Dangerous Women
Part II

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2013

Copyright © George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois 2013

Dangerous Women / Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Jacket photograph © Royal Armouries

George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007549436

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780008104955

Version: 2014-08-26

Copyright Acknowledgments

“Neighbors” copyright © 2013 by Megan Lindholm

“The Girl in the Mirror” copyright © 2013 by Lev Grossman

“A Queen in Exile” copyright © 2013 by Sharon Kay Penman

“Pronouncing Doom” copyright © 2013 by S. M. Stirling

“Lies My Mother Told Me” copyright © 2013 by Caroline Spector

“Name the Beast” copyright © 2013 by Sam Sykes

“Virgins” copyright © 2013 by Diana Gabaldon

Dedication

To Jo Playford, my dangerous minion.

George R.R. Martin

Introduction by Gardner Dozois

Genre fiction has always been divided over the question of just how dangerous women are.

In the real world, of course, the question has long been settled. Even if the Amazons are mythological (and almost certainly wouldn’t have cut their right breasts off to make it easier to draw a bow if they weren’t), their legend was inspired by memory of the ferocious warrior women of the Scythians, who were very much not mythological. Gladiatrix, women gladiators, fought other women—and sometimes men—to the death in the arenas of Ancient Rome. There were female pirates like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and even female samurai. Women served as frontline combat troops, feared for their ferocity, in the Russian army during World War II, and serve so in Israel today. Until 2013, women in the U.S. forces were technically restricted to “noncombat” roles, but many brave women gave their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway, since bullets and land mines have never cared whether you’re a noncombatant or not. Women who served as Women Airforce Service Pilots for the United States during World War II were also limited to noncombat roles (where many of them were nevertheless killed in the performance of their duties), but Russian women took to the skies as fighter pilots, and sometimes became aces. A Russian female sniper during World War II was credited with more than fifty kills. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe led one of the most fearsome revolts ever against Roman authority, one that was almost successful in driving the Roman invaders from Britain, and a young French peasant girl inspired and led the troops against the enemy so successfully that she became famous forever afterwards as Joan of Arc.

On the dark side, there have been female “highwaymen” like Mary Frith and Lady Katherine Ferrers and Pearl Hart (the last person to ever rob a stagecoach); notorious poisoners like Agrippina and Catherine de Medici, modern female outlaws like Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker, even female serial killers like Aileen Wuornos. Elizabeth Báthory was said to have bathed in the blood of virgins, and even though that has been called into question, there is no doubt that she tortured and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children during her life. Queen Mary I of England had hundreds of Protestants burnt at the stake; Queen Elizabeth of England later responded by executing large numbers of Catholics. Mad Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar had so many people put to death that she wiped out one-third of the entire population of Madagascar during her reign; she would even have you executed if you appeared in her dreams.

Popular fiction, though, has always had a schizophrenic view of the dangerousness of women. In the science fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, women, if they appeared at all, were largely regulated to the role of the scientist’s beautiful daughter, who might scream during the fight scenes but otherwise had little to do except hang adoringly on the arm of the hero afterwards. Legions of women swooned helplessly while waiting to be rescued by the intrepid jut-jawed hero from everything from dragons to the bug-eyed monsters who were always carrying them off for improbable purposes either dietary or romantic on the covers of pulp SF magazines. Hopelessly struggling women were tied to railroad tracks, with nothing to do but squeak in protest and hope that the Good Guy arrived in time to save them.

And yet, at the same time, warrior women like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Dejah Thoris and Thuvia, Maid of Mars, were every bit as good with the blade and every bit as deadly in battle as John Carter and their other male comrades, female adventuresses like C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry swashbuckled their way through the pages of Weird Tales magazine (and blazed a trail for later female swashbucklers like Joanna Russ’s Alyx); James H. Schmitz sent Agents of Vega like Granny Wannatel and fearless teenagers like Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee out to battle the sinister menaces and monsters of the spaceways; and Robert A. Heinlein’s dangerous women were capable of being the captain of a spaceship or killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Arthur Conan Doyle’s sly, shady Irene Adler was one of the only people ever to outwit his Sherlock Holmes, and probably one of the inspirations for the legions of tricky, dangerous, seductive, and treacherous “femmes fatale” who featured in the works of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and later went on to appear in dozens of films noir, and who still turn up in the movies and on television to this day. Later television heroines such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess, firmly established women as being formidable and deadly enough to battle hordes of fearsome supernatural menaces, and helped to inspire the whole subgenre of paranormal romance, which is sometimes unofficially known as the “kick-ass heroine” genre.

Like our anthology Warriors, Dangerous Women was conceived of as a cross-genre anthology, one that would mingle every kind of fiction, so we asked writers from every genre—science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical, horror, paranormal romance, men and women alike—to tackle the theme of “dangerous women,” and that call was answered by some of the best writers in the business, including both new writers and giants of their fields like Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, Joe Abercrombie, Carrie Vaughn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Block, Cecelia Holland, Brandon Sanderson, Sherilynn Kenyon, S. M. Stirling, Nancy Kress, and George R. R. Martin.

Here you’ll find no hapless victims who stand by whimpering in dread while the male hero fights the monster or clashes swords with the villain, and if you want to tie these women to the railroad tracks, you’ll find you have a real fight on your hands. Instead, you will find sword-wielding women warriors; intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen; deadly female serial killers; formidable female superheroes; sly and seductive femmes fatale; female wizards; hard-living bad girls; female bandits and rebels; embattled survivors in postapocalyptic futures; female private investigators; stern female hanging judges; haughty queens who rule nations and whose jealousies and ambitions send thousands to grisly deaths; daring dragonriders; and many more.

Enjoy!

Megan Lindholm

Books by Megan Lindholm include the fantasy novels Wizard of the Pigeons, Harpy’s Flight, The Windsingers, The Limbreth Gate, The Luck of the Wheels, The Reindeer People, Wolf’s Brother, and Cloven Hooves, the science fiction novel Alien Earth, and, with Steven Brust, the collaborative novel The Gypsy. Lindholm also writes as New York Times bestseller Robin Hobb, one of the most popular writers in fantasy today, having sold over one million copies of her work in paperback. As Robin Hobb, she’s perhaps best-known for her epic fantasy Farseer series, including Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassin’s Quest, as well as the two fantasy series related to it, the Liveship Traders series, consisting of Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny, and the Tawny Man series, made up of Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate. She’s also the author of the Soldier Son series, composed of Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade’s Magic. Most recently, as Robin Hobb, she’s started a new series, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, consisting of Dragon Keeper, Dragon Haven, City of Dragons, and Blood of Dragons. As Megan Lindholm, her most recent book is a “collaborative” collection with Robin Hobb, The Inheritance and Other Stories.

In the autumnal and beautifully crafted story that follows, she shows us that even the oldest of dogs, white of muzzle and slow of step, may have one last bite left in them.

NEIGHBORS

Linda Mason was loose again.

It was three in the morning, and sleep had fled. Sarah had wandered to the kitchen in her robe, put on the kettle, and rummaged the cupboards until she found a box of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea bags. She had set out a teacup on a saucer and put the tea bag in her “tea for one” teapot when she heard someone outside in the dark, shouting her name. “Sarah! Sarah Wilkins! You’d better hurry! It’s time to go!”

Her heart jumped high in her chest and hung there, pounding. Sarah didn’t recognize the shrill voice, but the triumphantly defiant tone was alarming. She didn’t want to look out the window. For a moment, she was eight years old again. Don’t look under the bed, don’t open the closet at night. As long as you don’t look, there might be nothing there. Schrödinger’s boogeyman. She reminded herself that she was much closer to sixty-eight than eight and drew back the curtain.

Low billows of fog cloaked the street, a precursor to fall in the Pacific Northwest. Her eyes adjusted and she saw crazy old Linda standing in the street outside the iron fence that surrounded Sarah’s backyard. She wore pink sweats and flappy bedroom slippers. She had an aluminum baseball bat in her hands and a Hello Kitty backpack on her shoulders. The latter two items, Sarah was fairly certain, actually belonged to Linda’s granddaughter. Linda’s son and his wife lived with the old woman. Sarah pitied the daughter-in-law, shoved into the role of caretaker for Robbie’s oddball mother. Alzheimer’s was what most people said about Linda, but “just plain nuts” seemed as apt.

Sarah had known Linda for twenty-two years. They had carpooled their sons to YMCA soccer games. They’d talked over coffee, exchanged homemade jam and too many zucchini, fed each other’s pets during vacation getaways, greeted each other in Safeway, and gossiped about the other neighbors. Not best friends, but neighborhood mom friends, in a fifties sort of way. Linda was one of the few older residents still in the neighborhood. The other parents she had known were long gone, had moved into condos or migrated as snowbirds or been packed off by their kids to senior homes. The houses would empty, and the next flock of young families would move in. Other than Linda, of her old friends, only Maureen and her husband, Hugh, still lived on the other end of the block, but they spent most days in Seattle for Hugh’s treatments.

“Sarah! You’d better hurry!” Linda shouted again. Two houses down, a bedroom light came on. The kettle began to whistle. Sarah snatched it off the burner, seized her coat off the hook, and opened the back door. The darn porch light didn’t work; the bulb had burned out last week, but it was too much trouble to get a step stool and a lightbulb and fix it. She edged down the steps carefully and headed to the fence, hoping that Sarge hadn’t done his business where she would step in it.

“Linda, are you all right? What’s going on?” She tried to speak to her as her old friend, but the truth was, Linda scared her now. Sometimes she was Linda, but abruptly she might say something wild and strange or mean. She did even stranger things. A few days ago, in the early morning, she had escaped into her front yard, picked all the ripe apples off her neighbor’s tree, and thrown them into the street. “Better than letting them fall and rot like last year!” she shouted when they caught her at it. “You’ll just waste them. Feed the future, I say! Give them to the ones who appreciate them!” When Robbie’s wife had seized her by the arm and tried to drag her back into their house, Linda had slapped her. Linda’s little granddaughter and her playmate had seen the whole thing. The child had started crying, but Sarah hadn’t know if it was from distress, fear, or simple humiliation, for half the neighborhood had turned out for the drama, including the neighbor who owned the apple tree. That woman was furious and telling anyone who would listen that it was time to “put that crazy old woman in a home.” She’d lived in the neighborhood a couple of years but Sarah didn’t even know her name.

“I am in my home!” Linda had shrieked back at her. “Why are you living in Marilyn’s home? What gives you more right to the apples off her tree than me? I helped her plant the damn thing!”

“Don’t you think we’d put her in a home if we could afford one? Do you think I like living like this?” Robbie’s wife had shouted at the neighbor. Then she had burst into tears and finally managed to tow Linda back inside.

And now Linda was out in the foggy night, staring at Sarah with round wild eyes. The wind was blowing through her white hair, and leaves rustled past her on the pavement. She wore a pink running suit and her bedroom slippers. She had something on her head, something fastened to a wool cap. She advanced on the fence and tapped the baseball bat on top of it, making it ring.

“Don’t dent my fence!” Sarah cried, and then, “Stay right there, Linda. Stay right there, I’m going to get help.”

“You need help, not me!” Linda shouted. She laughed wildly, and quoted, “‘Little child, come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day!’ Except it doesn’t! So that’s what I take with me. Moonlight!”

“Linda, it’s cold out here. Come inside and tell me there.” The phone. She should be calling 911 right now. Alex had told her to get a cell phone, but she just couldn’t budget one more payment a month. She couldn’t even afford to replace her old cordless phone with the faulty ringer. “We’ll have a cup of tea and talk. Just like old times when the kids were small.” She remembered it clearly, suddenly. She and Maureen and Linda sitting up together, waiting for the kids to come home from a football game. Talking and laughing. Then the kids grew up and they’d gone separate ways. They hadn’t had coffee together in years.

“No, Sarah. You come with me! Magic is better than crazy. And time is the only difference between magic and crazy. Stay in there, you’re crazy. Come with me, you’re magic. Watch!”

She did something, her hand fumbling at her breast. Then she lit up. “Solar power!” she shouted. “That’s my ticket to the future!” By the many tiny LEDs, Sarah recognized what Linda was wearing. She’d draped herself in strings of Christmas lights. The little solar panels that had charged them were fastened to her hat.

“Linda, come inside and show me. I’m freezing out here!” They were shouting. Why was the neighborhood staying dark? Someone should be getting annoyed by their loud conversation; someone’s dog should be barking.

“Time and tide wait for no man, Sarah! I’m off to seek my fortune. Last chance! Will you come with me?”

Inside the house, Sarah had to look up Linda’s number in the phone book, and when she called it, no one answered. After ten rings it went to recording. She hung up, took the phone to the window and dialed again. No Linda out there now. The windows in her house were dark. What to do now? Go bang on the door? Maybe Robbie had already come outside and found his mom and taken her in. Call the police? She went back into the yard, carrying the receiver in one hand. “Linda?” she called into the foggy darkness. “Linda, where are you?”

No one answered. The fog had thickened and the neighborhood was dark now. Even the streetlight on the corner, the hateful one that shone into her bedroom window, had chosen this moment to be dark. She dialed Linda’s number again, listened to it ring.

Back in the house, Sarah phoned her own son. She heard Alex’s sleepy “What?” on the seventh ring. She poured out her story. He wasn’t impressed. “Oh, Mom. It’s not our business. Go back to bed. I bet she went right back home and she’s probably asleep right now. Like I wish I was.”

“But what if she’s wandered off into the night? You know she’s not in her right mind.”

“She’s not the only one,” Alex muttered, and then said, “Look, Mom. It’s four in the morning. Go back to bed. I’ll drop by on my way to work, and we’ll knock on their door together. I’m sure she’s okay. Go back to bed.”

So she did. To toss and turn and worry.

She woke up at seven to his key in the lock. Good heavens! She’d made him detour from his Seattle commute to come by, and she wasn’t even up and ready to go knock on Linda’s door. “Be right down!” she shouted down the stairs, and began pulling on clothes. It took her longer than it should have, especially tying her shoes. “Floor just keeps getting farther away every day,” she muttered. It was her old joke with Russ. But Russ wasn’t around any longer to agree with her. Sarge was sleeping across her bedroom door. She nudged the beagle and he trailed after her.

She opened the kitchen door to a wave of heat. “What are you doing?” she demanded. Alex had the back door open and was fanning it back and forth. “What’s that smell?”

He glared at her. “The stove was on when I came in! You’re damn lucky you didn’t burn the house down. Why didn’t your smoke detector go off?”

“Batteries must be dead,” she lied. She had gotten tired of them going off for every bagel the old toaster scorched and had loosened the battery in the kitchen unit. “I must have left the burner on last night when Linda was outside. So it wasn’t on all night, only three or four hours.” The stove top still simmered with heat and the white ceramic around the abused burner was a creamy brown now. She started to touch it, and then drew her hand back. “A little scouring powder should clean that up. No harm done, thank goodness.”

“No harm done? Only three or four hours? Shit, Mom, do you not understand how lucky you were?” To her dismay, he unfolded her kitchen step stool and climbed up to the smoke detector. He tugged the cover open and the battery fell to the floor.

“Well! There’s the problem,” she observed. “It must have come loose in there.”

He eyed her. “Must have,” he said in a tight voice. Before she could stoop down, he hopped off the stool, scooped it up, and snapped it back into place. He closed the cover.

“Want some coffee?” she asked as she turned on the pot. She’d preset the coffeepot just as she had for the last twenty years so she wouldn’t have to fill it up every morning. Just push the button, and then sit at the table and read the paper in her pajamas until the first cup was ready when Russ would come down.

Or not, as was now the case.

“No. Thanks. I need to get on my way. Mom, you’ve got to be more careful.”

“I am careful. It wouldn’t have happened if the night hadn’t been so weird.”

“And you wouldn’t have forgotten your card in the ATM last week, except that the fire truck went by, so you didn’t hear the machine beeping at you as you walked away. But what about locking your keys in the car? And leaving the sprinkler running all night?”

“That was months ago!”

“That’s my point! This ‘forgetfulness’ started months ago! It’s only getting worse. And more expensive. We had that water bill. And the locksmith. Luckily, the ATM sucked your card back in and the bank called you. You didn’t even realize it was gone! And now we’re going to have a little spike in the power bill this month. You need to go to the doctor and get checked out. Maybe there’s a pill for it.”

“I’ll handle it,” she said. Now her voice was getting tight. She hated being lectured like this. “You’d better get on the road before the traffic builds up. You want some coffee in your commuter mug?”

He stared at her for a time, wanting to continue the argument, to reach some sort of imaginary resolution. Luckily, Alex didn’t have the time. “Yeah. I’ll get my mug. Looks like everything’s okay at the Masons’. There goes Robbie to work. I don’t think he’d be doing that if his mom were missing.”

There was nothing to reply that wouldn’t make her sound even more like a crackpot. When he came back in with his mug, she reached for the coffeepot and saw it was full of pale brown water. She’d forgotten to put the grounds in the filter. She didn’t miss a beat as she took out the instant coffee. “I’ve stopped making a full pot just for myself,” she said as she spooned powdered coffee into his commuter mug and poured the hot water over it. He took it with a sigh. Once he was gone, she fixed the coffee properly and sat down with her paper.

It was eleven o’clock before the police arrived, and one in the afternoon before an officer tapped on her door. She felt terrible as he carefully jotted down her account of what she had seen at 4 a.m. “And you didn’t call the police?” the young man asked her, his brown eyes full of sorrow for her stupidity.

“I called her house twice, and then called my son. But I didn’t see her outside, so I thought she’d gone home.”

He folded his notebook with a sigh and tucked it into his pocket. “Well. She didn’t,” he said heavily. “Poor old lady, out there in her slippers and Christmas lights. Well, I doubt she went far. We’ll find her.”

“She was wearing a hot-pink workout suit. And bedroom slippers.” She rummaged through her recall. “And she had a baseball bat. And a Hello Kitty backpack. Like she was going somewhere.”

He took out his notebook, sighed again, and added the details. “I wish you had called,” he said as he pocketed it again.

“So do I. But my son said she had probably gone home, and at my age it’s pretty easy to doubt your own judgment on things.”

“I imagine so. Good afternoon, ma’am.”

It was Thursday. She went to see Richard in the nursing home. She took, as she always did, one of the photo albums from when they were children. She parked in the parking lot, crossed the street to the coffee shop, and bought a large vanilla latte. She carried it into the permanent pee smell of Caring Manor, through the “parlor” with its floral sofa and dusty plastic flower arrangements, and went down the hall, past the inhabited wheelchairs parked along the walls. The hunched backs and wrinkly necks of the residents reminded her of turtles peering out of their shells. A few of the patients nodded at her as she passed, but most simply stared. Blue eyes faded to pale linen, brown eyes bleeding pigment into their whites, eyes with no one behind them anymore. There were familiar faces, residents who had been there at least as long as the three years that Richard had been here. She remembered their names, but they no longer did. They slumped in their chairs, waiting for nothing, their wheels a mockery to people who had no place to go.

There was a new nurse at the desk. Again. At first, Sarah had tried to greet every nurse and aide by name each time she visited Richard. It had proven a hopeless task. The nurses changed too often, and the lower echelon of aides who actually tended the residents changed even more frequently, as did the languages they spoke. Some of them were nice, chatting to Richard as they cleared away his lunch tray or changed his bedding. But others reminded her of prison guards, their eyes empty and resentful of their duties and the residents. She often brought them small gifts, jars of jam, squash from her garden, fresh tomatoes and peppers. She hoped those small bribes spoke even if they didn’t understand all her words as she thanked them for taking such good care of her brother. Sometimes, when she was wakeful in the night, she prayed that they would be patient and kind, or at least not vindictive. Be kind when wiping feces from his legs, be kind when holding him up for his shower. Be kind while doing a task you hate for a wage that doesn’t support you. Can anyone be that kind? she wondered.

Richard wasn’t there that Thursday. She sat with the man who lived in his body, showing him pictures of when they went camping, of their first days of school, and of their parents. He nodded and smiled and said they were lovely photos. That was the worst, that even in his confusion, his gentle courtesy remained. She stayed the one hour she always stayed with him, no matter how heart-wrenching it was. When no one was looking, she gave him sips of her coffee. Richard wasn’t allowed liquids anymore. Everything he ate was pureed and all his drinks, even his water, were thickened to a slime so that he wouldn’t aspirate them. That was one of the problems with Alzheimer’s. The swallowing muscles at the back of the throat weakened or people just forgot how to use them. So doctor’s orders for Richard were that he could no longer have coffee. She defied that. He’d lost his books and his pipe smoking and walking by himself. His coffee was his last small pleasure in life, and she clung to it on his behalf. Every week she brought him a cup and helped him surreptitiously to drink it while it was still hot. He loved it. The coffee always won her a smile from the creature who had been her big, strong brother.

Cup empty, she went home.

Linda’s disappearance was in the Tacoma News Tribune the next day. Sarah read the article. They had used an older photo, a calm and competent woman in a power suit. She wondered if it was because they had no snapshots of a wild-haired old woman. But then, no one had pictures of the grin she had worn when she’d turned her garden hose on the ten-year-old Thompson twins for squirting her cat with Super Soakers. It could not capture her smothered giggles when she had called Sarah at two in the morning and they’d both crept out to let the air out of all the tires of the cars parked outside Marty Sobin’s place when her teenager had the drunken party while Marty was out of town. “Now they can’t drive drunk,” Linda had whispered with satisfaction. Linda from the old days. Sarah remembered how she had stood in the street, flat-footed, her teeth gritted, and forced Marsha Bates to screech to a halt to avoid hitting her with her dad’s Jeep. “You’re driving too fast for this neighborhood. Next time I tell your parents and the cops.”

That Linda had hosted neighborhood Fourth of July barbecues and her house had been the one where the teenagers voluntarily gathered. Her Christmas lights were always first up and last down, and her Halloween jack-o’-lanterns were the largest on the street. That Linda had known how to start up a generator for the outdoor lights at the soccer picnic. After the big ice storm twelve years ago, she had taken her chain saw and cut up the tree that had fallen across the street when the city said no one could come for three days. Russ had opened the window and shouted, “Heads up, people! Crazy Norwegian lady with a chain saw!” and they had all laughed proudly. So proud that they could take care of themselves. But that Linda, and the cranky old woman she had become, were both gone now.

Her family put up posters. The police brought in a bloodhound. Robbie came by to visit and ask what she had seen that night. It was hard to meet his eyes and explain why she hadn’t called the police. “I called your house. Twice. I let the phone ring twenty times.”

“We turn the ringer off at night,” he said dully. He’d been a heavy boy when he played goalie for the soccer team, and now he was just plain fat. A fat, tired man with a problem parent who had turned into a missing parent. It had to be something of a relief, Sarah thought, and then bit her lip to keep from saying it aloud.

As the days went by, the nights got cooler and rainier. There were no reported sightings. She couldn’t have gotten far on foot. Could she? Had someone picked her up? What would someone want with a demented old woman with a baseball bat? Was she dead in the blackberries in some overgrown lot? Hitchhiking down Highway 99? Hungry and cold somewhere?

Now when Sarah awoke at two or three or four fifteen, guilt would keep her awake until true morning. It was horrid to be awake before the paper was delivered and before it was time to brew coffee. She sat at her table and stared at the harvest moon. “Boys and girls, come out to play,” she whispered to herself. Her strange hours bothered Sarge. The pudgy beagle would sit beside her chair and watch her with his mournful hound eyes. He missed Russ. He’d been Russ’s dog, and since Russ had died, his dog had become morose. She felt like he was just waiting to die now.

Well, wasn’t she, too?

No. Of course not! She had her life, her schedule. She had her morning paper and her garden to tend, and her grocery shopping and her TV shows at night. She had Alex and Sandy, even if Sandy lived on the other side of the mountains. She had her house, her yard, and her dog, and other important things.

At four fifteen on a dark September morning, it was hard to remember what those important things were. Steady pattering rain had given way to silence and rising mist. She was working the sudoku in yesterday’s paper, a stupid sort of puzzle, all logic and no cleverness, when Sarge turned to stare silently at the back door.

She turned off the light in the kitchen and peered out the back door window. The street was so dark! Not a house light showing anywhere. She clicked the switch on her porch light; the bulb was still burned out. Someone was out there; she heard voices. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed closer to the glass. Still couldn’t see. She opened her back door softly and stepped quietly out.

Five young men, three abreast and two following. She didn’t recognize any of them, but they didn’t look like they came from her neighborhood. The teenagers hunched along in heavy coats and unlaced work boots, moving like a pack of dogs, their eyes roving from side to side. They carried sacks. The leader pointed at an old pickup truck parked across the street. They moved toward it, looked into the bed of it, and tried the locked doors. One peered through the side window and said something. Another one picked up a fallen tree branch and bashed it against the windshield. The rotted limb gave way in chunks and fell in the littered street. The others laughed at him and moved on. But the young vandal was stubborn. As he clambered into the bed of the truck to try to kick out the back window, Hello Kitty looked back at her.

Her heart leaped into her chest. A coincidence, she told herself. He was just a macho youngster wearing a Hello Kitty backpack to be ironic. It meant nothing, no more than that.

Yes. It did.

She was grateful that her porch light was out and her kitchen dark. She eased quietly inside, pushed the door almost closed, picked up her phone, and dialed 911, wincing at the beeps. Would he hear them? It rang three times before the operator picked up. “Police or fire?” the woman demanded.

“Police. Some men are trying to break into a truck parked in front of my house. And one is wearing a pink backpack like my friend was wearing the night—”

“Slow down, ma’am. Name and address.”

She rattled them off.

“Can you describe the men?”

“It’s dark and my porch light is out. I’m alone here. I don’t want them to know I’m watching them and making this call.”

“How many men? Can you give a general description?”

“Are the police coming?” she demanded, suddenly angry at all the useless questions.

“Yes. I’ve dispatched someone. Now. Please tell me as much as you can about the men.”

Piss on it. She went to the door and looked out. He was gone. She looked up and down the street, but the night was hazy with fog. “They’re gone.”

“Are you the owner of the vehicle they were attempting to break into?”

“No. But the important thing is that one of them was wearing a pink backpack, just like the one my friend was wearing when she disappeared.”

“I see.” Sarah was sure the dispatcher didn’t see at all. “Ma’am, as this is not an immediate emergency, we will still send an officer, but he may not arrive immediately …”

“Fine.” She hung up. Stupid. She went to the door and looked out again. Upstairs in the dresser drawer under Russ’s work shirts there was a pistol, a little black .22 that she hadn’t shot in years. Instead she took her long, heavy flashlight from the bottom drawer and stepped out into the backyard. Sarge followed her. She walked quietly to the fence, snapped on the flashlight, and shone it on the old truck. The beam barely reached it. Up the street and down, baffled by the fog, the light showed her nothing. She went back in the house with Sarge, locked the door, but left the kitchen light on and went back to bed. She didn’t sleep.

The officer didn’t come by until ten thirty. She understood. Tacoma was a violent little town; they had to roll first on the calls where people were actually in danger. He came, he took her report, and he gave her an incident number. The pickup truck was gone. No, she didn’t know who it belonged to. Five young men, mid- to late teens, dressed in rough clothes, and the one with a pink backpack. She refused to guess their heights or their races. It had been dark. “But you saw the backpack clearly?”

She had. And she was certain it was identical to the one that Linda had been carrying.

The officer nodded and noted it down. He leaned on her kitchen table to look out the window. He frowned. “Ma’am, you said he hit the window with a fallen branch and it broke into pieces?”

“That’s right. But I don’t think the window broke.”

“Ma’am, there are no tree branches out there. Or pieces in the street.” He looked at her pityingly. “Is it possible you dreamed this? Because you were worried about your friend?”

She wanted to spit at him. “There’s the flashlight I used. Still on the counter where I left it.”

His eyebrows collided. “But you said it was dark and you couldn’t see anything.”

“I went out with the flashlight after I hung up with 911. To see if I could see where they had gone.”

“I see. Well, thank you for calling us on this.”

After he left, she went outside herself. She crossed the street to where the pickup had been parked. No pieces of branch on the ground. Not even a handful of leaves in the gutter. Her new neighbor had a lawn fetish. It was as groomed as Astroturf on a playfield, the gutters as clean as if vacuumed. She scowled to herself. Last night there had been dry leaves whispering as the wind blew, and there had definitely been a large, heavy rotten branch in the street. But the young apple trees in his planting strip were scarcely bigger around than a rake handle. Too small to have grown such a branch, let alone dropped one.

Sarah went back in her house. She wept for a time, then made a cup of tea and felt relieved that she hadn’t called Alex about it. She catalogued the work she could do: laundry, deadheading the roses, taking in the last of the green tomatoes and making chutney of them. She went upstairs and took a nap.

After three weeks the neighborhood quit gossiping about Linda. Her face still smiled from a “missing” poster at Safeway next to the pharmacy counter. Sarah ran into Maureen there, picking up pills for Hugh, and they got Starbucks and wondered what had become of Linda. They talked about the old days, soccer games and tux rentals for proms and the time Linda had hot-wired Hugh’s truck when no one could find the keys and Alex had needed stitches right away. They laughed a lot and wept a little, and worked their way back to the present. Maureen shared her news. Hugh was “holding his own” and Maureen said it as if being able to sit up in bed was all he really wanted to do. Maureen invited her to come pick the apples off their backyard tree. “I don’t have time to do anything with them, and there are more than we can eat. I hate to see them just fall and rot.”

It had felt good to have coffee and a conversation, and it made Sarah realize how long it had been since she had socialized. She thought about it the next morning as she sorted the mail on her table. A power bill, a brochure on long-term-care insurance, an AARP paper, and two brochures from retirement homes. She set the bill to one side and stacked the rest to recycle with the morning paper. She found a basket and was just leaving to raid Maureen’s apple tree when Alex came in. He sat down at her table and she microwaved the leftover morning coffee for them.

“I had to come into Tacoma for a seminar, so I thought I’d drop by. And I wanted to remind you that the second half of property taxes is due the end of this month. You pay it yet?”

“No. But it’s on my desk.” That, at least, was true. It was on her desk. Somewhere.

She saw him eying the retirement home brochures. “Junk mail,” she told him. “Ever since your dad signed us up for AARP, we get those things.”

“Do you?” He looked abashed. “I thought it was because I asked them to send them. I thought maybe you’d look at them and then we could talk.”

“About what? Recycling?” Her joke came out harder-edged than she had intended. Alex got his stubborn look. He would never eat broccoli—never. And he was going to have this conversation with her no matter what. She put a spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, resigned to an unpleasant half hour.

“Mom, we have to face facts.” He folded his hands on the edge of the table. “Taxes are coming due; the second half of them is seven hundred bucks. House insurance comes due in November. And oil prices are going up, with winter heating bills ahead of us, and this place isn’t exactly energy efficient.” He spoke as if she were a bit stupid as well as old.

“I’ll put on a sweater and move the little heater from room to room. Like I did last year. Zonal heating. Most efficient way to heat a home.” She sipped her coffee.

He opened his hands on the table. “That’s fine. Until we start to get mold in the house from damp in the unheated basement. Mom, this is a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and you live in maybe four rooms of it. The only bathtub is upstairs and the laundry is in the basement. That’s a lot of stairs for you each day. The electrical box should have been replaced years ago. The refrigerator needs a new seal. The living room carpeting is fraying where it meets the tile.”

All things she knew. She tried to make light of it. “And the bulb is burned out in the back porch light. Don’t forget that!”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “When the beech tree dumps its leaves, we’ll need to rake them off the lawn and get them out of the rain gutters. And next year the house is going to need paint.”

She folded her lips. True, all true. “I’ll cross those bridges as I come to them,” she said, instead of telling him to mind his own damn business.

He leaned his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his hands. He didn’t look up at her as he said, “Mom, that just means you’ll call me when you can’t get the leaves into the lawn recycling bin. Or when the gutters are overflowing down the side of the house. You can’t maintain this place by yourself. I want to help you. But it always seems that you call me when I’m prepping a presentation or raking my own leaves.”

She stared at Alex, stricken. “I … Don’t come, if you’re that busy! No one dies from clogged gutters or leaves on the lawn.” She felt ashamed, then angry. How dare he make himself a martyr to her needs? How dare he behave as if she were a burden? She’d asked if he had time to help her, not demanded that he come.

“You’re my mom,” he said, as if that created some irrevocable duty that no one could erase. “What will people think if I let the house start falling apart around you? Besides, your house is your major asset. It has to be maintained. Or, if we can’t maintain it, we need to liquidate it and get you into something you can manage. A senior apartment. Or assisted living.”

“Alex, I’ll have you know this is my home, not my ‘major—’”

Alex held up a commanding hand. “Mom. Let me finish. I don’t have a lot of time today. So let me just say this. I’m not talking about a nursing home. I know how you hate visiting Uncle Richard. I’m talking about a place of your own with a lot of amenities, without the work of owning a home. This one, here?” He put his finger on a brochure, coaxed it out of the junk mail pile. “It’s in Olympia. On the water. They have their own little dock, and boats that residents can use. You can make friends and go fishing.”

She put a stiff smile on her face and tried to make a joke of it. “I can’t rake leaves but you think I can row a boat?”

“You don’t have to go fishing.” She had annoyed him, popping his dream of his mom in a happy little waterfront terrarium. “I’m just saying that you could, that this place has all sorts of amenities. A pool. An exercise studio. Daily shuttles to the grocery store. You could enjoy life again.”

He was so earnest. “The bathroom has this safety feature. If you fall, you pull a cord and it connects you, 24-7, to help. There’s a dining hall so if you don’t feel like cooking that day, you don’t have to. There’s an activity center with a movie room. They schedule game nights and barbecues and—”

“Sounds like summer camp for old farts,” she interrupted him.

He was wordless for a moment. “I just want you to know the possibilities,” he said stiffly. “You don’t like this, fine. There are other places that are just apartments suited to older people. All the rooms on one level, grab bars in the bathrooms, halls wide enough for walkers. I just thought you might like something nicer.”

“I have something nicer. My own home. And I couldn’t afford those places.”

“If you sold this house—”

“In this market? Ha!”

“Or rented it out, then.”

She glared at him.

“It would work. A rental agency would manage it for a percentage. Lots of people do it. Look. I don’t have time to argue today. Hell, I don’t have time to argue any day! And that’s really what we are discussing. I just don’t have time to be running over here every day. I love you, but you have to make it possible for me to take care of you and still have a life of my own! I’ve got a wife and kids; they need my time just as much as you do. I can’t work a job and take care of two households. I just can’t.”

He was angry now, and that showed how close he was to breaking. She looked at the floor. Sarge was under the table. He lifted sad brown eyes to her. “And Sarge?” she asked quietly.

He sighed. “Mom, he’s getting old. You should think about what is best for him.”

That afternoon, she got out the step stool and changed the bulb in the porch light. She dragged the aluminum ladder out of the garage, set it up, pulled the hose out, climbed the damn thing, and hosed out the gutters along the front of the garage. She raked the wet leaves and debris into a pile on a tarp and then wrestled it over to the edge of her vegetable plot and dumped them. Compost. Easier than fighting with a leaf bin.

She woke up at ten the next morning instead of six, aching all over, to an overcast day. Sarge’s whining woke her. He had to go. Getting out of bed was a cautious process. She put on her wrapper and leaned on the handrail going down the stairs. She let Sarge out into the foggy backyard, found the Advil, and pushed the button on the coffeemaker. “I’m going to do it until I can’t do it anymore,” she said savagely. “I’m not leaving my house.”

The newspaper was on the front doormat. As she straightened up, she looked at her neighborhood and was jolted by the change. When she and Russ had moved in, it had been an upwardly mobile neighborhood where lawns stayed green and mowed all summer, houses were repainted with clockwork regularity, and flower beds were meticulously tended.

Now her eyes snagged on a sagging gutter on the corner of the old McPherson house. And down the way, the weeping willow that had been Alice Carter’s pride had a broken branch that dangled down, covered in dead leaves. Her lawn was dead, too. And the paint was peeling on the sunny side of the house. When had it all become so run-down? Her breath came faster. This was not how she recalled her street. Was this what Alex was talking about? Had her forgetfulness become so encompassing? She clutched the newspaper to her breast and retreated into the house.

Sarge was scratching at the back door. She opened it for the beagle and then stood staring out past her fence. The pickup truck was there again. Red and rusting, one tire flat, algae on the windows. The pieces of broken tree branch still littered the street, and the wind had heaped the fallen leaves against them. Slowly, her heart hammering, she lifted her eyes to the gnarled apple trees that had replaced her memory of broomstick saplings. “This cannot be,” she said to the dog.

She lurched stiffly down the steps, Sarge trailing at her heels. She walked past her roses to the fence, peering through the tattered fog. Nothing changed. The more she studied her familiar neighborhood, the more foreign it became. Broken windows. Chimneys missing bricks, dead lawns, a collapsed carport. A rhythmic noise turned her head. The man came striding down the street, boots slapping through the wet leaves, the pink pack high on his shoulders. He carried the aluminum baseball bat across the front of his body, right hand gripping it, left hand cradling the barrel. Sarge growled low in his throat. Sarah couldn’t make a sound.

He didn’t even glance at them. When he reached the truck, he set his feet, measured the distance, and then hit the driver’s-side window. The glass held. He hit it again, and then again, until it was a spiderwebbed, crinkling curtain of safety glass. Then he reversed the bat and rammed the glass out of his way. He reached in, unlocked the door, and jerked it open.

“Where’s Linda? What did you do to her?”

Surely it was someone else who shouted the brave words. The man froze in the act of rummaging inside the cab. He straightened and spun around, the bat ready. Sarah’s knees weakened and she grabbed the top rail of her fence to keep from sagging. The man who glared at her was in his late teens. The unlaced work boots looked too big for him, as did the bulky canvas jacket he wore. His hair was unkempt and his spotty beard an accident. He scanned the street in all directions. His eyes swept right past her and her growling dog without a pause as he looked for witnesses. She saw his chest rise and fall; his muscles were bunched in readiness.

She stared at him, waiting for the confrontation. Should have grabbed the phone. Should have dialed 911 from inside the house. Stupid old woman. They’ll find me dead in the yard and never know what happened.

But he didn’t advance. His shoulders slowly lowered. She remained standing where she was but he didn’t even look at her. Not worth his attention. He turned back to the cab of the truck and leaned in.

“Sarge. Come, boy. Come.” She moved quietly away from the fence. The dog remained where he was, tail up, legs stiff, intent on the intruder in his street. The sun must have wandered behind a thicker bank of clouds. The day grayed and the fog thickened until she could scarcely see the fence. “Sarge!” she called more urgently. In response to the worry in her voice, his growl deepened.

In the street, the thief stepped back from the truck, a canvas tool tote in his hands. He rummaged in it and a wrench fell. It rang metallic on the pavement and Sarge suddenly bayed. On his back, short, stiff hair stood up in a bristle. Out in the street, the man spun and stared directly at the dog. He knit his brows, leaning forward and peering. The fat beagle bayed again, and as the man lifted his bat, Sarge sprang forward, snarling.

The fence didn’t stop him.

Sarah stared as Sarge vanished into the rolling fog and then reappeared in the street outside her fence, baying. The man stooped, picked up a chunk of the rotten branch, and threw it at Sarge. She didn’t think it hit him, but the beagle yelped and dodged. “Leave my dog alone!” she shouted at him. “I’ve called the cops! They’re on the way!”

He kept his eyes on the dog. Sarge bayed again, noisily proclaiming his territory. The thief snatched a wrench from the tool pouch and threw it. This time she heard a meaty thunk as it hit her dog, and Sarge’s yipping as he fled was that of an injured dog. “Sarge! Sarge, come back! You bastard! You bastard, leave my dog alone!” For the man was pursuing him, bat held ready.

Sarah ran into the house, grabbed her phone, dialed it, and ran outside again. Ringing, ringing … “Sarge!” she shouted, fumbled the catch on the gate, and ran out into an empty street.

Empty.

No truck. No fallen branches or dead leaves. A mist under the greenbelt trees at the end of the street vanished as the sun broke through the overcast. She stood in a tidy urban neighborhood of mowed lawns and swept sidewalks. No shattered windshield, no shabby thief. Hastily, she pushed the “off” button on her phone. No beagle. “Sarge!” she called, her voice breaking on his name. But he was gone, just as gone as everything else she had glimpsed.

The phone in her hand rang.

Her voice shook as she assured 911 that everything was all right, that she had dropped the phone and accidentally pushed buttons as she picked it up. No, no one needed to come by, she was fine.

She sat at her kitchen table, stared at the street, and cried for two hours. Cried for her mind that was slipping away, cried for Sarge being gone, cried for a life spinning out of her control. Cried for being alone in a foreign world. She took the assisted living brochures out of the recycling bin, read them, and wept over the Alzheimer’s wing with alarms on the doors. “Anything but this, God,” she begged Him, and then thought of the sleeping pills the doctor had offered when Russ had died. She’d never filled the prescription. She looked for it in her purse. It wasn’t there.

She went upstairs and opened the drawer and looked in at the handgun. She remembered Russ showing her how the catch worked, and how she had loaded the magazine with ammunition. They’d gone plinking at tin cans in a gravel pit. Years ago. But the gun was still there, and when she worked the catch, the magazine dropped into her hand. There was an amber plastic box of ammunition next to it, surprisingly heavy. Fifty rounds. She looked at it and thought of Russ and how gone he was.

Then she put it back, got her basket, and went to pick Maureen’s apples. She and Hugh weren’t home, probably up at the Seattle hospital. Sarah filled her basket with heavy apples and lugged it home, planning what she would make. Jars of applesauce, jars of apple rings spiced and reddened with Red Hots candy. Empty jars waited, glass shoulder to shoulder, next to the enamel canner and the old pressure cooker. She stood in the kitchen, staring up at them and then at the apples on the counter. Put them in jars for whom? Who could trust anything she canned? She should drag them all down and donate them.

She shut the cupboard. Done and over. Canning was as done and over as dancing or embroidery or sex. No use mooning over it.

She washed and polished half a dozen apples, put them in a pretty basket with a late dahlia, and went to visit Richard. She left the basket at the desk with a thank-you note for the nurses and went in with the cup of coffee. She gave him sips of it and told him everything, about the fog and Linda disappearing and the man with her backpack. He watched her face and listened to the story she couldn’t tell anyone else. A shadow of life came back into his face as he offered a brother’s best advice. “Shoot the son of a bitch.” He shook his head, coughed, and added, “Poor old dog. But at least he probably went fast, eh? Better than a slow death.” He gestured around him with a bony, age-spotted hand. “Better than this, Sal. Better than this.”

She stayed an extra hour with him that day. Then she rode the bus home and went directly to bed. When she woke up at 2 a.m., she swept the floor and cleaned the bathroom and baked herself a lonely apple in the oven. The cinnamon-apple-brown-sugar smell made her weep. She ate it with tears on her cheeks.

That was the day she became completely unhooked from time. Without Sarge asking her to get up at six and feed him, what did it matter what time she got up, or when she cooked or ate or raked leaves? The newspaper would always wait for her, Safeway never closed, and she never knew which days would show her a pleasant fall afternoon in a quiet neighborhood and which ones would reveal a foggy world of derelict houses and rusting cars. Why not shop for groceries at one in the morning, or read the day’s news at eight o’clock at night while eating a microwaved dinner? Time didn’t matter anymore.

That, she decided, was the secret of it. She wondered if it happened to all old people, once they realized that time no longer applied to them. She began to deliberately go out into the yard on the foggy days to stare by choice into that dismal other world. Three days after Sarge had vanished, she saw a ragged little girl shaking the lower branches of an overgrown apple tree, hoping that the last wormy apples would fall for her. Nothing fell, but she kept trying. Sarah went back into the house and brought out the basket of apples from Maureen’s tree. She stood in her backyard and pitched them over the fence, one at a time. She threw them underhand, just as she had used to pitch softballs for her children. The first three simply vanished in the fog. Then, as the mist thickened, one thunked to the weedy brown lawn by the child. The girl jumped on the apple, believing she had shaken it down herself. Sarah lobbed half a dozen more fat red apples, sprayed and watered and ripe. With each succeeding apple, the child’s delight grew. She sat down under the tree, hunched her legs to her chest for warmth, and hungrily ate apple after apple. Sarah bit into an apple herself and ate it while she watched. When she was finished, it became a game for Sarah, to stand ready to lob an apple when the child shook the tree. When the girl couldn’t eat any more, she stuffed them into her ragged backpack. When all the apples had been thrown, Sarah went back into the house, made herself tea, and thought about it until the mist burned away and she saw the first apples she had tossed lying in the street. She laughed, brushed her hair, put on her shoes, and went shopping.

For three days the mist came, but no child appeared. Sarah wasn’t discouraged. The next time the mist swept through, she was ready. She had bagged the pink socks in plastic, taped securely shut. No telling how long they would lie there before the child came back. There were two sweatshirts, pink with sequins, and warm woolly tights and a sturdy blue backpack full of granola bars. One after another, she flung them over the fence and into the mist. She heard them land even though she couldn’t see them. When the mist cleared and only one pair of socks remained in the street, she rejoiced. She hoped she would see the little girl come back and find her gifts. She didn’t, but the next time the mist swirled, she could clearly see that the treasures were gone. “She found them,” she congratulated herself, and planned more surprises.

Simple things. A bag of dried apricots. Oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips in a sturdy plastic tub. Over the fence and into the mist. Those she saw the girl find, and the look on her face as she opened the box was priceless. The nights got colder and snow threatened. Was it as cold in that other world? Where did the child sleep? Did she den in some bushes or lair in one of the abandoned houses? Sarah found her knitting needles and ferreted out a stash of yarn. She had forgotten these colors, heather purple and acorn-cap brown and moss green. They wrapped her needles and slid through her stiff fingers with the memories of days when she could hike the autumn hillsides. She took her knitting with her in a bag when she visited Richard, and even if he didn’t know her, he remembered how their mother would never watch television without her knitting. They laughed at that, and cried a bit, too. His cough was worse. She gave him sips of coffee to clear his throat, and when he asked, in a boy’s voice, if he could keep the green wool hat, she left it with him.

Sarah packaged together heathery woolen mittens, a matching hat, and a pair of pink rubber boots. On impulse, she added a picture dictionary. She put the things in ziplock bags and when the mist swirled in the winter winds, she grinned as she Frisbeed them over the fence and into the fog. Early in November, she threw a sack of orange and black Halloween crème candies, pumpkins and cats and ears of corn left over after a very disappointing turnout of trick-or-treaters at her door.

When she visited Richard, he was wearing his green hat in bed. She told him about the little girl, about the apples and the mittens. He laughed his old laugh, then coughed himself red in the face. The nurse came, and when she eyed his coffee suspiciously, Sarah smiled and drank the rest of it. “You’re a nice lady,” Richard told her as she was leaving. “You remind me of my sister.”

Several nights later, in the middle of the night, a storm woke her and she came down the stairs to the kitchen. Outside, the wind blew past her chimney and brushed the tree branches against the roof. It would bring the last of the leaves down; she’d have to rake tomorrow. Through the wind, she heard a child’s voice, perhaps the girl’s. She opened her back door and stepped onto her porch. Overhead, the branches of the beech swayed and leaves rained, but in the street, a thick bank of mist rolled slowly past. She crossed her lawn and groped for the top of her fence. She strained her eyes and ears, trying to penetrate the fog and the darkness.

She almost stayed too long. The fence faded from her grip. She stepped back as it melted into fog. The porch light seemed distant. Mist roiled between her and her steps. Behind her, she heard heavier footfalls in the street. Men, not a child. She moved through the fog as if she were breasting deep water. Her breath was sobbing in and out of her as she stumbled up the steps. The men’s footfalls rang clear behind her. Reaching around the door, into her house, she snapped off the porch light and stood frozen on the steps, peering through mist and dark.

They had the girl. One held her firmly by the wrist. She pointed and spoke to them. She touched her hat and spoke again. The man gripping her wrist shook his head. The girl pointed again, insistently, at the apple tree across the street. The man advanced on it. Sarah watched them as they methodically searched the tree, the area under the tree, and then the planting strip and the yard across the street. One of them dragged open the sagging door and vanished into the house. He emerged a short time later shaking his head. When they looked in her direction, she wondered what they saw. What was her house in their world and time? A deserted place with broken windows like the house across the street? A burned-out hulk like the Masons’ home halfway down the block?

What would happen if the fog engulfed her house?

The man with Linda’s backpack and the baseball bat stared intently at her porch. A swirl of mist followed her as she retreated into her kitchen, not daring to shut her door lest it make a noise. Noise, she knew, could reach from her world to theirs. She pushed a chair out of the way, hating how it scraped on the floor, and hunched low to peer out over the windowsill. She reached for the light switch and snapped the lights off. There. She could see more clearly.

Backpack Man was staring at her window as he crossed the street, lightly slapping the bat against his palm as he came. The mist had coalesced in her yard. She saw him come into her yard, unhampered by an iron fence that didn’t exist in his world. He stood in her roses just below her kitchen window and stared up at her, his pale eyes focused past her. He studied her window, then threw back his head and shouted, “Sarah!” The word reached her, faint but clear. He stepped back, searching her window for her. She remained frozen. He can’t see me. I’m not in his world. Even if he knows my name, he can’t see me. He looked at the upper windows of her house and shook his head in frustration. “Sarah!” he shouted again. “You are there. You hear me! Come out!” Behind him, his cohorts took it up. “Sarah!” they chorused to the night. “Come out, Sarah!” The others drifted closer to flank Backpack Man.

They knew her name. Before they killed Linda, they had learned her name. And what else? The little girl took up the cry, her voice a thin echo. She stood close by the man who held her hand. Not his captive. Her protector.

Sarah slipped from her chair, folding down on the floor, her heart racing so she could scarcely breathe. Tears came and she huddled under her table, shaking, terrified that at any moment the window would shatter to his bat or he would step in through the open doorway. What a fool she was! Of course the child was part of their group. They would have a foraging territory, just like any group of primates. The gifts she had thrown intending only kindness to a hungry child had lured them here. The man out there wasn’t a fool. He’d seen Sarge come out of nowhere, the dog he had probably hunted down for meat. He’d know there was something mysterious about her house. Had Linda told him something before they killed her and took her things? How much had she told? Had she been pursued by them, had she led them here when she tried to cross back to this world?

Too many questions. She was shaking with terror. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, tried not to breathe lest they hear her panting. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to be utterly still. She heard the door creak on its hinges. The rising wind pushing cold air into the room, or the man with the baseball bat? She curled tighter, put her hands over her head, and closed her eyes. Don’t move, she told herself. Stay still until the danger is gone.

“Mom, what the hell! Are you all right? Did you fall? Why didn’t you call me?”

Alex, face white, on his knees by the kitchen table, peering at her. “Can you move? Can you speak? Was it a stroke?”

She blinked and tried to make sense of what she saw. Alex had his coat on. Snowflakes on his shoulders. A wool watch cap pulled down over his ears. Cold air flowing in from the open back door. “I think I just fell asleep here,” she said, and as his eyes widened, she tried to make repairs by saying, “Fell asleep reading at the table. I must have slid right down here without waking up.”

“Reading what?” he demanded wearily.

She tried to hide how much it hurt to roll to her hands and knees and crawl out from under the table. She had to grab hold of the chair seat to lever herself up and then onto it. The kitchen table was bare. “Well, how odd!” she exclaimed, and forced a smile onto her face. “And what brings you by here today?”

“Your neighbors,” he said heavily. “Maureen called. She was on her way up to Emergency with Hugh. She couldn’t stop, but she saw that your back door was open but your lights weren’t on. She didn’t see any footprints in the snow and she was worried about you. So I came.”

“How’s Hugh?”

“I didn’t ask. I came here instead.”

She looked at the kitchen floor. A delta of melting snow showed where the storm had blown into her kitchen. She’d slept curled on the floor with the door open during a snowstorm. She creaked past him to the coffeepot without a word. She went to turn it on and saw the burned crust of dried coffee in the bottom of the pot. She moved methodically as she washed out the pot, measured water, and put grounds into a clean filter. She pushed the button. No light came on.

“I think you probably burned it out,” Alex said heavily. He reached past her to unplug it. He didn’t look at her as he took off the pot, threw away the grounds, and dumped the water down the sink. “I think you must have left it turned on for a long time to evaporate that much coffee.” He pulled her small garbage can from under the sink. It was full. He tried unsuccessfully to stuff the coffeemaker into it and then left it perched crookedly on top.

He was quiet as he put water into two mugs and set them both in the microwave. She went and got the broom and swept the snow out the door, and then wiped up the water that remained. It hurt to bend; she was so stiff but didn’t dare groan. Alex made instant coffee for both of them and then sat down heavily at her table. He gestured at the chair opposite, and she reluctantly joined him.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.

She stared at him. “You’re my son, Alex. You’re forty-two and your birthday was last month. Your wife has two children. I’m not losing my mind.”

He opened his mouth, and then shut it. “What year is this?” He demanded.

“Two thousand and eleven. And Barack Obama is president. And I don’t like him or the Tea Party. Are you going to give me a handful of change now and ask me how much more I need to make a dollar? Because I saw the same stupid ‘Does Your Aging Parent Have Alzheimer’s?’ quiz in last week’s Sunday paper.”

“It wasn’t a quiz. It was a series of simple tests to check mental acuity. Mom, maybe you can make change and tell me who I am, but you can’t explain why you were sleeping on the floor under the table with the back door open. Or why you let the coffeepot boil dry.” He looked around abruptly. “Where’s Sarge?”

She told the truth. “He ran away. I haven’t seen him for days.”

The silence grew long. He looked at the floor guiltily and spoke in a gruff voice. “You should have called me. I would have done that for you.”

“I didn’t have him put down! He got out of the yard and ran off when a stranger shouted at him.” She looked away from him. “He was only five. That’s not that old for a dog.”

“Bobbie called me a couple of nights ago. He said he came home from working late and saw you carrying groceries into the house at midnight.”

“So?”

“So why were you buying groceries in the middle of the night?”

“Because I ran out of hot chocolate. And I wanted some for watching a late show, so I ran to the store for it, and while I was there, I thought I might as well pick up some other things I needed.” Lie upon lie upon lie. She wouldn’t tell him that the clock no longer mattered to her. Wouldn’t say that time no longer controlled her. The heater cycled off. She heard it give a final tick and realized that it had been running constantly since she’d awakened. Probably it had run all night long.

Alex didn’t believe her. “Mom, you can’t live alone anymore. You’re doing crazy things. And the crazy things are getting to be dangerous.”

She stared into her mug. There was something final in his voice. Something more threatening than a stranger with a baseball bat.

“I don’t want to drag you to the doctor and get a statement that you are no longer competent. I’d like us both to keep our dignity and avoid all that.” He stopped and swallowed and she suddenly knew he was close to tears. She turned her head and stared out the window. An ordinary winter day, gray skies, wet streets. Alex sniffed and cleared his throat. “I’m going to call Sandy and see if she can get a few days off and come stay with you. We have to get a handle on how to proceed. I wish you’d let me get started on this months ago.” He rubbed his cheeks and she heard the bristle of unshaven whiskers against his palms. He’d left his house in a panic. Maureen’s call had scared him. “Mom, we need to clear out the house and put it on the market. You can come stay with me, or maybe Sandy can make room for you. Until we can find an assisted living placement for you.”

Placement. Not until we can find an apartment or condo. Placement. Like putting something on a shelf. “No,” she said quietly.

“Yes,” he said. He sighed as if he were breathing his life out. “I can’t give in to you again, Mom. I’ve let things go by too many times.” He stood up. “When I came in here and saw you, I thought you were dead. And what flashed into my mind was that I was going to have to tell Sandy that I let you die on the floor alone. Because I didn’t have the strength to stand up to you.” He heaved another sigh. “I need to put you into a safe place so I can stop worrying about you.”

“I’m sorry that I frightened you.” Sincere words. She held back the other words, the ones that would tell him she would go down fighting, that neither he nor Sandy was going to keep her in a guest room like a guinea pig in a glass tank, nor board her out to a kennel for the elderly.

She only listened after that. He told her that he would call Sandy, that he’d be back tomorrow or Thursday at the latest. Would she be all right? Yes. Would she please stay in the house? Yes. He would call her every few hours today, and tonight he’d call her at bedtime. So would she please keep the phone near her, because if she didn’t answer, he was coming back here. Yes. Yes to everything he said, not because she agreed or promised but because “yes” was the word that would make him feel safe enough to go away.

Then she asked, “But what about Richard? Tomorrow is Thursday. I always go see Richard on Thursdays.”

For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “He doesn’t know what day you come. He doesn’t even know it’s you. You could never go again, and he wouldn’t miss you.”

“I would miss him,” she said fiercely. “I always go on Thursday mornings. Tomorrow I’m going to see him.”

He stood up. “Mom. Yesterday was Thursday.”

After Alex finally drove away, she made herself hot tea, found the ibuprofen, and sat down to think. She recalled the men standing in the street last night, the backpack man right outside her window, and a river of chill ran down her spine. She was in danger. And there was absolutely no one she would turn to for advice without running herself into even greater danger. Backpack Man might kill her with an aluminum baseball bat, but her family was contemplating something much worse. Death by bat would only happen once. If her children put her somewhere “safe,” she’d wake up there day after day and night after night. To a woman who had broken free of time, that meant an eternity of cafeteria meals and time spent in a Spartan room. Alone. Because soon Alex would decide that it didn’t matter if he ever visited her. She knew that now.

For the next few days she answered promptly whenever Alex called. She was bright and chipper on the phone, pretending enthusiasm for television movies that she cribbed from the TV guide. Twice she walked down to Maureen’s, and twice she wasn’t home. Sarah moved the accumulating newspapers off her doorstep and suspected Hugh was dying.

Sarah set the clocks to remind her when to go to bed and remained there, head on the pillow, blankets over her, until another clock rang to tell her to rise. She did not look out of the kitchen windows before ten or after five. The day that a flash of motion caught her eye and she looked out the window to see the girl run past in her hat the colors of freshly fallen acorns, she rose from the kitchen table and went to her bedroom and lay on the bed and watched The Jerry Springer Show.

The nursing home called to tell her that Richard had pneumonia. She sneaked out that day, caught the bus, and spent the whole morning with him. He didn’t know her. They had taped an oxygen tube under his nose and the pink hissing sound reminded her of a balloon endlessly going flat. She tried to talk over it, couldn’t, and just sat holding his hand. He stared at the wall. Waiting.

The next evening Sandy arrived. It startled Sarah when she walked in the front door without knocking, but she was glad to see her. She had driven over the mountains with her friend, a gaunt, morose woman who smoked cigarettes in the house and fountained apologies for “forgetting” that she shouldn’t. Sandy had bought Safeway deli Chinese food and they ate at Sarah’s table out of Styrofoam clamshells. The friend and Sandy talked of the friend’s divorce from That Bastard and of Sandy’s upcoming divorce from That Idiot. Sarah hadn’t known a divorce was in Sandy’s future. When she gently asked why, Sandy suddenly gulped, gasped that it was too complicated to explain, and fled the room with her friend trailing after her. Sarah numbly tidied up the kitchen and waited for her to come back down. When neither of them did, she eventually went to bed.

That was the first day. The next morning Sandy and the friend arose and began stripping the unused bedrooms that had been Alex’s and Sandy’s when they were teens. Sarah felt a mixture of relief and regret as she watched them finally emptying the closets and drawers of the “precious mementoes” that Sarah and Russ had longed to discard for years. “Lightening the load,” Sandy called it, as they discarded old clothing and high school sports gear and required-reading paperbacks and ancient magazines and binders. One by one they carried the bulging black garbage sacks down the stairs and mounded them by the back porch. “Time to simplify!” Sandy’s friend chortled cheerily each time she toted out another sack.

They ate sandwiches at lunch and then brought back pizza and beer for dinner. After dinner, they went right back to work. Sandy’s friend had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. Sarah escaped her cigarette smoke by going out into the dusky backyard. The evening was rainy, but when she stood under the copper beech, little of the water reached her. She stared out at the street. Empty. Empty and fog free. A calm neighborhood of mowed lawns and well-tended houses and shiny cars. Sandy came out with another bulging garbage bag. Sarah gave her daughter a rueful smile. “Better tie them shut, dear. The rain will ruin the clothing.”

“The dump won’t care, Mom.”

“The dump? You’re not taking them to Goodwill?”

Sandy gave a martyred sigh. “Secondhand stores have gotten really picky. They won’t take a lot of this stuff and I don’t have time to sort it. If I take all these bags there, they’ll refuse half of them and I’ll just have to go to the dump anyway. So I’ll save myself a trip by going straight to the dump.”

Sarah was drawing breath to protest, but Sandy had already turned and gone back for more. She shook her head. Tomorrow she would sort them herself and then call one of the charities for a pickup. She simply couldn’t allow all that useful clothing and all those paperbacks to go to a dump. As the friend plopped down another sack, a seam split and a shirt Sarah recognized popped from it. Sandy came behind her friend with another bag.

“Wait a minute! That’s your father’s shirt, one of his good Pendletons. Was that in your room?” Sarah was almost amused at the idea that a shirt Sandy must have “borrowed” so many years ago would still have been in her room. But as she came smiling to the bag, she saw another familiar plaid behind it. “What’s this?” she demanded as she drew out the sleeve of Russ’s shirt.

“Oh, Mom.” Sandy had been caught but she wasn’t repentant. “We’ve started on Dad’s closet. But relax. It’s all men’s clothing, nothing you can use. And it has to go.”

“Has to go? What are you talking about?”

Sandy sighed again. She dropped the bag she carried and explained carefully, “The house has to be emptied so it can be staged by a realtor. I promise, there’s nothing in these bags that you can take with you.” She shook her head at the shock on her mother’s face and added in a gentler voice, “Let it go, Mom. There’s no reason to hang on to his clothing anymore. It’s not Dad. It’s just his old shit.”

If she had used any other word, perhaps Sarah would have felt sorrow rather than anger. Any other word, and perhaps she could have responded rationally. But “shit”?

“Shit? His ‘shit’? No, Sandy, it’s not his ‘shit.’ Those are his clothes, the clothes and possessions of a man I loved. Do what you want with your old things. But those are mine, and I am not throwing them away. When the time comes for me to part with them, I’ll know it. And then they will go somewhere where they can do someone some good. Not to the dump.”

Sandy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Can’t put this off any longer, Mom. You know it’s why I came. I’ve only got this weekend to get all this stuff cleared out. I know it’s hard, but you have to let us do it. We don’t have time for you to be picky about it.”

Sarah couldn’t breathe. Had she agreed to this? When Alex had been there, talking and nagging, she had said, “Yes, yes,” but that didn’t mean she’d agreed to this, this destruction of her life. No. Not this fast, not like this! “No. No, Sandy.” She spoke as firmly as if Sandy were still a teenager. “You are going to take all my things back upstairs. Do you hear me? This stops now!”

The friend spoke in a low voice. “Your brother warned you about this. Now you’ve upset her.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out on the porch step. She left the butt there. “Maybe you should call your bro. She looks really confused.”

Sarah spun to confront the friend. “I’m standing here!” she shouted. “And you and your stinking cigarettes can get out of my house right now. I am not ‘confused’; I am furious! Sandy, you should be ashamed of yourself, going through other people’s things. You were taught better. What is the matter with you?”

Sandy’s face went white, then scarlet. Anger flashed across it, to be caged by dignity. “Mom. I hate to see you like this. I have to be honest. Your mind is slipping. Alex has been updating me. He told me he’d talked to you about this, and that you’d looked at the brochures together and chosen a couple of places you’d like. Don’t you remember at all?”

“We talked. That was all. Nothing was decided! Nothing.”

Sandy shook her head sadly. “That’s not what Alex said. He said you’d agreed, but he was taking it slow. But since that last incident, we have to act right away. Do you remember how he found you? Crouching under your table with the door open in a snowstorm?”

The friend was shaking her head, pityingly. Sarah was horrified. Alex had told Sandy, and Sandy had spread it to her friends. “That is none of your business,” she said stiffly.

Sandy threw up her hands and rolled her eyes. “Really, Mom? Really? Do you think we can just walk off and say, ‘Not my problem’? Because we can’t. We love you. We want to do what is right. Alex has been talking to several very nice senior communities with lovely amenities. He’s got it all figured out. If we use your social security and Dad’s pension, Alex and I can probably scrape together enough extra to get you into a nice place until the house sells. After that—”

“No.” Sarah said it flatly. She stared at Sandy, appalled. Who was this woman? How could she think she could just walk in and begin making decisions about Sarah’s life? “Get out,” she said.

Sandy glanced at her friend, who hadn’t budged. She was watching both of them, her mouth slightly ajar, like a Jerry Springer spectator. Sandy spoke to her apologetically. “You’d better go for now, Heidi. I need to calm my mom down. Why don’t you take the car and—”

“You, Sandy. I’m talking to you. Get. Out.”

Sandy’s face went slack with shock. Her eyes came back to life first, and for a moment she looked eleven and Sarah would have done anything to take back her words. Then her friend spoke knowingly. “I told you that you should have called your bro.”

Sandy huffed a breath. “You were right. We should have gotten the guardianship done and moved her out first. You were right.”

Cold rushed through Sarah’s body. “You just try it, missy. You just try it!”

Tears were leaking from Sandy’s eyes now. The friend rushed to put a protective arm around her. “Come on, Sandy, let’s go. We’ll get some coffee and call your bro.”

Even after the door had slammed behind them, and she had rushed over to lock it, Sarah couldn’t calm down. She paced. Her hands trembled as she put on the kettle for tea. She climbed the stairs and looked at the chaos they had created.

In the kids’ bedrooms, there were boxes neatly taped shut and labeled with their names. And across the hall, in the bedroom she and Russ had once shared, there were more boxes and half-filled garbage sacks. With a lurch of her heart, she recognized her old hiking jacket poking out of one. She pulled it out slowly and looked at it. It was still fine; there was nothing wrong with it. She put it on and zipped it. Tighter around her middle than it had been, but it still fit. It was still hers, not theirs. Her gaze traveled slowly from the sprawled bags to neatly stacked FedEx cardboard boxes. Each was labeled either “Sandy” or “Alex,” but one was labeled “Heidi.” Sarah tore the tape from it and dumped it out on the bed. Russ’s ski parka. Two of his heavy leather belts. His Meerschaum pipe. His silver Zippo lighter. His tobacco humidor. She picked up the little wooden barrel and opened it. The aroma of Old Hickory tobacco drifted out to her and tears stung her eyes.

Anger suddenly fired her. She dumped out all the boxes and bags on the floor. Alex’s box held Russ’s sheath knife from his hunting days. Some wool winter socks, still with the labels on. The little .22 and its ammunition were in one of Sandy’s boxes, along with Russ’s 35mm camera, in its case. The extra lenses and the little tripod was in there, too. His Texas Instruments calculator, the first one he’d ever owned and so expensive when she got it for his Christmas gift. A couple of his ties, and his old Timex watch. She sank down to the floor, holding the watch in her hand. She lifted it to her ear, shook it, and listened again. Silence. As still as his heart. She got to her feet slowly, looked around the ransacked room, and then left it, closing the door softly behind her. She’d clean it up later. Put it all back where it belonged.

Halfway down the stairs, she knew that she wouldn’t. There was no sense to it. Sandy had been right about that, at least. What did all the trappings mean if there was no man to go with them?

The kettle was whistling, and when she picked it up, it was almost dry. The phone began to ring. She wanted to ignore it. Caller ID said it was Alex. She spoke before he could. “They were ransacking the house. Putting all your father’s things into sacks to take to the dump. If that’s how you’re going to help me, how you’re going to ‘keep me safe,’ then I’d rather be …” Abruptly she could think of nothing to say. She hung up the phone.

It rang again, and she let it, counting the rings until her answering machine picked up. She listened to Russ’s voice answering the phone and waited for Alex’s angry shout. Instead, an apologetic voice said that they hated to leave this sort of message on the phone but they had been trying to reach her all day without success. Richard had died that morning. They’d notified the funeral home listed on his Purple Cross card and his body had been picked up. His personal possessions had been boxed for her and could be claimed at the front desk. The voice offered his deepest condolences.

She stood frozen, unable to move toward the phone. Silence flowed in after that call. When the phone rang again, she took the receiver off the hook, opened the back, and jerked out the batteries. The box on the wall kept ringing. She tugged it off the wall mount and unplugged it. Silence came back, filling her ears with a different sort of ringing. What to do, what to do? One or both of her children would be on the way back by now. Richard was dead. His body was gone, all his possessions taped up in a box. Russ was gone. She had no allies left, no one who remembered who she had been. The people who loved her most were the ones who presented the gravest danger to her. They were coming. She was nearly out of time. Out of time.

She made a mug of black tea and carried it outside with her. The rain had stopped and the night was chill. Abruptly she was glad of the coat she wore. She watched the mist form; it wove itself among the wet tree branches and then detached to drop and mingle with the grayness rising from the trickling street gutters. They met in the middle, swirled together, and the streetlight at the end of the street suddenly went out. The traffic sounds died with it. Sarah sipped bitter black tea and waited for that other world to form beyond the mist.

It took shape slowly. Illuminated windows faded to black as the gray rolled down the street toward her. The silhouettes of the houses across the street shifted slightly, roofs sagging, chimneys crumpling as saplings hulked up into cracked and aging trees. The fog thickened into a fat mounded bank and rolled toward her. She waited, one decision suddenly clear. When it reached the fence, she picked up a garbage sack full of discarded possessions, whirled it twice, and tossed it. It flew into the mist and reappeared in that other place, landing in the littered street. Another bag. Another. By the fourth bag she was dizzy from whirling, but they were too heavy to toss any other way. She forced herself to go on, bag after bag, until her lawn was emptied of them. Better than the dump, she told herself. Better than a landfill.

Dizzy and breathless, she staggered up the porch steps and went to her bedroom. She opened the blind on the upstairs bedroom window and looked out. The fog had rolled into her yard. It billowed around her house like waves against a dock. Good. She opened the window. Bag after bag, box after box she shoved out. Sandy and Alex would find nothing left of her here. Nothing for them to throw out or tidy away. Until only the gun and the plastic box of ammunition remained on the floor.

She picked it up. Black metal, cold to the touch. She pushed the catch and the empty clip fell into her hand. She sat down on the bed and opened the plastic box of ammo. One little bullet after another she fed into the clip until it was full. The magazine snapped into place with a sound like a door shutting.

No. That was the front door shutting.

She jammed the ammunition box into her jacket pocket. She held the gun as Russ had taught her, pointing it down as she went down the stairs. They were in the living room. She heard Alex ask something in an impatient voice. Sandy whined an excuse. The friend interrupted, “Well, you weren’t here! Sandy was doing the best she could.”

Sarah hurried down the hall and into the kitchen. Her heart was pounding so that she could barely hear them now, but she knew they were coming. She opened the kitchen door and stepped out.

The fog lapped at the bottom steps. Out in the street, the voices of Backpack Man and his scavengers were clearer than she had ever heard them. They had found the things she had thrown out there. “Boots!” one man shouted in excitement. Two of the others were quarreling over Russ’s old coat. Backpack Man was striding purposefully toward them, perhaps to claim it for himself. One of them took off running. He shouted something about “the others.”

“Mom?” Alex’s voice, calling her from inside the house.

“Mom?” Sandy’s light footsteps in the kitchen. “Mom, where are you? Please. We’re not angry. We just need to talk to you.”

The fog had lapped over another step. Her porch light was dimming.

Backpack Man would likely kill her. Her children would put her away.

The little .22 handgun was cold and heavy in her hand.

She stepped off the porch. The concrete step she had swept a few days ago was squishy with moss under her foot.

“Mom? Mom?”

“Alex, we should call the police.” Sandy’s voice was rising to hysteria. “The phone’s been torn off the wall!”

“Let’s not be” something, something, something—his voice went fuzzy, like a bad radio signal. Their worried conversation became distant buzzing static.

She tottered into the dark garden. The ground was uneven. She waded through tall wet weeds. The copper beech was still there and she hid in its deep shade. In the street, the silhouettes of the men intently rooted through the bags and boxes. They spoke in low excited voices as they investigated their find. Others were coming to join them. In the distance there was an odd creaking, like a strange bird cry. Sarah braced her hands on the tree and blended her shadow with the trunk, watching them. Some of the newcomers were probably females in bulky clothes. The girl was there, and another, smaller child. They were rummaging in a box, peering at paperback titles in the moonlight.

Two of the men closed in on the same garbage bag. One seized hold of a shirt sticking out of a tear and jerked on it, but the other man already had hold of its sleeve. An angry exclamation, a fierce tug, and then as one man possessed it, the other leaped on him. Fists flew, a man went down with a hoarse cry, and Backpack Man cursed them, brandishing his aluminum bat as he ran at them.

Sarah cringed behind the tree and measured her distance to the kitchen door. The house windows still gleamed but the light was grayish-blue, like the fading light from a dying Coleman lantern. Inside the room, her children passed as indistinct shadows. It wasn’t too late. She could still go back. The friend lit a cigarette; she saw the flare of the match, the glow as she drew on it. The friend waved a hand, commiserating with Sandy and Alex.

Sarah turned away from the window. She took a breath; the air was cool and damp, rich with the smells of humus and rot. Out in the street, Backpack Man stood between the quarreling men. He held the shirt high in one hand and the bat in the other. “Daddy!” the little girl cried, and ran toward them. One of the men was sprawled in the street. The other man stood, still gripping a sleeve, hunched and defiant. The girl ran to him, wrapped herself around him.

“Let go!” Backpack Man warned them both. A hush had fallen over the tribe as they stared, awaiting Backpack Man’s judgment. The distant creaking grew louder. Backpack Man raised his bat threateningly.

Sarah gripped the gun in both hands, stepped from the tree’s shadow and thumbed off the safety. She had not known that she remembered how to do that. She’d never been a great shot; his chest was the largest target, and she couldn’t afford a warning shot. “You!” she shouted as she waded through the low fogbank and out into that world. “Drop the bat or I’ll shoot! What did you do to Linda? Did you kill her? Where is she?”

Backpack Man spun toward her, bat held high. Don’t think. She pointed and fired, terror and resolve indistinguishable from one another. The bullet spanged the bat and whined away, hitting the Murphys’ house with a solid thwack. Backpack Man dropped the bat and clutched his hand to his chest. “Where’s Linda?” she screamed at him. She advanced on him, both hands on the gun, trying to hold it steady on his chest. The others had dropped their loot and faded back.

“I’m here! Dammit, Sarah, you took your sweet time. But looks like you thought to bring a lot more than I did!” Linda cackled wildly. “Bring any good socks in there?”

The creaking was a garden cart festooned with a string of LEDs. A halo of light illuminated it as Linda pushed it before her. The cart held two jerry cans, a loop of transparent tubing, and the tool roll from the truck. Three more battered carts, similarly lit, followed her in a solemn procession. As Sarah’s mind scrambled to put it all in context, she heard the rattle of toenails on pavement and a much skinnier Sarge raced up to her, wriggling and wagging in excitement. They weren’t dead. She wasn’t alone. Sarah stooped and hugged the excited dog, letting him lap the tears off her cheeks.

Linda gave her time to recover as she barked her orders at the tribe. “Benny, you come here and take this. Crank this fifty times and then it will light up. Hector, you know how to siphon gas. Check that old truck. We need every drop we can get to keep the Generac running. Carol, you pop the hood and salvage the battery.”

The scavengers came to her, accepting the jerry cans and the siphon tube. Backpack Man bobbed a bow to her before accepting the crank light. As he turned away, Linda smiled at her. “They’re good kids. A bit rough around the edges, but they’re learning fast. You should have seen their faces the first time I fired up the generator. I know where to look for stuff like that. It was in the basement of that clinic on Thirtieth.”

Sarah was speechless. Her eyes roved over Linda. Like the dog, she had lost weight and gained vitality. She hobbled toward Linda on the ragged remnants of her bedroom slippers. She gave a caw of laughter when she saw Sarah staring at her feet.

“Yes, I know. Dotty old woman. Thought of so many things—solar lights and a crank flashlight, aspirin, and sugar cubes and so on … and then walked out the door in my slippers. Robbie was right, my trolley was definitely off the tracks. But it doesn’t matter so much over here. Not when the tracks are torn up for everyone.”

“Russ’s hiking boots are in one of those bags,” Sarah heard herself say.

“Damn, you thought of everything. Cold-weather gear, books … and a pistol! I’d never have thought it of you. You pack any food?”

Sarah shook her head wordlessly. Linda looked at the gun she still held, muzzle down at her side, and nodded knowingly. “Didn’t plan to stay long, did you?”

“I could go back and get some,” Sarah said, but as she looked back at her house, the last lights of the past faded. Her home was a wreck, broken windows and tumbledown chimney. Her grapevines cloaked the ruins of the collapsed porch.

“Can’t go back,” Linda confirmed for her. She shook her head and then clarified: “For one, I don’t want to.” She looked around at her tribe. “Petey, pick up that bat. Remind everyone, we carry everything back and divvy up at the clinic. Not here in the street in the dark. Don’t tear the bags and boxes; put the stuff back in them and let’s hump it on home.”

“Yes, Linda.” Backpack Man bobbed another bow to her. Around her in the darkness, the others were moving to obey her. The girl stood, staring at both of them, her mittened hands clasped together. Linda shook a bony finger at her. “You get busy, missy.” Then she motioned to Sarah to come closer. “What do you think?” she asked her. “Do you think Maureen will be ready soon?”

Lev Grossman

A novelist and journalist, Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time and coauthor of the TIME.com blog TechLand. His quirky 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians was a phenomenal international sensation, and landed on the New York Times Best Seller list as well as being named a New Yorker Best Book of 2009, and its sequel, The Magician King, published in 2011, has enjoyed similar acclaim. Grossman’s other books include the novels Warp and Codex. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a website at levgrossman.com.

Here he takes us to an ancient, venerable school for wizards, one haunted by a thousand age-old traditions as well as spirits of a different kind, to show us that even the most innocent of pranks can end up having dangerous and even deadly consequences.

THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR

You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.

You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?

Plum was president of the League—unelected but undisputed—and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since the college had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been, at some point in the past, another League or at any rate something along the same lines, which you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.

They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was lying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but rather exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.

Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius—and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said solemnly. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”

The ayes came back in a range of tones from righteous zeal to ironic detachment to sleepy acquiescence. This business of clandestine after-hours scheming could certainly take a whack at your sleep schedule, Plum had to admit. It was a little unfair on the others, because Plum was a quick study who went through homework like a hot knife through butter, and she knew it wasn’t that easy for all of them. From her vantage point on the floor, with her eyes closed, her long brown hair splayed out in a fan on the carpet, which had once been soft and woolly but which had been trodden down into a shiny, hard-packed grey, the vote sounded more or less unanimous.

Anyway, there was fairly evidently a plurality in the room. She dispensed with a show of nays.

“It’s maddening,” Emma said in the silence that followed, by way of spiking the football. “Absolutely maddening.”

That was an exaggeration, but the room let it go. It’s not like Wharton’s crime was a matter of life and death. But a stop would be put to it. This the League swore.

Darcy sat on the couch opposite the long mirror with the scarred white frame that leaned against one wall. She toyed with her reflection—with both of her long, elegant hands she was working a spell that stretched it and then squished it, stretched, then squished. The technicalities were beyond Plum, but then, mirror-magic was Darcy’s specialty. It was a bit show-offy of her, but you couldn’t blame her. Darcy didn’t have a lot of opportunities to use it.

The facts of the Wharton case were as follows. At Brakebills, most serving duties at dinner were carried out by First Years, who then ate separately afterwards. But, by tradition, one favored Fourth Year was chosen every year to serve as wine steward, in charge of pairings and pourings and whatnot. Wharton had had this honor bestowed upon him, and not for no reason. He did know a lot about wine, or at any rate he seemed to be able to remember the names of a whole lot of different regions and appellations and whatever else. (In fact, another Fourth Year with the unintentionally hilarious name of Claire Bear had been tipped for wine steward this year. Wharton showed her up, coolly and publicly, by distinguishing between a Gigondas and a Vacqueyras in a blind tasting.)

But in the judgment of the League, Wharton had sinned against the honor of his office, sinned most grievously, by systematically short-pouring the wine, especially for the Fifth Years, who were allowed two glasses with dinner. Seriously, these were like three-quarter pours. Everybody agreed. For such a crime, there could be no forgiveness.

“What do you suppose he does with it all?” Emma said.

“Does with what?”

“The extra wine. He must be saving it. I bet he ends up with an extra bottle every night.”

There were eight girls in the League, of whom six were present, and Emma was the youngest and the only Second Year, but she wasn’t cowed by her elders. In fact, she was, in Plum’s opinion, even a bit too keen on the League and her role in same. She could have made just a little show of being intimidated once in a while. Plum was just saying.

“I dunno,” Plum said. “I guess he drinks it.”

“He couldn’t get through a bottle a night,” Darcy said. She had a big poofy 1970s Afro; it even had an Afro pick sticking out of it.

“He and his boyfriend, then. What’s his name. It’s Greek.”

“Epifanio.” Darcy and Chelsea said it together.

Chelsea lay on the couch at the opposite end from Darcy, her honey-blond head on the armrest, knees drawn up, lazily trying to mess up Darcy’s mirror tricks. Darcy’s spells were marvels of intricacy and precision, but it was much easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic.

Darcy frowned and concentrated harder, pushing back. The interference caused an audible buzz, and, under the stress, Darcy’s reflection in the mirror twisted and spiraled in on itself in weird ways.

“Stop,” she said. “You’re going to break it.”

“He’s probably got some set spell running that eats it up,” Emma said. “Has to feed it wine once a day. Like a virility thing.”

“Of course that’s where your mind would go,” Plum said.

“Well,” Emma said, flushing mauve—gotcha!—“you know. He’s so buff.”

Chelsea saw her moment and caused Darcy’s reflection to collapse in on itself, creepily, like it had gotten sucked into a black hole, and then vanish altogether. In the mirror it looked like she wasn’t even there—her end of the couch was empty, though the cushion was slightly depressed.

“Ha,” said Chelsea.

“Buff does not mean virile.”

That was Lucy, an intensely earnest, philosophical Fifth Year; her tone betrayed a touch of what might have been the bitterness of personal experience. Plump and wan and Korean, Lucy floated cross-legged in one of the room’s irregular upper corners. Her dark straight hair was loose and so long that it hung down past her bum.

“I bet he gives it to the ghost,” Lucy went on.

“There is no ghost,” Darcy said.

Somebody was always saying that Brakebills had a ghost. It was like Plum saying there was a League: you could never prove it either way.

“Come to that,” said Chelsea, who had consolidated her victory over Darcy in the mirror game by plopping her feet in Darcy’s lap, “what does ‘virile’ mean?”

“Means he’s got spunk in his junk,” Darcy said.

“Girls, please,” Plum said, by way of getting things back on track. “Neither Wharton’s spunk nor his junk are germane here. The question is, what to do about the missing wine? Who’s got a plan?”

“You’ve got a plan,” Darcy and Chelsea said at the same time, again. The two of them were like stage twins.

“I do have plan.”

“Plum has a plan,” intoned tiny, cheery Holly from the one good armchair.

Plum always had a plan; she couldn’t help it. Her brain seemed to secrete them naturally. Plum’s plan was to take advantage of what she perceived to be Wharton’s Achilles’ heel, which was his pencils. He didn’t use the school-issued ones, which as far as Plum was concerned were entirely functional and sufficient unto the day: deep Brakebills blue in color, with “Brakebills” in gold letters down the side. But Wharton didn’t like them—he said they were too fat, he didn’t like their “hand-feel,” and the lead was soft and mushy. Wharton brought his own from home instead.

In truth, Wharton’s pencils were remarkable pencils: olive green in color and made from some oily, aromatic wood that released a waxy aroma reminiscent of distant exotic rain forest trees. God knows where he got them from. The erasers were bound in rings of a dull grey brushed steel that looked too industrial and high-carbon for the task of merely containing the erasers, which were, instead of the usual fleshy pink, a light-devouring black. Wharton kept his pencils in a flat silver case, which also contained (in its own crushed-velvet nest) a sharp little knife that he used to keep them sharpened to wicked points.

Moreover, whatever life Wharton had led before becoming a magician-in-training at Brakebills, it must have included academic decathlon or debating or something, because he had a whole arsenal of spinning-pencil tricks of the kind that people commonly used to intimidate rival mathletes. He performed them constantly and unconsciously and seemingly involuntarily. It was annoying, even over and above the wine thing.

Plum planned to steal the pencils and hold them for ransom, the ransom being an explanation of what the hell Wharton did with all that wine, along with a pledge to stop doing same. By 11:30 p.m. that night, the League was yawning, and Darcy and Chelsea had restored Darcy’s reflection and then begun wrangling with it all over again, but Plum’s plan had been fully explained, fleshed out, approved, improved, and then made needlessly complex. Cruel, curly little barbs had been added to it, and all roles had been assigned.

It was rough justice, but someone had to enforce order at Brakebills, and if the faculty didn’t, then the League’s many hands were forced. The faculty might turn a blind eye, if it chose, but the League’s many eyes were sharp and unblinking.

Darcy’s image in the mirror shivered and blurred.

“Stop it!” Darcy said, really annoyed now. “I told you—”

She had told her, and now it did. The mirror broke: there was a loud sharp tick, and a white star appeared in the glass in the lower right-hand corner, with thin cracks branching out from it, as if some tiny invisible projectile had struck it there. Plum thought of Tennyson: The mirror cracked from side to side …

“Oh, shit!” Chelsea said. Her hands flew to her mouth. “I hope that wasn’t, like, super expensive.”

The instant it happened, the mirror’s face went dark, and it stopped reflecting anything in the room at all. It must not have been a real mirror at all but a magical device designed to behave like one. At first Plum thought it had gone completely black, but then she saw that there were soft shadowy shapes there: a sofa and chairs. The mirror, or whatever it was, was showing them the same room they were in, but empty, and in darkness. Was it the past? The future? There was something uncanny about it—it was as if someone had been there moments ago and had only just left, turning out the lights on their way out.

Plum got up at 8:00 the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain, the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. She’d counted on feeling all sparkly with excitement and anticipation at the prospect of the impending prank, but instead she just drifted vaguely into the shower and then out of it and into her clothes and downstairs in the direction of her first class. Her mind, she had often noticed, was a lens that alternated between states of lethally sharp focus and useless, strengthless blurriness, apparently without her having any say in the matter. Her mind had a mind of its own. This morning it was in its strengthless blur mode.

As a Fifth Year who’d finished all her required coursework, Plum was taking all seminars that semester, and her first class was a small colloquium on period magic, fifteenth-century German, to be specific—lots of elemental stuff and weird divination techniques and Johannes Hartlieb. Tiny Holly sat opposite her across the table, and such was Plum’s strengthless, blurry state that Holly had touched her sharp little nose meaningfully, twice, before Plum remembered that that was the signal that Stages One and Two of the plan had already been completed successfully. She snapped into focused mode.

Stage One: “Crude but Effective.” A few hours earlier Chelsea’s boyfriend would have smuggled her into the Boys’ Tower under pretense of a predawn snog, not out of character for either of them. Nature having taken its course, Chelsea would have torn herself from the arms of her beloved and gone and stood outside of Wharton’s door, her back pressed against it, smoothed back her honeyed locks from her forehead in an automatic gesture, rolled her eyes back into her head, and entered his room in a wispy, silvery, astral state. She tossed his room for the pencil case, found it, and grasped it with both of her barely substantial hands. She couldn’t get the pencil case out of the room that way, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift it up against the window.

Wharton himself might or might not have observed this, depending on whether or not he was asleep in his blameless couch, but it mattered not. Let him see.

Once Chelsea got the case over by the window, earnest Lucy would have line of sight from a window in an empty lecture hall opposite Wharton’s room, which meant she could teleport the pencil case in that direction, from inside Wharton’s room to midair outside it. Three feet was about as far as she could jump it, but that was plenty.

The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where keen Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold February predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.

Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the signature of the League. That was how the League rolled.

All this accomplished, it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning searching his room frantically for his pencils and not finding them. Through a fog of anxiety, he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by tiny Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.

It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinch of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.

As the day wore on, Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She knew she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad.

Her schedule ground forward, ingesting the day in gulps like an anaconda swallowing a wildebeest. Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Cellular-Level Plant Manipulation. All good clean American fun. Plum’s course load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing starters, the cold openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum had come prepared.

Brakebills was an extremely secret and highly exclusive institution—as the only accredited college for magic on the North American continent, it had a very large applicant pool to draw from, and it drank that pool dry. Though, technically, nobody actually applied there: Fogg simply skimmed the cream of eligible high school seniors, the cream of the cream really—the outliers, the extreme cases of precocious genius and obsessive motivation, who had the brains and the high pain tolerance necessary to cope with the intellectual and physical rigors that the study of magic would demand from them.

Needless to say, that meant that the Brakebills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. Moreover, in order to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit fucked up.

Plum was a little bit fucked up, but not the kind of fucked up that looked fucked up on the outside. She presented as funny and self-assured. When she got to Brakebills, she rolled up her sleeves and cracked her knuckles and did other appropriately confident body language, then she waded right in. Until they saw her in class, a lot of the First Years mistook her for an upperclasswoman.

But Plum made sure not to do so well that, for example, she was graduated early. She was in no hurry. She liked Brakebills. Loved it, really. Needed it, even. She felt safe here. She wasn’t so funny and self-assured that she never soothed herself to sleep by imagining she was Padma Patil (because sorry, Hermione, but Ravenclaw FTW). Plum was a closet Romantic, as were most of the students, and Brakebills was a Romantic’s dream. Because what were magicians if not Romantics—dreamers who dreamed so passionately and urgently and brokenheartedly that reality itself couldn’t take it, and cracked under the strain like an old mirror?

Plum had arrived at Brakebills cocked, locked, sound checked, and ready to rock. When people asked her what the hell kind of an adolescence she’d had that she arrived here in such a cocked, locked, and rock-ready state, she told them the truth, which is that she’d grown up in Seattle, the only daughter of a mixed couple—one magician, one Nintendo lifer who was fully briefed on the existence of magic but had never shown much talent at it himself. They’d homeschooled her, and given her her head, and quite a head it was. Basically, she knew a lot of magic because she’d had an early start and she was really good at it and nobody got in her way.

That was the truth. But when she got to the end of the true part, she told them lies in order to skip over the part she didn’t like to talk about, or even think about. Plum was a woman of mystery, and she liked it that way. She felt safe. No one was ever going to know the whole truth about Plum. Preferably not even Plum.

But not-thinking about the truth required a certain amount of distraction. Hence the Accelerated Advanced Kinetics and Quantum Gramarye and all her other hard-core magical academics. And hence the League.

Plum wound up having a pretty good day; at any rate, it was a lot better than Wharton’s day. In his first-period class, he found more pencil shavings on the seat of his chair. Walking to lunch, he found his pockets stuffed full of jet-black pencil eraser rubbings. It was like a horror movie—his precious pencils were slowly dying, minute by minute, and he was powerless to save them! He would rue his short-pouring ways, so he would.

Passing Wharton by chance in a courtyard, Plum let her eyes slide past his with a slow, satisfied smile. He looked like a haunted man—a ghost of his former self. The thought balloon over his head said, per Milton: What fresh hell is this?

Finally—and this was Plum’s touch, and she privately thought it was the deftest one—in his fourth-period class, a practicum on diagramming magical energies, Wharton found that the Brakebills pencil he was using, on top of its bad hand feel and whatever else, wouldn’t draw what he wanted it to. Whatever spell he tried to diagram, whatever points and rays and vectors he tried to sketch, they inevitably formed a series of letters.

The letters spelled out: COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE.

Plum wasn’t a bad person, and she supposed that at heart Wharton probably wasn’t a bad person either. Truth be told, the sight of him in the courtyard gave her a pang. She’d actually had a bit of a crush on buff, clever, presumably virile Wharton in her Second Year, before he came out; in fact, in all psychoanalytic fairness, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that this whole prank was in part a passive-aggressive expression of said former crush. Either way, she was relieved that the final stage—Stage Nine (too many?)—was tonight at dinner, and that the whole thing wouldn’t be drawn out any further. They’d only had to destroy two of Wharton’s precious special pencils. And really, the second one wasn’t all the way destroyed.

Dinners at Brakebills had a nice formal pomp about them; when one was cornered at alumni functions by sad, nostalgic Brakebills graduates who peaked in college, sooner or later they always got around to reminiscing about evenings in the ol’ dining hall. The hall was long and dark and narrow and paneled in dark wood and lined with murky oil paintings of past deans in various states of period dress (though Plum thought that the mid-twentieth-century portraits, aggressively Cubist and then Pop, rather subtracted from the gravitas of the overall effect). Light came from hideous, lumpy, lopsided old silver candelabras placed along the table every ten feet, and the candle flames were always flaring up or snuffing out or changing color under the influence of some stray spell or other. Everybody wore identical Brakebills uniforms. Students’ names were inscribed on the table at their assigned places, which changed nightly according to, apparently, the whim of the table. Talk was kept to a low murmur. A few people—never Plum—always showed up late, whereupon their chairs were taken away and they had to eat standing up.

Plum ate her first course as usual, two rather uninspired crab cakes, but then excused herself to go to the ladies’. As Plum passed behind her, Darcy discreetly held out the silver pencil case behind her back, and Plum pocketed it. She wasn’t going to the ladies’, of course. Well, she was, but only because she had to. She wasn’t going back after.

Plum walked briskly down the hall toward the Senior Common Room, which the faculty rarely bothered to lock, so confident were they that no student would dare to cross its threshold. But Plum dared.

She closed the door quietly behind her. All was as she had envisioned it. The Senior Common Room was a cavernous, silent, L-shaped chamber with high ceilings, lined with bookcases and littered with shiny red-leather couches and sturdy reclaimed-wood worktables that looked like their wood had been reclaimed from the True Cross. It was empty, or almost. The only person there was Professor Coldwater, and he hardly counted.

She figured he might be there; most of the faculty were at dinner right now, but according to the roster, it was Professor Coldwater’s turn to eat late, with the First Years. But that was all right, because Professor Coldwater was notoriously, shall we say, out of it.

Or not exactly out of it, but he was preoccupied. His attention, except when he was teaching, always seemed to be somewhere else. He was always walking around frowning and running his fingers through his weird shock of white hair and executing little fizz-poppy spells with one hand, and muttering and mumbling to himself like he was doing math problems in his head, which he probably was, because when he wasn’t doing them in his head he was doing them on blackboards and whiteboards and napkins and in the air in front of his face with his fingers.

The students could never quite decide whether he was romantic and mysterious or just unintentionally hilarious. His actual students, the ones in his Physical Magic seminar, had a kind of cultish reverence for him, but the other faculty seemed to look down on him. He was young for a professor, thirty maybe—it was hard to tell with the hair—and technically he was the most junior faculty at the school, so he was constantly getting handed the jobs nobody else wanted, such as eating with the First Years. He didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t notice.

Right now, Professor Coldwater was standing at the far end of the room with his back to her. He was tall and skinny and stood bolt upright, staring at the bookcase in front of him but not actually taking down a book. Plum breathed a silent prayer to whatever saint it was who watched over absentminded professors and made sure their minds stayed absent. She glided noiselessly across the thick overlapping oriental carpets, cutting swiftly through the right angle of the L into its shorter arm where Professor Coldwater couldn’t see her. Even if he did see her, she doubted he would bother to report her; worst case, he would just kick her out of the Senior Common Room. Either way, it was totally worth it.

Because it was time for the grand reveal. Wharton would open the wine closet, which was actually a whole room the size of a studio apartment, to find Plum already in position, having entered it on the sly through a secret back passage. Then she would present the League’s demands, and she would the learn the truth of the matter.

It was the chanciest bit of the plan, because the existence of this secret back passage was a matter of speculation, but whatever, if it didn’t work, she’d just make her entrance the normal, less dramatic way. And it was reasonably confident speculation. Plum was almost positive that the passage was there. It ran, or it once had run, between the Senior Common Room and the wine closet, so the faculty could cherry-pick the best bottles for their private use. Its location had been divulged to her by the elderly Professor Desante, her erstwhile undergraduate advisor, when she was in her cups, which was usually—Professor Desante was a woman who liked a drink, and she preferred harder stuff than wine. Plum had filed the information away for just such an eventuality.

Professor Desante had also said that nobody used the passage much anymore, though why nobody would use such an obviously useful passage was not obvious to Plum. But Plum figured that even if it had been sealed up, she could and would unseal it. She was on League business, and the League stopped at nothing.

Plum looked quickly over her shoulder—Coldwater still out of view and/or otherwise engaged—then knelt down by the wainscoting. Third panel from the left. Hm—the one on the end was half a panel, not sure whether she should count it. Well, she’d try it both ways. She traced a word with her finger, spelling it out in a runic alphabet—the Elder Futhark—and meanwhile clearing her mind of everything but the taste of a really oaky chardonnay paired with a hot buttered toast point.

Lemon squeezy. She felt the locking spell release even before the panel swung outward on a set of previously invisible hinges. It was a door, albeit a humble, hobbitlike door, about two-thirds height. Any professors who used it would have to stoop and duck their august heads. But presumably such an indignity was worth it for some good free wine.

Annoyingly, though, the passage had been sealed. It had been bricked up, only about three feet in, and the bricks had been bricked in such a way as to form a design that Plum recognized as an absolutely brutal hardening charm—just a charm, yes, but a massively powerful one. Not undergraduate stuff. Some professor had bothered to put this here, and they’d spent some time on it too. Plum pursed her lips and snorted out through her nose.

She stared at the pattern for five minutes, in the dimness of the little passageway, lost to the world. In her mind, the pattern in the bricks floated free of the wall and hung before her all on its own, pure and abstract and shining. Her world shrank and focused. Mentally, she entered the pattern, inhabited it, pushed at it from the inside, feeling for any sloppy joins or subtle imbalances.

There must be something. Come on, Plum: it’s easier to screw magic up than it is to make it. You know this. Chaos is easier than order. Whoever drew this seal was smart. But was she smarter than Plum?

There was something odd about the angles. The essence of a glyph like this wasn’t the angles, it was the topology—you could deform it a good deal and not lose the power as long as its essential geometric properties were intact. The angles of the joins were, up to a point, arbitrary. But the funny thing about the angles of these joins was that they were funny. They were sharper than they needed to be. They were nonarbitrary. There was a pattern to them, a pattern within the pattern.

17 degrees. 3 degrees. 17 and 3. Two of them here, two of them there, the only angles that appeared twice. She snorted again when she saw it. A simple alphabetical code. A moronically simple alphabetical code. 17 and 3. Q and C. Quentin Coldwater.

It was a signature of sorts. A watermark. A Coldwatermark. Professor Coldwater had set this seal. And when she saw that, she saw it all. Maybe it was on purpose—maybe he’d wanted a weak spot, a key, in case he needed to undo it later. Either way, his little vanity signature was the flaw in the pattern. She extracted the little knife from Wharton’s pencil case and worked it into the crumbly mortar around one specific brick. She ran it all the way around the edge, then she stressed the pattern—she couldn’t unpick it, but she could push at it, pluck its taught strings, so that it resonated. It resonated so hard that that one brick vibrated itself clean out of the wall, on the other side. Clunk.

Deprived of that one brick, and hence the integrity of its pattern, the rest of the wall gave up the ghost and fell apart. Funny that it should have been him—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush. Plum ducked her head, stepped over the threshold, and drew the panel closed behind her. It was dark in the passageway, and chilly, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room. The walls were old, unfinished boards over stone.

Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Common Room to the back of the wine closet, but she’d only gone twenty before she got to a door, this one unlocked and unsealed. She closed it behind her. More passage, then another door. Odd. You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years. Brakebills was old, really old. It had been built and rebuilt a lot of times by a lot of different people.

More doors, until the fourth or fifth one opened onto open air—a little square courtyard she’d never seen before. Mostly grass, with one tree, a fruit tree of some kind, espaliered against a high stone wall. She’d always found espaliers a little creepy. It was like somebody had crucified the poor thing.

Also, not that it mattered, but there shouldn’t have been a moon out, not tonight. She hurried across the courtyard to the next door, but it was locked.

She fingered the doorknob gently, inquiringly. She checked it for magical seals, and wow. Somebody smarter than her and Professor Coldwater put together had shut it up tight.

“Well, blow me down,” she said.

Her internal GPS told her that she ought to be going straight ahead, but there was another door off the courtyard, a heavy wooden one on a different wall. She went for door number two, which was heavy but which opened easily.

She had suspected before, but now she was sure, that she was traversing some magically noncontiguous spaces here, because this door opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library. It wasn’t impossible—or it was, obviously, but it was one of the possible impossibles, as Donald Rumsfeld would have said if he’d secretly been a magician. (Which fat chance. Now there was an impossible impossible.) It was preposterous, and a bit creepy, but it wasn’t magically impossible.

The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which, to be honest, she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought there were any actual books in them. What the hell would they shelve up here?

It looked tiny from below, and it was tiny—in fact, now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those medieval folly houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees. The books looked real, though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold—some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.

And like a few of the books in the Brakebills library, they weren’t quiet or inanimate. They poked themselves out at her from the shelves as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this was like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.

No, thank you. She liked her books to wait, decorously and patiently, until she chose to read them herself. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the end of the balcony—it was practically a cat door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking a long time, but it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.

This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact, it was one—as near as she could tell, she was actually inside one of the walls of Brakebills. It was a wall of the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clatter of silverware, and she could actually look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. They were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary. The sight of it made her hungry. She felt a million miles away, even though she was standing right there. She almost felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for the time when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.

And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. For the League.

Though, God, how long was this going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof. The night air was bone cold. She hadn’t been up here since the time Professor Sunderland had turned them into geese, and they’d flown down to Antarctica. It was lonely and quiet up here after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees. She had to stay on her hands and knees because the roof was so sharply raked, and the shingles were gritty under her palms. She could see the Hudson River, a long, sinuous silver squiggle. She shivered just looking at it.

Which way to go? There was no obvious path. She was losing the thread. Finally Plum just jimmied the lock on the nearest dormer window and let herself in.

She was in a student’s room. Actually, if she had to guess, she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though obviously she’d never seen it, because her crush had remained in a theoretical state. What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. She began to suspect that somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was fucking with her.

“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”

Well, fuck away, she thought, and we shall see who fucks last. She half suspected that she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! Actually, that would be kind of cool.

The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She decided that she wasn’t going to fight against the dream logic of what was happening; she was going to play it out. Steer into the skid. To leave by the front door would have been to break the dream spell, so instead she opened Wharton’s closet door, somehow confident that—yes, look, there was a little door at the back of it.

She couldn’t help but notice, by the by, that his closet was full, practically packed solid, with boxes of those pencils. Why, exactly, had they thought he was going to freak out at the loss of two pencils? There were like 5,000 of them in here. The aroma of tropical wood oil was suffocating. She opened the door and stooped through.

From here on out, her travels ran entirely on dream rails. The door in the back of Wharton’s closet took her into another courtyard, but now it was daytime. They were losing temporal, uh, contiguousness—contiguity?—as well as spatial. It was earlier today, because there she was, Plum herself, crossing the lightly frosted grass, and passing Wharton, and there was the eye sliding. It was a strange sight. But Plum’s tolerance for strange had been on the rise, lo this past half hour.

She watched herself leave the courtyard. That was her in a nutshell, Plum thought: standing there and watching her own life go by. She wondered whether, if she shouted and waved her arms, she would hear herself, or if this was more of a two-way-mirror deal. She frowned. The causality of it became tangled. This much at least was clear: if that’s what her ass looked like from behind, well, not bad. She would take it.

The next door was even more temporally noncontiguous, because it put her in a different Brakebills entirely, a curiously reduced Brakebills. It was a smaller and darker and somehow denser Brakebills. The ceilings were lower, the corridors were narrower, and the air smelled like wood smoke. She passed an open doorway and saw a group of girls huddled together on a huge bed. They wore white nightgowns and had long, straight hair and bad teeth.

Plum understood what she was seeing. This was Brakebills of long ago. The Ghost of Brakebills Past. The girls looked up only momentarily, incuriously, as she passed. No question what they were up to.

“Another League,” she said to herself. “I knew there must have been one.”

Then the next door opened on a room that she thought she knew—no, she knew she knew it, she just didn’t want to think about it. She had been here before, a long time ago. The room was empty now, but something was coming, it was on its way, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. It was the thing: the thing that she could not and would not think about. She had seen this all happen before, and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Now she knew it was coming, and it was going to happen anyway.

She had to get out, get out now, before the horror started all over again.

“No!” Plum said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

She ran. She tried to go back, the first time she’d tried that, but the door was locked behind her, so she ran ahead blindly and crashed through the next door. When she opened her eyes again she was in the little trapezoidal lounge where the League held its meetings.

Oh. Oh, thank God. She was breathing hard, and she sobbed once. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. Or it was real, but it was over. She didn’t care, either way she was safe. This whole fucked-up magical mystery tour was over. She wasn’t going back, and she wasn’t going to go forward either. She was safe right here. She wasn’t going to think about it. Nobody had to know.

Plum sank down on the ragged couch, boneless. It was so saggy it almost swallowed her up. She felt like she could fall asleep right here. She almost wondered if she had when she opened her eyes again and looked at the reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked earlier. Of course she wasn’t in it: magic mirror. Right. Plum was relieved not to have to look at her own face right now. Then her relief went away.

Another girl stood there in the mirror instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked, and its skin gave off an unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue. Its eyes were utterly mad.

This was horror of a different kind. New horror.

“You,” the ghost whispered to Plum.

It was her: the ghost of Brakebills. She was real. Jesus Christ, that’s who was fucking with her. She was the spider at the center of the web.

Plum stood up, but after that, she didn’t move; all moving was over with. If she moved, she wouldn’t live long. She’d spent enough time around magic to know instinctively that she was in the presence of something so raw and powerful that if she touched it, it would snuff her out in a second. That blue girl was like a downed power line. The insulation had come off the world, and pure naked magical current was arcing in front of her.

It was beyond horror: Plum felt calm, detached. She was caught in the gears of something much bigger than her, and they would grind her up if they wanted to. They were already in motion. There was nothing she could do. Part of her wanted them to. She had been waiting so long for her doom to catch up to her.

But then: bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—it sounded like something had run into it from the other side. A little plaster fell. The bump was followed by a man’s voice saying something like “Oof.” Plum looked.

The ghost in the mirror didn’t.

“I know,” it whispered. “I saw.”

The wall exploded, throwing plaster in all directions, and a man crashed through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off. White witchery sparked around both his hands like Roman candles, so bright it made purple flares in her vision.

Always keeping one hand pointed at the blue ghost, he walked toward Plum till he stood between her and the mirror.

“Careful,” he said over his shoulder, relatively calmly given the circumstances.

He reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out.

It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first reaction was: I must tell Chelsea that she doesn’t have to worry about paying for it.

Breaking the mirror didn’t dispel the ghost—it was still watching them, though it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned around to face the wall behind Plum and joined his hands together.

“Get down,” he said.

The air shimmered and rippled around them. Then she had to throw her forearm over her eyes, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity, it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. She didn’t see but she heard and felt the door behind her explode out of its frame.

“Run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Go on, I’m right behind you.”

She did. She hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shock wave as Professor Coldwater threw some final spell at the ghost. It lifted Plum off her feet and made her stagger, but she kept on running.

Going back was faster than going forward had been. She seemed to be bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, no, it was just magic. One stride took her through the hell room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the crawl space, the library, the creepy-pear-tree courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.

They stopped just short of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. She wondered if he’d just saved her life; at any rate, she definitely felt bad about having made fun of him behind his back. He resealed the passageway behind him. She watched him work, dazed but fascinated: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily, like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.

She couldn’t help but notice that this time he caught the resonance pattern, the one she’d used to break the last seal, and corrected it.

Then they were alone in the Senior Common Room. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.

“What did she say to you?” he said.

“She?” Plum said. “Oh, the ghost. Nothing. She said ‘You,’ and then she didn’t say anything else.

“‘You,’” he repeated. He was staring over her shoulder—he’d already gone absentminded again. One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Hm. Do you still want to go to the wine closet? That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”

Plum laughed in spite of herself. The wine closet. She’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It seemed too pointless to go through with it. Everything was too sad and too strange now.

But somehow, she thought, it would be even sadder not to go through with it.

“Sure,” she said, aiming for jaunty and almost getting there. “Why not. So there really is a secret passage?”

“Of course. I steal bottles all the time.”

He drew the rune word on the next panel over from the one she’d used.

“You don’t count the half panel,” he said.

Aha. The door opened. It was just what she thought: a doddle, not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.

She squared her shoulders and checked her look in a pier glass. The hair was a little wild, but she supposed that would be part of the effect. She was surprised, and almost a tiny bit disappointed, to see her own face looking back at her. She wondered whose ghost the ghost was, and how she died, and why she was still here. Probably she wasn’t here for the fun of it. Probably she wasn’t a nostalgic alumna haunting Brakebills out of school spirit. Probably she needed something. Hopefully, that thing wasn’t, you know, to kill Plum.

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