeated. "For tonight, I think I'll keep our little friend safe, what do you say?"

Ian's voice was measured and final.

"No. It's ours. We'll keep it safe."

Blackie's bore a wide grin that revealed metal teeth sprinkled in his upper gums, a gargoyle made flesh.

"Good for you," he said softly.

With that he retrieved their frog from the tape. His every movement was deliberate with care, the boys saw, all violence now absent from his hands.

After the musty smell of canvas and gun-grease, the Spring night air was a revelation. Every breath was perfumed with the far-spilled odour of flowers. The boys' senses seemed razor-keen, and they tumbled in the front yard like wolf cubs. Scott took a long draught of his beer and glanced at Blackie, who had forgone their usual drinking accompaniment music of The Flayed Brigade. His friend, with a look of bemusement, said:

"I had almost forgotten what it's like."

"What?" asked Scott.

"To know that anything can happen at any moment. Do you know that feeling?"

Scott nodded.

"I had almost forgotten," Scott repeated. "You can't see everything in this life, Scott. A Goddamn little frog can change everything."

With that he laughed and returned to careful inspection of his beer bottle. Scott drained his own brew:

"I know. Like if something that small and insignificant can piss with nature, what can that mean for me?"

Blackie seemed relieved to hear his own thoughts encompassed by his friend.

"Yeah. And what made that thing able to withstand a round that should have reduced the bastard to little flecks of red and green foam?"

"It's scary but also a bit ... exhilarating."

"Exhilarating," Blackie snorted, and Scott knew their level of discourse had returned to a comfortable superficiality. They spoke no more of the frog, watching the boys enact their new-found sense of wonder in nameless play.

That night, Jeremy, Nathan and Ian shared the same dream. Their trench network was translocated to a warzone. Soldiers in mud-soaked uniforms crawled down through the maze of tunnels like great gray rats. Each boy found immediate glee and vindication in the visage. Then the viewpoint afforded by the dream changed, drawing backwards into sky misted with gray smoke. As their trench receded from view, huge explosions began to erupt in the diggings, obliterating all. Gouts of blood and flame escaped the earth. Below their parapets, a sullen Hell was bursting its bounds through fissures of bright fire.

The dream-view flew into the sky, revealing at once that the boys' trench was merely one bulwark in a vast front line that reached to the horizon. The size of the battlefield was unimaginable now as they raced to the heavens. Awed, they saw that their swirling dugout pattern replicated itself in ever larger instances. Gaping warrens still rent with shell-bursts diminished to mere cracks in the dirt of ever more immense trenches. It was an ocean whose denizens, from plankton to leviathan, differed only in scale. When comprehension of this sight failed them, the boys woke.

At school that day they barely spoke, save the perfunctory warnings of ambushes being prepared in empty classrooms. Each boy was walking in the near-stumble of a man freed from long imprisonment. Ian mentioned the dream on the long walk home and the boys fell to contemplation of its meaning. They professed no terror. Despite the death of many millions implied in the magnitude of that conflict, none saw it as a nightmare.

"It's like we're part of a big story," said Nathan.

"One we can't see the ending to," added Ian. He was about to elaborate, drawing on the similarities of their current situation to a series of books where you could choose how the story advanced, but thought better of it. Jeremy could be withering in his views on children's fiction.

The pair watched for Jeremy's contribution.

"Well my lads," he said finally. "Not a story, but a plan. We are part of a big plan."

Ian's expression became wracked with joy.

"A mission!" He repeated this word.

Nathan was the voice of reason.

"The fact we all had the same dream doesn't mean it's a mission," he said warily.

"It could just mean that it's a story-" A dark look from Jeremy and Ian - "... A plan then. One where we don't know what's going to happen. We're just being pushed around like..." He let the obvious conclusion to that sentence die on his tongue.

"Let's look at the facts, Nathan," said Jeremy. "Someone is trying to make contact with us. If it wanted to push us around, it would send us nightmares and stuff. That makes sense, doesn't it?"

Faced with this, Nathan merely smiled and looked at his feet. Ian aimed an invisible Sten gun at a billboard across the street and crooked his finger to the trigger.

"What kind of a mission, do you think? Rescuing hostages, maybe."

"No, blowing up a dam!" shouted Jeremy.

Nathan overcame his reticence.

"A crashed UFO," he said hurriedly. "We are part of a rescue team that is trying to reach it first but the government has their own squad and they want to recover the bodies and also the engines because they want to make their own one."

Thus the likely nature of The Mission occupied their imaginations until late in the journey home.

No dreams intruded into sleep that night. The frog had been moved from the shoebox to beneath Nathan's pillow, where it seemed quite content. He had tried to engineer a fight between the frog and his cat, but even in the close confines of a gladiatorial area improvised from a laundry basket, there was no conflict. Nathan was disappointed, and spared the frog from any further tribulations. When sleep eluded him that night, he slipped downstairs to the backyard. Clouds slid from the dark atop a fragrant wind, their white flanks swollen with promise of rain where the city lights struck them.

To the North, beyond the hill into which their trench was inscribed, flashed the remnants of a storm. After a while, the wind stripped the clouds back from the night and revealed a spray of stars within the void. Nathan sat for long minutes and imagined their frog crawling from the ribbon of light, its mouth agape, a devourer of constellations. There was a creak of metal that drew his eyes earthward.

Nathan's one plaintive attempt at a tree-house last Summer was destroyed by Scott's friends the very next day. Blackie had produced a brace of high-powered crossbows and they had fallen to an afternoon of target shooting. In truth, Nathan's tears at the loss of his shelter were quickly overcome when they let him fire the weapon. It kicked only a little. The bolt easily defeated the thin panels and embedded itself deep in the wood. Nathan and Scott's father has arrived home not much later. It became one of the best times Nathan would ever know with Scott. Like Blackie, he had spent time in the army and was an excellent shot. They gave Nathan another try and cheered when he pierced one of his plastic soldiers they had placed upon it as a target.

The shattered door of the tree-house was now opening slowly under the touch of the wind. The boy saw then that the leaves surrounding the structure did not move; the breeze must have died some time before. Something was in there pushing against the wood. A pool of moonlight lay just beyond the tree and it was into this stage of ragged shadows that the beast would emerge. Nathan backed away as a shape formed there, until his courage broke and he bolted.

Jeremy was dismissive the next day.

"A fox or a big possum or whatever," he said.

Ian pressed his friend for more information.

"Did you catch the glint of its eyes? If they flash green it's a dog, and red it's a cat. If we hunt it down we can tell just before we kill it."

Jeremy pointed out that weapons were required to complete that enterprise. Ian looked nonplussed. In a precisely worded curse, he said that logistics were not the concern of hunters. Nathan rose on one knee and scanned the entrance to their hide. A hollow-gutted willow at the schoolyard's edge had been their lunchtime refuge for the whole week. Jeremy had cut thin switches of willow-wood and arrayed them close to hand.

"Any attempt to rush this Forward Observation Post will be met by force," said Jeremy grimly. "This is our fortification too. Out there we might be at their mercy, but here," - he whipped the rod through a clump of leaves for effect - "we can defend."

"We can't defend here as well as the hill," said Nathan. "Or lay a trap for this thing I saw, if it's after me."

Ian ceased slashing the tree trunk with his switch. His voice was that of the zealot who wakes to find his fervour the currency of the realm. Ian's face was lathed from a billet of steel:

"Traps," he stated.

Opening his school bag, Jeremy produced a wide sheet of paper, onto which was scrawled a contour map of their hill.

"I was saving this for when we were next at the position. I have noted the most likely angles from which we might be attacked."

As Jeremy spoke, the leaf-blinkered light playing through the enfolding branches revealed his Sergeant standing behind the other boys, nodding in approval.

"We are vulnerable from both the South and East."

Seeing the confusion in Nathan, Jeremy orientated the map.

"We can barricade our Northern flank easily, because we are aided by the natural fall of the land. But the East is largely flat. The South is where we roll rocks; it's steep as hell. But a determined _aggressor_ ..." He halted and looked at Nathan, wanting his absolute command of that word to be impressed upon him.

"A determined _aggressor_ could still exploit that means of attack."

"This will take a lot of work, but we can do it," said Ian resolutely.

Jeremy looked at the Sergeant and then Nathan. "It is best to fight on ground of our own choosing," he said. "History has proven that."

Nathan looked downwards. A small lizard raced amongst the tree-litter in darting flicks of its body, down through the twigged boughs before ascending to where the fallen branches lay. The boy knelt and watched it. No effort for him to shrink to the animal's size, the canopy of leaves above distanced to an atmosphere of white-dappled green. Now the lizard was crocodilian in size. A slick rainbow sheen danced about its scales; its black eyes spun lightly in their orbits, seeing all.

This close, Nathan saw its muscles flex as it ran, silver cables scoring gouges in the wood where the talons landed. For a moment the sky was framed with a reptilian eclipse of rounded jaws above a swollen gullet, heaving with breath. Then the lizard turned and was lost to sight.

"Nathan, do you think you can get up to the hill on Saturday? Tell Scott you're staying at my house. He never calls to check," said Jeremy.

Nathan was at his normal size in an instant. He nodded, saying:

"OK, but we are going to need some kind of weapon. Traps are fine, but if this thing gets past them, I don't want to be left up there without something to defend myself."

_"Ourselves,"_ Ian said emphatically.

Nathan's eyes dropped again and he repeated Ian's last word in admonishment. Jeremy quickly noted that the school bell had probably rung long ago. Laughing, the boys burst from the cover of the willow tree and ran to class.

The next day, Ian opened a thick book entitled Guerrilla Warfare Through The Ages and laid it upon the pine needles. He tapped a picture of a spiked log suspended above a path knowingly.

"The proper name for it is Malayan Gates," he said sternly.

"Shouldn't it be Malayan Gate? There's only one of them," observed Nathan.

Ian frowned. "No, it's still Malayan Gates. Now check this one out."

He flipped forward a few pages.

"This one is really nasty, the Venus Flytrap. It's like two combs made out of metal locked in together."

Jeremy laced his fingers in a matrix by way of example and proclaimed "Intermeshed" loudly.

"Intermeshed," agreed Ian. "And once your foot slips in between them, you can't get it out. They have to amputate the whole foot."

Nathan pointed out that it would be impossible to make such a device without welding equipment. This produced an argument about whether wood could be an effective substitute, given that its tensile qualities were nothing like metal. Nathan started to suspect that this discussion was prolonged overly by Jeremy's obsession with the word "tensile." Finally, the Venus Flytrap was abandoned when Nathan found another entry in the book.

"These look easy," he said. "We just dig a hole and line it with spikes."

Ian smiled. "Hey, and when we're cutting the spikes, we could double up and make some to tie onto a branch that's going to whip around and stick into people, like in that movie."

Jeremy agreed. "That is good thinking. We are on a short time frame. How about we get one person on stake-cutting, one on pit-digging and the other on the Malayan Gates and..." he paused and frowned.

"Killing branch trap," said Ian.

Nathan was poring though the book.

"The holes, they're called Punji pits."

Another argument ensued as to the correct pronunciation of "Punji." Nathan settled this by remarking that the sun already looked low on the horizon. The entire complexion of their toil had changed, their labours now unleavened by play. At one point, several hours into their work, Nathan shot a glance at Ian. With wooden spikes arrayed before him in a semi-circle, he suggested a primeval armourer. Jeremy's bowed head rose occasionally as his shovel connected with the ground. Nathan had never before felt so much a part of something. He almost wished that what he had seen was the menace worthy of this feeling. Perhaps other boys had done this before, he thought. Maybe only the entrenching was eternal, and every other work of humanity pure ephemera.

He pictured a lost tribe of children digging atop hills behind towns everywhere in the world, a ringed fortification growing ever larger as it consumed young minds and ancient forest alike. One day, parents would awake to empty, silent houses. They would run shouting through the deserted streets in search of their offspring. But in the tree-shadows, heedless of these cries, would crouch a new race far beyond their control.

All three boys were required to heft the Malayan Gates into place. Ian insisted on a single test swing to validate its lethality. Bemoaning the lack of a live subject, he had made a crude scarecrow from old overalls filled with dirt. The boy set up the tripwire and release mechanism from a lying position, should the device be sprung accidentally. He could not get the dummy to do anything more than slouch dejectedly before the onrushing spikes, which removed its head in an explosion of cloth and dirt-brains. The trio's silence was broken by Jeremy.

"That is _awesome_."

"It's like fishing," said Ian. "We keep the bait where they can see it."

Nathan pushed the Malayan Gates back and forth.

"If I am the bait, then this is the hook," he said, smiling. "Let it come up here, we will make it pay for every inch of ground."

He looked at Jeremy, who smiled back.

"It's not like playing war, is it?" he smiled. "I mean, it feels different."

Nathan was relieved to have his thoughts expressed.

"No. It's like being scared and excited at the same time. I just want tonight to be over, but I don't want it to end either. Do you know what I mean?"

Ian picked up the dummy and tossed it upon the wooden spit-points of his trap, where it dangled like a rag-doll that had found its way to Hell. In answer to Nathan, he motioned to the waiting trench, a feral grin about his jaws.

They had arrayed spears close to hand by way of close-quarters defence. Each had cut the weapon according to their preference (in spite of Jeremy's insistence that they standardize lengths). A system of orientation was devised, with 12 o'clock being the waiting maw of the Malayan Gates, 3 o'clock the opening to their frontal trenches, the rock-rolling slope at 6 and the forest at 9. Jeremy brought up a pair of binoculars and scanned the perimeter every minute or so.

Nathan saw the sunset slowly drench the pines in gold. Hazy rivulets of pollen swept above their heads to the valley below and were put to yellow fire. He breathed deeply, marvelling yet again at the verdancy upon the air, a pungent aroma of new life. A slow red glow was deepening within the hollows of the cloud pillars facing dusk-ward.

Nathan smiled; clouds had been an early point of differentiation for him, an aid in marking him out. Their teacher had led the class outside to learn about cloud formations. She started by asking the kids to describe the shapes they saw there. The response came back: a donkey, a castle, an octopus, a kitten. Nathan was last to answer, oblivious to the many eyes judging his expression of pained concentration.

"It's like a spaceship," he said at once, "but one made of a great big animal that's not dead, it's just been hollowed out so people can live in it. It is telepathic too, so the pilots can communicate to it. People are starting to go missing in the lower decks though, because it is getting hungrier the more time it spends away from its home planet -" This continued for long minutes, the mumbling of his classmates slowly dying away as he revealed an entire infrastructure within the animal-craft. Intrigues and characters emerged the faster he talked; then lurking horrors battling for supremacy within the white-fleshed corridors. It marked him early as The Weird Kid, and helped in his gravitation towards his two best friends.

The younger Jeremy had sought him out later and interrogated him methodically.

"What does the creature use to power itself?"

Nathan replied that it would swim through currents of solar wind. Jeremy was vigorously shaking his head long before Nathan finished.

"No," he said simply, "that wouldn't work. It needs some kind of drive that goes into a sub-space mode."

Jeremy's response had set the tone of their friendship forever more.

Nathan raised his eyes again to the cloud above. Only basalt cliffs were suggested there, free from infestation by monster or alien. The clouds shifted dreamily, serenity unassailed by fear. Their evocation of the eternal was no comfort to Nathan. Onwards they would roll in slowly diffusing strands of vapour until nothingness overtook them.

_Is life like that?_ Nathan thought, _just patterns of stuff forming and falling apart again? And if you're scared or being hunted by something, there's nothing that the clouds can tell you to help you out, because they're stupid and dying for no reason too._

He looked at Jeremy and Ian. They had broached this subject before. It was hard going to think about for too long. He thought of his dream of the hanging wave, how real the sand felt under his back, the salt-tang in the air as the wall of water curved ever upwards. A single tear sank through the collected dirt upon his cheek. For the first time in his short life, he saw that his consciousness was not the hub upon which the wheel of existence spun. His death would not still the clouds. This setting sun would dawn tomorrow on untold waking millions, arising to a day in which the death of Nathan Kinnaird did not figure. He sniffed loudly.

"Jesus, Nathan, what are you seeing up there?"

Nathan wiped his tear away with a guilty swipe.

"Nothing."

"Well come and help us then," Jeremy said, flinging a clod of dirt upwards at his friend.

Much ceremony attended the lighting of the campfire. Ian had brought a packet of firestarters to form the base of an inflammable pyramid of twigs and newspaper. Jeremy was nervous around the flames. Nathan knew his stepfather had introduced the boy to fire by hanging him upside down over a backyard incinerator. This was just one of the many life lessons he sought to impress upon Jeremy.

On the few occasions he had met the man, he had seemed to Nathan all bulging eyes, protruding teeth and wild hair, more than earning Jeremy's pejorative of "The Troll." When eventually slaked by beer, the Jeremy's stepfather's formidable thirst would darken his mood like a thunderhead beknighting a valley. It was then his mania for subjecting Jeremy to trials of worthiness would take hold in earnest. Needless to say, his stepson despised him with unfettered passion.

The firelight guttered low and crept up the pinewood. A spider, dislodged from its home by the heat, spun crazily upon the bark. Ian picked up a stick and flicked it into the fire where it was quickly scorched.

"We should do this in shifts," suggested Jeremy.

"I will take the first one," offered Ian quickly. "My watch has a countdown timer, so I can hand it over to the next sentry."

Nathan murmured agreement. Jeremy was shuffling about in his knapsack and emerged carefully holding a plastic bag.

"I left this 'til last, so we could put it up close inside the traps."

Jeremy revealed a mass of thick string from which small bells were strung every foot or so. Nathan asked where he had got them.

"Courtesy of the Troll. He did not observe proper wallet security protocols."

Ian had already grabbed one end and was delicately threading it all around their trench. There was a good nine or ten metres of the cord to play out around the trench rim. The bells chimed softly as Jeremy tested tension along the span. Ian then noted that the cord would have an unexpected secondary function as a tripwire. He expressed his pride.

"But we can't test it now. No way. We're in here until the morning."

Nathan felt like a spiderling in its first web, glorying in every sticking point and killing place.

"Let's do a quick drill," he suggested.

The boys practiced running to a section of the trench and impaling an enemy. Soon Nathan felt as he did when playing Samurai Movie with Scott. Their practice wound down when the over-head spear twirl by Jeremy caught the back of Ian's head with the weapon's haft and floored him. There was no blood; Ian sat rubbing his head stoically.

By the time the mock attacks finally trailed off to nothing, the day had vanished from the forest again. They had never seen a fire before. Or more correctly, had never seen one not enclosed by relations wielding food on prongs at family camping trips. Whereas their torches blanched all in an anaemic wash, the fire was an endless skirmish between shadow and light.

"We should put on more wood," said Ian. "Build it up as much as we can."

He stared ruefully at the perimeter.

"And we could have dug a fire ditch around it too," he said. Jeremy joined him and fanned his spear outwards.

"I hear you. Filled with diesel, with a channel that came in here so we could torch it up when the assault came."

Talk of impending attack seemed suddenly ludicrous to Nathan. The very fabric of night was warm and aromatic; only the slow designs of dreams could be woven there.

They talked low and excitedly for an hour or so longer. Nathan felt the afternoon's exertions hit him in a wave of tiredness. It was like he previously had only the merest concept of that word. The marrow of his bones had been replaced by a sludgy gray concoction, the pure distillation of lethargy. In spite of himself, Nathan was enjoying the sensation. Sleep seemed possible at any moment. His head would pitch forward and then into the fire where it would sizzle as he slept.

_And I will sleep,_ he told himself _. I have earned a thousand years' worth of sleep._

Lying on the bottom of the trench, enclosed in his sleeping bag, Nathan was still listening for the bells' low tolling when exhaustion claimed him.

Ian's watch was uneventful. A single night bird took wing above him about halfway through his shift, but that was all. He felt ready. A weapon to hand and his friends close by; could the world possibly offer anything more? _Let our enemies try and take this place._ With the moonglow framing him in low silhouette, he was as a Victorian-era statue embodying wild and noble grace: The Savage Child Watches For His Prey. Animals suggested themselves in the branches stirring above when the wind rose. There were spiders of course, their great spindly legs supporting bodies lost in the darkness clotting the treetops. Other things shifted and played there, however Ian did not like to dwell in contemplation of them for too long.

By slow, languid degrees, Ian joined his friends in sleep. Sighing gusts rustled the plantation, rhythmic and lulling. The boy looked at the harlequin shapes dappling his hand as the branches wove shadow across the trench. Ian's head nodded once before he righted his vision. There he found the state where waking thoughts acquiesce to the whispered demands of dreams. The forest became the ocean's edge, a tidal pool sluiced by warm surf. He drifted with the water's motion. Sea-grass fronds and shell domes were beneath his trailing hands. The sky was oppressively low, shot though with black lightning. In the nearby shallows lolled a whale, curtains of water streaming from its glossy flukes. Ian slept then, and knew no more.

A shuddering roar arose from the world's foundations. All three boys still clung to sleep. Nathan was tracking through the dawn's gray void at immense velocity. His pace matched that of a man running through the city streets below. A bow wave preceded him, the very atmosphere shearing before the force of his progress. Nathan could see the vortices of ruptured air spreading rearward from this living engine of momentum as a wake of steam. Nathan woke. That sound was still loud in his ears.

He shook his friends to readiness.

"Something is coming for us," he whispered. "Get your spears."

The trio took up their positions beneath the growing mantle of drumming steps.

"Come on, you bastards," snarled Ian.

The sound stopped. A white flash in the sky above. Nathan saw only the pine boughs reddened by dawn.

_"Where is it? Can you see it?"_ hissed Jeremy.

A robed skeleton appeared beneath the cross-brace for the Malayan Gates. It did not warp into being from spectral mists. It was just there, a tall man's height, the face half-hidden by ashen cloth.

And the frog was in its bony palm.

Nathan felt as if a giant hook made of ice had been inserted through the back of his skull. He could see himself standing in the trench suddenly, like when you flipped the views of a character in a computer game.

The hook began to pull him forward. Nathan was startled to see the spear rising in his hands. He felt capable of anything. Looking at Ian and Jeremy, he saw their stance mirrored his own, spear forward in the manner of a medieval pikeman. Jeremy yelled, his voice trembling.

"If you want Nathan, you will have to get through us first."

No movement from the skeleton; a long series of moments which crawled down the boys' spines. Ian decided to end the stalemate. Dropping his main spear, he stooped for a lighter, throwable version. Jeremy nodded and looked at Nathan. Ian hefted it for a moment, poised and released. To their combined shock, the boys saw the javelin fly true, striking the figure where they guessed its stomach would be. Ian was both immensely proud of the shot and wracked with primal guilt.

_Now I've done it, I've really done it!_ he thought.

Another missile flew wide of the skeleton, and a third javelin arced over its head. Nathan and Jeremy grabbed up their larger weapons again. Their intended target leapt lightly over the warning-line of bells and was in their trench. Ian's spear dislodged from its robes mid-flight, and with a dancer's grace the thing plucked it from the air, stabbing it into the ground before landing.

Jeremy and Ian went forward, hefting their spears to chest-height.

"Not any closer," he warned. "We know how to use these!."

Nathan took his place in the line. Raising and uncurling its hand, the boys saw the frog nestled there. Adrenaline was coursing through Nathan's body like a high Summer tide. He spoke his thoughts.

"It can't be real, can it? A skeleton that walks!"

"There's only one that I know of," Jeremy mused.

"I hit 'im square in the guts," lamented Ian. "But he didn't feel it at all".

Nathan imagined his next words were from a movie, one just before the villain is delivered his death blow.

"Maybe he'll feel this."

The boy stormed forward, seeking to bury the spear in their guest's vertebrae. It sidestepped just before the blade's impact and snatched the weapon away from him. Nathan sought to rejoin his friends but both its gruesome right hand splayed open and was upon his forehead like a pallid spider dropping from a web.

At the touch of that dusty claw he had felt an immense will brush against his mind and then recoil. Just behind that contact was an unimaginably expansive intelligence. Nathan gasped, for this was not the discovery of a being extant to his body. He was conscious of that mind as an ocean revealed within his very being, its depths filling the space between heartbeats.

He could see the faintest trace of moss between the ivory nubs of his wrist-bone. It was only now that Nathan felt how hard his heart was hammering; his T-shirt was sweat-soaked. Finally the skeleton took a single step away, its claw retracting deep within the folds of his robe.

"Is it who I think?" asked Jeremy.

Nathan nodded. "It's Death. He wants us to follow him for some reason, I'm sure of it. Like a kind of a mission." The last embellishment did not seem that fanciful. For why else would they be chosen?

Ian retrieved his spear, looking nothing so much as a tiny warrior seeking the Childrens' Crusade. Jeremy approached their guest.

"I need to be shown proof. What if you are just planning to take us down to the underworld for your own amusement?"

Ian giggled for a moment but quickly stilled himself. Death moved forward to clasp Jeremy's forehead as he had Nathan's. The boy shrank away from his advance.

"It's because we found the frog, right?" asked Jeremy. "I mean, it just makes sense. That makes us special.... like special forces kind of."

Both boys watched for Ian's reaction. When it came, it was to the figure in black, fierce and proud.

"Do your worst," he said.

Death gave no sign of recognition. He turned and leapt lightly up to the trees. Nathan saw that the swelling sunlight fell upon him as a thick halo. The black of his robes captured the light but did not devour it. The boys followed, with Nathan carefully cradling the frog in a cupped hand.

_We have fallen into a dream,_ Nathan thought. _We might never wake up._ He looked down at the frog.

"It isn't scared at all," he noted, drawing a finger across its head gently.

Ian looked for himself.

"We are going to keep it forever," he said firmly. "He promised, right?"

Nathan said yes. Jeremy scooped the frog into his palm as he walked beside his friends. Their guide set a quick pace. Jeremy voiced their thoughts.

"Where is he taking us, Nathan? I mean where is the mission going to be?"

Nathan lied with deft precision.

"There's a war going on. In the underworld. There's... _a pretender to the throne of Death."_

His friends said nothing. Nathan knew that concept was taking root within their imaginations. In truth, it was the title of one if Scott's favourite albums.

"So we are going to fight for Death himself!" said Ian.

"Soldiers of Death!" said Jeremy. As soon as he spoke the words, he thought of the orange lights extinguished by Death's flight. It meaning stood before him yet he refused to acknowledge it. Placing the frog carefully back in his pocket, he thought no more of it.

Hegarty's Creek ran thinly over rocks down where the pines ended and natural bush began. It entered the local golf course not far from there as a promising brook, but the innumerable tramplings of golf ball-seeking children reduced it to a muddy trickle by the time the greens ceased. At its widest point, even the smallest of them could stand with a foot on either bank. Death walked into the creek, the water barely covering his ankle bones. As he continued on, he sank. It was as if he were the entering the sharply sloping depths of a lake. Within six steps only the disappearing skull was visible above water the boys knew could only be a hand's-breadth deep.

"Come on!" urged Nathan. "Soldiers of Death don't know fear."

Ian pushed him aside and ran in. He felt the ground fall away beneath him as chill wetness massed about his legs and chest in a rush. Then his head was enclosed fully by the cold dark and he was conscious of the ground leaving his feet. His eyes remained closed for a second or so before he surfaced. The boy fought to control his panic, for he was not a strong swimmer, and began a dogpaddle.

Lifting his head, he saw that the morning sky had vanished. In its place was a ceiling of clouds, yellowish-white as before a summer storm. His mouth was stung with salt; his feet touched a hard surface. A shore of cubed rock was before him. As he reached for it, Ian heard a spluttering cough behind him. Jeremy and Nathan appeared.

"We were stupid, jumping in like that," said Nathan.

"You didn't jump, Nathan," scoffed Jeremy. "You tip-toed in like a little girl."

Nathan was undeterred.

"I mean we should have got all our supplies."

Jeremy started to speak but Ian cut him off.

"Soldiers get kit and weapons, they don't have to bring their own. That makes sense."

Jeremy clambered ashore alongside his friend.

"I want a scythe that shoots homing missiles!" he yelled.

They stood upon a thin isthmus that rose just above the waterline. Grey chunks of crushed stone made up the promontory, which stretched before them to a nearby cove. Thin white trees were spaced along its spine. Death was nowhere in sight.

As the boys picked their way along the rocks, they saw the water on either side was crystalline. Nathan nudged Ian and pointed. The wreck of a great ship lay there, its antenna masts probing for the surface. Eddies of kelp swept over the hull. In its shadow flew clouds of tiny fish. Then the peninsula became a broad swathe of beach.

The ship's prow was driven into the sands, its foredecks swamped with the wash of low waves. Only a raised portion of the bow itself projected forlornly above the sand. There was a narrow strip between the vessel and the surf, which encroached upon the metal in a hissing rush. Nathan lead the boys there. Standing with his back against the pitted steel, he pictured the unseen length of the ship, now rusting far out beneath his feet. Without warning, the surf soared up around his waist. He yelped in panic and scrabbled for a handhold upon the ship's corroded flanks, but found no purchase there. As in his dream, the wave sucked him back and down into a bubbling slurry of sand-thick water. From this vantage, he could see the blue wall about to rise resurgent.

"Come on, lads," said Jeremy. "Before the next one comes."

Their knees plodding into wet sand, the boys crawled to their feet and ran before the wave could mature and thunder down upon them. They struggled to draw breath. Nathan had no doubt that the wave could have smashed them against the bow with ease.

"It's not like I had imagined the Underworld to be," he said. "I mean, it's got a beach and the sun is shining."

"Yeah," said Ian. "I don't like it."

Jeremy pointed out that the near side of the ship's prow bore a strong resemblance to a landing craft shattered by artillery fire. This lead to a long game of Storm the Beach, with the boys re-enacting the Normandy landings in faithful detail. Finally Ian eased the bolt forward on his German machine-gun.

"Ask him if he wants to play," shouted Jeremy.

Death was behind him. Ian did as Jeremy had asked, but the thing gave no response. The boy hefted the weapon from its tripod and unloaded half a belt into the skeleton's robes. Then the screams of his friends came in loud as they rushed his position. He leapt from the emplacement and grabbed a driftwood rifle. The battle was resolved when Jeremy called in an artillery strike upon the whole beach, describing the immolating fires in exact detail. With play over, the boys lay upon the cooling sand.

Gulls spun high overhead, the sea breeze bearing them against a sky now devoid of cloud. Nathan thought the sunset unremarkable, nothing like those he knew on their hill.

"I'm hungry," said Jeremy flatly. "Is there a mess hall here?"

"I didn't see one," said Nathan. He looked at Death, then his voice faltered with the impudence he felt hanging wetly from his next words:

"Can... can we have something to eat?"

Death turned and walked away. The wind gusted for a moment and his robe billowed around his shoulder blades.

"Come on," said Jeremy, and the boys trooped behind Death in single file.

Nathan looked at the sun just as it fell into the ocean. Above the water hung a diaphanous curtain of spray, through which he could watch the shimmering disc without pain to his eyes. Just after the last sliver of golden light dipped beneath the water, he saw a brilliant flash of green that spanned half the sky.

Then the sun was gone, leaving the whitecaps to churn beneath the awning of his beloved twilight. Nathan kept this vision secret, and never spoke of it to the others.

Beyond the beach was a low hillock. Death cast no light about him, yet the boys could see him clearly. The evening gloom was delineated from the blackness of his dress by nothing at all; it was simply that his being exerted too strong a claim to the dark. They followed him, watching for the hollow of his progress within the deepening night. Jeremy took point, his scowl not visible to Ian and Nathan.

_If this is a mission,_ he thought, _it sucks._ _We should be on a base or something, bayoneting dummies, or at least trying on uniforms._

He pictured a custom outfit of his own, with a stylized skull on the back and red flames down the arms. The missile-shooting scythe in a black leather holster on his back. They would roam the Earth doing Death's bidding. What this might be was of no consequence to Jeremy. Again, the trench rent by shrapnel and flame crowded his mind.

_That's what Death does, he takes life away from people,_ thought Jeremy. _And we will too._

The boy stopped walking, for his feet were now unmistakably tramping on metal. It gave slightly under his sneakers as he trod. Death had stopped a few feet ahead. Whether the figure was looking at him or staring ahead he could not tell.

"Is it another ship?" whispered Ian.

"Can't tell," Nathan replied. "Can we have some light, please?."

Before Nathan had finished his words, a long bank of oval lights snapped on. Their pattern and shape was obvious after a second: a grounded jetliner, and they were standing on its wingtip. The boys instinctively stepped back, never having encountered an aircraft this from this vantage or at this proximity before.

"It's huge," whispered Jeremy. "A 747 at least."

Death was striding to an open door in the fuselage, bending his head as he entered. Timidly, the boys followed. To their disappointment, no cobwebs barred their entry, nor did skeletons sit gape-mouthed in the dusty aisles. The plane's interior was factory-fresh, almost suggesting plastic covers had been whisked from the seats a second before their arrival. It smelt of newness, and every surface held a high buff polish. Behind the antiseptic tang was the aroma of food. Three packaged meals lay upon seat tables. The boys fell upon them without a word.

Halfway through his meal, Ian peered into the elastic pocket backing the seat before him. There was an emergency card in there which he eagerly fished out. Scanning it, his excitement quickly ebbed. There was no surreal quality to it, no winking skulls or emergency slides crewed by zombies. Jeremy was saying something about checking the cockpit for bodies, but Ian felt tired. Not long after they had finished eating, the lights dimmed and their world was dominated by the hum of a generator within the bowels of the fuselage.

When Nathan woke, the sun was streaming through every window on his side of the plane. A food trolley was in the aisle, and he could see steam fogging the clear plastic cover of three airline breakfasts. He took the meal container and went straight for the door. The jet could not have possibly arrived at its current position by a crash. Below the wing's silvery sweep, which lay almost flush with the yellow grass, was embedded the humps of four huge engine intakes.

There was no rust nor stain upon the aircraft's body, save the tracks of their own feet. His meal finished, Nathan dropped the distance of his own height to the ground, executing a flawless Combat Roll upon landing. The trio had practiced Combat Rolls the previous summer, leaping off tree branches every day for a week. Despite his increased bulk, Nathan had proved the most adept at this. Jeremy had felt more aggrieved than usual at Nathan's victory, for he had introduced the paratrooper paradigm to their group. In Jeremy's mind, the boys had been wasting their time in the juvenile notion of The Army as a homogenous entity. But the paratrooper was an elite, who jumped under fire, casting his body between hammer and anvil. So a jump school was instituted, along with screenings of D-Day movies to bolster their training.

Jeremy employed the pause button liberally when the Sergeant issued his monologue.

"Confusion and disorder reign on the battlefield," he would repeat to the TV screen, as if intoning revelation. When the movie finished, his pupils were wide and face reddened. Jeremy had enjoined them to redouble their efforts as they tumbled through the undergrowth. Those days, suffused with heat and war-play, passed quickly.

A minor competition had arisen between Nathan and Jeremy for the highest jump necessitating a Combat Roll. It was decided definitively one day when Nathan launched himself off his garage roof. His technique was perfect. The paratroop training ceased, and the boys did not return to the hill until that spring when the digging began.

It was a walk of twenty minutes for a small boy to circumnavigate the plane. Grassed dunes around him gave rise to scattered trees that grew at an angle, suggesting that a fierce wind as yet unfelt was resident here. Jeremy and Ian were kicking their legs over the wing when he returned. Death was at their side, although whether they were aware of his presence Nathan could not tell.

"There's nothing around here," he observed wearily. "No bodies or anything."

"I checked the cockpit too," said Ian. "No-one in there. I tried to start the engines but they wouldn't work."

Ian was keen on playing Hostage Rescue, but the other boys were reluctant. The aircraft had a serenity to it, sureness of purpose that they were loath to sunder with shouts and weapon-screams. When he was very young, Nathan had been taken to a large cathedral in the city. He remembered alcoves of hushed dark that smelt of stale incense and rosewater. During the service, he had watched a patch of sun steal across the pews and into the side grotto honouring a saint. At the instant when the white spot touched the statue's feet, he had imagined that it was put to flame, and could not watch, burying his face in his mother's neck.

Again, Death was their guide through the low scrub. A flock of small birds scattered when Death approached. Jeremy nudged Ian. _Surely the birds would feel the wrath of the Grim Reaper._ But no scythe blades cleaved the air, and the birds took wing intact. Jeremy felt disappointed. Jogging ahead, the boy tugged at Death's robe.

"Excuse me," he said. "Are they already dead? I mean, is this the underworld or somewhere else?"

The skull rotated and looked at Jeremy. Folds of black shifted away from its claw as it rose to almost touch Jeremy's forehead. Without a sound, Jeremy darted back to be with his friends. Before resuming his long-striding gait, Nathan was sure he saw Death pause for just an instant. Now beside him, Jeremy's gaze was distant.

"What did it show you?

Nathan looked down. He could not bring himself to admit that the concept of a mission was his alone. Instead, he mumbled that Death was not very specific.

"Let's make a pact. We won't have him show us anything more unless we all agree on it."

Ian and Nathan nodded.

"I saw our trench with real soldiers in it," said Jeremy. "I saw him take them all. But you know what I think? He's seen everyone die."

He flipped himself forward into a thicket of grass in a quick combat roll.

"And he remembers it all too."

The boys ruminated on this for long minutes. Soon the dunes began to flatten with every step. A great desert plain took shape when the sand's long slope guttered among smooth pebbles. When they reached the dune-bottom, Nathan glanced backwards. His tsunami was suggested there in the cresting sand, a bloodied king sliding from his throne. And on either side, as far as his eyes could see, a flanking brotherhood of monarchs recumbent. The yellow rock upon which his sneakers rested was rilled with tiny striations.

The sun still touched their heads with spring, a benevolent warmth that belied the heat-shimmer beyond where sky met land. Nathan blinked at the light for a moment.

_When it's like this, you can see it's a star,_ he thought. _It's hanging there in space, just a big ball of burning gas._

He lay down on the cool rock and shut his eyes. By turning his head and keeping it flat on the ground, Nathan could feel the Earth's entire weight swelling against his spine. The sun's gravity pulled him to its embrace. He imagined the atmosphere stripped away by a searing corona of fire, blasting all life to ash in a heartbeat. He remembered his excitement when the Solar System's eventual fate was revealed in school. The Sun ballooning to a Red Giant, swallowing the inner planets whole and putting its outlying satellites to the torch. His thoughts turned to the metaphysic:

So all trace of me will one day disappear. For even if I made something out of pure diamond, and put that in a safe of stainless steel, and put that safe in a huge vat of concrete and threw that to the bottom of the sea once it had set hard, it will still all be charred to nothing one day.

"One day," Nathan said softly. Then a realization struck him. He rose and ran to catch up the other boys.

"One day, Death will die. I mean, when the world is destroyed by the sun."

"No," said Jeremy. "He will die when there is no life left on the world, long before that."

The pair looked at Ian. Jeremy's eyes pleaded for at least acknowledgment of the intellectual superiority of his reasoning.

"When the sun burns everything up, then he will burn up too. There will be nothing left of him."

Jeremy looked down and kicked his heels. Seeing this, Ian put his arm around his friend's back.

"That is when we can be sure."

Nathan almost wished for their guide to rush back at them in a tempest of fury. But if he heard them, Death gave no indication that their words meant anything more to him than the breeze picking at his robes.

Ian ran ahead of the group. He set a good pace, and was almost lost to sight where the horizon smouldered, but a minute's sprint away. Jeremy had followed his friend's progress from a kneeling position, an imaginary grenade launcher lowering in accordance with Ian's trajectory. When he spoke, his voice was high.

"What is that?"

A series of V-shapes was ahead in the sky, their outline almost defeated by the low heat-haze. None of the three gave voice to their thoughts on what they might prove to be. Nathan tried to see them better, but his eyes failed him. Then Jeremy was running, and Nathan too, leaving Death behind them.

The SR-71 Blackbird is a large aircraft. Three bus-lengths of black-clad titanium, every inch wrought solely to defeat the air's impedance. At each delta wing's mid-point blooms a huge conical engine intake, the angular airframe seeming too flimsy to accommodate the thrust avowed by their bulk.

Three such jets were poised nose-down in a triumvirate structure, their wingtips supporting each other some thirty metres above. Then Nathan saw that the planes were actually resting upon the very tips of slender tubes that projected his own body's length from the nose cone. The impossibility of this was apparently not lost on Ian, who scaled the nearest spike to the point where it met the fuselage.

Ian hung from one hand and lolled his head back toward the other boys, chimpanzee-style. A heavy, viscous glob struck Jeremy's forehead, and he jumped. The sand spotted briefly where more drips fell. Jeremy wiped it away and smelt the liquid with a child's imperative.

Kerosene? He wondered. Noontime was almost upon them, and the sun's white blaze was in his eyes when he looked above. Nathan spoke, and Jeremy saw drops of the oil strike his upturned palms.

"My real dad gave me a book on planes."

Jeremy could see his friend's face tighten with concentration.

"This is a Blackbird spy plane. When it was sitting on the tarmac, it would leak fuel, because it got so hot when it flew that the plates in the body would expand."

Satisfied with the consistency of his explanation, he ran to join Ian upon the nose spike. Jeremy's mind seethed suddenly.

Has it been leaking fuel for years, or did us coming here make it start?

Nathan and Ian hooted at each other as they played. Jeremy sought refuge in the real. He ran to Nathan and grabbed his shirt, urging:

"They had to make ... to make ..." When the term came to him, it was accompanied by a grimace of pure pleasure. " _Allowance_ for the expansion in their planning."

Nathan nonchalantly dropped to the ground. His delivery was studiously cool.

"A _structural_ allowance, I think you'll find, Jeremy."

Nathan's friend had never struck him before, but did then. It was a weak right fist to the temple and Nathan avoided most of its power by an instinctive flick of his head. He had been hit that way before, by a kid who seemed to make a project of his blows every day as he passed in the school corridor. They were flinch-punches at first. Nathan even believed it was a game in which the boy had involved him in spontaneously, perhaps as a prelude to friendship. When that forlorn belief was shattered the next day, Nathan had welcomed the loss. Jeremy's creed had a resonance now.

Let's give them their target.

Spitting his friend's words back at him, Nathan jumped on the smaller boy and wrestled him to the dirt. Ian was upon the pair immediately, and separated them. Jeremy heard Ian yelling something, and it startled him.

"Don't let him win!"

At first his heart sank; should Ian side with Nathan, the alchemical mystery upon which their friendship balanced would fail. But this admonition was hissed to both boys. Nathan rose and helped Jeremy to his feet.

"Ian, soldiers of death. _Soldiers of death."_

Ian shook his head.

"We aren't soldiers."

"Soldiers follow orders, Ian. If they don't then it's a... a... _drumhead court-martial."_ Jeremy replied. It was thrilling to be able to use that term.

"Ask our commander" said Nathan suddenly.

"Yes Nathan," replied Jeremy archly. "Let's ask him what the penalty is for mutiny."

Ian faced the skeleton and raised his hand, the way he would in class. Death did not acknowledge him. The boy went up and tugged his robe.

"Are we soldiers or aren't we?" he asked. "I mean, we need guns and training and all the rest of it."

"In order to complete our mission" added Jeremy quickly.

Ian repeated the words to Death. The skeleton rose one arm and pointed. Their eyes followed the white beacon of its finger out to the wasteland beyond. A lake was close by now, too near to be a mirage. Its waters shone purest blue. Ian's hand released Death's clothing.

"Are there guns in there?" inquired Jeremy. "A submarine at least?"

But Death was walking away. Resigned, the boys fell into step again.

There was no telling the lake's true depth. Nothing disturbed the fluid's surface. It gave the water the appearance of a great oiled lens, from which reflected light did not so much shimmer as pulse. The entire face lifted and fell ever so slightly as the boys approached. Their first action was to collect stones and fling them out over the flat expanse. Perfect ripples arose and crept across the water towards them. The tiny waves swept bare a stone bridge originating at the shore nearby. It lay but a millimetre or so below the waterline, and had they not disturbed the lake, its existence would have remained unknown.

Nathan looked to Death for direction. Ian and Jeremy were already running over the causeway. Huge splashes were thrown up where their feet landed; their laughter reached him easily across the lake. He was glad to see them transformed again by play. Their shadows, dancing fitfully upon the ruffled water, were soon joined by Death's. Now the black thing beckoned to him with an outstretched finger, and Nathan ran to him.

An island arose several hundred metres from the lakefront. Looking back, Nathan felt slightly queasy, as their path was submerged again where the ripples stilled. Ian stopped and walked back to him.

"It looks weird, doesn't it?" observed Ian, scuffing a wake beneath his heels.

Nathan nodded. Jeremy was waving at them in the distance, and Ian almost sniffed the air in eagerness.

"Come on!"

Then Ian was gone. Nathan's gaze lingered back for long seconds. He had never seen this lake in a dream, nor in any of the few trips to the country his father had taken him on. Yet the sensation of standing in the very midst of unknown territory, the sureness of every step masked with doubt, was impossibly familiar to him. The boy turned and ran to catch the others. Running now, he abandoned his fear, kicking up plumes of silvery water with every stride.

Death, Jeremy and Ian had gained the meagre refuge of the island. Knee-high bluffs of crumbling sand were its shoreline. Beyond these lay granite flagstones that crowded close to the bridge, widening further to a long avenue. Flanking this path were tables of thick wood lying in strict rows. Nathan saw then that they carpeted the island to its very limit, a point which the boys could not hope to see. Nathan knelt and saw dark ruling the spaces beneath, sunlight permitted to merely glance upon their legs of thick metal and venture no more. He thought at once of avenues of trees and the plantation upon their hill. Objects glinted upon each table, and the three friends were upon the nearest one in a second.

Beneath a case of clear plastic lay a rock. It was an unremarkable rock in all respects, and Ian noted this loudly. Jeremy had glanced at the table's contents and was already scanning its neighbours.

"More rocks," was his dismayed report.

Nathan hesitantly nudged the rock's cover, as if he expected an alarm to go off. To his surprise it slid easily away and he was able to examine the object in greater detail.

"Just a rock," he noted, and with that cast it back out over the lake in a long throw. Ian and Jeremy's shock dissolved a moment later, and they joined their friend in fits of laughter. Jeremy looked at Death furtively, and then followed its cover into the water.

The boy ran again. Nathan had flashes of the glass cases on either side. He stopped, panting hard and with sweat pattering on the laminated wood grain of the table. The case before him held a piece of stone with one side scalloped away to a crude blade-edge. Its handle of black wood was bound by thronging that jammed it firmly to its haft. Ian and Jeremy were behind him.

"A tomahawk," said Jeremy.

Ian swept the cover aside.

"It's a crap old one," he reported.

Nathan reached forward and drew it from the wood's surface.

"Like the ones Indians use."

He tossed it lightly, end over end, and caught the haft. Blackie had shown him this last summer. His brother's friend was adept at the trick, honing his skill with it between draughts of his powerful home-brew.

Ian asked for a turn with the axe. Nathan was reluctant to give up his acquisition, until a realisation struck him.

What might lie on the other tables?

Another tomahawk eluded his darting eyes. Under the closest glass was a thin dart the length of his arm, with an attendant rod of curved wood fitted to one end. Jeremy had located another axe and gleefully retrieved the weapon, reducing its cowling to crystalline dust with a back-handed blow.

The boys journeyed far into the aisles. A system was improvised where Ian and Nathan scanned every fifth table and reported to Jeremy, who directed their progress. Death trailed them many tables to the rear, their earlier fight having put some distance between themselves and him. Nathan thought that people were silly to put such fear in Death.

We've been able to out-run him easily all afternoon.

It was a comforting notion, that this so-called nemesis of mankind was gambolling after them with no more menace than a decrepit and unwanted clown. Ian and Jeremy were play-fighting with their hatchets, martial-arts movie blows that were received with an accompanying roar of slow-motion agony. Nathan smiled. A long blowpipe lay close to hand, and the boy thought of grabbing the weapon and entering the fray. He saw that the sun was dipping noticeably now, and an urgency overcame him.

"Come on guys. It's getting late," he said plaintively. Ian glanced at him.

"In a moment," he said, before hooking and twisting Jeremy's tomahawk away with a triumphant shout.

A pang of anger coursed through Nathan. If they wasted time in play, then their mission would never be complete. Well, he would be their pathfinder, the lead scout operating far ahead of the main force. He left them without another word, dual shadows lengthening down the aisle as Death joined him. The pair slipped away. Nathan noted that his companion kept perfect pace with him now, and he was glad. Were the skeleton a few steps behind, it would feel altogether too much like being hunted. He hoped that Death had no power to divine thoughts. Now Nathan regretted his earlier dismissal.

Ian and Jeremy fought on; the backdrop of glass-studded tables was declared to be the laboratory of an evil genius, bent on world domination. By mutual agreement, the boys were playing with only the weapons that fell to hand. Jeremy enjoyed sliding the cases away with regard to whether they landed intact or not. Their contents clattered to the flagstones a second after the glass exploded, and he sought his prize hungrily amongst the shards.

Jeremy faced his friend with a crude wooden sword edged in shark teeth. Ian emerged from a kneeling inspection of the tiny detritus. Whipping a long, sharpened piece of ivory through the air, he advanced on Jeremy. From beneath every table bled long shadows. Jeremy's ankles were immersed in the cold, and he shivered. He could just make out the fading silhouettes of Nathan and Death in the far distance.

The boys ceased their play with a trail signal consisting of a clenched fist alternating with a palm. Ian's eyes widened. A tactical halt. In accordance with the gravity of this command, he placed the ivory spike on the nearest table.

"Friendly forces are moving away from us. We must abandon this position and recover the coherency of our patrol formation."

Ian signalled back his affirmation, a thumbs-up followed by a hand smoothing away to the horizon. Jeremy nodded and smiled.

_The wheels are turning now,_ he thought. _We're not being lead around like sheep. We are on defensive reconnaissance, the rearguard patrol that prevents an ambush._

A final signal motioned Ian to take point. Sunset lit the cases like a thousand orange prisms, facets shorn from a jewel.

Nathan stopped to take in the sight. Death halted too and watched him. On the nearest table, the sunrays raked a prism-beam of rainbow colours across its contents. The shine of metal caught his eye. A flintlock pistol lay there, a long fluted barrel ending in a grip of polished walnut. Its firing mechanism looked perfect to Nathan, as if this was no museum piece but a gun fresh-minted that afternoon. The boy removed the case and was dazzled for a moment as the revolving glass flashed bright into his eyes. His finger closed about the trigger and he swung to aim the pistol at the three Blackbird jets propped together; a black insect caught mid-scuttle by the ebbing sun. The gun fired, a percussive boom that slapped his ears. He saw the pistol fall from his hand and skitter upon the flagstones.

It was loaded.

His mind echoed with this certainty. At his sides as a bedevilment of muskets: a stubby blunderbuss whose muzzle was wide enough to swallow Nathan's fist. Stocked alongside was a pistol mated to a short cutlass, a unicorn chased in pearl upon the stock. Reaching for the weapon, Nathan's hand skidded softly on the glass.

I bet it's loaded too.

Two right hands joined his on the cover, the index finger of one tapping there pensively for a moment. Jeremy was breathless from his and Ian's sprint.

"Did it have much of a kick?"

Nathan nodded. Ian said that they should fire all the guns - one right after the other - but Nathan disagreed.

"What if we are meant to conserve ammunition? We - "

Jeremy cut him off in a blur of words.

"It's a test. I mean, if we go crazy and shoot all the weapons off then we'd show we have no battle discipline and not be worthy soldiers."

"Yes, it's a test," agreed Ian, lifting the cover and sliding out the blunderbuss. The musket's weight bore down his left hand's grip on the barrel; the thing slipped and clattered upon the flagstones. Ian grinned.

Lights winked on, small crystals studded to the inner seam of each table leg. They appeared much as summer streetlamps do, one beaming to life, then the glittering birth of its thousand brothers a second later. The boys were torn. A bewilderment of weapons was ripe for the taking on all sides, an orchard heavily laden with fruits of primed gunpowder and razored steel. Jeremy's anxiety was clear to Nathan. To progress was to be in an ever more deadly part of the collection, that much was obvious. By his reckoning, Nathan could see the promise of modern guns but a few hundred metres away.

He told his friends of his theory and they were quick to agree.

"This is Death's armoury, his arsenal, his storehouse," said Jeremy. The boy smiled and hefted a mace whose flanged blades caught the lamplight with an understated malice. Kneeling to peer at the table bottoms, Ian's voice was insistent.

"No, it's like a museum. Of the all the ways people have killed each other."

A realisation came to Nathan.

"They are both one and the same thing," he whispered. "But will there be neutron bombs at the end, or something else, I wonder?"

Jeremy seized the thread quickly.

"I think this could be like a continuum of death," he declared. "An eternal place out of time's reach. We could see plasma rifles, mass driver guns and cool stuff from the future at the end."

Ian jumped suddenly and planted both sneakers into the nearest case, which failed to break but cracked ominously. Nathan winced now.

_If this is Death's property, we should show it some respect,_ he thought. Regret overcame him for his earlier mocking thoughts. Death was most certainly nobody's fool.

Nathan looked to find their patron in the dark, but could not.

"We will be wanting the best guns," Ian said with conviction. Then his eyes fell on Jeremy.

"For the mission," he added. He repeated this statement to the ground.

"For the mission," repeated Jeremy, stacking his hand to Ian's, Three Musketeers style. The boys looked to Nathan and he knew he could not give voice to his misgivings.

Not now.

The space atop Jeremy's hand seemed ringed with flame now.

"For the mission," he said in a voice not more than a whisper, and brought his palm down to the others.

They decided to press on without pause. Jeremy occasionally bashed a case with the club; Ian whisked a samurai sword about to liven his passing. Nathan found a jewel-encrusted octopus cresting a wave of pearls. Only a being with an eye for whimsy could have placed such a bauble beneath its cowl of glass.

The boy's heart leapt for a moment, contemplating Death's revolving the piece in his claw as he now did, the eyeless sockets hungry for its playful dance in the moonlight. The pressure of Nathan's hand must have hit a recessed button, for tiny blades sprung from the tentacle-tips, making the jewellery a throwing star. His vision evaporated, and he placed the shiny weapon upon the nearest table.

_There are no surprises here,_ he thought. There was only the clinical sureness of blade and barrel. Jeremy swept his mace to the horizon.

"They're like a family of fireflies!" he exclaimed.

Nathan smiled.

"Not a rally, old boy. Quite a large... a large..." - the Field Marshall's voice faltered – "Con... con..."

Ian screamed then, startling both boys.

"Conflagration!"

Jeremy and Nathan looked at each other in amazement. After a moment, they could not contain their laughter. The stars were out now. Jeremy wished he knew more of constellations and nebulae, so that he might look skywards and know that he trod on alien ground. The moon slid from behind weak clouds, and Nathan's mind was sloughed with frustration. Where had he read of the moon as a ghostly galleon tossed on a sea of cloud? Probably a storybook, long discarded upon the pile forming a small Mayan pyramid beneath his bed. A sigh became audible, the sea's incessant whisper. This, however, was not the crash of falling waves. The sound was an unrelenting thunder, giving the boys an image of ocean flowing to land's end, there to torrent into a gulf of nothingness.

"Can you hear it?" asked Nathan.

Jeremy looked concerned.

"It all _can't_ all end here. We are only amongst rifles from a hundred years ago, I'm guessing."

The boys murmured agreement.

"Right. So we would all agree there are more deadly things in the world," finished Jeremy.

Ian said then that he hoped there were. Nathan smiled, his apprehension dulled for a moment.

_I hope there are, too,_ he thought.

"Have any of you seen Death?" asked Jeremy, with an urgent lilt to his voice.

Ian prised a heavy rifle from its case and snapped an attendant bayonet in place. Then the boy shook his head. Jeremy's voice was clear and to the darkness.

"We're hungry, Death," he said, while glancing quickly at his comrades for a nodded confirmation.

"We don't want to walk any more today. Give us some food and a place to sleep, please."

Hearing this, Nathan and Ian hissed nervously at their friend. It seemed too bold.

"We should still vote on all tactical decisions," said Nathan.

Jeremy was about to speak when his friends drew close to him, an instinctive shielding before the dark thing who joined their company with a soundless leap from the near dark. Ian returned the rifle to its velvet cradle, forgetting to remove the bayonet in his haste. The cover straddled the blade and rocked back and forth with a clunking sound. It drew the trio's attention from the hooded skeleton for a second, and when they looked back it was slipping away between the tables.

Nathan was sure now that the valley was sundered by a rift, and falling within that divide would be a green bank of ocean wide as the sky's breadth. Receiving the torrent would be an abyss whose depth Nathan dared not contemplate. A thrill arose in his stomach at the thought of it. The trailing of Death's long robes mesmerised the boy, the soft lights sheening over the fabric like a lake of rippling velvet.

Yet Nathan saw that the robe's underside was utterly black. With the cloth fluttering above the winking footlights, Nathan could see now that there was no highlight or texture about its surface. It was as if that portion of their guide's form was animated, and the cartoonist had chosen the blackest black in all the world to ink the robe-bottom. The effect was startling, and Nathan though at once of a Black Hole.

" _Nothing_ can escape a Black Hole, not even light!" their teacher had said brightly, to the general ambivalence of the class. Nathan had barely looked up from his drawing of a dragon shooting a giant squid with a howitzer. He already knew this, of course; whether gleaned from computer or science show or book, he could not recall. She said something then that burst a bright flare in his brain:

"Not even _gravity_ can escape it!"

The boy closed his eyes: he could now feel the enormous forces at its core wrenching the lattice of reality ever inwards upon itself to sure dissolution. The teacher's continued drone began to annoy Nathan, her words now tainting Black Holes with a malevolence he knew in his heart was undeserved.

They do what they're meant to do, he thought. Nothing more and nothing less. . They came from a crushed star, not a little orange marble like the sun but a gas giant, a billion year old monster with burning hydrogen for guts. Yet that great god of red fire becomes just a tiny shell in space.

Then Jeremy had piped up:

"Miss, they have recently theorised that _every_ galaxy, even our own, has a giant black hole at its core. One they recently discovered has a mass several _billion_ times that of our own sun. It sends a blast of superheated plasma from its core that is 6,000 light years long."

Groans from his classmates; these corrections in science class were regular and consistent in the volume of information offered. Their teacher blinked hard. Jeremy continued.

"But yet... yet... _paradoxically_ , for both big black holes and small ones, the Event Horizon inside is still an _infinitesimally_ small point removed from both time and place, where the rules of the universe do not apply. And here trillions of Earths find their end, in a _seething mass_ of quantum disorder that is dwarfed by a single atom from... from... the hair of an ant."

Nathan smiled. Much of this was paraphrased from Jeremy's reading, yet his friend spoke with absolute authority. Nathan looked at the skin of his palm. He could hold the Event Horizon there, and watch it devour the earth through a vortex of diminishment, the very seas made steam and the mountains dust.

"Death's clothes are lined with the stuff from black holes," he told Jeremy.

His friends pondered this as they walked. Ian favoured rushing their host and casting their heads into the blackness under his cloak to see if the idea had any merit. Before Jeremy could answer, Death halted and his robe settled about him again. The bulkheads of some great war engine lay exposed from the flagstones ahead. A swelling of armour plate was embedded before it, and atop the pitted steel rested three packages wrapped in khaki plastic. The boys fell up them.

Morning followed on but a seeming few minutes away. Dawn saw two mysteries revealed. Firstly, the Plain of Weapons, as they called it, ended in an abrupt gully of close-tumbled boulders. More desert bloomed grey and red beyond the gulch. But commanding both their attention (and the very sky itself) was a pillar of water, its skin juddering foamy wave crests that slashed against each other. The pillar contorted wildly like tethered lightning. Then a huge span of water, hundreds of metres thick, branched out over the boys' heads. It was close enough that gobbets of spray flecked their heads.

Nathan thought at once that the pillar must be alive. Ian was yelling something to them, when the sea-limb sucked back to the trunk as an explosion of frothy plumes.

"-fell on us!" Came Ian's voice, filling the roar's absence with a frailty the boys winced at. Jeremy spoke quickly.

"There must be _millions upon millions_ of tons of water in there. If it fell on us, we would be instantly crushed."

Death stood beside them.

"What's that?" asked Nathan, pointing.

"He can't speak, you know, Nathan," said Jeremy tiredly.

"But he understands us. Is it another weapon? One from the future?" That barren stare fell upon the boy. Nathan fished the frog from his pocket. In the adventure games on his computer, there always came a moment where the key you had picked up 10 screens ago would have to be employed. No further progression could be made without a close inspection of your inventory for the appropriate amulet or talisman to slot into the idol of frosted jade. Ian clasped his shoulder. Nathan looked at his friend and smiled, saying:

"I think the frog is part of this."

Jeremy's voice was excited.

"Like in _Return to Evermore Hills_ where you had to throw the badger into the pool of flaming spiders."

"He's _not_ getting thrown," said Nathan firmly.

Jeremy spoke, but the pillar loomed outwards near them again, one flank boiling with surf as it descended; Nathan thought of Scott and his father for some reason. He wondered what they would make of the Plain of Weapons. He felt disappointment and guilt all at once.

_Not even a real machine-gun in the whole lot,_ he thought. He imagined his teacher standing above him as she had on more occasions than he could recall, her upper lip curling in disgust at the sight of his pen outlining an assault rifle with integral proximity-fused grenade launcher. Jeremy and Ian had learned to place their drawings of weapons in the context of a futuristic war or mad scientist's laboratory. But Nathan had long since abandoned such ruses. Instead, he threw himself into gun design tenfold. He made intricate sketches and notes for each creation that detailed ignition chambers, scope mounting points and helical magazine housings.

"Every journey requires a sacrifice," said Jeremy then. Nathan looked up at his friends. A certain shine was about Ian and Jeremy's faces. Nathan recognised it at once from their hill. It was the glare of anticipation just before they repelled a new attack; directed over the parapet at their enemies' onrushing horde. The boy bowed his head again.

_Is that what I look like too?_ He wondered. The frog flexed its legs a few times and he stroked its back.

"It might be that in this world, the frog can die," he mused. "That's what I'm afraid of."

Jeremy nodded.

"Well, that would make sense. We could test it again, of course."

Nathan swallowed hard. When the frog's unkillability was unquestioned, he had revelled in the test of mortality. Now nervous excitement, viscous and cold, was seeping through the chambers of his heart. He was aware now that his grip on the frog was steadily tightening, and the irony of that was not lost on the boy. He smiled.

"There's a kind of harpoon gun over here and a clunky old pistol, too," said Ian.

Jeremy voted immediately for the harpoon as a method of testing. Nathan agreed, and the trio placed their frog upon a large rock at the gully's edge. The harpoon gun was three feet of dull steel and cracked leather. The frog was soon betwixt its crosshair of gilded metal. Ian snapped back the hammer. Nathan looked towards the frog, then away to the pillar. It was flattened upon one side, wave tops showering away into the sun, as if a typhoon was rending its body to particles of luminescent gold. He next heard the gun's blast and a yelped curse from Ian. The boy's explanation tumbled from him.

"We shot it, but there was a ricochet and the spear took it clear over the gully!" A thread of spun gold trailed from the gun's barrel. Ian began to haul it back, but Nathan stayed his hand with his own.

"If it was shot \- " he heard Jeremy mutter _impaled_ quickly – " _Impaled_ by the harpoon, we might lose it on the rocks somewhere if we drag it."

Ian's face was flushed. He examined the weapon's breech, twisting it to and fro to peer within.

"I can see... like a wheel with the wire wrapped around it," he reported. Jeremy was quick to make his own inspection.

"There looks like a cartridge behind it that powers the harpoon," he said.

Nathan felt impatience rising. He was about to register a protest, when he was overcome by epiphany. Unnoticed by his friends, he backed away to the maze of tables and was gone.

_Our frog might be impaled on a rock, and they're just playing around again,_ he thought.

"I think the lever ejects the spent cap, and you can reload another manually," he heard Ian say. "I wish it had a forward magazine, and then a pump action to it so that you could shoot faster." Jeremy smiled.

"But then, you would still have to retrieve the harpoon each time, so it would offer you no advantage."

Ian thought on this, and the obvious solution appeared to him.

"A backpack, then, with hundreds of harpoons feeding off a belt."

"Then you would need another backpack with an equally large number of propellant caps feeding off the other side," offered Jeremy.

This increasing complexity meant nothing to Ian. The boy shrugged, and said if that what was required, then it had to be. The boys replaced the gun beneath its case. Ian was careful not to scrape its surface on the table. Their recent glee at smashing the tables struck Jeremy. He shot a glance back at Death, and leaned close to Ian, whispering:

"Are you scared of him?"

"He does have a plan for us," Ian said. The boy smiled as if he and the ghoulish thing shared a secret joke. Death gave no acknowledgement of Nathan's existence. Jeremy shifted uneasily, and looked to where the gold wire was lost from view between two rocks. A small figure was rising up the gully slope a hundred metres distant.

"Nathan!" shouted Jeremy.

Nathan knelt and looked back. Jeremy imagined that a smile crossed Nathan's face before a vast blue palm of water tore downwards and smashed the gully bank. A shockwave of displaced air blew Jeremy and Ian backwards and they lay stunned. When they recovered their senses, the bank gave no sign of their friend. They could not reach agreement upon whether Nathan had met his end.

"Death wouldn't have brought us all this way just to smash us like bugs," mused Jeremy. "Not his new recruits."

"Perhaps it was like a training thing, and Nathan failed the test," said Ian sadly.

Hearing his friend's tone, Jeremy spoke quickly to mask his own doubts:

"We are going to get as many weapons together as we can, the most advanced ones."

Ian was almost heel-clicking with glee.

"And then we are going to hunt for Nathan," he said. "Anything that stands in our way will –"

"Be put in the hurt-locker" said Jeremy brightly, quoting a favourite movie line. Ian pondered the pillar of water. It swayed and shimmered in steady turmoil, flexing its limbs intermittently. Tears clouded Ian's eyes and Jeremy stared intently now at the pillar's heart.

"He's not dead, you know. Not in this place."

Ian said nothing, merely kicking at the discarded harpoon gun with his sneaker. The boy was framed by the roiling sea wall. Jeremy imagined that he and Ian were speeding above an ocean in the bomb-bay of a B-52 as its doors widened into hostile skies. Ian would be rolling from a rack of ordnance towards an onrushing island, with himself to follow. Then a sensation of falling overtook him; only a groundward glance could overcome it. A billow of salty mist erupted from the pillar and swamped the boys. Ian studied it for a moment.

"Imagine if there was a whale inside, swimming around. It could get tossed out on top of us if it wasn't careful."

"I don't think there's anything alive inside," said Jeremy. A second of unexpected awkwardness passed.

"Except for Nathan," he added quickly. "He is probably swimming in there somewhere." Ian picked the harpoon gun up and peered into its chamber.

"What if there was a submarine lying around here somewhere? Then we could get it into the waterpipe and find him. And if it had missiles on it then we could fire them off too, like a bonus." Jeremy began to point out his logistical objections to the plan, but the concept of the missiles had already overtaken him.

"They could be launched horizontally," continued Ian, "If they were nuclear, we could pop the hatches and watch the explosion!."

So the boys agreed they would require a nuclear attack submarine, several hundred cranes and a space vehicle of at least Energia rocket capacity. This last item had been Jeremy's choice after a ten minute span of intense, brow-wrenching thought in which he cursed the lack of a calculator and waved away all Ian's attempts to contribute to the equation. The boys struck out then, gathering a percussion pistol each from the Arsenal. Ian also spotted a Bowie knife half as long as his arm which he back-mounted for ease of access. He kept up an incessant practice of shouting a challenge while performing a quick over-hand draw of the Bowie. In time, he co-ordinated this action with the drawing of his pistol to hold both weapons at the ready.

Jeremy favoured removing his gun in a slow fashion and bracing it with both hands. The boy then sighted a steady bead along the barrel.

"Gunfights in the Old West were won not by the quicker draw," he pronounced as they walked. The front blade sight swung to the pillar and then to the sun. "That is a Hollywood myth. It was the man who could bring his weapon to bear and aim it carefully who would win the day. Better to fire a single killing shot than three that went all over the street."

Ian shrugged, saying the knife and pistol "Just felt better together."

Night crept to their heels again, and he boys had Death prepare shelter and food. A pup tent appeared ahead, alongside a fire and military ration packs. Ian announced that he would like a shower too, and the boys saw a light blink on, a short way from the fire. Under its feeble beam lay a camp shower of canvas and elastic tubing. Ian and Jeremy looked at each other. Death's compliance was a wonder to them now, the implications of which they dare not voice. Ian studied the shower, thinking:

What if we just asked for a nuclear sub too? And for Nathan to be back with us. And then we could go back home in a mega-tank with a turret-mounted cluster bomb launcher.

Jeremy busied himself with his meal pack and his own thoughts:

We have under our power the enemy of all life, the thing that people fear the most.

He looked up. The Sergeant's eyes said nothing, cast downwards at him from a camouflage-smeared face. His webbing was strung thick with fragmentation grenades. He sat beside the boy and began to field-strip his Thompson. The kerosene aroma of gun-oil stung his nostrils. Jeremy sighed and looked at Death. His menace was undiluted. Even now, he could not look too long at the skeleton's wide grin without a shiver. Yet there was a cruelly ludicrous, almost comical edge to the terror now; like a torture wheel constructed from candy-canes and pink ribbon. This was a feeling that Jeremy had never encountered before in all his years.

Ian shouted glee to him at finding a banana pudding in his meal portion. Jeremy gave a thumbs up, then a trail sign meaning the tactical situation was in their favour. In the shrink-wrapped depths of his own pack he found a cup of grape jelly. Ian held this up so it caught the firelight, a glassy air bubble suspended within now a heart of sapphire. Would Death swoop behind them and cleave Paul Forster in two at their command? Would he lay waste to whole populations for them? Jeremy thought long on this before sleep and troubled dreams took him.

The next morning, the pair awoke, breakfasted and were on their way again. By mid-day the pillar was so small that Ian could obscure it with his thumb. The landscape they traversed was more desert spotted with sickly bushes. Hills lay upon the horizon, yet appeared to the boys to stay a fixed distance from them regardless of their progress. Jeremy and Ian discussed this phenomenon at great length. They could be painted scenery upon canvas sails, attached to columns of thick metal. A subterranean web of cables, wires and levers detected their movement (perhaps via magnetic bolts in their sneakers, Jeremy suggested) and triggered an opposing drift in the giant rods, shuddering the scenery away through grooved slots in the earth. Each step forced another creaking rotation of the machinery, and not even the fastest run could defeat the sail's diminishment at land's end.

Ian reminded Jeremy of Battlezone, a tank game at their arcade set in an arena comprising a valley floor ringed by volcanoes. If you disengaged from the combat field and drove directly at them, the volcanoes would grow no closer. Thus began a series of fruitless attempts to gain the mountainsides, a desperation attached to each "expedition", as the computer-controlled enemy tanks still methodically lobbed shots at your vehicle's rear. A rumour ran among them, that a boy several arcades away had successfully driven to the volcanoes. This, of course, only fuelled their determination. Many hundred of hours' worth of chores were transmuted to coinage, a booty soon squandered in Battlezone's clinking gullet.

The morning sky was darker now as thunderheads fumed like chimney smoke. Ian drew his pistol and knife and waved them menacingly at the cloud. Thinking then that the likelihood of close combat was remote, he returned the Bowie to its scabbard and aimed the pistol with both hands. The boys halted, for the clouds coalesced to a single front and strode Westward in black rank. Sunrays arched there, streaming ghost-white from heavens to desert. The storm slid implacably on to shear them. Beginning again, the boys kept their faces trained skywards in awe. A pre-lightning smell was upon the air of copper and dried flowers.

Ian felt as he always did before a storm, as if his muscles were gapped from his skin by a thin film of static. Without his medication this sensation would arrive at his throat unbidden. His toes and head would form the contacts of this circuit. In this condition he had devastated an art classroom one July afternoon. A battery of testing resulted in a small pill the colour of their frog's underbelly. Its name sounded to Ian like the gargling of Lego. This feeling, when described to Jeremy, was given the name Subdermal HD-Fluxus, or SHF for short. This neatly incorporated a kernel of Ian's true diagnosis with words the boys found "Kick-ass."

Jeremy sniffed now and commented that he could smell the negative ionization of the air. A thunderchild glutted on charge stirred in the air. Ian noted a pyramid upon the horizon. Light washed upon its heights of dull stone. Jeremy noted that the structure seemed more Aztec than Egyptian. Ian said he wished they could launch an airstrike against the position to soften it up before assaulting. Jeremy stopped, imagining his Sergeant standing atop the pyramid, his hand in Death's. He shook the image away. He had the sudden fear that Ian's next words would be to their dark benefactor.

_I won't stop him,_ Jeremy decided. The boy would submit to the will of blast and flame. Ian mumbled "airstrike" distractedly all the way to the pyramid's lower steps. These were free of moss or lichen, the blocks fresh-hewn. Steps ascended its steep sides, and a gleeful Jeremy informed Ian that these would run red with the blood of sacrificial victims.

"Their hearts were torn out while they were – "

Ian cut him off, in SHF's full thrall.

"Draw your weapons," he said.

"I will get off two or three quick shots before they reach me," he continued. "Maybe bash them in the head with my gun as a distraction while pushing the knife up –" he mimed the action gingerly – "into their guts." Ian decided that, if required, he could then release the knife handle and draw his other pistol to fire point-blank at his assailant.

"They won't take us, Jeremy," said Ian. "Not the two of us. And _especially_ not with our weapons."

Jeremy started to pant from the climb. Lightning came then, a quiver of bolts bursting within the cloud-belly. Their glow tremored briefly upon the pyramid's summit. The boys were now just below.

"If it is Olmec priests," whispered Jeremy, "They will be armed with long knives of razor-sharp obsidian."

Ian nodded, and patted his pistol. Jeremy did the same and smiled.

"Obsid... obis... that stuff is no good against a bullet," said Ian.

"We will wait until just after the next big burst of lightning," said Jeremy, frowning immediately at the inadequacy of "burst" in this context.

He explained briefly the concept of electricity to Ian, how it took time for the charge to build up between stormcloud and earth.

"Once the target area is denied compromising illumination, we will go."

He considered using the Field Marshal's voice, but the Sergeant was at his side, his face swathed in a disruptive pattern of black and olive green. The man checked the ejection port of his carbine, smudging away a speck of dirt with a thumb. Their burst of lightning came and the boys rose in unison, gaining the platform in a few bounding steps. Ian kept his finger outside the trigger guard as he knew real soldiers did. He had slung his Bowie to his hip in a reluctant concession to tactical necessity.

A shadow lay within the cloud-mass. Ian knelt and aimed where he imagined a person's chest might be; he heard Jeremy issue a curt challenge and an announced his intention to fire. The boys' vision pulsed patterns of light and dark around the shape. Ian's clasp tightened upon the pistol until his trigger finger threatened to leap from the safe position upon the ring of iron. He whispered to Jeremy.

"Fire a warning shot."

Jeremy pictured an Olmec priest, dagger poised tip-down, arm raised in a throwing stance. The boy raised his weapon and levelled its blade sight. A shameful and wondrous thought came to the boy.

"Death," he said. "I want light here."

_And a 10 millimetre submachine gun with custom grips and extended magazine,_ he thought. Light did come then, a saturation of crisp white. Death himself was revealed there, facing away from the boys.

Ian jumped. "You bastard! You scared the _shit_ out of us!."

Jeremy's shock at the outburst was soon overtaken by a fit of giggling. Soon both boys lay upon the floodlit stone consumed by laughter. Through great sobs of breath, Ian repeated his last sentence again and again. Jeremy pleaded with him to stop. He closed his eyes against a film of tears; cold stone at his palms.

Finally Ian stood and holstered his pistol, addressing Death:

"You really shouldn't do that again. We will call for you if we want you."

The boy's affirmation provoked a gasp of indignation in Jeremy. But Ian stared him down. Jeremy felt a flush of shame, for his friend had given voice to his own thoughts, in a voice resonant with pride, every syllable anchored in lead. One last longing for the mission came to him; the glimpse of a cathedral spire as it slipped beneath floodwaters.

_Perhaps there never was a mission,_ Jeremy thought.

Ian was now enacting that certainty, standing alongside Death with thumbs hooked cowboy-style in his jeans pockets. Jeremy saw then that Death's arm was raised, fingers of his right hand splayed beneath an index finger aimed at the pyramid's opposing side. The clouds were dissipating. At their backs was a black day hued in cast-iron. Against this boilerplate were rain showers etched in silver. Before them lay what seemed to Ian an Alpine meadow under Spring-light. Wind tossed the grass-tops here and there in quick gushes.

The boys stood together. Jeremy pointed to a house upon a hilltop. Its skin of board shone a lustrous white. Jeremy peered to his right and left, to see where the desert ended and paddock began. There was no clear division between the two, with sparse lawn patching the sand far out to their rear. These islands of grass congealed to make the desert mere rivulets of dust between them. Finally all traces of it were over-run by green, and the sight gladdened the boys' hearts.

"What is this, then, Death?" said Jeremy softly.

Ian heard his friend and offered his own thesis. "Maybe there's dinosaurs down there, or other stuff that time forgot. Maybe it's living stuff. Like the guns except alive."

Jeremy had a rush of conflicting thoughts.

Perhaps Death has a garden where animals were sent for safekeeping. The ones the world had no use for any more.

Unicorns and Griffins might lie on the porch of that house, attended to by tuxedoed Minotaurs bearing iced tea.

The thought made him smile. He wanted to slide down to the house on a commando line. He did not request this from Death. Instead, he motioned for Ian to take point. The trio made a steady progress down the pyramid. A fissure sundered the blocks halfway down the structure. From this cavity came a meek stream. The boys plunged their hands and arms into its flow. A sheen of moss coated the cracked stone from which the stream ran. Jeremy imagined their frog crawling within this aperture. He dared Ian to stick his arm in the cave up to the shoulder. Ian shook his head.

"If we had a flamethrower we could..." the boy would have said "cauterized" but the absence of Nathan weighed suddenly on his heart. He used "burn" instead. Ian mimed closing his finger on an invisible ignition switch and hosing the area with fire. Jeremy took care not to step within the stream, for he guessed the moss would rob him of traction.

_If I slipped, would Death help me?_ He wondered. _Or would he and Ian peer after me as I crashed down from block to block like a bone-stuffed doll?_

They started down. A stand of trees obscured the pyramid's lower reaches, receiving the stream as it left the blocks. Rocks were scattered through this glade, ringed by a soft mantle of turf.

"It looks like it's been cut, that grass," observed Ian.

Jeremy nodded. He turned to Death.

"Is that your special place? Somewhere you come to get away from things and think?"

Ian busied himself with spinning his gun's cylinder to and fro. Death looked at Jeremy, and he smiled at him. Within those eye sockets could be discerned nothing. Jeremy could not overcome his fear. His grin slackened.

"Can you smile as well, Death?" asked the boy in a near-whisper.

Wind whipped lightly at the skeleton's robes. Ian drank of the breeze deeply, remarking that it was the smell of their school's soccer ground when newly cut.

When he was small, Jeremy had accompanied his real dad to a golf links. Every green seemed to him the landing site of some alien species, landing beacons secreted somewhere in the flags. Each bunker was an emergency runway, the young Jeremy decided, should the craft lose power en route to one of the main sites. For some reason he could not shake the picture of Death partnering his father around the course.

"Does Death play golf?" he asked Ian.

Ian considered this, then replied no.

"He doesn't play much of anything. Apart from us."

Jeremy saw the truth in this.

"Should we play with him, Ian? I mean, show him how we play?"

"I feel SHF again, Jeremy" said Ian.

Jeremy looked at Death, smiled, and said that he did also.

Nathan awoke to the sensation of sliding. It was a gentle descent, nonetheless (albeit headfirst and upon his stomach). He dug his fingers into the ground to arrest his travel. His fingertips drew squeaking lines of resistance across a surface slicker than glass. Finally he slid to a halt and blew the friction from his fingers. He lay upon a slope of polished stone. A channel no wider than his palm bisected the face. A minor torrent lay thick within this groove. Only a hiss proclaimed its passage. It moved with such force that its skin was a plane compromised by neither bump nor ruffle, like a blade of molasses. Nathan scoured his pockets, finding a coin. This soon entered the water without noise or impact.

A shadow flashed up upon the black hill and Nathan saw that the pillar was directly above him. Its base was only a football field away. Where it met the stone was obscured by the hill's slope. Nathan saw now that the channel ran from the pillar's centre. A thread of ocean wavered out towards the boy, swayed momentarily then fell as a peal of green water. This detonated upon the stone with a ringing crash, sluicing down the hillside as a waist-high flood.

There was no avoiding the water. Nathan had an instant's fear before the wash caught him by the shins and brought him down. The boy gasped down a mouthful of icy saltwater. His spine hammered upon the rock like an insect wing beating out Summer's fullest joy. Nathan succumbed suddenly to plunging, cold impact, as might a nail driven into ice. He kicked at the depths, but his next breath was still half-riven with liquid. When this ceased, he found that he stood in water no deeper than his chest. Remnants of the wave frothed rings of white away from him. Thunder reached him, as the pillar calved off monstrous plates of ocean.

He was in a pond of a soccer field's size. Ripples from his entry were only slapping at the far banks. A man stood there, and Nathan ducked down instinctively. When he surfaced, the man was squatting at the poolside. The boy felt a pressure beneath his feet. A swelling bloom of lake rose up; a gobbet of greenish water in which he hung. The force of its ascension overtook his efforts to stay afloat, and a thorough dunking resulted. For a moment, he regarded the man through a bulbous prism.

This was not Death, Nathan saw. It was a knight, steel-clad head to toe. A profusion of weapons were strapped to him. A cluster of spiked balls affixed to a rod via a short length of chain sat upon one hip.

_Morningstar,_ though Nathan. He had modelled one with a tennis ball, stick and links of rubber band. It had the satisfying effect of ensnaring any opponents' sword, ready for disarmament.

He stretched upwards to gasp in a breath. The mountain of black stone lay at his back, the pillar calving off vast panes of ocean. The Knight waved to Nathan, and bid him closer. Wobbling as it came, the lake-ball hovered to the man and sank ponderously to the grass. Its belly flattened and spread, before dissipating in a bright shower upon the pair.

Instinctively, Nathan called for Death, and his dread shadow fell upon him almost at once. The boy stepped back to reclaim the wan sunlight for his face. The Knight nodded at Nathan's companion, and the movement was assured, fluid. This was no weighty warrior mired in clanking metal. A coat of paint clung grimly to his breastplate, and Nathan thought he saw a Griffon prowling there. Twin antennae of grooved metal wavered out behind his back. Both were tapered to jewelled tips set with a stone of deepest blue. Leaves of thin steel sprouted thickly from chains unlinking this rail-length. Soon great wings now spread from his back in a profusion of glittering metal.

Only then was Nathan conscious of the sensation of standing upon firm ground again. This was only a moment's grace, for shock soon overcame him. He had drawn many hundreds of angels before: robot angels, reptilian angels; those that might crowd the ocean depths on silken wings of scale. Had he imagined one in the form of a knight? The boy decided it was inevitable that he had. Therefore, this being was equally his creation, surely. He said as much in a tone measured with caution. The great wings rustled black and silver.

The Knight pointed to a nearby rock, upon which a thick book was placed. Nathan traced his fingers across the cover, entranced by the tree-pattern wrought in leather and metal. The two seemed to find an odd fusion amongst the embossed tangle of limbs. Tracing a leaf, Nathan saw it transmuted several times between hide and metal in a mere thumb's breadth. The books covers were clasped by a crab sculpted of pitted brass. From its golden carapace projected a heart-shaped turnkey. As Nathan inspected the book further, its legs splayed wide upon the spine with a clatter, and he. It seemed to indicate amusement rather than anger, for the Knight's helmet tilted to one side slightly.

Then, one gauntleted hand mimed the twisting of a key. Nathan did so, surprised at the torsion required to crank the thing. It was as if the crab's innards were gummed with thick oil. Nathan persisted. Finally the key offered no more resistance.

Its final yielding revolution must have locked a vital cog into position, for the crab's claws sprung apart. The book eased open. The boy's eyes devoured the front page, which read in raised gothic type:

Our conversation: Commencing at the time of our meeting; between Nathan and myself - concluding one hundred and seventeen pages hence.

There was nothing else.

"Do you want me to read this?" asked Nathan, regretting the words even as they left his mouth.

A nod from the Knight. The crab's claws crackled and the front page eluded its grasp. Its replacement slipped across the gulf between the pincers and was instantly snagged. An unseen spring must be powering the pages' progression, Nathan realized. Each leaf was bonded to the book's spine by a thin strip of copper. He gave a gentle tug at the current page, but the crustacean would not relinquish it. The boy eased his fingers from the book. The words before him read:

The proceeding content has already been written. Every word of our conversation to come lies herein. When the appropriate moment is reached, it will be revealed to you. Ponder this paradox, Nathan.

Nathan did. The crab was merely a time-piece, whose watch-springs and toothed wheels were churning inexorably to the moment when its claws would snap apart again.

There are exactly 94 pages in this book, there will never be one more and never any less. They correspond exactly to the questions you will answer me and my responses. Now then. Tell me something only you know, that you've never told anyone else.

"I buried an action figure down by the pool and could never find it again. I thought Jeremy might have taken it but I never asked him about it," Nathan replied quickly. The next page was revealed even as he completed the last word.

A lost toy is a serious matter. Now then, was my response written before I asked you to name the secret, or were the words you're now reading written after asking?

The boy thought the latter, and told the Knight, adding:

"It's not a paradox, though. If you'd let me open the book, then I could see if the pages have anything on them or not, and I'd know for sure." The crab clattered again.

The paradox exists in that the certainty of either can never be established.

Nathan felt himself warming to the argument.

"Yes it can. You just need a big enough crowbar or something and then you could find out."

_Indeed. Let us leave that for a moment. The other alternative_ , read the book, _is absurd. That I somehow have prior knowledge of your words and have already transcribed them._

"To do that, you'd need to know the future. You can't travel into the future," said Nathan.

Determinism is what we're really discussing, Nathan. Cause preceding effect. The violation of determinism is abhorrent to us, because it revokes free will. And according to lore, we accord only God or the Devil that privilege.

Nathan squinted with concentration again. For a moment, he considered calling Death to his side, to tear the book open and reveal the great mystery. He relented and returned to the page:

Let us return to your assertion about a crowbar. There are unknowable places and things in the universe. The state of Death is one, of course, that is pertinent to you and I. This encompasses the greatest paradox we shall ever know, that everyone shall join our gaunt friend yet none shall ever part from him.

This steel-encrusted bully was making him the foil of a prank. Its trappings of clockwork and parchment were more elaborate than Paul Forster's, no doubt about that. The underlying malice was most likely identical. He placed the book upon the rock.

The crab's eyes, he noticed now, were rubies set on stalks of stubby brass. The book whipped open.

_Paradox can be as simple as incongruous juxtaposition, the pairing of inherently disparate elements,_ it read.

Nathan grimaced with concentration the last words. He had once been to a carnival where he shot jets of water into a clown's gaping mouth to fill a balloon emerging from its head. Nathan felt this way now, as if blood was swelling he paid to a sure point of explosion. He placed the book before him.

"Do you mean things in the wrong place?"

Yes. An eloquent summation! Exactly.

"The book can't just be like an alarm clock with the pages as the alarm, if you know what I mean. That's impossible."

Paradox. Not impossibility. And paradox is the truest state of the universe.

The boy knew he should walk away from this game. The last words intrigued him.

"You think? Why don't you know for sure? Aren't you some kind of soldier of Death? Like us?"

You are not in his service, any more than I am.

"Then why were we brought here?" Strength, unexpected yet welcome, sat at the boy's right shoulder. "Why are you here?"

The Knight sent his sword clattering with a fist to the scabbard. Nathan jumped back in alarm. Then he recognized the noise-making as gesture of approval.

_That's the way of it, boy,_ the book read, _Boldness has genius, power and magic in it._

Nathan smiled. "I like that."

So said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Such eloquence is beyond a mere messenger such as me.

"Then you are a servant of Death, then. A messenger boy, like you say."

The Knight's hand fluttered towards the sword's hilt, then stilled mid-movement.

Messenger boy indeed! Lucky it is for you, boy, that 500 years in this minor hell has bled my honour a bony white. Why, in my fullest season ...

Nathan apologized quickly, realizing now the three dots after "Season" were combined with the man's faceless glare into the distance. This struck the boy as slightly ludicrous, and he bit his sleeve to stifle a giggle. The book's flicking revealed:

The message I shall impart is not his. He has nothing to say. Look at him, Nathan.

Nathan did, hoping his fading smile would be lost upon Death.

His existence is bereft of doubt or hesitation. He is a pure expression of will. This is what must and always be, if life is to persevere.

"Why should it? If he left us alone, we could live forever."

Into the realm of paradox we go, son. Life is defined by Death.

The Knight bade Nathan to sit. The next page whispered across.

Our time upon the earth is brief. Human-kind occupies a trifling insignificance of the span for which life has existed.

Nathan nodded. He had more than once induced within himself a sense of utter meaninglessness by contemplation of this fact.

A butterfly's wings will bear it but for a single week of life. Do they express this certainty? Are they dreary tools of function, as bereft of adornment as the parchment these very lines are written? No. In hues iridescent do they proclaim defiance, Nathan! Not of the insect itself - although, had nature favoured their race with intelligence, a noble clan of butterfly philosophers would ponder such as this - It is life itself that refuses to concede.

"Jeremy told me..." Nathan blushed. "I had heard that animals have colours to attract a mate."

Well done. Plumage and finery are indeed displays to denote breeding fitness in pure evolutionary terms. Let us now think further. Life best defies Death not in a being's single lifetime, but in the revision of whole species. Humanity is not the culmination of life's plan, as if there were such a thing! We readily appropriate billions of years of evolution to lay upon the altar of our hubris.

Nathan frowned. When he looked back at the book, another page had appeared.

_Arrogance,_ it read.

Nathan nodded at the Knight.

If we are the penultimate expression of life, then why do we still die? Why have we need of this Death? If creation had stopped with us, then surely we would be gifted with immortality!

The Knight drew his sword and lanced the sky with it.

Let all creation defer to our inherent majesty! Why, the smallest babe shall lie upon a bed of serpents! In envy, let the flower wither and seas drain to nothingness! Let the very planets cease their motion!

He held his weapon high for a moment after Nathan had devoured these words, then brought it to earth.

Life holds not such pretensions for any of its creatures, and neither should we. Here we are, four-score years and ten our allotment. A collection of primal urges are we, enshrouded within every cell of our being the ghost of what we were, every shrewlet or lizard-kin or fishling, for you were once such as these.

"We're more than that. People, I mean."

Of _course we are. Of course humanity's achievements do not merit such reductionism. But it is still true nonetheless, and thus we reach paradox again._

Let us cross over to an ancestral hall, Nathan, through which we might trace back your line as far back as creation itself. In its doorway stands your father. At his back and arm's breadth away stands your grandfather. Behind him stands his own, and thus regresses your line.

Nathan raised his hand. The Knight nodded at him.

"Wouldn't it be both my parents, though, not... not just my Dad?"

The book advanced.

Indeed. But to illustrate this regression would take an exponentially larger number of halls; at some point the galleries would have to interweave and cross, for your antecedents were not limitless in number. You have arisen from a cauldron of human genetic material bounded now by borders and datelines, but once merely by the farthest field that marked the village's end. So we will not navigate such a landscape.

Irrespective of this, father to son is important, Nathan. Knowledge of our fathers is what completes a man.

Nathan wiped a tear into his sleeve and smiled.

On we go then. Let us say you start to walk down this hall towards its far end. You choose a gentle pace, and stop to neither study your ancestor's faces nor acknowledge their presence. They are half-aware of you and I, for no museum exhibits are these. They are your flesh, Nathan, caught betwixt the dream-world and waking. Their time came, be it by the sword or pestilence or the sure hand of age. Shed no tears for them, for we see them now as they would like us to, in youth undiminished.

Nathan's father was indeed about twenty-five, in clothes that made the boy glance downwards so as not to divulge his amusement. He stood as a soldier might, a half-smile upon his lips, his eyes unfocussed. His son extended a tentative finger for purposes of cheek-prodding, but thought better of it. Nathan returned to the book.

The generations recede.

Lifting from the flagstones imperceptibly, the Knight and Nathan flew down the hall. The ranks blurred to patterns of oscillating haze, like fence-posts viewed from a speeding car.

Weapons sit at the hip of some; still others are bedecked with tools unfamiliar to you. In 10 minutes' walk you might gain the edge of recorded history. These fathers are hunters. Wolf-teeth crowd their necks in links of polished white; they slew lions where the Eiffel Tower now stands.

The boy sought echoes of his own face within these warriors. They were much smaller than he could have imagined. One clasped a stubby bow tight to his chest, his cheeks furrowed with thin scars of lost ritual. As Nathan peered at the man, there was the barest rightward shift of his eyes; his head shifted an inch or two. Nathan jumped in alarm.

Betwixt the dream-world and waking, read the book. On a summer's afternoon within the fern-fronds of some ancient vale, this man will now be rousing. He will tell his clan-mates his vision of you.

The pair rushed on again. It seemed that the air offered no resistance to their passing. To Nathan's surprise, their flight's end was accompanied by no discomforting feeling of deceleration. Scott enjoyed a game based around just this premise, gunning his car and then stomping on the brakes again and again in cycles of lurching queasiness.

The crab's claws scattered a page free:

Beyond the ice ages, their jaws flatten slightly and brows bulge, these fathers. We see evolution's hand.

These beings were just as the Knight had described. Their dress of roughly cut hide differed little now from generation to generation. They were more an amorphous rank stretching without limit to Nathan's left and right. The boy described to the Knight a picture he encountered once in a science book: a fish flopping stumpy legs upon the ground away from a fetid pool. Beyond this creature crawled an amphibian, and beyond that a lizard, and so on until a businessman strode into destiny bearing a suitcase. He told the Knight of this picture.

Such is man's conceit. When you have the merest inkling of the true nature of that progression, it shall depart and never return. Also consider that your ancestry is but one species of human, Nathan. There were others –

"Neanderthals!" said the boy excitedly. Before the page turned, he noticed the dash after "others" and felt less pleased with his answer than he might have liked. The per-ordained nature of their conversation weighed upon him somehow, dulling the amazements of the Ancestral Hall.

Yes, Neanderthals and many others. None of their descendants walks with us today. It is like a great and monstrous family who board a ship for a new land. Its uncles are ogres, dressed in their mammoth-hide finery. Goblin children crowd the decks. These grotesques are all your blood, Nathan. Say some pestilence befalls the tribe mid-ocean and a solitary child survives to make landfall: Homo sapiens sapiens, double wise man. The companions we had on that forlorn voyage are soon forgotten, save as wisps of legend.

Nathan nodded.

Perhaps this father-

The Knight drew his sword and laid it upon the shoulder of the closest being; the page flipped and took up with a dash and the word "Slaughter."

-slaughtered the last of some ancient race of man-kin. He may have seen them as usurpers, sport for the hunt or even game. Who can tell?

With a barely audible sigh, the ancestor shrugged one shoulder against the sword's weight.

There is no easy leap from man to animal, no clear devolution. Just as surely, the light of intelligence does not dim in the space of a generation. 2,039,808,385 people currently walking upon the Earth can trace their lineage, as you do, directly to this man. When might the soul be lost and the breath of divinity expire within the hulking beast?

Again, Nathan nodded and was silent.

A week's journey by foot.

They travelled at far greater speed now, the Ancestral Hall all but a haze far beyond the discernment of shape or colour.

We pass your fathers as might a general reviewing a troop of billions.

Their pace slackened. The faces sliding by at vision's periphery were that of apes no taller than Nathan's shoulder. This vision perturbed him, somehow, and he asked the Knight not to stop.

_Certainly,_ the page read, _in these eyes we would not see beings covetous of dominion . I see an animal whose ascendancy is by no means assured; whose rule might be thwarted by comet-smite, pestilence or vaporous effusion of pyroclastic gases from within the Earth. On we go._

Their next stop was before a line of cat-sized creatures that Nathan fought the urge to stroke, despite their strong resemblance to dogs crossed with fierce rodents. As before, the animals were identical to their fellows in both directions. Nathan was reminded instantly of a rather feral pet show.

The common ancestor of the mammalian line. Within this body plan lies potentiality for a organism as large as a bus and as small as your thumb; who will sprout wings and blind itself as it worries its way through the soil.

Gently, the Knight knelt and extended a gauntlet to smooth a stray wisp of hair from the closest mammal-father.

This is wealth, Nathan. An evolutionary richness of which you are but one inheritor. Which is to be though of as more worthy of awe, a whale-song or the Sistine Chapel? You are a man at arms in the company of mammals, Nathan. Unique is your awareness of self, but nothing else about you might be though of as such. Genetically speaking, you are an eyeblink away from a chimpanzee.

Nathan recalled the moment Jeremy had revealed this fact to him. His friend seemed to take this as a confirmation of man's baser instincts, a reason their war-play would remain with them lifelong.

In another hundred million years, will your ancestor still walk upon this or other worlds? Will your line end, as did the Neanderthals, cowering at a spear-tip? Look with reverence upon this father, Nathan. Its children are your brothers; race-car drivers and killer whales.

Without warning, they alighted and sped away.

We move now faster than anyone has before, ten kilometres a second. In a half-minute's travel down the hall at this pace, we have passed several million years. The entirety of recorded human history flashes past in the merest paring of a moment. Even at this rate, we will need half a day to reach life's beginning. Should we accelerate now to the speed of light, we shall be there in a little over five minutes.

It is almost impossible to comprehend what we pass by: the dinosaurs wither to lizards in a matter of seconds; their fathers and yours become fish soon after that. For most of this time though, Nathan, life consists of the very simplest creatures that can be.

"Bacteria?" suggested the boy. The Knight shook his head and the book flipped a page.

Your father here is the father of even bacteria. Although of course, the term "father" loses its meaning this far back. Lineage itself is lost.

Nathan frowned.

Let us stop, and I will explain.

They did so. The hall here was empty in both directions. Nathan peered at the flagstones to discern a scrap of slime or frog's egg-like collection of cells, but there was nothing.

Life at a basic level is the transposition of genes. A gene is an instruction for the coding of proteins. Yes my boy, such is reductivism and such are you. But here is a time before life constituted the exchange of genetic material.

Nathan could not stop his eyes from finding the hall's horizon, where ceiling and floor converged in an implacable whole. The sight disconcerted him.

"Where do animals begin again?" he asked.

Walk now, Nathan, and never rest. At the end of your life you will not be able to differentiate this stretch of hall from the one that passes your dying eyes.

"Oh," said the boy.

Run for a thousand years and find your animal. Forget not that here lies the font of plants. Here, your brothers shall be summer grasses and mildew and willow trees.

"Can we go further back?" Nathan asked.

Life finds no irreducible instance of primacy.

"You mean there's no first father at the beginning of everything," said Nathan.

_Indeed,_ read the book, _a state in itself perversely paradoxical. Life had no single point of conception. That is, not existing in one moment yet arisen in the next. However, along a given timeframe, say a few hundred thousand years, this observation is valid._

The parallels with quantum states of uncertainty are exquisite. The exact positions in time and space of the particles that compose us are unknowable. If quantum states bind the lower levels of the universe together, then at an underlying level must empirical thinking have no sway. Notions of causality, constancy of matter, even life and death are irrelevancies. They are like a map of the subway in the desert – They cannot describe the quantum state. There, the empiricism of "being" and "not being" have no meaning.

Nathan winced and rubbed the back of his head. He maintained a passing knowledge of the concept.

Draw an atom for me, Nathan.

A silver pen slid from an aperture in the book's spine. Nathan chose a spot below his own name and dutifully scribed a cluster of neutrons and protons orbited by an electron. The moment his nib lifted from the paper, the page shuffled away.

Good. You have an electron spinning around the nucleus. It spins unimaginably fast; so fast indeed I will not grasp for meaningless superlatives. It occupies certain orbits around the nucleus. Do you follow me thus far?

Nodding, Nathan thought this all far below him. Another page hove into view.

Excellent. Now hold the word "spinning" in your head for me.

Nathan did.

Hold it fast!

The Knight thumped his breastplate loudly, and the boy jumped.

Paradox again, Nathan, that sense of ceaseless motion. Consider now that the electron is in every possible position of its orbit at the same time.

"Like a band of metal," said Nathan.

No. The book read. That is an incorrect comparison. Metal implies solidity, inertia. The electron is still very much in motion, my lad. It just so happens to be everywhere at once. Do you watch car races?

"No," said Nathan.

The steeled face cocked to one side.

Nevertheless, you are no doubt familiar with the concept. A race-car that is travelling in such a way that it is simultaneously visible to an observer half-way around the track as to one at the starting line.

Nathan embraced the thought. Now he recalled a discussion more fully, inevitably Jeremy's derision of the layman's concept of ...

"The Quantum Leap!" said the boy.

Good boy. Can you explain it?

Nathan told of how the electron would transfer between orbits instantaneously, and never occupy the space between.

A more succinct violation of Einsteinian physics is difficult to imagine. Thus uncertainty holds the universe in thrall.

The Knight made a gesture of throat-cutting.

Laplace's Demon is long dead.

"Laplace's Demon?" asked Nathan.

Imagine an entity who knew the exact state and location of all things at this very moment. The divination of all fates would then be his, no future beyond his ken. However, these smallest pieces of reality defy observation, almost wilfully so.

Nathan knelt and dragged a stick through the grass at his feet.

Man has sought knowledge of all things, as is his birthright, but there are things unknowable, obscurations of a totality so absolute as to defy our reason.

Nathan spotted a grey mote where the desolation touched the sky in the far distance.

A property of the quantum state is entanglement. When sub-atomic particles share the same wavelength, they are said to be so.

A small tremor reached Nathan through the soles of his sneakers.

Once entangled, you can separate the particles across an immeasurably large distance, even across the breadth of space, and when you change the properties of one, its twin is changed instantaneously, faster than light and time can catch hold of it.

Nathan wanted to study the figure in the distance again, but this line of thought held him.

So if all matter were once one in that point of infinite density at the Big Bang, it surely must still be so. Quantum skeins link all particles like the warp of a weaver's loom, indivisible within and without their host atoms, stretching back in space and time to commonality. Your kin are truly stars and dust-showers hovering in the frigid vast.

Nathan looked up from the book. The central swelling of the Knight's visor formed a squat cone that suggested a canine muzzle pressing against the steel. The boy felt a little light-headed.

"Death," said Nathan, "I want a sandwich, please. And a can of cola too."

Death walked into Nathan's field of view immediately, and he found the effect disconcerting; it was as if the skeleton stepped from a space he had always occupied rather than merely appeared. Nathan could bring himself not take the food from the thing's claws.

"Put it down on the ground."

Death did so. Nathan sat cross-legged and asked the Knight to continue while he finished his snack. The boy smoothed grass stems beneath his palm.

"Where we are now..." he said, "Is somewhere that can't be reached. A hidden place, like the event horizon."

The next page snicked smoothly into place.

A fine analogy. Death is one such realm, Nathan.

"We aren't dead though, are we?"

Nathan found himself surprised to be entertaining this possibility only now. He picked the book up.

"I know we can't be in heaven. It's too weird here," he said.

No, we are not dead and this is not Paradise.

The Knight swept his hand across the sky, smearing clouds there. A light rain soon followed and he craned his face upwards. Droplets streamed from his visor's snout. Another page flicked into view.

It follows then that if certain elements of the universe remain unknowable _ exquisitely, immutably so - then why must they concern man? Death need hold no fear for us.

Nathan said that electrons and death were very different. Did the crab's claws relinquish their prize just the briefest moment too quickly?

Immeasurably different yet identical.

"Paradox!" said the boy with a smile.

What a beautiful gift is mortality, life's handmaiden.

"I wish I could live forever," said Nathan defiantly. "I never want to die."

The Knight looked at Nathan.

_Eternal life,_ the book read.

The boy nodded gravely.

Well then.

A darkness more complete than any Nathan had known fell upon the landscape. Into this sudden abyss came a tiny spume of white light.

The crab's shell excreted a luminous bulb atop a spindly twist of copper cord. Nathan imagined the anglerfish from nature documentaries with its sawtooth grin, shadow-struck by a dangling filament.

Stars flashed now within the firmament; the passage of a billion suns.

"The stars like dust," said Nathan.

The flitting page seemed like a cannon within the black.

_Issac Asimov,_ read the book.

He nodded and read on:

In our imaginations, we can conflate a concept like 'The lifespan of the universe' into a human context, our own lives, a year, the blooming of a flower. These are spurious, of course, but yet we persist. Such is our grandeur and our temerity.

Some of these words confounded the boy, but he remained quiet. The gist of what the Knight said was obvious: people could never understand how long the universe would last for, not really.

A galaxy wheeled down upon them, a single star dominating the heavens as might a tyrant moon.

Imagine the passage of billions upon billions of years with yourself as a cogent being. Once the sun has devoured your planet, you will be cast adrift, Nathan, unfettered from not merely from our world itself but from all possible meaning, any context that might make your existence anything less than a persistent madness. You drift in the icy waste, the vacuum between systems, for millennia. In time, the sure hand of gravity is upon you.

The star's brilliance engulfed them. Nathan instinctively tightened his eyelids; the light however, was no brighter than a summer's day. Whether this sun bore down upon them or they flew to it was unclear. There was no sensation of movement - no rushing of wind or displaced air plucking at the boy's clothes. Looming larger and larger was the gaseous flare of the corona above a roiling sea of yellow-white.

You travel within, as we are now, and are seared for eternal eons.

They entered the star.

How you would agonise for death every second of your damned existence, weep for it even as you endured –

"Unkillable!" yelled Nathan, and smiled at the hyphen.

The page turned.

Unkillable, indeed! Thus I call mortality a gift.

Nathan was about to answer, but instead took in the reddening tunnel about them. He knew that they were almost at the star's heart. In the space of half a minute the gloom advanced to a pall. The crab's light blinked on.

A page flipped.

The heavy elements that compose us were made here, carbon and iron and silicon and oxygen. Here you would return as an immortal, gravity sinking you down through the infernal heat and pressure to a billion years of torment.

Nathan thought on this and smiled.

"Okay," he said. "It would be awful to live forever."

_Yes,_ said the book simply.

The star dissipated around them, and the pair stood within the wasteland again.

A finite amount of matter was created in the Big Bang. No information can be created or destroyed , added or subtracted from the universe. Matter and energy are finite, fixed quotas. In essence, the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Nathan wondered where this was going, but to the Knight he said nothing.

The second law of thermodynamics: Overall entropy of a system can only increase over time.

Nathan had not heard this word, and said so.

Matter and energy were nothing, came from nothing, and very much want to be so again. Energy craves diffusion; a blessed disorder, then ever on to an inert state of complete rest.

For all their intellectualizing, the boys had never engaged this notion. Nathan struggled to recall a lecture from Jeremy on the subject and felt a small sense of pride to find he could not. The Knight stepped back and bowed with a dramatic sweep of his arm.

Death appeared before them. As always, the eye-sockets betrayed nothing, and Nathan was saddened to realize he not longer looked for a sign of recognition there. A page snicked over.

Physics for their own sake need not concern us, Nathan. Only physics in relation to his role in the universe.

Entropy is the innate quality of energy to disperse, to seek release from its bonds. We shall age and die, the mountains will rot into sand, the universe itself will, after a billion times billion years, become an abyssal cold, the very atoms beguiled by entropy.

"So everything will just fade away," said Nathan.

The Knight nodded.
"And there'll be nothing at all."

Another solemn lowering of the faceplate. Were there eyes discernible in the metal slits there as the shadows leapt across their span? Nathan could not decide. He regarded Death for a moment, feeling like he was at school and called to write on the blackboard.

"And then Death will have won," he said.

The Knight stroked his helmet where the temple might be thought to lie. The book revealed these words:

There is a finite amount of matter in the universe. Therefore there is a finite amount of potential energy in the universe. Therefore, life itself has a finite potential. Therefore so does Death, Nathan.

In seeming emphasis, the Knight swung his heel into the dust, which sprayed in a reddish font against his armour.

Life arose from scattered elements that had no reason to band together to make you; they are merely evidence of matter's inherent tendency to spontaneously organize complex systems. In the Universe's span, only a certain number of things will ever be able to live, and thus only a certain number will ever be able to die.

Nathan could follow this logic.

If life and death do not hold a limitless potentiality; they are as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as an apple falling from a tree. The Big Bang was the entering into being of matter from a state of non-being. There it was, an infinitely dense particle containing all the potential matter that would ever be... ever need to be.

Nathan looked at the Knight and nodded his understanding. He saw now that the dozen or so breathing-holes, as he imagined them to be, perforated only one half of the Knight's visor. The boy asked why this might be. As the gauntlet rose, the Knight mimed a cutting notion at his helmet. Again, another page flicked into view.

Most opponents, being right-handed, will tend to concentrate their attack upon your left. Therefore, any weakness in the metal is to be avoided on that side, and the breaths, as we call them, are indeed that.

"I see," said Nathan. He imagined commanding Death to create a squadron of men-at-arms to attack the Knight and test the veracity of this principle, but thought better of it.

"So... at the Big Bang, all the stuff that would be around, ever, was made."

The Knight nodded.

"And you say that only so many things can happen or be in the universe."

Another page.

There is a finite possible number of ways that matter can be arranged. When did you last clean your room?

Nathan laughed.

"A month ago, I think," he grinned.

Let us imagine whether you put your jeans back in a drawer or stuffed them under the bed, and maybe also put a basketball beside them, and a single sock besides. It follows then that even imagining all the outlandish configurations of clothes, toys and furniture, there is a physical limit to the possible outcomes.

"I can see that too," nodded the boy.

So then the universe. It has space for around 10 to the power of 118 subatomic particles. Let me express that as a whole number : 10 with one hundred and eighteen zeroes after it. Here, let us see :

The next page indeed revealed the number thus :

10,000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000

Nathan snorted.

"You might as well say a _Gazillion_ or something."

The Knight balled a fist and lightly rapped his upper leg defence with the brass-shod knuckles. A page turned.

Not at all. This prediction arose from a physicist called Max Tegmark, and I would not consider him to be a man to deal in Gazillions. This is a number of some significance, for it leads directly to his next assertion : All of those 10,118 particles can only be arranged a certain number of ways, just like your room. The number of ways they can be arranged is 2 to the power of 10,118. That is 2 with 10,118 zeroes after it. Let me express this number :

The book flicked ten pages in quick succession, Nathan seeing the zeroes clustered in such uniform cascade as to be merely a pattern on the paper, seemingly devoid of meaning:

2,00000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

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'Now that looks more like a Gazillion!" exclaimed Nathan.

_Now,_ the next page read, _that this number represents every possible combination of particles within the observable universe. Within that number is the potentiality of anything you can imagine - worlds where elephants walk about in top hats, you are born as exactly as you in every respect except with a tail or the clouds rain spiders instead of water. Everything is both likely and certain within that number._

Nathan replied that this made sense, considering how large it was.

Following simple probability then, all possible universes will play themselves out. Imagine a large enough space, say a box –

Nathan saw the hyphen appear, and realised just at that moment he was about to interject. Had the appearance of that punctuation mark spurred his thought, or the other way around? He wiped his brow briefly.

"Or a coal bunker," he murmured, still somewhat chastened by the hyphen.

The Knight nodded, and pointed to the book's new page.

\- indeed, a coal bunker, one packed with all the possible universes containing all the possible arrangements of particles. This is again an almost incomprehensibly vast number, but again not infinite : 10 to the power of 10,118 metres across. Beyond this box, universes will – must – repeat themselves. Therefore, Nathan, in a universe at that approximate distance this conversation, such as it is, is happening right now.

The concept confused Nathan and he told the Knight this.

Think of your room again. We construct a lattice framework – not unlike the Ancestral Hall – full of doors. Behind each door are versions of your room, in which every possible configuration of particles occurs. It will be a structure many trillions of kilometres wide and tall.

"And I wouldn't want to clean it!" cried Nathan, smiling.

_Of course not!_ Read the following words, _as I say, almost incomprehensibly vast, but ultimately finite._

"So... like an arrangement of every different way the messy room could be."

Yes. Remember, we are contemplating the re-arrangement of atomic particles, not mere clothes and furniture. Open a random door, and the particles within would be so dispersed as to make the space within appear completely empty. Open the next one along, and you stand there looking back at yourself, with all the memories you have right at this moment, because of course you are merely a certain arrangement of particles. But to re-iterate : it is a finite structure.

The notion unsettled Nathan and he looked away from the page for a moment. The thought of having to clean each room for the rest of eternity as some real and present Hell came to him, and he shivered. Of course, to believe the Knight, another Nathan in another universe was doing exactly this. He returned to the book :

So too the Multiverse, Nathan. Imagine now that rather than rooms, behind each door is an entire universe. Some will be almost identical to ours, yet differ by a minuscule amount. One is almost the same as ours, yet in it a single leaf on a single tree in a dark forest by a silver lake an Autumn millennia ago does not fall; in our universe, it does.

"That's the only difference? That one leaf?" asked Nathan.

Yes. Now think of how many different tiny things could differ throughout the entirety not only of history so far, but of history to come. Then imagine the entire universe, countless billions of forests on countless billions of worlds where that leaf does not fall. That is how many rooms there are, Nathan. That is how we arrive at the figure of 10 to the power of 10,118 metres.

I repeat : all possible arrangements of matter within the specified space of our universe will exhaust themselves across that distance. Beyond, there must be repetition. That means that around that distance is an exact clone of our universe, identical in every single respect. That means an exact clone of you too, of course.

Nathan smiled.

"And you too!" he cried.

The Knight nodded.

_Well noted!_ The book read, _this is the spatial Multiverse, to crudely label it as such. There may be another, we shall call this the quantum Multiverse. Think before about how the position of particles is unknowable._

Nathan squinted.

"We can't know exactly where they are. They're everywhere and nowhere, all at once."

_That is correct,_ the next page read, _to go a little further : every possible state of the particle exist all at once. When we look at it, we see only this universes' version of the particle, while a nearly infinite number of its possible states exist simultaneously in parallel universes._

Nathan struggled a little with the concept and told the Knight so. The Knight leant over and picked up a rock and tossed it to him. Nathan caught it easily and immediately threw it back. To his surprise, the Knight made no attempt to deflect the rock and it struck him cleanly in the breastplate. A page flicked across.

Think of the rooms full of universes. We inhabit the one where I chose not to catch that stone. There is a room immediately parallel where your throw was a millimetre to the left; in that room's universe the rock still hit but an infinitesimal degree away from where it landed in ours.

"So... everything that could have happened, does happen," said Nathan.

Correct. In the rooms that closely surround ours, there are only minor variations in the probabilistic outcomes. These will still, however, be almost infinite, and they all occur simultaneously. As we move further away, we are subject to the more baroque turns of fate, which I will talk more of soon.

The Knight picked up the rock again.

Think now of our game of catch. At every single moment, universes stream away from us at light-speed, realms where every single possibility is realised, cascading bubbles into infinite-dimensional Hilbert Space. The stone is caught or is not – both these eventualities exist, and we are merely in a single version of reality among many others.

Again, a light-headedness was upon Nathan at the thought.

You shine with pure potential worlds, Nathan, other selves and lives calving off into untold dimensions every moment of your existence. It is not merely you as an individual, either, or merely every person on the Earth. Think now that every single particle in existence is within the Multiverse also. Every single variation of their possible states exists as well, since the beginning of time.

"We're back to the Gazillions of Multiverses then," said Nathan.

Not at all, read the book. It is a number we have seen before : 10 to the power of 10,118, identical to the amount of possible universes that there could ever be given the arrangement of a finite number of particles.

Nathan found his powers of comprehension at their limit.

"I get that all the particles can be arranged in so many ways, and after a while you run out of rooms to fill," said Nathan. "But you're talking about new universes being made if I choose to ride my bike a different way down from our hill. Where do they all go?"

_The spatial Multiverse and the quantum Multiverse are the same, merely descriptions of probability, but they both exist nonetheless. Simply put, the spatial universes are extant, out there beyond, and the quantum Multiverses are enclosed within that cloud of probabilities defined by the permutations of your body's own particles. Yet I state again : They are the same, and they are finite in number, and that number is 10 to the power of 10,118_.

The Knight placed his gauntlet upon the page and tapped the final sentence in apparent emphasis. Nathan saw then that each knuckle on the metal-shod fingers featured a raised pyramid of brass terminating in a blunt spike.

Over a timeframe approaching the infinite, an almost infinite number of possibilities will find realization. What is the most unlikely thing you can think of?

Reading this, the boy guffawed, for the answer was obvious: standing in a barren plain reading from a book of absolute prescience with Death and a Knight at his side was not far from it. He told the Knight this.

_Indeed!_ The book read, _yet it is a certain occurrence within the infinite timeframe. The spontaneous re-arrangement of particles in space into an exact facsimile of yourself, retaining the memories you have now, will occur without fail. It is just a matter of when and where._

"But you just said that energy... had a limit, and so did life and death," said Nathan.

Of course. I say that there will be re-arrangement, not creation. Nothing can be destroyed or created. Whatever was will be, at least until the far distant future.

The Knight knelt. One of straps fastening his upper leg armour snapped and a hinged plate creaked away from his thigh. The gauntlet collected up a palmful of dirt. Standing, the Knight flung it to the four winds. The grit-flurry descended lightly on Nathan and he shook it from his hair.

Remember the Big Bang was merely the scattering of dust, an amount as surely finite as this. From it arose life; the potentiality of life is greater than the inherent power of the forces that seek to negate it. More than this, Nathan, is the province of philosophers.

Nathan closed his eyes in concentration and said :

"So everything that could have happened does happen somewhere, has happened and will happen again, almost forever and forever. And Death is there wherever things are alive but life is stronger. But you wouldn't want to live forever, though, 'cos that's a long time".

The Knight nodded, then motioned for Death to approach.

A word was upon Nathan's tongue, the same image insistently crowding his mind a moment later:

"Our frog," he said.

At these words, Death brought up his hand and the tendrils of bone unfurled from the palm. The frog lay there and a flush of relief came upon the boy as he noted the steady pulse of its breath.

"So he will be in space forever now? Until the very end of time?"

The Knight nodded.

"I don't want that," Nathan said. The enormity of his words hit him and he flashed a stern look at Death. His voice shook.

"But you can't kill him. Not 'til I say you can."

A new page appeared.

_Remember the alternative,_ read the first sentence.

Tears overtook Nathan now.

"I know, I know!" he cried with a volume that surprised him.

He snuffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve. He had to look away, seeking something in the horizon that was familiar. A column of dust was at the sky's verge, its top-wisp turning to fire where the sun lanced at it. He turned back and sternly asked Death:

"Is the frog a toy you just like to torture? Like burning a bug with a magnifying glass?"

The figure gave no acknowledgment. The book whisked again.

We come to it now, Nathan. Our conversation is almost at an end.

Nathan looked at the Knight and controlled a fresh venting of tears.

"Okay," he said, and squinted at the dust-thing again. He could not bring himself to look at the book now; his glance downward was an act of will.

Death is merely entropy; the elements that resided together briefly to constitute you dissipating, awaiting new destinies, new forms.

"Until they all fade away too, one day," said Nathan.

Another tremor, with greater strength this time. A page flipped.

In a timeframe so vast, we need not fear it.

"Unless you lived forever."

Nathan saw then that only a couple of leaves remained. The crab relinquished another.

_Yes,_ it read.

"But this place, the Plain of Weapons, why would he make all this up?" said Nathan.

The final page flipped.

_This work is mine alone,_ it read. _Death wants nothing._

Nathan saw that a single sentence remained. He motioned for Death to hand the frog to him; a whisk of cold ivory against his palm along with the amphibian.

The boy recoiled and then smiled; thinking: _touched by Death again._

When he looked back, the Knight was nowhere to be seen. As he sought him in all directions, the boy's scanning eyes found that the dust-cloud was much closer now. There was nothing in the barrenness that might lend the thing a true scale, but Nathan could see it was skyscraper-high. It soon filled his entire field of vision.

A monstrous panoply of steel and brass was all he could discern through the clearing bank, a vertical machine-face whose far battlements and eyries were rimed with cloud.

Nathan was startled by the repetition of his name through loudspeakers. A patch of flame leapt from hand to his forehead. This seemed the precursor of a targeting beam, as the ray widened to the width of a telephone pole.

This light arced down from a crane-frond hundreds of metres above. This limb of burnished metal had a thousand siblings, Nathan saw. Some were obviously weapons platforms, forested with howitzer barrels or rocket tubes. Still others were great spheres shiny-clad in a livery of blades.

_It's like the Plain of Weapons_ , thought Nathan, _only attached to some Godzilla robot of doom that would dwarf a mountain._

Indeed, whether the machine relied on wheels or legs for locomotion was impossible to determine. The very structure was in-cognizant; bound to morphology in flux. Once you caught the upswing of a lever or ratchet, its motion was soon lost in the swirling miasma of steel and brass, not to be seen again.

The boy thought at once of M.C. Escher, whose etchings adorned Scott's wall. Nathan had heard that Escher's absurdly tyrannical perspective was impossible to replicate inside a computer.

Such counter-intuitive physics were the preserve of human perception alone.

Nathan liked that. There was a world that could never be quantised away, ever outlaw to the pitiful dictates of reason. It was an affirmation.

The targeting laser swept from him. A roar of discharging cannon; the insistent shove of displaced air as the shockwave of an explosion rearwards came upon him. The amplifier crackled to life.

"Got the bastard!" shouted Jeremy.

Ian's rueful voice came through the speakers.

"A railgun shot would have been better."

"Same difference," said Jeremy.

Nathan rose up, borne insistently skywards by pressure at both soles. He avoided over-studying the structure. Stuttering bursts of shadow played at his closed eyelids. Intermittently, his nose was enfolded by pungent shoals of kerosene and cordite. The boy opened his eyes.

His friends sat in a globular turret high up in the leviathan's midsection. Constructed from ironwork in wicker-basket fashion, they sat recumbent at a bank of levers, buttons and joysticks. Each toggle was labelled in ominous shades of red and black. A section of the canopy warped into itself like a slow splaying of spider's legs. Nathan stepped through the resulting aperture.

"I wanted a door with explosive bolts there, but I was outvoted," said Ian.

Nathan pointed out that there would be three people needed to cast votes.

"Well," said Jeremy sheepishly, "we use Death, but he doesn't really make any decisions on anything. In fact, mostly he just stands around and we guess what he's thinking."

"What was it you guys were shooting at?" asked Nathan.

Ian touched a pane beside his helmet, the bubble-visor of which dissipated like a swarm of bees in the wind.

Jeremy began to explain this marvel, but Ian cut him off excitedly.

"That target you set up for us. The Knight."

Nathan sat down. A part of him had known this as soon as the gun had fired.

"It was a ..." Ian stopped speaking and looked at Jeremy.

Jeremy's visor strobed a jolly roger in chunky digitised blocks.

"Standard H.E. warhead loadout."

Ian drew a revolver from a chest holster and aimed to Nathan's side. Pulling of the trigger resulted in a report scarcely louder than a handclap. An impish wisp of flame vented from the barrel. Nathan stifled a laugh. Ian pointed at the plain below. A mushroom cloud the size of a tennis court boiled up blackly from a distant hill.

Jeremy's voice was high with excitement.

"Ian's gun is firing thermobaric submunitions, approximating 5 kg's of R.D.X."

Nathan nodded and forced his eyes down below to the site of the initial blast.

"He gives us anything we ask for, Nathan," said Jeremy, "and we don't even have to ask him, really. You just have to wish for it in your heart and it arrives. Like in a game."

A tactical bomber appeared above Ian's head, aligned vertically, and to Nathan's astonishment its steely tonnage actually dangled, massive tailfins trailing to and fro at the wind's touch. Its means of suspension was lost to sight; the cupola was engulfed with the smell of aviation fuel. The boy's leviathan sank slowly forward, with an aperture forming in its upper heights. Coated with fighter jets, its maw widened and consumed the bomber whole.

Nathan shivered, for this projection of metal had obscured the sun.

"I want to see the blast zone down there," said Nathan. "Can you put me down?"

Jeremy laughed.

"Just jump down," he said. "You'll float there."

Ian shook his head vehemently.

"It's better training if you create a drop-pod or something."

Jeremy considered this for a moment.

"Let Nathan decide," he said.

Nathan declared that floating would be best, perhaps with a disc of metal to support his feet. This was duly provided, and the boy gingerly stepped onto the elevator. The quadrant of the machine his descent traversed seemed devoted to close combat.

A pair of hammers, their grey faces dwarfing the boy many times over, drew slow passes above and below him. A thrumming rumble preceded the passage of these monsters. A wake of steam and oil-vapour trailed thinly behind.

Finally Nathan alighted the disc and walked down towards the blast site. At any moment he expected the deployment of some folly of Ian and Jeremy's to dance before him; a napalm-puppet or tank-baby.

Nathan reached the impact zone. Fires blazed yet in the craters there. His friends appeared atop the opposing rim.

"Absolute devastation," beamed Jeremy. "Just the way we like it."

A flash of metal to Nathan's right; the book slid lightly from the smoke towards the trio. To Nathan's disappointment, the covers were bound tightly shut.

Ian snorted with glee and drew his pistol. Jumping between Ian and the book, Nathan yelled for his friend to hold fire.

"Do you want to play a skeet game?" Ian asked. "We can take turns trying to shoot it."

Nathan shook his head.

"I don't control the book," he explained.

Jeremy motioned for Ian to lower his weapon.

"Of course you do. Death doesn't move it around because he can't. Death..." The tone became scornful, _"Is_ nothing." At his behest, Death appeared. Jeremy ordered him to bow, and the skeleton obliged.

Jeremy winked at Nathan and twirled his ankle beneath a raised knee in a cartoon wind-up for a kick.

"Don't," pleaded Nathan. Jeremy's tone was quizzical.

"I've done worse than that to him, Nathan. When we worked the whole thing out, Ian and I spent a whole day firing everything we could think of at him."

Ian holstered his gun, nodded and said:

"Including a .50 cal like Blackie's."

"He doesn't do _anythin_ g," Jeremy said.

"Well just because we can do things to him, that's no reason to" argued Nathan. "We're not Paul Forster."

"Death isn't us either, Nathan." Jeremy knelt and scratched the back of his head. He drew a hunting knife from a scabbard by his shoulder and creased a pattern in the dirt.

"He's a servant. We're the rulers here." He looked up and smiled broadly. "We can do _anything_ we want!"

Nathan said nothing and picked up the book. It had been partially caught in the explosion, he saw. One of the crab's claws was dented, coated in soot.

Nathan used an edge of his T-shirt to smear the grime away, half-expecting the thing to snap open in his hands. What would be written on that final page? Nathan knew now that the Knight was no manifestation of Death.

"Lunch," said Jeremy. "We'll talk about it over lunch."

"Let's have it up in the galley," suggested Ian.

"But off course," replied Jeremy with a smile. He motioned them to look upwards.

Bright shards of silver fell on them - an inundation of Samurai swords. Nathan flinched as they lanced towards his face. He felt an instant's wisping of blade through his hair, then a pandemonium of clattering steel around him. Formed next to the trio was a bowl of blades. Each weapon was so snugly fitted to its neighbour that the boys could safely walk upon them without fear of laceration.

"Ian likes... fantasy stuff," said Jeremy. "Bronze lions with claws of fire, that kind of thing."

Nathan nodded.

"For me, each object has to be based in reality," Jeremy continued.

_Grounded in reality,_ came to Nathan immediately, but he refrained from correcting his friend as he might have once have done.

Ian clapped his hands regally. The sword-bowl rose at an elevator's pace. Looking over the side, Nathan spied Death receding rapidly below, obscured a moment later as the wind placed a thick strand of smoke below their conveyance.

_This should be one of the greatest things that ever happened to us,_ thought Nathan. _To be inside the greatest game that could ever be._

As they ascended, Ian and Jeremy fired a giant crossbow now anchored to the vessel's wall at a helicopter shadowing their progress. Ian's shot pierced something vital within the machine and it collapsed to spiralling flame.

"Can you make live things?" asked Nathan.

Ian and Jeremy shook their heads.

"No, only machines," said Ian.

"I have done androids which look exactly like people," said Jeremy. "A more refined version of the Knight you had constructed."

Another helicopter wavered into his sight-line, and he slapped down the crossbow's firing lever.

"It's a shame we didn't leave you alone for longer. Eventually you would've made a war machine like ours. But you still can, of course."

Ian hopped up and down with excitement.

"Yes!" he exclaimed. "We'll have a battle then!"

Nathan wiped away tears, no longer able to deny the certainty that his friends had killed the Knight. Death's servitude was no guarantee against their predations; their limitless capacity for destruction. Death held no fealty in this place.

"Paradox," muttered the boy, and smiled. He looked up. The War Machine still confounded Nathan's reason. It could only be comprehended in scant glimpses entirely proportionate to his disbelief, never in its totality.

A blister of iron upon the thing's side split apart to admit their sword-craft. Nathan was grateful to be in sudden darkness, for his tears could now flow undetected.

They entered an enormous internal bunker, with vision slits admitting weak bars of light from the machine's exterior. Checker-plate was the dominant furnishing, stamped sheets of which constituted decking, tables and chairs. A meal of shakes, burgers and fries sat before them. Jeremy admonished Ian for bringing weapons into a "designated mess area." Chastened, Ian dutifully removed his sidearm.

The boys ate. Nathan noted that the war machine defied understanding. Jeremy smiled.

"It is a collection of ideas we gave to Death, but without a ..." - there was a long pause - "unifying concept. At any time it's a robot, a giant, a truck or a plane ... And of course it's none of these things."

Nathan thought it sounded a lot like Superposition, and said so.

"That's exactly right," said Jeremy. "It exists in all possible states simultaneously, but when you look at it, it commits to a single form."

"It rules!" said Ian loudly.

The boys finished their meal, then Nathan spoke. He told them of the Knight, the book and the Ancestral Hall. When he concluded, his friends were wide-eyed. Jeremy spoke first:

"A time machine!" he cried. "We can get Death to make one and then go back and change everything!"

Anger overcame Nathan.

"I don't care about a time machine, I really don't. We killed him, Jeremy. He was trying to tell us something really important and now he's dead."

"Collateral damage," said Ian. "He was in the way of our guns."

Jeremy adopted his Field-Marshall's voice:

"A spot of friendly fire, old boy."

Nathan ignored them.

"You two should have waited. Not everything has to be a target or an enemy." The boy stabbed a pickle extracted from his burger with a straw.

"Now he's dead, and we'll never know why he was here."

Jeremy pushed a button and the tables receded into the deck-plate with a hum, taking the remains of their meal with it.

"I'm sorry he's Dead, Nathan," said Jeremy. "But we didn't mean to do it."

Ian effusively re-stated Jeremy's plan for a time machine.

_"No,"_ stated Nathan firmly. "Definitely _not_. We need to work out why the Knight was here ... and what the book meant."

A pressure in his frontal lobes.

_How did we go from a frog to war machines?_ He wondered.

A vision consumed him: A teacher of gargantuan size peeling the side off their vehicle and plucking them from their seats, her breath a scald-blast of chalk fumes and retribution. He noticed Jeremy speaking again:

"- Crusades, 100 Years War, Diem Bien Phu, the invasion of Normandy!" His friend relayed this litany of conflagration as if imparting flavours of bubblegum. Nathan closed his eyes and spoke.

"We won't do time machines. We won't see wars. We'll hunt for the Knight's book and work that ... paradox out."

Jeremy smiled.

"The Knight and the book were enigmas, not paradoxes."

Nathan ignored this and tried to speak again, but Jeremy spoke over him.

"We have the greatest gift anyone has ever had, Nathan. Endless power to create. Power over Death himself -"

Ian broke in.

"The Knight may have been our enemy all along, just using you as bait to lure us in."

Nathan sighed in exasperation.

"This wasn't a trap. He was ... instructing me somehow."

"Or distracting you with that hall and stuff" suggested Jeremy. "Perhaps it was all some sick game of his. Anyway, we'll never know, now."

Jeremy seemed satisfied that his earlier apology was ameliorated by the concept of the Knight as potential aggressor.

"Pre-emptive strike," muttered Ian.

Nathan's headache seeped further into his skull.

"We need to stop this. Stop making things and ordering Death around. Just until we've worked it all out."

"No, Nathan" said Jeremy. "I can't stop. But I also won't stop you doing what you need to do, either. We won't end up like Lord of the Flies."

Ian exploded into laughter. Nathan smiled too.

"It's obvious," continued Jeremy, "That there's plenty of Death to go around. That is, he's omnipresent here."

It came to Nathan that this was true in the real world also. Then a moment of imploding vacuum; a crystal balloon at sea-bottom.

They're going to leave me.

He looked to the vision slit opposite, felt the first of his tears come, then a whisper upon his lips:

"We have to stay together."

Ian retrieved his pistol and spun it gunslinger-style on his index finger.

"It's just playing," said Jeremy. "Just like on the hill, Nathan. Don't be sad. You play your way and we'll play ours."

Nathan cried freely now.

"We weren't lead here to play. I don't know why we're here but that's not it."

Ian touched his shoulder. His eyes were rimmed with moisture.

"We crashed the blackbird planes into each other," Ian said reverentially. "It sounded like a million refrigerators falling down a million flights of stairs."

"No," said Nathan firmly. "I can't, Ian. We are in this place for a reason; I know that now."

Silence between them. Jeremy popped a hatch and produced a box of tissues tinged in olive drab. He smiled broadly.

"What if we left, Nathan, and could never come back? Think of all we would have missed!"

There was awe in his eyes. Ian discarded his tissues on the grating at their feet. With a hiss, the square of mesh widened and devoured it. Nathan had by now staunched the flow from his eyes.

"Can we see outside?" the boy said. "I want to feel the sun on my face."

Jeremy nodded. The vast bulkhead comprising the wall before them blew outwards with a concussive blast.

"Explosive bolts!" beamed Ian.

Nathan edged towards the aperture. A railing of post and chain sprang from the gulf's edge. The window framed a sloping flank of black steel. Nathan saw that across this sombre façade streamed many cascades of silver, each comprised of thousands of metallic pieces.

"Pistol rivers," said Ian proudly. "Those are all unloaded though," he added, seeing Nathan's look of concern.

"There is one around the other side made of tanks," said Jeremy. "World War 2 Shermans. They look beautiful when the morning sun hits them."

Nathan imagined ranks of knightly armour flowing down the slope. The thought gladdened his heart for some reason. While his friends fired grenade launchers into the gun-stream, great turbines screamed in voices high and pure. Not far from the boys, a wayward crank from some vast engine-room beneath punched its bus-length of greasy iron through the armour plate. Steam vented forth with every whining revolution.

Ian clapped his hands in joy. Jeremy's eyes were shut against the wind, a lock of hair stirring to life upon his forehead. Via Death, the boy had command of the very heavens, for the sun fell prey to a swift-closing moon. Nathan closed his eyes too.

_They are going to leave me,_ he thought again. _And the mystery of the book and the Knight will be mine alone_ – he opened his eyes - _and Death's._

They retired to a bunkroom again adorned liberally in checker-plate The boys played video games. Ian and Jeremy talked incessantly about the war-machine and their planned modifications. Death would provide them with another, it was decided, an identically fitted out creation with which to wage a battle.

"It'll be _awesome,"_ mused Ian. "You can watch from a distance if you don't want to join in."

Nathan shook his head.

"I need to do some things tomorrow," he said.

Jeremy looked up from his game.

"There's nothing else to do here. The Knight is gone, Nathan, you can't bring him back."

Ian began to describe a time machine again and Nathan glared at him.

"Just some things," he said firmly.

A plan was forming in his mind.

The machine started forward from Jeremy or Ian's unspoken command. Ian motioned for Nathan to look groundward; they entered the outskirts of a city. Cars and buses streamed up the boulevards before them. Nathan saw tiny figures scattering at their approach and looked to Jeremy.

"Androids," assured Jeremy.

Cannon-fire burst to life from the batteries at their feet. Each retort shimmered the decking and wafted hair across the trio's faces. The rolling barrage focussed on a skyscraper in their path; its face of smooth glass was now put to fire and the spattering impacts of smaller calibre shells.

The firing pleased Nathan. His friends would never leave this place, that much was clear now. Ian and Jeremy were too much in thrall to weapons and war-play. That Death's servitude might be fickle was of no consequence to them, he saw that clearly. The unfettered devastation they now bore was its own reward.

"Check this out!" yelled Ian, and a gantry bristling with high-energy lasers arched out from the colossus' spine.

The boy swept his hand downward dramatically and the barrels opened up. A pre-lightning smell of ionised air swept over them. Nathan saw a car swerving madly to avoid the strobing beams before a direct hit vaporised its front section.

Jeremy clapped his friend on the back and congratulated him. The pair looked to gauge Nathan's reaction, but he was gone.

Nathan had Death create a vault within the war-machine proof against all attempts at outside detection. He sat there and summoned the skeleton before him.

"Death," said Nathan, "You will take us back to the world of living things and never serve us again." This seemed too inconsequential, somehow. The boy reconsidered, said:

"I... will _release_ you from our service."

Death again gave no recognition.

"No matter what Jeremy or Ian say, you won't listen to them. I am your new and only master."

There was nothing. A fearful thought struck Nathan: _What if this was no contract at all? What if Death's fealty to his friends remained, and they exacted a swift and terrible revenge upon him?_

"You'll make them sleep first, a real deep sleep. Then we'll go back to the world and you'll leave us alone."

Nathan looked to the ground.

"Tonight," he said firmly.

For the remainder of the day, Nathan heard Ian and Jeremy engaged in another weapons test. Even in this chamber separated by a city block's worth of the War Machine's hide, the detonations shifted the floor beneath Nathan's feet. Eventually, the sounds ceased; his friends had gone to sleep. Nathan waited until he was sure of this and rose from his bunk bed.

"Now, Death," he whispered. "Take us back."

There was no sudden lurch in reality, no gaudy tearing of the fabric of space-time. The innards of the war-machine merely faded away to nothing. Nathan had seen this type of effect so often in TV and in movies it seemed not surprising at all; expected, somehow.

The trio were in a clearing near their trenches. Jeremy and Ian lay sleeping upon pine needles. Death approached and held out his claw.

Nathan smiled.

"It's our frog, isn't it?" he said.

Again, the bone-spider unclasped and the amphibian revealed. Nathan gingerly retrieved it.

"Now leave us," he commanded. He attempted the portentous tones of a narrator in a documentary, but found his voice frail.

Nathan checked Ian and Jeremy, ensured no anthill might disperse a horde upon them. They were indeed deeply in slumber. A weak squall quavered through the branches; his friends' clothes stirred at the wind's touch. He knew instinctively this was the same afternoon of their departure.

Nathan ran to his bike and rode. He felt only elation and the gathering press of air at his face when his cycle found the hill's arc. _No going back now,_ he thought. _No more war machines and Death._

A thrill of anticipation down his back, an imagined renewal of Death's allegiance to Jeremy and Ian, a cyclone of bayonets threshing with wrathful haste through the pine trees above and behind him.

There was nothing, of course; just the flurr of his spokes in the wind. His ride home was without incident. He dropped his bike next to the back door, pushed past the fly-screen, found his bed and fell at once into a dreamless sleep.

Nathan awoke the next day to Scott's insistent push of an action figure into the back of his head.

His brother proffered the phone.

"It's Jeremy, your little buddy," he said.

Nathan gulped and took the phone.

Jeremy was despondent, explaining how Death had abandoned them in the forest. A consoling rush of feeling accompanied Nathan's realisation that his duplicity had been undetected.

He suffused his voice with false regret.

"I know," Nathan said. _"It sucks."_

Jeremy said that he and Ian were returning to their position and commanding Death to take them back.

"Maybe he grew tired of us," suggested Nathan. "Like we played with him but he just got bored."

Jeremy insisted that this could not be the case, that the rules of the game were firmly established, irrevocable. He ended their conversation with an enthused description of the improved War Machine they would create as a priority upon their return.

Nathan agreed and hung up. He drew the frog from his pocket and placed it in the centre of his bed. By shifting the blankets up, he could locate it within a furrowed land of canyons and bluffs. It regarded him impassively and blinked.

"We won't go back there and he'll never get you," the boy whispered. "I promise."

Death did not appear for them the next day. From study of Scott's album covers, Nathan knew that a candle-draped pentagram was the most effective means for the speedy invocation of devils, succubi and other occult diaspora; this the boys duly constructed in the backyard.

For the remainder of the afternoon, they sat in the middle of the device. Several hours of improvised chanting produced nothing.

"It's Death, after all," said Ian. "He might need a sacrifice."

Jeremy thought on this.

"He might want the frog," he offered, and turned to Nathan. "Do you still have it?"

Fear welled immediately in Nathan. His liar's voice, however, was smooth and without tremor.

"He took it from me."

Ian jumped up squashed a candle as he rose.

"Of course!" he shouted. "He got what he wanted and then cut us loose!"

Jeremy flashed him a dark look.

"That makes no sense at all," the boy said. "Why not take it from us as soon as he found us? And kill us into the bargain?"

Nathan was intrigued by this thought. He knew now that the lie of the frog would have to be maintained, but his duty to his friends' intellectual inquiry was still one he must honour.

"Because it would be awful to live forever, like the frog was going to do. Maybe Death was trying to tell us that."

"I can't see that at all," said Jeremy, annoyed.

The boys argued for an hour without consensus. Nathan did not mention the Knight or the book. Finally, Ian insisted that they return to combat, in that perhaps if they enacted a battle with suitable ferocity they might once more gain Death's favour.

They fell again to war. Jeremy invoked a penal battalion of last-chancers mounting a suicide charge against their lines. Ian mounted up an automatic grenade launcher; Nathan was responsible for the heavy machine-gun

"I have command of a small search and destroy team," said Jeremy, "And we'll get any stragglers that come inside the wire."

Ian whooped and declared he was mounting a pre-emptive strike on the trees to their front. In spite of his misgivings, Nathan felt his pulse rise at the prospect of play. The coming attack would not recall Death, he knew. He glanced away from his weapon to Jeremy.

_You won't see him again,_ he thought, _at least, not until you die._

This caused him to giggle. Ian threw a pebble in his direction and hissed for operational silence.

"They will send a human wave against us," shouted Jeremy. "Perhaps some light armour. Nathan, I want you to target the cockpit positions and gun mountings."

Nathan yelled back in the affirmative.

"Here they come!" Ian shouted.

Nathan squinted into his gun's sight and spotted figures dashing for cover. He click-clacked the action rearward and ensured the belt was held tight in the breech.

_The sky will lower a little now,_ he thought, _just enough to swallow up the tops of the trees._

He caught movement to his front again and loosed a long burst in that direction. For the first time, Nathan heard not the thump of weapon-fire but his own voice stammering out the retort. The forest retained its serenity. Nathan knew the longed-for transfiguration, where the collective force of their imaginations could will an enemy into being, had failed them.

The boy looked down; his machine-gun was a stick with a roofing nail at one end.

Jeremy lamented:

"This isn't like it was."

Nathan regarded his friends, then loosed the weapon from his hands to skitter over the parapet.

"Let's fill it all in," said Nathan. "Every trench and bunker."

Jeremy looked at the ground and sniffled. Ian stated that perhaps a change of battlefield would help. Nathan shook his head with all the gravitas he could muster. Jeremy wiped his nose with his sleeve and did the same.

They all regarded the fortifications.

"We'll bring back shovels tomorrow," said Jeremy.

Nathan scratched the back of his neck. "It will take a couple of days," he said, "at least."

A turn of fortune this monumental required oath-taking. As Ian and Jeremy believed the frog in Death's possession, the boys spent long in deliberating the most suitable talisman upon which to swear.

"The first trench we ever dug," said Ian.

Jeremy and Nathan agreed. This proto-embrasure had been retained for prosperity, a mere shell-scrape which barely covered their heads. Ian knelt and caught up a fistful of earth. The trio bowed their heads.

Nathan remarked that it was just like the last scene in _They Fought For Freedom,_ a war classic on TV. The boys assented. Nathan's vow was half-remembered from this and other movies, a short ode to forgiveness from the ground itself. Ian trailed the grains of dirt upon their sneakers. At the end of this ceremony, Jeremy spoke.

"We'll still play war, of course," he said. "Just not up here again."

The other boys nodded, although they had embraced this truth from the moment their attackers were revealed as wind-tremor in the branches.

They returned the next morning with an assortment of tools and set to work. Nathan waited until the others had commenced their tasks before carefully placing the frog in a tree-fork where it could observe his labours. It did so placidly, eyelids swiping the globed lenses of its eyes from time to time.

There were no games now. A tree split wide by rot caught Nathan's eye behind the frog's perch. Its innards immediately suggested violent rupture from laser fire or -

_No,_ Nathan told himself. _It's just a dead tree._

The day passed quickly. They broke for a brief lunch, silent save for their situation reports. For these, they still used the term "Sector"; Nathan also caught Ian hacking away at a sapling roughly a man's height. Save this incident, the boys' destruction of their playground was a joyless affair.

The tunnel system proved problematic: their re-discovery by another group of kids would be heartbreaking. It was agreed that only the entrances be sealed and the work camouflaged. Ian briefly mentioned Punji pits, but this suggestion was sternly stared down by his friends.

"No-one will ever know this was here," said Nathan.

"What will we do the rest of the Summer?" pondered Ian.

"Global Sniper," said Jeremy.

Global Sniper was a computer game comprising many millions of players all over the world simultaneously doing their utmost to annihilate each other.

Teams of two operated within the game-space: Sniper and Observer. Jeremy was the most skilled shooter, with Nathan and Ian taking turns to act as his second.

The world they traversed was a simulacrum of a small country. Towns, factories, forests and farms were modelled down to such a level that no two of the tens of thousand of dwellings was replicated. Each seemed to have been abandoned by its digital inhabitants only moments previously. In addition, the whole zone was fully and satisfactorily destructible. A bulldozer could be commandeered and driven through a shopping centre, say, with no other object than sustained havoc. Rubble resulting from such mayhem was then able to be re-assembled into hides and firing positions. The mainframe sustaining this illusion was reputed to outsize a school bus and lie beneath a lake of liquid nitrogen.

"Global Sniper" offered a prize of one million dollars for the final surviving team. It was anticipated by the game's publisher that twelve months would suffice for the field of competitors to be winnowed down to this stage. Five years later and the game had yet to end. Clans assembled, with dread oaths exchanged between their initiates: to hunt down their opposition, then dissolve in internecine fighting from which the rightful victor would emerge.

The boys had tracked and slain just such a coven to their last member. They spurned group-play; it seemed another manifestation of the eternal bully. They had even defended other "lone wolves" from the predation of Clans and slunk off into the digital night.

Ian agreed to this immediately. Nathan did so too, knowing it to be a lie. All he wanted was to retrieve the frog and go home, perhaps engage Scott in a samurai battle. He had no desire to see his friends for a while. He needed only to reflect upon their shared adventure to shake the memories of the Knight and Paradox.

The Summer passed quickly. Nathan did play Global Sniper, in the end, making a few desultory kills with Ian's aid that gave him no joy. Once, he almost stayed his hand, hovering the crosshairs upon an enemy's face overlong.

"Take the shot," hissed Ian.

Jeremy was calmer, adding that they had watched this hide all afternoon and their patience would be for nothing.

Just before the head was lost to the gloom of the bunker, Nathan tapped the mouse. Red and black pixels showered wide and a rousing burst of martial music played. Ian clapped him on the back.

"A fine trophy, my boy," said Jeremy in the Field Marshall's voice. "Jolly good show."

Nathan nodded, and hit the "Tab" button on his keyboard.

**Team Ranked 4,563rd of 1,243,823**.

As the boys watched, the "3" in "4,563" became a 2 and then a 1 a moment later.

"We've beaten most of the kids from school," said Ian with audible pride.

"Scott said if we got to 4,000th he'd buy us all pizza," said Nathan.

There was a tactical debrief. Jeremy gave the team his observations, including a critique of a passage of play where Nathan had crouch-run across a slagheap.

"It set up the shot, but was risky," said Jeremy.

"It was a risk worth taking," offered Nathan. It was, of course, a clichéd riposte from a movie; the surly sergeant defending his reckless one-man assault on a German pillbox.

Jeremy slapped his thigh for effect.

"We're a team, Nathan. We should act like one."

Nathan had the peculiar feeling of curiosity alloyed with anger's molten flow: _What film had featured this particular exchange?_

Jeremy began to speak again, and there was something about the turn of his mouth, the way his words fell upon his ears like wasps.

"Shut up," he told his friend. "Stop telling me what to do."

Jeremy began to talk and his Nathan was upon him, both boys crashing to the carpet. Nathan pinned his friend's arms; fixed Ian to his chair with a blood-thick stare.

"The Doomed Battalion," said Nathan triumphantly.

Jeremy snuffled away tears.

"That part in The Doomed Battalion," he continued, "Where they come back from the raid."

Ian nodded, saying:

"Just after he takes out the MG-42 nest."

Jeremy said that his arms were hurting. Nathan made his friend promise to forswear all retribution before he would release him. Ian stepped in to broker the peace. The negotiations were brief, and included the removal of all nearby weapons of opportunity, should tempers re-ignite.

Finally, Jeremy was freed.

"I'm not apologizing for that," said Nathan. "Not ever."

Jeremy was defiant, arguing that this was the type of act that ended combat teams, the dissolution of trust into bickering and recrimination.

"You killed the Knight!" shouted Nathan. "You didn't wait or check with me, you just killed him. For real, Jeremy, not like in Global Sniper."

"Was it a man? Or was it just some slave-monster of Death's?" asked Jeremy.

"We'll never know," said Ian sagely.

Nathan saw now that the duo stood literally side by side. He wanted to reveal his secret, his awful duplicity in the removal from the realm of Death, but found he could not.

"I'm not friends with you guys any more," said the boy finally.

He had seen a movie where a kid was trapped under ice, fists banging impotently against that glassy ceiling as the current grabbed his ankles. A frigid barrier constrained his feelings at this second no less effectively; this time there were no tears. A second image came to him of the frog with its front digits balled into a tiny fist slamming the ice, and he giggled.

Apparently this sound convinced his friends of impending violence and shied away. Nathan felt immediately stronger and he affected more laughter.

"Leave me alone," he said. "We're done."

Jeremy nodded.

"We're not enemies, though," said Ian hopefully.

"No," said Nathan. "Not enemies. Just never friends again."

Jeremy and Ian nodded. After they left, Nathan sat down and walked their sniper into the wasteland. He ran around in circles, jumping, until he caught the attention of another marksman who cast him down.

At home that evening he drew a map of the Land of Death and a short history of everything he could remember. He kept this in a box under his bed next to the frog's home, a disused aquarium filled with moss and rocks. At night he left the animal to roam his room.

Every morning he found the frog sitting exactly where he had left it.

That year passed. Their schism was resolute, yet bereft of the enmity that might have salved the incident in their collective memory and re-cast it as mere childish spat. Nathan kept thoughts of the Knight close when rapprochement threatened. This lent his refusals gravitas far beyond his years. Nathan made every spurned détente a minor victory, the Knight's Revenge, as he increasingly thought of it.

Nathan's father found a well-paying job just after Christmas and he and Scott moved interstate.

For his Art project in the final year of high school, Nathan constructed an intricate replica of the clockwork book. He could not bring himself to repeat any of the Knight's words in text, and told all who asked this was a copy of an obscure medieval tome dealing with sea monsters. He drew pages and pages of nonsense Latin in narrow gothic script, interrupted here and there with a diagram of a kraken or mermaid.

He loved the way the book delighted children at a public showing, the crab's steady reveal speaking to them in a way adults seemed oblivious to. Several collectors showed interest, but Nathan could not bring himself to part with it.

The boys grew and made their way in the world as men.

Their next meeting was at a school reunion many years hence. Nathan drove there with the frog placed on his dashboard.

"They'll have forgotten you, I bet," he told it.

Nathan often imagined that the frog was the embodiment of a universal consciousness. Other times, such as when he fished it oven-hot from a tumble-dried jeans pocket, he thought it merely unkillable as he had declared so long ago. At these times, he imagined its stoic stare was the auto-response of neurons long since scoured of any evolutionary purpose; the Knight's depiction of endless life as an interminably serene hell.

At the night's end, the trio drifted to a deck overlooking the darkened bay below. Their earlier meeting was neither strained nor joyous. They had already made the proscribed summation of the past twenty-five years. Ian and Jeremy had kept in contact, thus the axis seemed firmly on Nathan.

"Not much to say, really," he said.

This was not true, of course, but he found himself not at all ebullient. The frog now sat in his suit jacket and seemed to twitch sporadically. After a while, Nathan imagined Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart", that to describe his wife and daughter might provoke the animal suitably to tear free from his pocket in a discomfited frenzy.

So now they sat and drank. A table-umbrella leaned on the glass window folded against the night wind. Nathan imagined casting the frog to the deck, gaining the distance in a bound and spinning the thing above his head like a samurai wielding a spear. They would quail before him as he suspended the umbrella a moment in Kabuki stillness. Only then would he drive it down to slide ineffectually from the frog's hide. Instead, he put his drink down.

"Well guys," said Jeremy, "Anyone seen anything in the last 20 years to top that?"

The others laughed. Ian clinked some cubes about in his scotch.

"Did it really happen? I wonder sometimes," he mused.

Jeremy leaned forward.

"A collective hallucination? Where we were all in the same place at the same time meeting Death and driving killer robots?" snorted Jeremy. "It happened, but to this day I have no idea why."

"It was something to do with the Knight," offered Nathan.

His friends were nonplussed. Nathan excused himself, went to the bar inside and freshened his drink, then returned and told them about the Knight, the Ancestral Hall, the book with their conversation already written and as much as he could remember about it. As he finished, Ian nodded vigorously.

"I don't care, Nathan," said Jeremy. "It's just the memory of a dream now."

Ian bade Nathan to tell him more, but Jeremy cut him off.

"I don't want to revisit that place, even in my imagination," he said.

"Nathan has another piece of the puzzle," said Ian. "He got to see something we didn't. I owe it to that boy I once was to find out."

Jeremy drained his beer. "I don't need embellishment. I don't seek a greater understanding because I don't think there's any to be had."

"So it stands as the defining event of your life and you _don't seek greater understanding?"_

Nathan could not help coating his last words in sarcasm.

"That's my choice," said Jeremy flatly.

"Not mine," Ian enthused.

"Hear me out, Jeremy," said Nathan. "Just for a little while."

He looked to the bay.

"The Knight didn't talk to me. I don't think I ever told you guys that. He had a book which released a page every time he wanted to speak."

"Like a kind of sign language?" asked Ian.

"No. This was his every response to our conversation, all pre-written."

"I'd say that was impossible... " Jeremy let the sentence die within his smile.

"He told me about Laplace's Demon, which is a creature that knew the position of everything at a set point in time, then could work out what would happen forever."

"Except quantum states make that impossible," countered Jeremy.

"Hold up," said Ian. "I don't know anything about quantum states. Speak to me like someone who knows nothing."

Nathan replied that they did anyway, and Ian laughed.

"In quantum states, you can know information like the position or speed of a particle, but not both," said Jeremy. "That is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle."

Ian considered this, then said:

"So you can't predict how things will turn out. I get that. So that makes the book utterly impossible. So why use it? Why not lay everything out by just talking to you?"

"Perhaps the Knight was not alive at all," Nathan replied.

"It all seems elaborate, don't you think?" asked Jeremy, "Just to impart some kind of metaphysical lesson to a child for no apparent reason."

"If we agree that we met Death, which I think we all do, yeah?" – Ian glanced at the others for affirmation as he nodded – "Then the lesson was Death's also. The Knight was part of Death's plan, not a fellow traveller in that place."

Jeremy fluttered his glass upon the table.

"We'll never really know then, will we?" he said. "Unless Death returns –"

"He will, sooner or later," interjected Nathan, smiling.

Jeremy did not smile.

"Unless Death returns in a _non-professional capacity,_ it's all academic now. To reiterate and elaborate: It happened, I don't know why, and don't care to."

"Okay," said Ian. "We've drawn a line in the sand."

Jeremy's tone was just a little more conciliatory now.

"My real point is that I'm not being a victim. I don't want to wonder about that summer for the rest of my life, to plumb its meaning endlessly. I want to get on with my life."

Ian looked at his feet.

"But you can't, can you," he mused. "You see that damn skeleton and the Plain Of Weapons and weep for lost chances, because if you could only return and see Death again you might just be able to tell him to never touch the people you love."

Nathan nodded, thinking he could not have put this better himself.

"It was just so damn cruel," said Jeremy. "That's what I can't excuse. And yeah, it keeps me up some nights."

"I know if I preface something with 'the Knight said' you'll roll your eyes, Jeremy, "Nathan continued, "but he told me that paradox permeates the universe down to a fundamental level."

Jeremy stated that this again was hardly the revelation of the ages, merely what an undergraduate physics student was told.

"I'm not claiming that," said Nathan. "He told me that along a nearly infinite timeline, a nearly infinite number of possibilities will be realised, no matter how unlikely."

"I read that too," snapped Jeremy. "And this wasn't some thought experiment. This was – this is – our lives. There is nothing left for me from that time but confusion and pain."

"Aren't you struck still," said Ian gently, "At the wonder of it all? The veil was drawn aside for us and we saw the world beyond."

"There is nothing beyond," argued Jeremy. "What we saw was an aberration, a bastardry of cruel fates, a canker in space and time."

A pause. Nathan saw that the pair regarded him expectantly. Nathan finished his drink.

"Say that Death found embodiment, that humanity's fear had created a kind of..."

A perfectly ebullient phrase came to him, not one he might have used in any other circumstance save this, with Jeremy's glare upon him:

"... mortal distillate; that the ethereal vapours between stars were receptive to our dread and found... they found quintessence."

Jeremy made a shucking sound with his teeth and shook his head. Ian motioned for Nathan to continue. Nathan did:

"Remember that on a long enough timeline –"

Ian jumped in and completed the maxim for him.

"But you're talking about an absolute state, not the formation of a conscious being," Jeremy countered. "That's like saying the number zero took us away to its magic playland. I don't buy it."

Ian smiled.

"It's a leap, I grant you that," Nathan said. "Anthropically though, it is the only solution."

Ian placed his palms in a 'Time-Out' sign.

"The Anthropic Principle: There may be countless trillions of other universes," Nathan said, "where life can never be, where the fundamental laws of physics there make life impossible. We live in the one where the conditions are right"

Ian said he could understand that.

"There's a line from the Torah," Nathan continued, "talking about demons: _If the eye could see them, no-one could endure them. They surround one on all sides. They are more numerous than humans, each person has a thousand on his left and ten thousand on his right."_

"So it's like Goldilocks," said Ian. "I get it."

"It's different," said Nathan. He began again, but Jeremy jumped in:

"This universe has not come into being because we exist here and can perceive it. We are in this _particular_ world because it _happens_ to be perfect for us. A million tiny variables all aligned to make matter not decay the attosecond after the Big Bang, for example."

Ian looked quizzical. Nathan clarified:

"The common metaphor used is the sea. Imagine you knew nothing about what it might contain, and one day you rowed a boat out and dropped a line. You hook a jellyfish and haul it in. With your limited frame of reference, you surmise then that every inhabitant of the sea must be a jellyfish."

Ian nodded slowly.

"OK. So, there's a universe where Death is a present entity and there's one where he's not. And we happen to live in the one where he is."

"That's it," said Nathan. "Or we are in the one where he evolves. I've thought long and hard about Death all these years, guys. His motivation for becoming our slave was not, I think, to impart a metaphysical -"

"Or maybe the Knight was laughing at us the whole time," Jeremy interjected. He leaned forward.

"It's just a thought exercise, nothing more," he scoffed. "A time-wasting confection following a dinner party. Bostrom's simulation argument is the same deal".

"I've not heard that one either, guys," said Ian, scratching the back of his neck.

Jeremy explained that a culture with enough technology could create a computer simulation so sophisticated, its inhabitants would not be able to distinguish it from reality.

"I've seen that in a dozen movies," said Ian.

"That's right," replied Jeremy. "But the Ancestor Simulation, as it's called, is run not once but _billions_ of times over potentially billions of years. If a simulation is left to run for this long, then it follows that the inhabitants of the simulation would one day make their own simulations. So if you follow the maths down the rabbit hole fully, that is to say, a nearly infinite number of simulations are currently being run and will be so in the future. Therefore the chance of us currently _not_ being in a simulation is as close to nil as to be almost meaningless."

Ian smiled uneasily.

"The computer power to do that ..."

Jeremy rolled his eyes :

"They have an answer for that. Think about how fast computational speeds have increased since -"

"Global Sniper!" Nathan broke his friend's sentence with a laugh.

"Yes, Global Sniper," sighed Jeremy.

"It's a logical extension of the premise about nearly infinite potentialities," murmured Nathan. "Expressed in a different way."

"I like the simulation idea, then," said Ian. "You could imagine that when we saw Death it was like a... Beta version of the program."

Nathan warmed to the idea.

"Or perhaps a programmer got bored one rainy Wednesday afternoon and saw us playing on the hillside and thought we should meet Death," he said. Then, to himself the thought came to him : _And he wrote himself into the simulation as a Knight with a metal-bound book._

Jeremy's annoyance manifested as the steady drumming of his glass against the chair sides.

"As I maintain," he said slowly, "A parlour game. Useless conjecture devoid of relevance to my own life. And not that I really care, but surely not a thought to comfort either of you when he appears in your dreams."

Ian laughed, saying that he never dreamed of Death.

"He is there every damn night!" growled Jeremy. "He is looking for that damn frog, and thinks I have it."

Nathan thought of The Tell Tale Heart again and reached for the frog in his pocket, not really knowing if he would actually produce it, when Jeremy stood suddenly, sweeping his glass to the timber decking.

"This was a mistake," he said.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," said Ian. "You've sought your own answers, we can see that, in science and books. Yet it seems you can't relate to our experience at all."

"You see mysticism and cosmic wonder in it all, Ian, and for that I pity you. But you know what? A part of me almost envies the ignorance that allows you that luxury."

He turned to face Nathan, saying :

"And Nathan, you've chosen some middle ground I find frankly contemptible. You're meekly welcoming the abuse we suffered, yet your knowledge of science should surely have scoured the sentimentality away by now."

In a few seconds he reached the door, shrugging through Nathan's hand where it sought his shoulder.

"Don't try and contact me again," he stated flatly.

With that he was gone; the pair did not follow.

Nathan suggested a return to the main room. There, they freshened their drinks and regarded their former classmates clustering on the dance floor.

"We'll never know, will we," said Ian. "Why us, I mean."

"I don't think so, no," replied Nathan. "A paradox."

Ian asked what he meant.

"Well, to be shown the world beyond, as you say, to command Death itself and then be left to ponder its meaning for the rest of our lives."

"Veterans is what we are," said Ian. "I mean like young men who go off to war and grow old with the defining moment of their lives receding faster and faster, still trying to make sense of it all."

Nathan's next words were said with a smile.

"Apart from the bayoneting and shooting and watching our friends blown up."

"Of course," said Ian wryly. "Apart from that, veterans is _exactly_ what we are."

"I think Jeremy knows he is fooling himself, to deny it all I mean," said Nathan. "We have to deal with it, and –"

A jostling presence to their side; a thick-set man setting up a line of shotglasses.

Ian's eyes narrowed.

_It's Paul Forster,_ thought Nathan immediately. Untouched by the years was the wide set of his eyes, his fleshy nose and cleft chin, features which Nathan had internalised on some primal circuitry of threat. The wine-web flitted from his brain in a second. He found space and time swinging like barges in the wake of his thoughts.

Nathan knew immediately what he would do. He leaned forward and scooped up two of the glasses.

"They have to be for us, don't they?" he said.

Paul looked at him without recognition. Nathan saw multiple realities split away from this instance: Smashing the glasses in the man's face; dropping the drinks and walking away; clasping him close and weeping.

"How've you been, Paul? It's Nathan" – he clapped Ian on the shoulder – "Nathan Strangward."

"Christ, Nathan!" came the man's response, in seeming genuine surprise. "It's lame and I've been saying it all night, but how the hell are you?"

"Good," replied Nathan. "But I'm sure you've been hearing that all night too."

Paul guffawed, there was no other word for it. Nathan had been expecting this; that Paul would not be twirling his moustache and boasting that he now ran a successful business making kitten-hide coats and landmines for the third world.

_They are never the villains we want them to be,_ he thought, _or deserve._

"You made our lives hell, you bastard," said Ian suddenly. "I wanted you to know that."

Ian trembled to such a degree the glass slipped from his fingers and shattered. This cast the dénouement instantly as mere drunkenness; Paul took a step back. Nathan smiled and Ian, dropped his glass in solidarity.

_Oh why not,_ he thought.

"You did, you know. And Paul, I am going to do to you the worse thing I know how to."

"Touch me and you'll be charged," said Paul. "Plus a pair of fucking lawsuits." As he delivered these words, he spread his stance wider and balled his fists by his sides.

"The worst thing I can do is not hit you, it's make you doubt the very foundation of your reality," said Nathan.

He withdrew the frog from his pocket.

"You've seen this before, but I have no doubt you've forgotten it."

Before Paul could reply, Nathan tore the top from his shot glass against the bar edge with a downward swipe, slipped the ruined vessel down against the frog's belly.

"I'm sorry, old friend," he whispered to it.

Paul's reaction was denied Nathan; the arms of his former classmates bound him and he saw only mirror ball spots where they coated the ceiling. One of them told him to shut up; it was only at that moment he was conscious that he was laughing. Nathan closed his eyes and when he opened them again he saw the night sky. The arms released him and he folded to the ground.

"Thank-you, gentlemen," he said. "Let's do this again in another 20 years."

Ian was soon beside him.

"It's all true," he said. "Jeremy can deny it all he wants, but you have proof, Nathan, and –"

Nathan closed his eyes again.

"It was never proof," he said. "Then frog just is. Its unkillability is like a property of the universe itself."

"Maybe so," said Ian. "Jeremy deserves to see it again."

Nathan un-balled his fingers, drew the amphibian to his face and whispered another apology to it.

"He'd science it away. You heard him, he doesn't want mystery. There'll never be an unknowable for him."

Ian chuckled now as he helped his friend up.

"You're right," he said. "That's his choice. On some level I respect... and even understand that."

Nathan looked to the sky. _Those stars,_ he thought, _will twinkle down at me regardless of anything I do or may become, of what atrocity man might visit on man._

"Indifferent serenity," he said.

"The stars?" asked Ian, and craned his own neck skyward.

"Yes," said Nathan. "The stars."

The pair watched them for a while and then left with promises to call each other. Ian and Nathan did talk over the coming years, but their conversation never again broached the metaphysic or the Land of Death. This was not a failing of their collective will or imagination, thought Nathan.

It was paradox again: They could share their experiences with no-one else, yet could no longer with each other. Ian's veteran analogy came back to Nathan: _I don't suppose old soldiers reminisce about the meaning of the machine-gun fire that took their arm and their friend's life,_ he thought. _Or if they do, not with each other._

Yet such simple stoicism eluded Nathan - no matter how desperately he pursued it - and the paradox of this eventuality was not lost on him.

Upon his arrival home, Nathan kissed his wife and daughter. Flashes of the night's events came to him now and then; while pouring a glass of bourbon he saw his hands shook. He sat on the back porch and his wife joined him.

"That wasn't easy, Andrea," he said. "They've all changed so much. Ian was pretty much the only one I could relate to."

As if on cue, the frog jostled in his pocket and he cast his eyes down in shame, for she had no knowledge of the animal or its provenance.

"That's what everyone says," said Andrea, "And it's pretty inevitable when you think about it."

"I couldn't help thinking..." he started, but no further words came. The pair sat in silence for a while.

"What is the point of knowing so much?" he said finally. "I mean in the end it makes no difference whether you understood the workings of the universe or not. You'll still be just as dead."

Andrea took his hand.

"Of course that's true my love," she said, "But most people won't ever work everything out. I don't think we're meant to."

"But you could," Nathan said. "If mankind lives long enough as a species –"

"Humanity," she corrected with a smile.

"On a nearly infinite timeframe..." he could not bring himself to say the rest of it. What had Jeremy said?

" _This isn't some kind of a thought experiment, this is our lives_ ," he whispered.

Andrea said that made no sense. Nathan agreed and sipped his drink.

"You always over-think things, Nathan," she said. "I wish I could take the top off your head and let some of the pressure off."

"That is called trepanning," he said wryly, "And was practised by some ancient cultures as a means to release evil spirits."

She took his hand.

"It's enough for me to be with you tonight," she said. "I'm spiritual and wonder about things, but you can't let it dominate your thinking. Then the here and now will always suffer."

"My love, someone has to be obsessed about it," he said. "I know you don't want me to, you worry about me, but I've been giv-" he stopped.

Andrea pressed his hand to her lips.

"Gifted? Is that what you were about to say?" Andrea teased. "I agree a hundred per cent. You are a perceptive man, Nathan. You see things I never could."

_She should use the past tense there,_ thought Nathan, but said nothing. There was a long pause. Nathan reflected how perfect she was for him, how she respected his silence at times at this, knowing well his propensity to stop mid-conversation when his mind overwhelmed his capacity for expression.

"It's too much sometimes, being perceptive I mean," he said.

Andrea laughed, saying that her appreciation of his talents did not extend to indulgence of them.

"You can't mope around with a brain full of cool stuff," she said. "You have to express it."

Nathan nodded. He instantly pictured a modern art installation comprising a ramp swept by revolving blades down which the frog would be slid, blunting them as it went.

"Death isn't something to fear," said Andrea. "If there's a heaven, do you just sit on a cloud praising God for the rest of eternity? Or is there something else?"

"I think because we're experiential beings - I mean that we only can conceive of what we can experience - it's impossible to imagine what heaven would be like."

"That's a bit of a cop out, isn't it?" said Andrea. "I mean to say that time will somehow have no meaning and there'll just be a cascade of God's love forever or something. Well not for me, I still want to be me, not to give my identity away to be absorbed into some amorphous lump of the grateful dead."

"That's disgusting!" laughed Nathan. "Also kind of cool too. But I know what you mean. It's too horrible to imagine the abyss and too awful to imagine singing Kum-by-yah for eternity as well."

"So I hope there's something else," said Andrea. "And my love, I'm spending the rest of my life worrying if there's not."

Nathan said that they should have a blood-pact to that effect. They talked for a while longer and then went to bed.

Later that night Nathan awoke as if shaken so. Ferment was upon him, his very thoughts like a river of starlings; he could merely grasp at their meaning as they traversed his consciousness. He retrieved the frog and composed himself by the rapid expedient of plunging his face into a laundry sink of night-water. He dusted a towel across his face, only conscious of the car keys in his hand when they brushed his nose. An image spun free of the vortex: their trenches under the Summer sun.

His childhood home was a half hour away, and he submitted to the thought-haze as he drove there, let it descend about the ears like a hedge's cloying leaves might enfold his rising head. Nathan found himself on the site of their trench works. He was ashamed to admit he could not find them; the intervening decades had thrown brambles and ferns up around the trees so thickly that even the moonlight pooling at their branch-tips was no help.

"I don't know where that coal bunker is," he said to the frog. "We'll need to come back."

The words threw the mantle from his brow, and he knew in that moment he intended to drop the frog into that void. He sat and closed his eyes. He wanted to open them and see the Knight there, to walk the traces of their ramparts like the veterans Ian said they were. There was nothing there, of course; Nathan wanted to call for Death also but lost his nerve.

_There's your damn paradox for you,_ Nathan thought, _the bastard will gladly come now, take the frog and me into the bargain and I'll never know why we were chosen, only the abyss-_

He shook the notion free from his head and stood. Their experience, unique as it seemed in the entirety of human existence, was no more a bulwark against mortality as....

_As anything else mankind might do,_ he thought. _Oh Christ, this is really it, isn't it, the billions of people who have lived and are yet to live, all sliding into Death's arms with their last scream or stoic smile or lover's kiss an irrelevance._

The Knight did not appear as Nathan hoped he would then. He imagined the book's gothic font and he laughed, for in his memory he always heard the Knight talk to him. Six words he had committed to memory.

_Thus I call mortality a gift,_ read the page.

"What comfort is that?" he asked the frog, answering himself a moment later that it was absolutely none.

"Of all animals, we are the only ones that appreciate the finality of death, yet our vast perception only really gives us doubt and pain and the need to invent Gods or wonder about damn computer simulations and Multiverses..."

The words ceased. Nathan was aware he was projecting them to the spot where he imagined the Knight might appear.

"You would, you know," he said. "If this were a movie, you'd be right there and you'd reveal Death's great secret and the meaning of the frog to me like a Deus Ex Machina or every good plot device that ever was."

He picked up a rock to toss; even as he grasped it he could hear the ringing collision with the Knight's visor. Finally it fell from his hand. He pocketed the frog and picked his way back down the hill.

The years passed. Andrea and Nathan did not have another child. Their daughter, Jane, grew to be independent and strong of will, and watching this transformation gladdened her parents' hearts immeasurably.

When she was five, her goldfish died, and father and daughter stood regarding the fish solemnly. Nathan had seen this very moment depicted in innumerable books and movies, but still found himself unprepared for his daughter's quiet distress.

"Where will it go now, daddy?" Jane asked. Her bearing was stoic, yet the occasional sniffle still escaped her.

"Well, Death will come and take it," said Nathan. "He comes and gets everything, in the end."

By her intense stare at the goldfish, Nathan surmised she was internalising this fact.

"Can you hide from him? Dig a hole in the ground or... or behind the sun?"

She gently tapped the glass pensively.

"Once," said Nathan, "A frog crawled into the earth so deep and far he was forgotten about by all living things in the world, and eventually even by Death."

Jane's finger ceased its motion.

"Daddy, what happened to the frog?"

Nathan smiled and ruffled his daughter's hair.

"He felt sleepy and it just so happened there was a nice log he found in a cave underground. It must have washed down from a stream in the upper world. He looked inside, and sure enough it was snug and warm. So he crawled inside and went to sleep."

Jane asked what happened next.

"He slept and slept and slept like no frog has ever slept before. After a while, the log turned into coal around him."

"Was Death still looking for him?" asked Jane.

"He sure was. He had never lost anything before, ever. You know how mad you get when you lose one of your toys? Like that time you couldn't find your paint set?"

She nodded sagely.

"A hundred, a thousand times worse. He wasn't mad so much; he was just wanted to find it so bad, like an itch he couldn't scratch."

"Did Death get him in the end?"

Nathan kneeled, and tapped on the glass of the fishbowl.

"Well.... no, he never did," replied Nathan. "Death found the frog, but didn't take him away. He left him here."

Jane's question was why this would be.

"That's a para-" he smiled. "That's a mystery. Maybe Death found he didn't want to take alive things away with him any more. Maybe the frog was so special he found that he couldn't."

"Mummy and you and me are special too," she said while folding her arms. "If he ever comes around here I'll tell him so and he'll _have_ to leave you alone."

Nathan knew a child's logic was immutable.

"Thanks honey" he said, and found his eyes brushed with a skein of tears. "I hope you don't have to do that for a long, long time."

She suggested they get on with burying the goldfish, and Nathan agreed that this was the right thing to do.

Thirty years passed. Then a great sickness befell Nathan, a condition whose terminal nature was revealed to him one Summer afternoon by a doctor young enough to be his son. Nathan nodded as the litany of medical terms were carefully produced: _metastases, genetic therapy, palliative care._

"It could be as long as a year," ventured the doctor.

Nathan looked out the window. Heat scoured the heavens of clouds, save a single tremulous waft of water vapour over the far hills.

"Such a beautiful day," he said. "It seems... inconceivable that news as bad as this can co-exist with that blue sky and that sun."

The doctor mumbled a platitude. Nathan stood and thanked him, saying then:

"What's that line Peter Pan says? _Death must be an awfully great adventure."_

He laughed at this and slapped the table with a palm. The doctor shrank away, no doubt sensing that the diagnosis had awakened in Nathan the beginnings of madness.

"Oh, I don't actually think that's true," said Nathan. "He doesn't do much at all, in fact. To be honest though, I've even missed him. It's been a lot of years. But I don't think he'll have changed much."

As soon as he said it, Nathan appreciated the absurdity of the statement. He shook his head.

"I've pushed that stuff so far down that I had almost forgotten it all. Life just got in the way, you know? Now at the end I'm finally going to see him again. And that will kind of be an adventure."

The doctor had by now vacated his desk and was at the door, opening it wide.

That afternoon, he told his wife and daughter. Amongst the tears, Nathan found his secret imbuing him with an increasing sense of guilt.

_I feel sad for them rather than with them,_ he thought. _My own impending death fills me with nothing but anticipation, God help me, and I can't share their dread._

He sat with Andrea and Jane until late that night.

"I've had a good life," Nathan said. "I couldn't have wished for anything more."

Jane leaned across the table and squeezed his hand.

"Don't talk like it's over," she said.

He covered her hand with his.

"Of course it's not," Nathan said. "I just have no regrets, that's all. You were the thing I was proudest of..." Her sudden crying stopped him, and his own eyes ran wet.

He leant forward and gathered his family into his arms, and they stayed like that for a good while.

Several months passed, and Nathan's deterioration was imperceptible but no less assured. One afternoon he had too much morphine and awoke from an opiate-haze to Andrea's insistent shaking. When he recovered, she revealed that he had told her to leave when Death came for him.

"I'm not going anywhere," Andrea said. "If he wants you, he'll have to get through me first."

"My love, we have history," he said, knowing that she would regard this as the befuddlement of the morphine. "We're old friends, he and I."

She kissed his forehead and told him to sleep.

Autumn came, and Nathan took to sitting on the back porch with Andrea as was their custom, talking for long hours. One afternoon, he sat alone; from the kitchen he could hear Andrea singing as she prepared their lunch. With the stilling of the wind, Nathan of conscious of how much he was waiting for the cadence of Death's approach, the thrumming footfalls that had preceded his first appearance so many years ago.

A clutch of birds flitted from branch to branch among the trees. Nathan marvelled at how they moved seemingly as one organism.

What's that behaviour in animals called, I wonder?

He followed the birds as they ascended the trunks until they were lost to him in the play of leaf and light.

A board creaked at the far end of the porch. Nathan shut his eyes, turned towards the sound, and when he looked again, he saw him there, just as he knew he would.

"Don't let her see you," Nathan said in a stern tone. "I don't command you anymore, but I think you owe me that much."

Andrea's singing faltered; Nathan knew how much she loved this song, but she struggled with the lyrics of the second verse. He wanted to give her the words, as he was accustomed to, but found he could not.

Death walked towards him. Nathan fished the frog from a pocket and placed it over his heart. His voice broke, then he continued in a whisper.

"You need to take it with you too," he said. "You hear me? Don't you leave him here."

The finger-bones reached for Nathan; he closed his eyes. At his breast, the frog pulsed its legs once and was still.

Inside, Andrea heard her husband speak briefly then give a small laugh.

_That damn morphine,_ she thought. _He's lucid now but they still need to adjust the dose down._

She finished making their lunch and went to him. Nathan sat with his head slumped slightly forward as if in sleep. That laughter's moment was at play yet in his mouth and face, but he breathed no more.

Andrea knelt beside her husband and wept.

At the end of Nathan's funeral, Jeremy and Ian approached her. For the entirety of the proceedings they had sat separately and in silence at the rear of the hall. They made their introductions and then Jeremy spoke quickly:

"I need to know about a frog. Did he ever mention one or have one as a pet?"

Andrea said that he had owned pet frogs all his life, and was holding his favourite one when he died. Ian laughed, and quickly apologised.

"There's no need," she said, "Although you need to tell me why that would be funny to you."

"That wasn't many different frogs, but the same one," he said.

"We found it together," Jeremy said, "A very special frog that couldn't be killed."

"Was it... was it dead when you found him?" asked Ian.

"As dead as Nathan was," said Andrea. "In fact, it's in his casket, I slipped it into his top pocket at the funeral home."

"Were you sure it was dead?" said Jeremy. "Not sleeping?"

She shook her head.

"Dead," she said.

Ian and Jeremy both breathed deeply, as astronauts might when the portal of their sea-tossed capsule was removed and gusting air filled their lungs for the first time in an age. Ian wiped his eyes. Jeremy moved away from them to the coffin and regarded it for a long while.

Then, as Andrea and Ian watched, he knelt, put his ear to the side and rapped his knuckles on the wood. Andrea's words of protest trailed away, for the intensity on Jeremy's face absolutely belied that this was any attempt at mere prankery. Finally he looked back at the pair.

"I'll have to take your word for it," he said.

He walked back towards them saying as he brushed past:

"It's good that the frog is dead. I'm sorry about Nathan."

With that he was gone.

"What did he mean earlier, that it couldn't be killed?" Andrea asked.

"It's too much to take in now," replied Ian. "You have a wake to go to"

"So do you," said Andrea, and took his arms in hers. "I have to know everything. Nathan and I didn't have any secrets, and what you've told me is a pretty big one, wouldn't you say?."

Ian nodded.

The wake was conducted according to Nathan's direction, which included a hired jukebox stocked with music he knew his friends and family would like. Nathan's brother pushed numbers on the keypad and stood back, shaking his head as heavy metal poured forth.

The lyrics were gutturally delivered by both Scott and the singer. Andrea could not understand much of the words, save the chorus:

"Be not proud, be not proud, be not proud!" yelled Scott, and she smiled at this 65 year old man in his head-down pose, waving greying locks at an invisible guitar.

Finally he walked away from the jukebox, saw Andrea there and hugged her close.

"Pathogenic Demise, I love that band," said Scott. "I was so into them. Nathan was too, but more through me, I guess."

"What's that song called?" she asked.

"It's based on a John Donne poem, 'Death Be Not Proud'."

Andrea knew it. She hugged Scott back, saying:

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men

And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better then thy stroke, why swell'st thou then?

Scott smiled and kissed her on her forehead.

Andrea could not bring herself to move Nathan's favourite chair, and had made it home to the bouquets and flower arrangements brought by guests. She placed two others next to it, and sat with Ian.

"We dug well that Summer," began Ian, and recounted the story in its entirety. To his surprise, Andrea neither expressed derision nor shook her head at a single word. He took pains to include their conflict over the Knight, and as he felt the old curiosity well within him.

"He seemed to have a part of the experience we didn't, and I've always wondered if that was for good or ill," he said.

He described the reunion, and mentioned again that they were veterans in some way. At this, Andrea nodded.

"He would get that look in his eyes, I could never place it, until I read its description in a magazine article about post traumatic stress."

"The Thousand Yard Stare," said Ian immediately.

Andrea smiled and repeated his words. At that moment Jane appeared with a plate of cookies. Her mother touched her hand and squeezed gently.

"Your dad was a special man," Andrea said. "But I know you know that."

"I do," said Jane. "And he still is."

Jane kissed her mother's head as Scott did and left.

_She must presume it's just old friends talking_ , thought Ian. _And why wouldn't she, because we are, in a way._

"Do you think he saw Death or the Knight at the end?" Andrea asked. "I mean, did they explain some great secret of the universe to Nathan?"

Ian reached for a cookie and regarded the garden for a long while.

"I would like to think so," said Ian tentatively.

"Do you mean you hope so?"

"I mean, I honestly don't know," he said. "Perhaps I'm not dwelling on it too much because I have no doubt I'll at least see Death – I mean the Grim Reaper as you would call him – at the end of my life. I mean, I'll still be dead, but I'll actually see him first."

"But there will be no great revelation for you?"

"That's not his gig," said Ian. "I think he would have given us his wisdom back then. But he was our servant, like I say, not our teacher."

Andrea took up Ian's hand and held it, saying:

"He invited you to his house and then waited on you."

"That's it, and we've wondered why for some fifty years," said Ian. "But as I come closer to seeing him again -."

"You're old friends, you see," said Andrea, and the tears that she had suppressed that long afternoon came forth.

"He told me that, and I thought it strange. Thank you for making it not so now."

Ian kissed her hand, then stood to leave.

"I don't fear him," He said. "I don't imagine that Nathan did either. I don't say that to comfort you, just a statement of fact. If that was his message, to inure us against his presence, it worked well."

"You say it not to comfort me, yet it does," said Andrea. "To know he wasn't afraid, that his laughter was one of defiance or joy."

Ian smiled, released her hand, and left.

Yet Ian would never see Death, at least not in the manner of his imagining. Another twenty years passed, and he simply slipped from life mid-breath as he napped one afternoon.

Jeremy did not attend Ian's funeral. The release from fear experienced by his friends was not his to share. By this time, dementia was almost unknown thanks to gene renewal therapy and the transmutation of cells into automata to scour plaques from the substrate of the brain. His aging mind was thus untrammelled by any feebleness; the comforting haze of forget and confound that might have bolstered his resistance to that dread anticipation.

As Nathan had, Jeremy took to waiting for Death's foot-beats to run him down. Having never married, and without much use for his painstakingly accumulated wealth, Jeremy hired robots to patrol the grounds of his estate.

"I'm being stalked by a man in a Grim Reaper costume," he told them.

Orders were then given to restrain this man so that the police could be called. The small squad of machines saluted and dutifully trudged off to their guard points. Jeremy retired to a rear room to watch a bank of monitors.

_He's physical, isn't he? An embodied presence,_ thought Jeremy. _Well, that works both ways._

Eighteen months went by. Jeremy did not sleep, having had his hypothalamus suitably modified to obviate the need. He sat for all hours of the day watching the screens. Sure enough, one day his vigilance was rewarded. The skeleton lightly slipped over the perimeter wall; sensors at its apex emitted a klaxon blast.

"You bastard!" shouted Jeremy, and almost convinced himself that this moment was one of surprise. He reached for a microphone and his amplified voice filled the compound, commanding Death to halt. He did not, and walked through an outer garden towards the house.

_It was worth a try,_ thought Jeremy.

The robot posted there was upon Death now, warped light shimmered within its carapace as it discarded its cloaking field. It grabbed Death at the forearm.

"Take _that,"_ whispered Jeremy.

He uttered a command word, and another servant machine took Death's other arm firmly. Jeremy knew that sensors in each metal palm would be detecting no pulse under those robed limbs; thus his next order would be obeyed instantly.

"Rip him apart," ordered Jeremy, and to his great satisfaction the robots did so; shards of grey bone and cloth pattered amongst the flowerbeds.

He rose from his control chair and hurried to the garden to observe his handiwork. His guardians gathered pieces of Death into their own bodies via hidden vacuums and sweepers. Jeremy slapped the nearest robot on its back.

"Well done, boys," he said.

The robot raised a finger, its face pitching crimson and black. Jeremy's eye-line followed the digit to its target: a skeletal hand scrabbling at the wall-top, soon joined by another. He ordered his troops onward. Their response was no less brutal than that meted out for the Reaper's first incarnation; this time, the skull flew loose from the spine with a single punch and rolled over the lawn with jawbone gawping.

Another Death followed, of course. Jeremy eased himself to the grass and sat cross-legged. The skull's orbits regarded him blankly.

_Of course, this will continue,_ thought Jeremy, _until the robots' power drains and they are unable to attack any more._

He had never married nor had children, and his family were long dead. This very moment's longing was solely for the existence of one more, that he be allowed to be himself for as long as that conception could hold possibly true. As never before, Jeremy was conscious of the beating of his heart and his breathing. A single cornflower blossom, severed by the robots' exertions, lay nearby.

He stroked the petals, thinking:

That is the most beautiful shade of blue I have ever seen, that could ever be. What a silly cliché to feel so very alive. It's a corny paradox I'd laugh away, if it were not happening to me.

He asked the nearest robot the power reserve remaining for the squad, assuming Death's attacks continued as they were.

"Seven hours, twenty-two minutes and six seconds," was the reply.

"I don't think..." Jeremy smiled, feeling himself near tears. "I don't think I can wait that long. I can't just sit inside until he comes for me."

And then he thought:

I can't hide anymore.

The robot acknowledged this with a tilt of the head, asking what its new orders where.

"Leave him be. He's suffered enough, don't you think?"

The joke was a poor one, yet he managed a small laugh. The robots ceased their attack mid-way through the dismemberment of this Death.

Both arms were gone but he still could walk. Jeremy guessed he would gain the 10 metres that separated them in a matter of seconds. He drew his breath in deep and waited.

_I see now,_ his mind ran, _that each discrete second is really its own reality, that Death is not the promise of an imaginary future but the abyss spanned only briefly by our perception and that Samurai saying, what is it, oh I know - If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue and here he is now -_

And so he was. The lead robot watching this scene saw the robed figure crane its head forward as if to kiss Jeremy. He recoiled slightly then raised an arm to grasp the black cloak, his knuckles blanching white with the force of the grip. Whether this was an attempt to keep the skeleton from him or draw it closer could not be discerned.

Death leant its gaunt frame forward, easing Jeremy to the ground where he lay still.

In the absence of further instructions, the machines waited a further three days until their batteries were completely depleted. The pieces of bone and cloth stowed within their internal holds were transmuted to a fine ash.

In the flowerbed next to Jeremy's body, the remaining cornflowers began to bloom, and although the robots' fading electric eyes could not judge, they were the most beautiful shade of blue that had ever been.

###
