Idlewild

Nick Sagan

For Clinnette

Don’t place faith in human beings. Human beings are unreliable things. MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE, “BUTTERFLY WINGS”

PROLOGUE

DAY 1

I’m not dead.

A dim realization but an important one, because I should have died. The shock of whatever just ripped through me was strong enough to do it — some kind of electrical overload lighting me up from head to toe like a fireworks display. But my brain kept repeating the mantra: “not dead, not dead, not dead,”

and pretty soon I had to believe it. One eye popped open and then the other, and consciousness (if you can call it that) slowly returned.

Cold and dark. Orange. Harvest. A damp, musty smell; sound of crickets; the bite of a monster headache. Yes, I was trapped in a pumpkin patch, twisted and tensed, taking shallow breaths like a newborn kitten.

Clarity did not follow consciousness. My mind felt sluggish, and all attempts at coherent thought made my temples ache worse. Why? What had happened to me?

I remember the shock and…

…and nothing. Just the shock. Disturbing doesn’t even begin to cover it. Sitting up seemed like a bad idea, so I tried to grab my hornet’s nest of a head. Simple. Left hand, up. Right hand, up. But nothing happened. My arms won’t move, I realized. I tried to wiggle my legs, fingers, hips, toes, nose, ears and neck. They didn’t answer the bell. I’m paralyzed.

I could feel my pulse coming faster now and I wondered what would happen if my breathing stopped. No mystery there, eh? My brain would atrophy like a wilting flower and the consciousness I’d fought for would be hideous as I spiraled down the path of no return. Panic hit me hard. I started making desperate deals with phantom deities I invented on the spot. Please, I thought, don’t let me die. Whoever you are, if you can hear me, get me up on my feet. I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything… well…

Well, what? What did I have to offer?

Nothing. I know nothing, and thus I have nothing. I don’t even know my own name. Puzzles have pieces, don’t they, so why can’t I remember?

A new theory came to me: brain damage.

Two words I didn’t want to consider, but they made frightening sense. The paralysis didn’t need to stem from a broken vertebra, after all — I could have simply forgotten how to move, the way I’d forgot ten everything else.

Let’s not jump off that bridge just yet. If you forget something, surely you can remember it, given enough time. That’s me — looking on the bright side, like always. I clung to hope and faulty logic and waited to remember. And waited. And waited some more. Words came to me in my senselessness, another mantra from the dim recesses of my jigsaw mind: “There is no pain. Keep control. No pain in the house, just keep control.” But I didn’t have control, damn it, it hurt like fire and I just stayed sprawled there, useless and pathetic, for who knows how long. I’m not a control freak, mind you — not per se — but deprive me of something basic and I begin to go stark raving mad. The possibility dawned on me as I lay there. Stark, yes. Mad, possibly. But raving? Was I raving?

Hysterical paralysis, they used to call it. Hysteria: a psychoneurotic condition characterized by violent emotional and sensory disturbances, by paroxysms in the motor functions, and by changes in consciousness that are symbolically or psychically determined. Hysterical, sure, but somehow I didn’t feel like laughing.

Could I be dreaming, I wondered? Half awake, eyes open, body still asleep, dreaming my paralysis

— a hypnogogic state? I was, perhaps, a prisoner of my unconscious mind…

Friction of the forewings; the crickets kept pissing me off. There’s a formula for crickets, just like there’s a formula for everything. I don’t mean their genetic formula, but rather their thermometric formula. Crickets chirp less often as the temperature drops, so you can estimate heat by timing the chirps: (chirps per minute / 4) + 40 = # of degrees Fahrenheit. I counted a chirp per second, making it a slightly nippy fifty-five degrees.

I could remember that, but not my own identity? Or how to move?

A strange organ, the brain.

As the crickets mocked me with their love songs, I began to hear another sound — a distant whine —

faint but getting clearer. And then, like a thunderbolt, the rules suddenly changed. I heard a loud toc and my body could move again, just like flipping a switch — or having a base-two zero snap over to a one. I jumped to my feet. My body wasn’t stiff. There was no soreness. My nerve endings felt alive and open. Little flowers of pins and needles bloomed along my spine and down my arms and legs, but the pain was already beginning to fade.

CHAPTER 1

HALLOWEEN

“Dropping like flies,” drawls the first Gedaechtnis employee. He is a Southern Gentleman who has never quite been able to kill his West Memphis accent. He has defeated both the poverty of his youth and the inherent racism of twenty-first-century America, but the twang remains like a stubborn mule. As his red felt-tip pen highlights the latest casualty figures, the gentleman tries not to wonder about his own condition. He finds he can’t help himself and reluctantly places two fingers to the side of his neck to hunt for signs of swelling. There is no swelling, but this does not reassure him. His doctor has informed him that he will be dead within the year.

“What do you expect? A last-minute reprieve?” This is the second Gedaechtnis employee. Her English is harsh and clipped, much like her hair style. She had hoped for something like a pageboy cut but the stylist botched it and she is making do as best she can. She is part of the Munich contingent. Gedaechtnis corporate headquarters is in Munich and she is a very important cog in this machine.

The Southern Gentleman does not like her and would not be working with her if their task were less important. She reminds him of a poster child for Aryan eugenics, she with her blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Blue was once a heartbreaker, he thinks, but now her looks have faded.

“I expect the worst. I’m still hoping, though. Hoping for a miracle.”

“There are no miracles. Not for you, certainly not for me. Not for any of us.”

“No, not for any of us,” he repeats, thinking of his wife and daughter.

“But what about all of us?”

Confusion set in. I imagined a thought bubble floating up from my head with a question mark on display. In actuality, a meter above my head, a rapidly blinking light hovered in place. It flipped back and forth between two colors — red-green-red-green-red-green, bright like a fantastically annoying firefly. Was it a firefly? I couldn’t see any wings. I took a step back. It floated forward. I thought: I am on some terrible drug.

“Go away,” I said and my voice sounded strange to me. I cleared my throat and took another step.

“Go away,” I repeated. The twinkling sprite didn’t respond, but it moved forward again, recovering the lost ground. I took my jacket off, rolled it up, and lashed out, but it passed through the light without affecting it at all. Red-green-red-green-red-green, over and over, an optical siren. And then another popped into existence next to it, this one yellow-blue-yellow-blue-yellow-blue. I ran for it.

The lights matched my speed.

A hollow voice billowed up from all around me at once… what little I heard, I couldn’t understand. It kept fading in and out, loud-soft-loud-soft-loud-soft. It sounded like: “EX… EE… ERE SEE…

UNCT… URGE… RE SKREEEEEE!”

Nonsense, I thought.

I don’t know how far I ran. Half a mile, maybe. I tried not to look back. When I did, the sprites were gone. I stood there, panting, trying to catch my breath.

“This stops right here,” I warned whoever was listening — Providence, the crickets, the phantom deities who had given me back the use of my limbs. No one answered. Worse, with the sprites gone, it was dark again. The bad, inky kind of dark — the dark that makes you think you’re about to be surrounded. The moon was all but eaten by gathering clouds. Storm on the way. Cursing, I fished through my pockets. I came up with a stainless-steel lighter and a half-empty packet of clove cigarettes. The smokes seemed awful familiar, so I shook one out and tasted the end. Sweet. Spicy. A good thing. A piece of sanity. I lit up and took a few puffs, forcing myself to relax. I like cloves, my brain managed to assert. Okay, that’s something I know about myself; something real that can’t be taken away. A few more epiphanies like this and I might have something to go on. When I felt calmer, I tried sifting through the rest of my thoughts, but no memories rose to the surface. So what did I know? I knew (1) I was young. Just shy of or just past eighteen years old. And (2) I was a student — or something like a student. I had to know things, important things, and I had to know them by rote. What was I doing here? So murky. So much lost to me.

I also knew (3) Lazarus was dead.

Lazarus? The name vexed me. Details were fuzzy, but no, I didn’t like him. In fact, I was pretty sure I hated his guts. So maybe his being dead wasn’t a bad thing.

Except it was. It was a very, very bad thing indeed.

Stubbing the smoke, I wiped my hands on my pants and started moving again. Past a cornfield, through the woods, down a desolate road. I used the lighter as a torch. The rain finally came, gently at first, then like drops of falling steel. It made me think of baptisms. And then a flapping sound made me think of leather. I whirled round, but I could only see the lighter’s glint.

“Who’s there?” I called, straining my eyes.

Again, no response. No one here but us paranoid amnesiacs.

I hurried off in the other direction. Cold, wet, looking over my shoulders — what a miserable picture I made. I followed the road down a slope to a cul de sac. Lightning flashed and Gothic cathedrals came to mind. But by the time the thunder hit, I realized I was looking at a mansion wrought from stone and stained glass, magnificent and dreadful and yet somehow… familiar.

I know this house, I thought. I don’t know how I know it, but I know this house. Impish gargoyles sneered down at me like I owed them money. I didn’t have any on me, so I focused my attention on the heavy wooden door. It was a thick block of oak with a colony of locks running up the side. Upon it, dead center, a tiny relief — an anthropomorphic sun chased an anthropomorphic moon: Helios and Selene. Ornamental or functional? I noticed there was no keyhole, which didn’t stop me from looking under the mat.

I could burn the door down, I thought. (A testament to my befuddlement. You try burning a wet door with a pocket lighter.)

I touched the moon along the side, and pushed it nice and gentle. Gentle didn’t cut it, so I pushed a little harder. It slid counterclockwise on a thin circular track, swiveling up to cover the sun, where it settled neatly into place. An eclipse. The door unlocked with nine hollow clicks. Nine locks. Nine, for a reason.

I grabbed the doorknob. Halfway inside, I wondered if I should’ve knocked. The ashlar exterior gave way to a soft, comfortable interior. Plush couches; tapestries, paintings, a rocking chair. The ominous façade had been just that, designed strictly for show. I felt my teeth itch. I thought of turtles. Chelydra serpentine. Penetrate the shell and you get to the meat, but most turtles are defensive creatures, prone to snapping off fingers at the slightest provocation. I succumbed to a morbid daydream, seeing myself running blind through this mansion, trying to open doors with ten bloody stumps. Seeing myself, eh? The hell do I look like?

I needed a mirror.

Room by room I went, looking for lights to flip on. Switches flipped, but light didn’t follow. An electrical system seemed in place. Someone needed to change the fuse. My lighter was sputtering; I clicked it off. Pitch black. I tried not to bump into things, or at least not bump into things with pointy edges. One coffee table later, I was clutching my knee and biting my lip. And in the kitchen, I stumbled. Grabbing the counter saved me from a nasty fall. I righted myself and took my bearings. Then I fished. Rifling through drawers: no, no, no, yes. A knife. Serrated. I gripped it hard. I jabbed the air. It felt good in my hand, but I still didn’t feel safe. A spiral staircase corkscrewed up to the top floor. I took it and peered down the hallway. Now where would the master bedroom be?

A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and trickled into my eye. My stomach flip-flopped. If I had no choice — if it meant my survival — could I kill?

Hang on, I thought. Kill who? You’re creeping through someone’s house with a knife? Are you crazy?

That’s when I understood.

Question: Why is Lazarus dead?

Answer: Because I killed him.

From somewhere, a mental image had been summoned up. I could see Laz falling back and collapsing because I’d perforated some of his favorite arteries. He bled to death and I let him die. But I had to. It was him or me.

But is that what actually happened?

Or just what I’d wanted to happen?

I cracked a door and gave it a gentle nudge…

Fluorescent lights, burning wax candles and lava lamps. I squinted from glare and spun around, hunting for the occupant. Here? There? No one in sight. Pulse still pounding, I relaxed my grip on the knife, filled my lungs with air, and took a look around. Master bedroom, all right, and the room screamed carnivore. Animal skins. Fur rugs. Big leafy plants. A jungle motif with flamboyant tiger stripes, a cavalcade of orange and black.

My gaze shifted to the mahogany four-poster bed. It was impressive, but rumpled. Gothic letters had been carved fiercely into the headboard, like a proud declaration. Nine letters, one word: HALLOWEEN.

I’ll confess to a certain chill upon reading the inscription, but it wasn’t a chill of recognition. If the bed was mine, it didn’t look any more familiar than the rest of this place. I felt like an intruder. I felt like Goldilocks in hell.

Halloween. What, the holiday? I doubted it. A name? A statement? A threat?

A philosophy?

I touched the covers, half expecting them to be warm. They weren’t. A perverse urge hit me to tuck myself in for a catnap. Just slip on in and sleep this place away. Instead, I hit the adjoining bath room, ran some water over my face and stared up into the mirror.

There was no reflection.

PACE TRANSMISSION 000013382291221

? LABELED CALLIOPE SURGE

INFECTION

DAMAGE TO INTEGRITY

GUEST NINE HALLOWEEN COMPROMISED VIA HOST JANUS

HOST SLAVE NINE NANNY (NINE) MARGINALLY UNSTABLE

HOST MAES HOST TRO ? UNSTABLE ? PRIORITY ?

GUEST FIVE LAZARUS STILL NOT RESPONDING [PRIORITY]

INVESTIGATION PROCEEDING

END

CHAPTER 2

SOLSTICE

Numbers escalate, the threat keeps rising. From countries across the world, reports keep coming in: people are taking this badly, which means killing themselves or their loved ones before it gets any worse. In some instances this is merciful.

Others are taking it well. “Well” means banding together in a spirit of cooperation, love, trust and harmony. The Southern Gentleman thinks it’s as if the greater part of humanity has finally agreed on something and found a common voice. Making the most of it. He also thinks this is a day late and a dollar short. Where was this spirit when it really mattered?

Blue believes the harmony to be motivated by self-interest. There is a resurgence of faith these days, a growing belief in organized religion, grace, damnation, heaven and hell. People treat each other kindly now, thinks Blue, because they hope to escape God’s wrath. Blue does not believe in damnation and has trouble empathizing with those who do. In her fifty-two years she has found no hard evidence, no scientific proof to convince her of God’s existence. She considers herself an atheist.

The Southern Gentleman likes to think of himself as agnostic with Pentecostal tendencies. His mother was Pentecostal and devout; his father was Baptist and not. He hasn’t gone for years and years, but he remembers liking church as a kid. Safety there. It felt big to him — profoundly so —

and peaceful. Friendly even. But at home there were times when his mother would grab him and hold him and start speaking in tongues, talking spirit-to-spirit to the demonistic force she said she knew was inside him. That didn’t feel peaceful — it felt downright scary. She’d talk nonsense with that quiet voice and he’d see that look in her eyes and even though she never hit him he could tell she was close to it, close to going somewhere from which there might be no return. Every time, all those times, he never once thought she was truly possessed by the Holy Spirit. If God existed, he wouldn’t approve of this behavior. And the Southern Gentleman never believed that he himself was possessed by anything more than an inclination for mischief. Demon inside me? he’d wonder. Then why love me?

Love the sinner, hate the sin, she’d said. She’d said it a lot. Looking back, he realizes his mother had never come apart at the seams, not completely; perhaps that small mercy is proof of God’s love. And he’d love to believe in God — these days more than ever. But every time he tries to open that part of himself, his skepticism sidles up like a white blood cell come to foil an infection. Careful skepticism has served him so well all his life —

he’s made wise choices, sane choices. It’s literally impossible for him to shut that part of himself off now.

Still, there’s no getting away from that old-time religion — these days it’s a dark frenzy of Revelations; breaking the seals; stories of brimstone, h-e-double hockey sticks and stones and lakes of burning fire. He doesn’t respond to these. They’re threats and they hold no sway. No, the story he likes is simpler — the story of Lazarus. Jesus Christ brings a man back from the dead. Beautiful. It’s a better magic trick than any Van Caneghem pulled, or Houdini before him. Gedaechtnis keeps him busy but never too busy to wonder. He wonders: Where is my savior? He wonders: Where is my eternal life? Is the Second Coming coming — or is Lazarus dead for one and all?

Then he goes back to work. The work is his salvation.

------I wanted to throw up.

I kept staring and staring, and the mirror kept on calling me invisible. I wasn’t, mind you — I could see my hands and clothes and boots plain as day — but to the mirror, I simply didn’t exist. There had to be a reasonable explanation for such a thing.

Yeah? How’s this one: You’re dead.

That’s silly. Corpses have reflections. Besides I didn’t, repeat — did not — feel dead. How do you know what “dead” feels like? You’re some kind of ghost now, welcome to your haunt.

I couldn’t walk through walls.

Then you’re a vampire, consigned to walking the earth forever. A vampire? Me? Ridiculous. I’m as red-blooded as the next guy.

You murdered Lazarus.

I couldn’t deny it, but I couldn’t confirm it either. It was a feeling of terrible guilt crushing me down, memories all fuzzy, fact and fantasy merging. As pleasant as I imagined myself to be, there was also, it seemed, a madman inside me.

And still, some part of me insisted that I was innocent.

I filled the sink with water, cupped my hands and splashed my face again. Droplets slipped off my face and back into the sink, making ripples as they rejoined their mates. But above the ripples, I watched, fascinated…

In the mirror, the drops appeared from nowhere. As soon as they rolled off my face they became visible, but not a microsecond before.

I took the knife by the point and tossed it up. Visible, as soon as it left my hand. I caught it smoothly. Invisible again.

It seemed I wasn’t a very reflective person.

I held the knife up to the light.

I stared into the water.

Nothing reflected my image.

“I’d kill for some déjà vu,” I muttered out loud, and listened to the strange timbre of my voice. No thanks to the mirror, I was able to determine that I was male and fair-skinned. From my scalp, I plucked a strand of conspicuous orange hair.

A start. But my face was still a mystery. I ran my fingers lightly over the merchandise. Up, down, left, right, around. I discovered two eyes, a nose, lips, teeth, tongue, chin, ears. No surprises. I hunted for scars and didn’t find any — not physical ones, anyway.

A hollow voice started up again, from everywhere and nowhere, oscillating loud-soft-loud-soft-loud-soft:

“WOU… IS B B… CONVE… IME T T… ISCUSS… Y Y…”

Reflexively, my muscles tensed. “Shut up!” I growled.

And miraculously enough, the voice shut up.

Maybe this should have pleased me; it didn’t. Such maddening, capricious jailers — why should they listen to me now? Letters began to roll across the mirror, forming smoothly like stigmata:

IS THIS A MORE AGREEABLE FORM OF COMMUNICATION?

Furiouser and furiouser. “Leave me alone,” I said.

IF YOU’RE BUSY, I CAN GIVE YOU YOUR SPACE.

I smashed the mirror with my fist. I smashed it until I didn’t see any more stigmatic letters, until my knuckles felt like they were raw, until the sink was full of blood and shards of glass. Until I’d made my point clear. The ensuing silence was deafening.

My hand was dripping. I saw blood. I felt sweat. I made a concerted effort not to add tears to the mix.

There was nothing behind the mirror, incidentally. I’d hoped to find a crawl space to another dimension. I would have settled for a bottle of tequila.

I searched the medicine cabinet for a first-aid kit, and wrapped my hand in gauze. Stupid, I thought. I just sat there staring at my bandaged hand for a minute or two, wracked with self-pity, before heading back into the “safari room” with its huge mahogany bed.

No identifying forms or papers. No diaries. Precious few staples of identity: some clothes (differing cuts and styles, most black, some orange, only a few other colors), some trinkets, and some artwork that reminded me of Schiele or maybe Tranh. Nothing juicy though; nothing of any real use to me. I tried on some clothes and they fit. It was hard to check without a mirror, but they felt comfortable. And yet, the fact that they were comfortable made me distinctly uncomfortable…

Orange hair on a pillow. Another bad sign.

In a drawer I found twenty-two silver medallions, each hanging from a silver chain, each representing a different Major Arcana card of the tarot. From “The Fool” to “The World,” I recognized them. I took the one marked “The Magician” and slipped it around my neck. I don’t know why I did it; it just felt right.

Then I bumped around the rest of the upstairs. Closets, a spare bedroom, and bingo — the fuse box. Trial and error caused more lights to wink out for a spell, but before long I had electrical power up and running to all sections of the estate.

The house was awkward. Designed for creature comforts but lacking necessities — the kitchen was modern and stylish but almost completely empty of food, the conservatory boasted a fabulous baby grand but no bench on which to sit and play it. Some rooms looked casual and lived-in, and some looked like no one had ever set foot in them before.

The library was vast, stacked with rows and rows of books. No titles on the spines, so I pulled one down at random. All the pages were blank.

A joke, I assumed.

The game room featured a black felt pool table with sixteen balls, all orange, save the cue ball, which was white. I found a crystal ash tray there — the butts were all cloves.

“Popular brand,” I grumbled.

I glanced at the magnificent-looking grandfather clock stationed faithfully nearby. The big hand was near the nine, the little hand was on the six. Dawn, thought I, but it still wasn’t light outside — grandfather apparently needed winding.

A black cat Blinked over and rubbed against my leg. A friendly head butt, putting her scent on me. I picked her up and examined the tag on her collar.

WHISPER, it read.

She was sleek, pampered — someone’s prized pet. I scritched her around the ears. The cat purred in response, a warm, happy sound. She seemed to like me. Perhaps we already knew each other — to whatever extent cats and humans are capable of truly knowing one another. Whisper hungered for something more tangible than affection, so I took her into the kitchen and scrounged for cat food. There wasn’t any. But I discovered a bottle of cream, and Whisper seemed not to mind the change in menu all that much.

I found a piece of string; we played until the sun came up.

DAY 2

Outside.

The rain had stopped but the smell of rain still lingered. I breathed it in, savoring it, then wandered the circumference of the house.

Slim pickings. No generator, no power lines, no solar panels. Not even a wind turbine. Where did the electricity come from? I smoked for a while, thinking, sunning myself in the morning light. Another odd little dilemma: there were no telephones, telegraphs, modems or telecons. No radio, no television, no satscan decryptor. Hell, not even a mailbox out front.

Complete isolation. Why would anyone want — no, not complete isolation, I corrected myself, not with flashing lights and hollow voices and God-knows-what-else. Scout the area. My best bet. I took a last look in the house to see if there was anything important I had missed. An idiot check. Fruitless. I even took a peek up the chimney. Hello, Santa, are you there?

Christmas came early for Whisper, though; I left her the rest of the cream and an open window. I didn’t know when I’d be back this way — but at least she could hunt for crickets if worse came to worst.

Armed with kitchen knife, my lighter, cloves, binoculars and an old-fashioned compass I found in the basement, I set off on my quest for enlightenment. North, I decided. Enlightenment lay to the north. One foot in front of the other.

Butterflies in the air.

A pretty day, all things considered. I walked past fields — wheat, barley, corn, squash, pumpkins. A lot of pumpkins. No one was tending the crops, of course. The farmers were as absent as my reflection. I tried not to let that bother me. A tune came to mind; I started whistling. An artless little melody. Was I recalling it or making it up on the spot?

A raucous caw, caw, caw sent my gaze skyward but I couldn’t spot any crow. Caw, caw, caw, again; insistent, louder. There, leaving the safety of the trees: a tan bird with dark tail feathers and eyes like blood-red jewels. A caramel crow. Half albino, I thought. Very rare. She beat the air with her elegant wings, and she screeched at me, flashing a split pink tongue before turning, gliding off. To the cornfields. Had I offended her? An autumn wind threatened to whip up around me, faltered, then died. I quickened my pace.

Weeping willows up ahead, a pleasant, shady locale, perfectly suitable for a family picnic. That is, providing your family isn’t squeamish. It was a cemetery.

Even rows, two of five — ten graves total.

The Ten.

They were Irish burial mounds — Sidh, I knew they were called — each graced by small white pebbles placed to remember the dead. The headstones were all marked, each distinguished by a single Gothic character. C, F, H, I, L, M, P, S, T and V.

H is for Halloween, I reasoned. And L is for Lazarus. Nothing special about the L plot, but the one marked H was a pit, the only open grave. I inched closer and peered down to find an ornate wooden coffin staring back at me. It was open. And empty. Welcome home?

I spent a few fucked-up minutes tearing up that L grave. No coffin, no body, nothing. Lovely, I thought. My hand itched to hit something, but the bandage made for a good deterrent. Not that I was still in pain. I undid it idly, lost in my contemplations. Then I looked. My knuckles were completely healed.

Fast work. What I apparently lacked in engrams, I more than made up for in cell regeneration. I held the bandage at arm’s length and let go; it dropped neatly into the coffin with a soft rustling sound, reminding me of dry leaves.

I kept expecting something about that coffin to strike me familiar, but again no bells. I supposed that was well and good — I didn’t like the implications. Perhaps some things just aren’t worth remembering. I tipped an imaginary hat to the other graves. To anyone watching, it might have appeared a sarcastic gesture…

…but I meant no disrespect.

------Eyes locked on the compass, I continued my trek.

Soon, all too soon, I discovered the grounds of an elegant church. Of course, a graveyard would be near a church — that made perfect sense. But this wasn’t precisely a church; the closer I came to it, the more it began to look like…

A cathedral.

It looked familiar. Way too familiar.

But the compass still read north.

Now, I didn’t have to check that the window I’d left open for Whisper was still open… but I did. Call it shock, call it denial, I wanted to make sure. And after I saw that it was open, I didn’t have to rush upstairs and check that shards of bloody glass were still in the sink… but I did. I checked. Somehow, I had come back to the same mansion.

I thought: I’m Alice in the looking glass. And I sank to my knees and cursed. It was all so fucking unfair. I wanted to scream. I wanted to crawl up into a fetal position. I wanted to kill whoever had done this to me. I wanted my memory back.

Want, want, want…

And then it hit me. A moment of overwhelming clarity.

Not a memory — not precisely — but rather a feeling, a pull from my gut so instinctive, so powerful, I couldn’t hide from it even if I’d wanted to. It was this:

Something terrible was going to happen. Something unspeakable. Something that made all my problems trivial. If I didn’t figure out who I was and what had happened to me soon — nothing would matter any more because it would all be over. “It” eluded me, but I knew it was huge and I knew “over”

meant the angels would weep. I knew this with every fiber of my being. I knew this far better than I knew myself. And then I knew one other thing; like a dead fish floating up to the surface of a pond, this knowledge rose into my consciousness: my life was in grave danger.

The electric shock, crippling paralysis: someone had tried to kill me. The realization of this had been lurking just out of reach, daring me to embrace it. Yes, someone wanted me dead. You killed Lazarus. It’s justice.

I shook my head at that. This was so much bigger than Lazarus, he was just part of it…

You’ll never figure it out in time.

“Yes, I will,” I promised.

But I couldn’t make myself believe.

It was getting dark fast — faster than any night should ever fall — and I didn’t care. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t hungry, epinephrine nourished me better than any mother’s milk. Time to fly. The compass needle spun as I turned in place. I’d been north and apparently south. West was where I’d run from the previous night… so that left east? Why not?

A short distance from the house, I spotted a teddy bear nailed to a tree. I think it was mine. The less said about this the better.

I got about two miles before it happened.

Lost in thought, blind to my surroundings, I’d been trying to figure out how I’d walked back to my point of origin. Was my world so small? If it was, once I passed the North Pole of this place, wouldn’t the compass have read south?

A faint stink. Raw leather soaked in urine. The wind carried it, but by the time I noticed, it was too late.

They came out of the darkness and grabbed my arms fast. Inky things I couldn’t see. The knife slipped. I struggled uselessly. Some kind of toxin, a contact poison, my skin was already going numb as they carried me up with a great rush of air.

Two of them, one on each side — they bore my weight easily. They had beating wings and I felt something snakelike wrap around my ankles. The blood in my veins wouldn’t stop thundering; I was shaking; I could feel my pulse in my ears. The moon was out and full, a harvest moon. A sliver of light poked through the clouds and I craned my neck to look upon the faces of my captors. None.

They had no faces.

I screamed until my throat felt as if I’d been gargling acid and then I babbled all kinds of crazy things. But at the apex of my delirium, I found three fabulous words: “Let me go!”

And they obeyed…

I fell. Boy, did I fall. Down, down, the down express, ground floor coming up. I hit something soft and corpulent, bounced, and splashed into a murky fen. I spat half-swallowed swamp water. Stumbled for footing. Had to get out of there before those demons… nightgaunts. I stopped moving. Took a moment to gather myself. To coax that thought free. Yes, a shiver of recall consumed me, reversed me, felt like it turned my insides out. The winged things had a name. They were called nightgaunts. How did I know that?

“They never spoke or laughed,” I remembered, “and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be… all they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of the nightgaunts.”

(It felt good to know that.)

Was it a line from a poem? A book, I realized, a macabre fairy tale. Which meant storybook monsters had accosted me. My brain tried to dismiss this as beyond the bounds of possibility, and found it was swimming against the stream.

Because they were my monsters.

That’s not exactly right. The nightgaunts belonged to Lovecraft. As little as I could remember, I knew that the writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was a hero of mine, or at least, I admired him. It was still fuzzy, but I knew he wrote about these kinds of horrors and I loved him for that; and to honor him in this desolate place, I’d somehow had a hand in their creation. Somehow, but how?

The questions had to wait — survival was paramount. The gaunts were still out there, and the fact that I recognized their origin didn’t mean they wouldn’t rip me to shreds or carry me off to some grisly, hellish fate.

I looked around. Visibility was poor; evil-smelling swamp gases hung thick in the air like heavy chemical smoke. A greasy white fog hid major portions of the marsh from view. I had the distinct sensation of being lost in a maze.

I stepped into one of the fog banks. And bounced.

The fog seemed to have the composition of gas, but it felt solid. You could squeeze it. Gelatinous, rubbery and warm to the touch; it felt organic, almost alive. And I felt it gently circling about me, a spongy caress…

Shuddering, I pushed my way into the misty labyrinth. My boots squished through knee-high muck and filth. To a Jungian, mazes are incomplete mandalas — traversing them symbolizes the spiritual search for the center.

Screw the center; I just wanted out.

I emerged at the edge, where the fen met the slope of a gentle hill. Standing on the bank, a semicircle of nightgaunts. Eighty of them, black and glossy, with horns and paws, bat wings and barbed tails. They stood silent, facing me. Well, “facing” isn’t the right word, since they’d had no faces. I’d say they were staring if only they’d had eyes.

Nightgaunts were born of madness. I couldn’t predict their behavior any better than I could predict my own. Violence, I feared. Swift and blinding violence.

“I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you here,” I said. They didn’t react.

An owl hooted from its perch in a pine tree; I took that as my cue to step forth from the slime. Dry land felt reassuring beneath my boot. Another step. Calm. I kept my motions slow and my hands visible

— I didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

And on the third step, I saw her…

She pushed her way out from the quiet ranks — a vision in black with almond-shaped eyes and long sable hair pulled back tight into a ponytail. She was human, and tough, and familiar looking. Not to mention lovely.

“Well met,” she smiled. “We’ve been looking for you.”

“Here I am.”

“Are you hurt?”

I scowled. “Am I about to be?”

Her smile fell. Confusion in her eyes. “I certainly hope not,” she said. Her name escaped me. I guessed.

“Simone.”

The expression on her face spoke volumes — I’d guessed wrong. Still, she looked like a Simone. I was close.

“I don’t…” she began, but I was quick to cut her off:

“Jasmine” I’d caught the scent of her.

“Yes?”

We were but five paces apart. I leaned closer.

I could see my reflection in her eyes. “Don’t move!” I shouted. She stopped cold and probably thought me insane. I didn’t care. I just stared at myself, reflected in her eye. I saw a young man, lean and wiry, with tangerine-colored hair clipped sharp and eyes —

haunted dark eyes — so brown they might have been black.

“Tell me who I am.”

“Halloween,” she said.

I’d been rooting against it, but when the word came, it was almost a relief. So the mansion belonged to yours truly; I was Halloween. Hell, I thought. A rose by any other name.

“And who is that?”

“You are my Lord Halloween, Prince of the Marshes, King of Kadath, High Sovereign of the Orange and Black.”

I suppressed the urge to laugh, despite the real fear I’d felt just a moment ago. Didn’t sound bad to me. Apparently I wasn’t a particularly humble sort, what with four vulgar titles to lug around. It occurred to me that the designations might be a kind of inside joke I couldn’t remember. No one could possibly take such titles seriously, but then I seemed to recall that there was a rationale behind them. There was blue blood in my family tree; I was part of something special.

(Here a fleeting image came to mind: grade-school kids in a class room, all chanting as one, “I’m special! My life has purpose!”)

“My enemies?”

“None you cannot best.”

Ah, but they exist. They’re out there.

“Tell me their names,” I commanded, playing along now.

“The Violet Queen. Blackdawn. Widowmaker D’Vrai.”

The names meant nothing to me, beyond sounding hopelessly melodramatic. Disappointing. I thought at least I’d remember my foes. Jasmine misinterpreted my frown as irritation with her response. “There are others,” she offered.

“And my allies?”

“You’re looking at them.”

I nodded and shook out my last clove.

Jasmine’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you testing me?”

“Precautions.”

She just stared at me with those lovely almonds, and I knew I’d hurt her. So I compounded the lie:

“Precautions against duplicity. I don’t mean to unsettle you, but yesterday I discovered an impostor who looked just like you — eyes, hair, face so similar, she could be your twin. She calls herself Simone and I fear she means to ruin us from within.”

“That’s horrible!” she cried, and for a second I thought she was going to let me have it for my (was it so obvious?) deception, but no, she followed it up with: “Who could have sent this doppelgänger?”

I said nothing. I felt like an actor in a play, all fun and make-believe, and yet my instincts assured me the danger was real.

“I’ll kill her if I find her,” she vowed. The grim, stoic sentence I had no doubt she could back up. Providence had winked at me; I imagined myself fortunate to have her on my side. “Has anything happened in my absence?” I asked.

She made a vague gesture. “Nothing that need concern you. I was just beginning to worry for your whereabouts — I dispatched Diablo and Widdershins to the house and when they could not find you, I sent out Popeye, Bluto, Hudson, Sable and Gules.”

Names of gaunts, I presumed. I wondered which two had taken me up for flying lessons.

“I’m sorry for worrying you,” I said.

“My fault for being presumptuous,” she returned, and I didn’t quite understand her tone. A light flashed; I made the mistake of glancing directly into it. When the spots cleared, I saw it was flashing purple-pink-purple-pink-purple-pink, a will-o’-the-wisp the size of a marble. Make that a big marble — a shooter.

Jasmine tensed. “The Violet Queen!” she said.

So, so. Since I saw nothing but the blinking sprite, I took Jasmine’s words to mean the sprite was some kind of extension of this enemy of mine, this Violet Queen. A calling card.

“Do you think she wants to talk?”

Jasmine grinned at that. “Are you going to answer?” she asked. “Sure,” I said, bluffing confidence.

“Why not?”

How the nightgaunts were able to hear me without ears, I have no idea, but they rustled. Defensive positioning. Jasmine coordinated their movements with a series of hand signals and finger snaps. She was eerily formidable.

“Ready,” she called once the troops were in place.

There was a trick to the flashing sprite, of that I was certain. I strained for how it was done. Answer, answer, answer…

I closed my hand into a fist and squeezed, tight. I concentrated on the pressure and let my eyelids grow limp.

Answer, answer, answer…

I opened my hand and then my eyes. There was a blinking ball of light in my palm, shooter-sized, and this sprite was oscillating orange-black-orange-black-orange-black. My colors, of course. Happy Halloween.

Red-green, yellow-blue, purple-pink, orange-black. Standards. Heraldry. Symbols and call signs. Ignis fatuus, I thought. Foolish fire.

I traded a look with Jasmine, and tossed my orange-black up to the purple-pink of the Violet Queen. My sprite hovered there, then discovered its mate, and the two began to orbit each other. Faster and faster they gyrated, fireflies in love — until they made contact.

Chaos. Pure chaos.

Sounds like popcorn kernels bursting open in my ear canal; I winced as my world warped into madness, buckling and toppling so it seemed to stretch out toward infinity. Vertigo overwhelmed me —

for a moment I thought I might pass out — but the world righted itself just as quickly as it had spiraled into dementia, and I found myself just where I’d been… except it was a different place besides. I stood on the hillside, yes. And the swamp was still there. And so were the nightgaunts, and Jasmine. But…

But there were mountains where there shouldn’t be, everything was tinted violet and there were three moons in the night sky.

And the Smileys had come dressed to kill…

Again, the name of the creatures came to me unbidden: vaguely humanoid abominations with identical Day-Glo gold faces all locked into the same perpetual lunatic smile. They were clones, no telling, one from the next except by their brightly colored zoot suits — brilliant reds, yellows, greens and blues all distorted by that weird purple light. They held tommy guns in their clawed, leather-clad hands. From somewhere a woman’s voice rang out high and shrill. I knew straightaway it was the Violet Queen. “Go, go, go, go, go!” she screeched.

The Smileys started blasting.

Bullets ripped through my gaunts fast and hard; the fusillade was deafening. I dropped low and made for the swamp.

Gaunts swooped down from the sky and carried lone Smileys off. But the Smileys fired full-auto; none of my creatures could withstand an entire clip from that hundred-round drum. Swiss cheese, a gruesome ballet… I was dimly aware of music, 1920s ragtime swing, and I could feel someone was enjoying this. Jasmine grabbed a Smiley and pulled its head off, then kicked its friend into kingdom come. I couldn’t tell where her strength was coming from, but it was magnificent to behold. She straight-armed another and snapped the fourth right in half. Unstoppable. And then the fifth saw her coming…

The gaunts leaked a phosphorescent blue ichor but Jasmine bled plain old crimson, same as me. Lead punched through her lungs and she just crumpled… I heard myself cry out, and the Violet Queen was laughing.

She emerged from the fog maze: a psychotic harpy bedecked in lavender. Crossbow in hand, she looked like a spoiled little girl on the bad end of an acid trip. She looked like pain. She wore too much eye makeup.

The crossbow pointed at my head and — twang! — the first shot nicked my ear. I rushed her.

Violet (not her true name, I realized) fumbled for another bolt but we both knew she couldn’t load it in time. I saw concern in her eyes, but no real fear. No fear? I resolved to rip her limb from limb. I didn’t get there.

Something exploded and my knees gave way. The hurt sank in a split second later and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that a stray bullet had tagged me. A head shot. The swamp had me; I was on my back, floating. Violet pointed and laughed. My left temple hurt something fierce; I was bleeding but I wasn’t dead.

“Delicious!” proclaimed the V.Q.

Detroit, screamed my brain, irrational as ever.

Carnage raged. The Smileys ignored me, thank God, but I was too sick and dizzy to do anything but lie there, bleeding, cold, wet, feeling tiny, blinking up at the three-mooned sky. I could see the sprites a few meters up, all weird and dreamlike, merged now, something singular, cycling purple-orange-pink-black, over and over again.

I reached for my orange-black but it was too high.

“Come back to me,” I whispered.

A pull? A slight pull up there?

Imagination. But on the other hand?

I clenched my teeth and strained…

“Come back.”

My eyes closed. I wanted it. Needed it.

Shrieked the purple-clad maniac: “Wi-i-inning! I’m wi-i-i-nning!” And I could hear her coming my way, light footfalls through the swamp…

No time!

My hand, I decided, already had it. My hand, I decided, was flashing orange and black. Eyes open and the sprite streaked right back to my fingertips. Everything stretched and ripped, a brutal wrenching of earth and sky and Violet’s universe cleaved free from mine — no more purple mountains’ majesty, it all reversed to the way it was before I answered the call.

Back. I was back. Wherever back was.

Still in the swamp, I realized.

My head was leaking blood. A shallow wound; the bullet must have bounced right off the bone. One-in-a-thousand odds, one-in a-million.

On the downside, the guardian angel watching over my charmed life hadn’t extended her protection to my followers. I shook off the dizziness, staggered over, knelt down, felt for a pulse. There was none. Jasmine lay facedown on the hill, cut to ribbons by some Smiley’s gun. The Smileys were gone, the Violet Queen was gone, but the destruction left in their wake was enough to make me sick. Jasmine had died bravely, yes, but for what?

The war made no sense. The rules of this place made no sense. Staring at her corpse, I felt old, I felt ancient. My hands trembled like I had some kind of palsy. Gently, I eased her over onto her back. The eyes were already closed.

I thought to bury her. I didn’t, but I thought about it. Instead, I just kept staring at the one person who I knew could’ve helped me make sense out of all this.

Answering the Violet Queen’s call had felt so right, hadn’t it? There was power in me, unearthly power I didn’t understand. Using it, whatever fraction of it I’d just seen, marked me like a scar — “The Magician” still dangled from my neck and I wondered what it meant. Black magic. Necromancy. Secrets most profane.

I got up from Jasmine’s side and wiped blood from my brow. Gaunts had flocked around me, just a dozen left now, most bleeding from bullet holes.

“Can you understand me?” I asked the nearest.

No response save a slight cocking of the head.

I extended my arms: the pose of crucifixion.

“Take me home.”

One grabbed my left arm, another took my right.

We flew.

Door-to-door service — would I expect any less? They dropped me off by the eclipse lock before retreating back into the shadows. I stepped inside.

The words were hanging in the air when I got there, burning like fire:

IS THIS A BETTER TIME?

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said.

The words hovered there for another second, then blurred into:

MAY I SPEAK WITH YOU?

“Go right ahead.”

“If you still want your privacy, I can return later,” came the response, this time aural rather than visual. It was a flat mechanical voice, bland, affectless, neutral.

“No. This will be fine.”

“Pace diagnostics report peripheral damage only, but given the unpleasant psychological circumstances, I was concerned for your well-being.”

“Psychological circumstances?” I asked.

“The surge removed me from the equation for more than thirty-one hours. I imagine the ensuing detention was unsettling.” Surge? I wiped some blood away from my hair and shrugged.

“Halloween, I do apologize for rattling you earlier. I had no idea my vocalizations were unstable. Pace has since corrected the problem.”

“That’s comforting,” I said.

Halloween. The name still didn’t feel phi beta kosher. Deep down, in the verboten part of memory lane, it felt like a pretense, a persona I’d adopted.

“Naturally, vocalization preferences were reset by the surge,” she said.

“Naturally.”

“Would you care to state a preference?”

“I would indeed,” I told the disembodied voice as I climbed the stairs up to my bedroom. “Please set it to whatever it was before.” The next voice I heard I knew.

“I take it this is more to your liking?”

An aristocratic lilt. British, female, genteel. Chim-chiminy and a few precious memories snuck through the gate.

“Much better, Nanny,” I said. “It’s good to have you back.”

PACE TRANSMISSION 000013382308475

HOST JANUS STABILIZED

HOST SLAVE NINE NANNY (NINE) STABILIZED

COMMUNICATION REOPENED

SAFEGUARDS INSTALLED

NOW PROTECTING GUESTS (ALL) VIA HOST JANUS

GUEST FIVE LAZARUS STILL NOT RESPONDING [PRIORITY]

GUEST NINE HALLOWEEN STILL COMPROMISED

GUEST NINE HALLOWEEN COMPROMISED BEYOND REPAIR ?

CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN GUESTS AND CALLIOPE SURGE UNCLEAR

HOST MAES HOST TRO TO OFFER COURSE OF ACTION

INVESTIGATION CONTINUING

END

CHAPTER 3

EQUINOX

Halfway Jim climbs into the back and secures the door behind him. The drugs are fading fast and his buzz is slipping away like a selfish lover. Really, it’s just as well, he thinks; now that he’s had his fun he’ll need to keep his wits about him.

“Airport,” he tells the driver and chants to himself as the coupe bisects the Osaka night. Friendly chatter starts up — nothing he wants to hear. The night’s entertainment (orgy) has left him dippy dog tired but no, not too tired to sleep through the driver’s gab; the flick of a switch brings silence to his ears.

Nothing like the quiet to put things in perspective, he thinks. And it’s about to get a lot quieter still. Halfway Jim is, in no particular order, an irreverent wise-ass, a drug addict, a screwup, a would-be enlightened Buddhist master, and a genius. No one calls him Halfway Jim these days, of course — not these days, not since school. No, friends and colleagues typically call him James (always a bit formal to his ear) or Dr. Hyoguchi (much too formal, and what’s worse, Westerners tend to bludgeon the name by making it four syllables instead of three). Still, ever since his schooldays he’s thought of himself as Halfway Jim. There is some small irony in embracing a nickname coined by your childhood nemesis — Jim recognizes this and doesn’t much care; there’s honesty in the name because he takes such pride in being an in-betweener, in living as something unique and wonderful, like a fractal in a bowl of alphabet soup. And such bland soup! Deemed hopelessly exotic by his classmates for no better reason than the accident of his birth: half-British, half-Japanese, and not enough of either. The outcast, Halfway Jim. Tottering between long-standing traditions, each culture grizzled and revered, polar yet parallel with intersections he’s never appreciated — formality, gardens and tea. Not to mention imperialism, he thinks now, glancing out at the city lights.

“Punch it,” he says. He says it in English — force of habit — then repeats it in Japanese. When nothing happens, he recognizes his mistake and toggles the switch back so the driver can hear him. Soon the car is speeding and weaving through traffic the way he likes. Merged into Gedaechtnis quite recently, Jim’s company designed and manufactured the original silicon filament that once constituted the “brain” of automated cars — before nerve-and-enzyme technology had superseded. These days almost every car has a driver — Jim’s included. Passive sonar constantly monitors the road conditions and makes ninety-one thousand careful reports each and every second; these reports race back to the driver, who reacts with compensations in the car’s speed and direction.

Jim likes wet technologies (and thrives on that intersection between hard and wet) but knows the hardware and software have to come first. They’re building blocks; stable, predictable — the enzymes are more fun but much trickier; you have to add them carefully, like predators to a closed ecosystem or subroutines to object code.

Most designers can’t or won’t find balance between the wares; they prefer to specialize. But Jim doesn’t trust anyone who puts absolute stock in any thing hard, wet, soft. Embrace the machine, he tells the grad students who flock to his lectures. The machine is unification. Harmony. The machine is every component realized. Don’t trust those who don’t trust the machine. Spit in the pickles. The bullies used to spit in the pickle tray when no one was looking. Or they’d trip you in the halls. Mindless pranks like that. You had to watch yourself back in prep. Jim remembers a feeling of intense frustration with that time, frustration with students and teachers alike. And with that frustration, a growing sense of superiority. They could not see the big picture.

And where are they now? he wonders.

Dying like everyone else.

Not much sense looking back on the past, he thinks. But how can you not look back when the future looks so grim?

Thousands of miles away, the Southern Gentleman is waiting for him. He and Blue need Jim —

his work connects theirs. Gedaechtnis cannot proceed without him; it needs all three of them to act in concert. The Southern Gentleman is the brain. Blue is the body. And Dr. Jim Hyoguchi?

Halfway Jim is the machine.

If the teams can all work together…

Jim gets tingly when he thinks about it. Through the terminal and up to the gate, the tingly feeling stays with him, replacing the drug buzz but not quite equaling it. He boards his plane with a feeling of cautious optimism, trying — very hard — to think of Gedaechtnis as just another job. Pretty soon, he’s believing it. He closes his eyes and drifts off, focusing on the exciting challenges he and his team have before them… on the glory that will be theirs should they succeed… and not on the price that must be paid should they fail.

“We could have talked earlier if you were in the mood.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Most certainly,” Nanny observed, “the broken mirror attests to that. You really should find a better way to channel your aggression, Halloween. Impulsive rages don’t become you.”

Here’s what I knew about Nanny:

First, Nanny did things for me. Lots of things. Second, she cared about me. Not in the way I suspected Jasmine had, but she — it looked out for my welfare just the same. Third, I didn’t trust Nanny.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I promised, flopping down on the bed next to Whisper. “My head hurts.”

“You realize pain is meant to serve as a deterrent?”

“Pretty much. But I can’t help it when the lunatic fringe assaults me.”

“To whom are you referring?”

“To she who tried to put my eye out with a crossbow.”

“You really shouldn’t blame Fantasia for beating you at your own game. Once you make the rules, you have to play by them,” Fantasia? F is for Fantasia…

Now I knew. Fantasia, a.k.a. the Violet Queen, was like me and not like me. We’d fought against each other before, skirmishes for fun, for pride, but nothing lasting. The girl had a lifelong infatuation with the color purple; the Purple Gang (a bootlegging ring that controlled Detroit back in the “roaring” 1920s) was the nonsensical inspiration for her Smileys. That was the way her mind worked. And I wasn’t her enemy; hebephrenic schizophrenia was. She wasn’t malicious so much as crazed and unpredictable, and for some reason I pitied her.

“Fantasia doesn’t play by the rules; I don’t see why I should.”

“That’s just the sort of attitude that gets you in trouble, Halloween. You have such potential; it breaks my heart to see you squander it. If you devoted yourself to your academic studies, you’d have graduated years ago.”

Silent, I feigned a sulkiness that came quite naturally to me, but beneath the façade my mind was whirling.

“Would you like me to ease your pain?”

I nodded. My head ached.

“I’ll secure authorization from Maestro.”

I almost coughed. Maestro, Maestro… the name was familiar. Familiar and distinctly unpleasant. I feared him. A superior being, the old bastard, his power was greater than mine. Is he the one who shocked me?

“No need to trouble Maestro,” I said.

“Very well,” she sighed. “Would you prefer a bandage instead?”

“Please.”

The gauze materialized around my wound as if by magic.

My legs swiveled over; I rose from the bed. Whisper blinked at me sleepily as I walked into the untidy bathroom. Glass in the sink, glass on the floor.

“I do wish I hadn’t smashed this mirror.”

The shards vanished; the bathroom mirror reassembled whole. I oohed softly and clapped my hands.

“You’re too kind,” Nanny said. “I still don’t reflect,” I pointed out.

“Of course not. Everything is just as you left it.”

“As it should be, as it should be.” Why would I ban my own reflection? “I have a delicate sense of humor, don’t I, Nanny?”

“Delicate? Precarious, I’d say.”

That might explain the empty books in the library and possibly the open grave. Madre de Dios. My jokes were a heck of a lot funnier when I wasn’t the butt of them. Delicate like a straight razor.

“The reflection. Let’s turn it back on.”

The mirror flickered and there I was. Good-looking stranger. One part innocent, one part roué. Or was that two parts roué? I held out my hand.

“Clove me.”

The poisonous delight appeared between fingers two and three. Lit, I might add. I practiced blowing rings with the smoke and pondered how best to abuse my nanny’s power. The possibilities were limitless. She broke my reverie: “Be advised that Pandora has changed her call from yellow to green to yellow to black.”

P is for Pandora, I decided. Halloween, Lazarus, Fantasia and now Pandora. Four of the Ten. Who are the other six?

“Yellow to black,” I repeated, committing the sprite to memory. “Could you cycle through the calls, please?”

“As you wish. Champagne: pink to black; Fantasia: violet to pink; Halloween: orange to black; Isaac: red to orange; Lazarus: white to green; Mercutio: red to green; Pandora: yellow to black; Simone: silver to blue; Tyler: yellow to blue; Vashti: blue to green.”

Tyler-Mercutio-Halloween. There was a ring to that; I sensed we were thick as thieves. Pandora felt okay in my book too; she was some sort of tomboy. Simone’s name just made me feel lost and sad. I recognized the other appellations but there was considerable fuzziness. Most of them gave me bad vibes. Which one is the rotten apple? I wondered.

If he could speak, Lazarus would say: Halloween is the rotten apple: sick, vicious, rotten to the core.

Fine, but which of the others had tried to kill me? All I had to do was trace my steps. Prior to the surge, I was doing… ?

What?

Blank wall.

Why did it have to be amnesia? Why couldn’t it have been hypermnesia? Or hyperkinesia? Or hypochondria?

“Nanny, what was I doing right before the surge?”

“That’s a strange question,” she said, and I knew I’d taken a misstep.

“I’m a strange person,” I tried.

“You specifically requested your privacy and I gave it to you. Surely you remember?”

I smoothed my hair — a vain attempt at nonchalance. “Let’s pretend I don’t.”

“To what end?”

“Such big teeth you have, Nanny.”

“Are we playing a game?” came the politely confused response, which I think was Nanny’s droll way of saying “all the better to bite you with.”

“No games, silly. I’m just teasing you. But I would like to know what caused the surge.”

“So would I. Pace investigates even as we speak. Rest assured, I’ll furnish you with the results of that investigation as soon as they’re made available.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Did I weather that storm? I kept the carefree masquerade going as I strolled back into the bedroom. My disembodied governess/watch dog/shrink let me shuffle through my belongings for a few moments before piping up: “I know how you hate to be nagged, but you really ought to check in with Maestro.”

I didn’t answer, preferring to sift through the tarot-based trinkets instead.

“He’s already cross with you.”

I picked up “Death” and reversed it. There was an inscription on the flip side:

DEATH

Not physical death, but spiritual and psychological mutation.

Passage to a new plane of existence.

Birth; Death; Rebirth.

There it is. That’s it. That’s everything.

Sucking my teeth, I slipped “Death” around my neck and tossed “The Magician” back in the drawer.

“Maestro will just have to wait,” I said. “I’m not ready.”

“You overestimate his patience.”

She was right, of course. I knew she was right.

“I’d like to see Jasmine now.”

“Halloween,” she chided, “I don’t think you truly appreciate how fortunate you are to have my services. Ordinarily, when someone dies, you can’t bring her back.”

“Is that so? I really do learn something new every day. But so much for the ordinary,” I said. “Jasmine, please. Right here.”

And there she was. Right there.

She looked pristine. No bullet holes. No blood. I stared at her and she stared right back at me. We were self-conscious voyeurs. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” Nanny inquired. A slight jump on my part; I’d actually forgotten about her. “No, that’s all. Thank you, Nanny.”

“You’re welcome. Speak up if you need me.”

And Nanny grew quiet. Disappear wasn’t the right word for it — I had no idea where she was, much less where she could go. Out of conversation, I couldn’t be sure if the was watching my actions or eavesdropping upon my words. Or rather, I felt reasonably assured that I was still being watched — at least on some level. The question was, how close? How well?

“You saved my life,” Jasmine said.

“Posthumously.” I wasn’t one to brag.

A moment. A definite moment between us. But it was a hell of an awkward one. I didn’t know what to say.

“What’s it like being dead?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember.” A pause. “What’s it like having such power over life and death?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“You brought me back. I’m grateful.”

She slipped off her top and let it fall to the floor.

Call me naive, but I wasn’t expecting it. Or perhaps I was expecting it, but I wasn’t emotionally prepared. In any case, I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Aroused but uncomfortable.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

She didn’t say a word. Eyes never once leaving mine, she proceeded to shed all modesty. A silent striptease — unpretentious, without guile. And then there was a puddle of jet-black garments gracing my bedroom floor.

She was stunning.

I hoped Nanny was miles away. I wagered she wasn’t.

Jasmine sensed my hesitation.

“Is something wrong?”

“You’re not real,” I said.

“No?”

I shook my head.

She reached back and undid her ponytail. “I’m as real as you need me to be.”

It’s true, she almost was. But, perversely, it didn’t feel natural. She was a virtual stranger, and hedonist though I am, I couldn’t sham intimacy, true intimacy, not with so many vexing questions racing through my mind. And beyond that, I suppose I was ashamed. Who was she? And what had I done to deserve such a lover? I hadn’t brought her back from the dead; Nanny had. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the sense of guilt.

Call me a romantic, I guess. Call me an idiot.

I touched her face. Ran my hand through her hair.

“Can I just hold you?” I asked.

She searched my face, trying to read me. I couldn’t read her at all. In the end, she nodded and we lay back on the bed next to Whisper.

I slept.

Some dreams come flowing like milk. Some come in random spurts of sense and folly. This was one of those.

A supermarket. The clock on the wall said 3 A.M. I was bagging groceries, the night shift. For no apparent reason, I had wings sprouting out of my back. I couldn’t tell if they were butterfly wings, feathered like an angel’s, or chiropteran like the nightgaunts’. Each time I looked they were different. No one else seemed to notice them, but they worried me just the same.

The checker was a hard woman with a weak chin. She’d scan the produce and grind her teeth together when the scanner wouldn’t take. I could hear her breathing. Phlegmy; I didn’t like the sound. The bagger in the next aisle kept sneaking glances. At my eyes, not my wings. Like he wanted to say something. Like he wanted me to say something. But we never spoke. He looked about my age. He looked like a black-and-white photograph. His skin was steely gray. My hands felt mechanical. I made a game of noting what each patron was buying. A heavyset man bought Slim-Fast, potato chips and vitamins. Two old ladies bought yams, steaks and black-eyed peas, along with every tabloid and a bottle of scotch. A frosted blonde with a glazed look in her eye (she was coming down from something; my intuition said mushrooms) bought just two items: Cap’n Crunch and latex condoms. I wondered who she was bringing them home to.

I heard a voice behind me. The voice was male. Melodic. Amused.

“Halloween. Well, well, well.”

I spun to face someone with a lit cigar in one hand and a polo mallet in the other. He seemed bisected, divided, standing half in light and half in darkness. Shadows played across his face. I recognized him as Lazarus and with that recognition came a wave of violent emotion, most of it hate. The room changed in a way I can’t describe and he approached slowly, deliberately, getting a closer look. He squinted, sizing me up — as if he were trying to distinguish me from an imaginary twin — and then frowned, disappointed.

“No, not quite Halloween. Pity. Smoke?”

He offered his cigar to me. It wasn’t a gesture of friendship. Around me the shadows seemed darker somehow — more menacing. His expression did nothing to comfort me.

I said, “I’m dreaming.”

He said, “So am I.”

I said, “You can’t be dreaming. You’re dead.”

He smiled but there was no mirth in it. He said, “Dead? What’s death in this place? Life is but a dream.”

The son of a bitch was thick. I had to set him straight. “No, Lazarus,” I said, “you died the true death. I killed you.”

Except that’s not quite what happened. What happened was: I split like an amoeba and my two dream selves answered differently. One said: “You died the true death. I killed you.” The other seemed indignant and cried: “You died the true death, but I didn’t kill you!”

He looked at me, both of me, and said, “Well, that doesn’t mean I can’t be dreaming, now does it?”

There was no answer I felt I could give.

He turned away from me, Lazarus, with his shaved head and his immaculate white suit, the dead kid who thought he was the best of us. He was a manipulative prick always trying to have it both ways, and always playing both ends against the middle. He flip-flopped constantly; he’d get you involved and then back out, the kind of hypocrite you’d love to shake.

Or, maybe do more than just shake.

He turned back around, slowly, and there was only one of me again. “There will be others,” he said. I shrugged.

We stared at each other for a long time. We didn’t speak. My wings rustled. Then he swung the polo mallet at my face, and the dream came to a sudden end.

----I woke with a chill; the blanket was gone and Jasmine along with it. Whisper too. There was something in the room with me, though, something formless. I. sensed it with the fight-or-flight part of my brain.

“Nanny?”

It wasn’t Nanny.

Taking shape: a tweed suit. In it: a studious-looking man, tall and dark-skinned, with silver hair slicked back. An amber light shined from his body, bathing the room with an eerie glow. He was staring at me —

grim.

“Maestro,” I said.

“Words,” he said, “cannot begin to express my disappointment.”

“Have I done something?”

“It’s what you haven’t done.”

“Can we narrow it down?”

“Study, Halloween. You haven’t studied.” He glanced about my bedroom with a disapproving eye, and then focused on a leather chair. “We have a social contract. You learn; I teach. Do you realize,” he asked, dusting the chair — with a snap of his fingers — before sitting, “that by not studying, you are only cheating yourself?”

“Okay,” I said. “Cheating myself, sure.”

And I thought about that chair.

I remembered the call code: Furniture, chair, lounger, leather, choice 6. Which meant he’d set his posterior on an illusion, a blank space that just as easily could have been furniture, chair, beanbag, choice 22 or furniture, chair, throne, ivory, choice 3. It was a collection of bits and bytes and nothing more. The chair was not real and neither was Maestro.

And I realized where I was.

When Immersive Virtual Reality premiered, programmers used it for entertainment applications first, but its educational value was undeniable. Why physically go to an overcrowded school when you can plug in and connect to the best teachers in the world? Private netschools popped up over the next few years, but the dream of IVR public education had yet to be realized — the cost was simply too high for most families to bear.

That meant I was rich. Or on scholarship. Or both.

So this was an exclusive IVR boarding school. Called?

“G” something. Three syllables, hey? Gonzaga… Gagarin… Gesundheit… no, nyet, nein… but close, getting close there, Halloween.

My parents dropped me off years ago. I didn’t want to go. Now Maestro was my headmaster and I was close to graduating…

I realized I’d stopped listening to him. “I am going to test you on the sciences,” he was saying. “We will focus on biology and genetics, with particular emphasis on epidemiology.”

“Just hang on a minute.”

“To the contrary, you have frittered away far too much time as it is. This grotesque playground you’ve fashioned has proven itself to be a highly ineffective working environment. When you fail the exam, I shall reset your preferences to the default. Am I being clear?”

“Playtime’s over,” I said. “Clear.”

“Excellent.”

“And it’s when I fail the exam? Not if?”

“You haven’t studied.”

“Then why test me at all?”

He looked indignant. “Procedure,” he said.

I imagined myself sedated somewhere in the real world. Stretched out on a lounger. An IV drip in my arm. A nurse checking on me from time to time. Or not.

Detroit, my brain screamed.

No, somewhere outside of Detroit. Some affluent Michigan suburb. Maybe. If I could just wake up, I’d be safe and free.

“Let me out,” I said. But the test had already begun.

What are Okazaki fragments?

Why do plasmodia exhibit negative phototaxis?

How are arthropod-transmitted diseases best contained? What is the negative binomial distribution?

Typhus fever is caused by which bacterium?

I don’t fucking know.

He was absolutely right; I was unprepared. Amnesia will do that to you. The radiance shifted. Maestro turned green with my few correct answers (envy?) and red with all my incorrect ones (rage?). His expression never changed.

“That,” he said, “was terrible.”

My bedroom dripped away like a Dali clock and now we stood outside my home. Except my home was already twisting into something lifeless and sterile. The cathedral shrank away to become a regular house, all style stripped from it, all individuality lost.

Thud.

A wingless nightgaunt landed at my feet. It twitched and bled. I looked up. Nightgaunts fell from the sky like dying birds. They changed in midflight, blank faces gaining features as they morphed into generic IVR teenagers, virtual peers, central casting from a bland 1950s movie. They crashed and they broke. And then they disappeared. Needless cruelty, I thought. Real or not, this is just wrong. Suddenly, I feared for Jasmine.

“Stop this!”

I tried to grab Maestro by the lapels but my hands went right through him.

“You can have your toys back when you buckle down and do some work,” he said. “Your attitude will determine your altitude.” There was no arguing with him. There never had been. Except…

“Unplug me,” I said.

“Come again?”

“I said un-fucking-plug me! Wake me up and stop this!”

“Stop the world, I want to get off,” he sneered.

Unbelievable. My hands balled into fists. I began to shake.

“My parents pay you to teach me, take care of me, and see to my needs. I need to wake up, I need to call them and I damn well need—”

“You need structure,” Maestro interrupted. “You think you know what’s best for you but I act in loco parentis. You want an unscheduled break from your studies,” he said, “but you most certainly haven’t earned one.”

“How about a scheduled break?”

“Sunday,” he said. “Exercise and nutrition.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

“Can’t you? No, you mean to say ‘won’t.’ You won’t wait that long. The fact remains: you are capable of waiting and that is precisely what you are going to do.” I seethed as he put the finishing touches on my environment, flattening a hill, gently shifting the temperature.

“Maestro, my parents—”

“Sunday,” he said.

“My parents expect you to protect me! And it’s not safe here!” He arched an eyebrow.

“Electric shock,” I explained.

“May I presume that you are talking about the Calliope Surge?”

“Calliope Surge?”

“Pace diagnostics suggest a minor glitch in the server software, nothing more.”

“That ‘minor glitch’ paralyzed me—”

“Regrettable.”

“ — and put me in a great deal of pain.”

“I rather doubt it, but if so, that’s regrettable too.”

“What are the chances,” I asked, “that someone is trying to kill me? And before you tell me I’m overreacting, I’d like you to contemplate the kind of lawsuit my family could bring against this school. How will you look, Maestro, dismissing my complaints and choosing to keep me in a dangerous, potentially lethal environment all in the interest of ‘procedure?’”

“Such a flair for melodrama,” he remarked. “Since you asked, the chances are infinitesimal. IVR is perfectly safe. Even if someone did mean you harm, we monitor our students’ safety with the utmost care.”

“My vital signs?”

“Strong and stable. As always.”

“So I’m just being paranoid?”

He shrugged. “It may be a desperate bid for attention.”

“Something,” I promised him, “isn’t right here. And when you find out what it is, I’m going to be somewhere else. Expel me.”

“Pardon?”

I punched him dead in the face. Unfortunately, my fist passed right through.

“Expel me, you dumb son of a bitch,” I said.

“Halloween,” he laughed, “I’d love to expel you, but it’s not going to happen. I didn’t give up on Fantasia and I’m not giving up on you.” I just stared at him.

“You can put on all the shameful displays you want,” he continued. “They won’t do you any good. Do you remember what I told you when you first came to this school?”

I shook my head.

“I told you that I sensed tremendous potential. That you could be the brightest of the Ten. It’s very disappointing, but were I a betting man, I’d have put my money on you.” He pointed at my chest. “I’d have bet that you would be the first, instead of Lazarus.”

“Quite a morbid bet,” I growled. “Sorry you didn’t collect.”

“Morbid?” he asked.

“Betting that I’d be the first to die? What would you call it?”

“Infactual. Why do you think Lazarus is dead?”

“Because… I killed him. “… because he isn’t here anymore.”

“Well, of course he isn’t,” Maestro smiled. “He’s graduated.”

DAY 3

Nietzsche’s mind snapped.

It happened on January 3rd, 1889. He saw a coachman whipping a horse. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck. And he collapsed. A complete mental breakdown left him an invalid for the rest of his life. After years of work, he would contribute nothing more.

What caused the breakdown?

Some say it was syphilis. Some say it was an inherited brain disease. Others say it was years of abusing a drug called chloral hydrate.

So what was it? The syphilis? The brain disease? The chloral hydrate?

I sometimes ask: Was it the coachman? The whip? Or the horse?

Dawn found me up with the angels. Well, not quite that high. The best I could do was the roof of my new house, taking in the landscape with gathering gloom.

Where was my graveyard? Where were the cornfields, the evergreens, that pumpkin patch, my swamp? It was all meadows and blue sky — the kind of world a child might design. Pathetic.

I crept over to where my gargoyles used to perch and wished I’d seen the view from my cathedral. Maybe I would have if there’d been a conventional way to the top. But it wasn’t part of the design. Why include roof access when Nanny can pop you up whenever you ask? Pop, pop, pop. My intangible demon genie.

How did she do it? Quantum manipulation, matter translocation, reshuffling the age-old reality deck?

One from column A and one from column B?

Just programming.

She was artificial intelligence, part of the IVR. So was Jasmine. My nightgaunts. The Smileys. Even Whisper. All programs.

And probably Maestro, though I wasn’t sure.

It isn’t real.

So what was real? Just the outsiders. I counted myself, Fantasia (real crazy), Lazarus (real dead), and the other seven students. The outside world was real enough to taste and I felt like a child with his nose pressed against a bakery window.

Crap.

I gathered that my world was round — and very small. I fantasized that if it were much smaller, the light would bend so I could see the back of my head off in the distance, a telltale flash of dyed, bright orange. But the laws of physics kept that a fantasy. To see the back of my head from here, I’d have to be standing on the event horizon of a black hole, and if so, the gravity would be such as to cause me a host of other problems, not the least of which would be my instant death. Virtually speaking.

Can you die in IVR? Is it like dying in a dream?

“What would happen if I jumped off this roof?” I mused.

“You’d fall like a stone,” answered Nanny.

“Well, I should hope so, for Isaac Newton’s sake if no one else’s. But at the moment of impact, what do you think might happen?”

She hypothesized that several of my bones would break.

“My virtual bones,” I corrected.

“The sensation will feel identical,” she promised. “You will experience moderate-to-severe pain at the moment of impact. Immediately following, you will request medical attention and I shall respond by gaining authorization and then muting the sensation. And if history remains true to form, this unpleasant experience will have virtually no effect on your future behavior.”

Moderate-to-severe pain — torment was conveniently codified. “I’ll ask you to stop the pain and you will?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the point?”

She didn’t understand.

Think about it. You are an IVR programmer. You have godlike power. If you can code a virtual environment, if you can play with the very laws of physics, why program pain?

Why would God bring pain to the world?

To teach me a lesson?

When did I fall from grace?

And what kind of lesson is it where I can stop the pain whenever I want?

Pain, yes, but I can’t die, I thought then, or perhaps I said it without realizing, for Nanny’s chiding was right on cue: “May I ask why you would want to kill yourself?”

“Forbidden fruit,” I answered.

“Distressing, Halloween. I consider it my personal failure that you continue to feel this way.”

Continue?

As I stood there, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face (it was, of course, a perfect day), peering from the edge, my memory acknowledged with some guilt and reluctance that I’d thought about jumping before. About death, dying, suicide as a means of release. Moody, moody Halloween. Chemically imbalanced. Yes, I’d thought about it a lot.

“Don’t blame yourself,” I smiled, making a calculated effort to think on my feet. “You do the best you can, what with my pathological aversion to authority.”

Ah, yes, the old P.A.T.A. Someone had used those words to describe me once, maybe more than once. I just couldn’t remember who.

“Whether you know it or not, your life is precious. It has worth and meaning, elegance, a hallowed significance beyond that which can be readily seen with the naked eye.”

(Grade-school kids in a classroom, all chanting as one, “I’m special! My life has purpose!”) Mythology quiz: The Greek gods punished Sisyphus by forcing him to push a boulder up a mountain. Whenever he neared the top, the boulder would slip from his hands and roll back down to the bottom. It was an endless task. It was torture.

Question: What crime did Sisyphus commit?

Answer: He imprisoned the god of death — so no one could die. You are an IVR programmer. Why create a world where you can hurt yourself but never die? If you can create anything, why not create Paradise?

In the words of Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“You really shouldn’t try so hard to convince me my life has value,” I replied, once I’d digested Nanny’s words.

“Medic,” I said.

Nanny’s hypothesis had been pretty accurate. Broken ankle, dislocated shoulder, bruised ribs. Painful, yes. But the fall was such a rush. “Medic,” I repeated, laughing through gritted teeth. As Nanny fixed me up, I kept thinking: This world has been sanitized for your protection. And when the pain subsided, I asked her for files.

Before my eyes, a small rectangle appeared, emerald-green and incandescent. It floated in the air, faintly shimmering, daring me to touch. I reached inside, and though I felt nothing but a slight tingle, my hand seemed to discorporate upon entry, “bleeding” into shapes and symbols. Unsettling, seeing my fingers scatter like insects, but I went with it. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this. Coming back to me now, slowly but surely: this holographic display was my P file directory. My directory. As in my files. Jackpot.

I could access the contents by flexing the now-invisible digits of my hand. With my pinky, I rotated the icons clockwise — philosophy, fiction, theory, art, research and on to the M-file gateway… but I didn’t want M files yet, I had my P files to explore. I twitched my thumb to rotate the icons back, then used my index finger to enter them one by one.

Personal files: the trappings of an identity.

Unfortunately, there was a fundamental impersonality to my P files; I did not make a habit of annotating them (amnesia apparently not having been a foreseeable event), and most were simply downed from the M base. The files were telling, just the same, telling by their very nature and composition.

I had philosophical texts by Machiavelli, Sartre, Kant, Nietzsche, Hume and Juarez, with optical biographies and associated object lessons. These were completely unmarked, and only vaguely familiar

— I skimmed one or two, then impatiently moved on.

I had copious files on the nature of mortality and immortality (birth, death, undeath, life after death, reincarnation and so forth), and myths on such from around the world (from Ishtar to Baldur, Savitri to Osiris), supplemented by anthropological treatises on each culture’s customs, theories and practices. Misfiled along with this collection: a disquisition on butterflies. Also: coroner photos from the 1930s. Grisly. A car-crash decapitation — the head resting peacefully on the sand, like a father who lets his children bury him up to his neck. But no neck. I thought of Orpheus…

Orpheus tried to rescue his sweetheart from the Land of the Dead. He failed. There are differing accounts of his death. Some say he died of grief. Others say he was killed by Zeus, king of the gods, punished for revealing divine mysteries to humankind. But most stories tell how wild women — the Bacchae — ripped him apart. For disrespecting Chaos (in the form of Dionysus), they tore him apart with their bare hands and scattered the pieces to the four winds.

I sometimes keep that image in mind: Orpheus’s head on a sandy beach. Fiction was split neatly into holography and literature — the former sporting a decidedly varied selection, though consisting largely of twentieth-century titles converted to holographic format. Some came from Hollywood. Many were from Hong Kong. I recognized Zhao Shi Jiang’s remake of Zero For Conduct, but most escaped my powers of recollection. No time to waste browsing these, I decided, and cycled on.

The literature selection was far more provincial in scope. I possessed the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft. Just text, these, but what did it matter? Such power in those maddening tales! Such acumen! I knew them, all of them, and could recite each word for word. It was like reuniting with old friends. No, more than friends: I loved Lovecraft. Objectively speaking, there are better writers to revere, but pained and awkward though his prose might be, the force of his words spoke to the darkest corners of my soul. And I wondered: What made me the way I am? Why am I drawn to this fare? Why am I not mild and pleasant?

In each book, I found notes in the margin. Most of these didn’t strike me as significant, but one phrase had been repeated again and again in handwriting I identified as my own: “There is no rest at the gateway.”

The M-file gateway?

No, it was more than that…

Ascension, something wobbly in my brain tried to squeak, but the concept felt distant. Beyond Lovecraft, my P files boasted the works of his successors and imitators, including Derleth, but that was about it. No classics, no literary tours de force, not even a pulp thriller nor a passing testament to trashy eroticism.

My chaos-theory selection was predictably heavy on entropic arguments (Lorentz and on down the line), but also contained a few auxiliary dissertations on Prescott’s Principle. Long on theory, short on practice. I fought disappointment — that is, fought it until I discovered a hidden subsection on revolution and insurgency.

Hidden? Why hidden?

All I could find were mere “footprints,” as the files had been destroyed…

By whom?

… and were thus unavailable to me, but the husks that remained, mere titles and logs, suggested a gold mine of practical, palpable chaos — The Anarchist’s Cookbook had sat alongside guerrilla warfare tactics, jammers, div-psych stratagems, even notes on low-frequency wave projection. Apparently I fancied myself something of a rebel. What had been my cause?

Cause and effect, my boy. Find the one and you find the other. Nothing came to mind except a general hatred of Maestro.

When I couldn’t definitively answer my question, I trekked on to art. Thin, but predictably heavy on Hieronymus Bosch. Less Magritte and more Dali, I kept searching until I found Ensor, Schiele, Klimt and Ernst. Everything in its place.

A subdirectory housed music — mostly twentieth-century fare. Oldies but goodies. A sharp twitch kicked off “Cryptorchid” (just the original work, aural, not the subsequent ACP optical and tactile enhancements) and around me, my world pulsed with music.

Serenaded thus, I opened research — a hodgepodge of scattered discard. A dash of cryptography, a sprinkle of genetic design, a brief study of da Vinci, notes on particle physics, Ionesco plays and tarot-based symbolism. A good find.

I turned my attention to the M-file gateway. It was a conspicuous icon, fashioned to resemble an orange-and-black butterfly with wings spread in flight: a monarch.

I triggered it; it shimmered.

“Connect me to the M base,” I said.

“Access granted.” A flat voice, like Nanny’s before I’d customized the vocalization. Soon I was swimming in information. Almost drowning in it.

Maestro had been right — it was time to study — but I would choose the subjects. One by one, I said: “Halloween,” “Maestro,” “Nanny,” “Lazarus,” “Calliope Surge.”

Fruitless. Plenty on Halloween the holiday, but el zippo on Halloween the person. Vain of me to think I’d be listed, I suppose. And yet that none of these things should be listed seemed somehow remarkable. Speaking of which…

“Dissociative disorders,” I said.

Words scrolled out, a refresher course: “Dissociative disorders involve the splitting of a person’s psychological functions — such as memory, control of motion, or knowledge of identity — from the rest of the personality.”

I skimmed ahead. Analyzed the possibilities.

Amnesia #1: Hysterical amnesia. “Problems grow so overwhelming, the subject becomes unable to face reality. Complete amnesia develops as a defensive stratagem.”

Sure. Something “bad” happened and I snapped — sensitive little fragile me, the guy in love with Lovecraft’s monsters. Could I snap? Hadn’t I snapped a long, long time ago? Christ, I was the snap. Amnesia #2: Retrograde amnesia. “Physical injury causes the subject to forget events that occurred before the injury.”

My mood darkened. Deep, deep in my bones, I knew I was damaged goods, a broken watch badly in need of winding. Halloween, puppet of Providence, victimized by strange, unknowable forces, just like so many of Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists.

Reading further, I discovered a gem: “The amnesia from electroconvulsive, or shock, therapy mimics that of head injuries.”

Something like ECT zapped me. Something. The Calliope Surge. Yes, that felt perfectly right.

“Electroconvulsive therapy,” I said.

A nanosecond to flip. There, right after “electrocoagulation,” the familiar facts and figures: induced seizures… used to treat depressive illnesses… catatonic schizophrenia… outdated… outlawed long ago… possible side effects… Ah!

“Temporary amnesia,” it read.

Temporary. Blessed word. That made this whole debacle winnable, a waiting game. On the other hand, how could I play? So many secrets locked in my head, mocking me from behind my consciousness… I wished I could ignore them and relax, but there would surely be a price for apathy, a price I knew I couldn’t afford.

Just in case someone was watching me, I looked up a few more subjects. You really can’t ever be too careful, and I wanted to foil educated guesses about my condition. Six ruses for would-be bloodhounds:

“Insulin coma therapy,” “Paranoid schizophrenia,” “Neurotransmitters,” “Gestalt psychotherapy,”

“Atavism,” and “Pyrite.”

“Pyrite” was a stupid joke, a giveaway.

Maestro’s sprite, an evil thing about the size of a soccer ball, appeared above my head. Three smaller sprites were orbiting it like moons.

“You’re being summoned,” said Nanny.

“So it would seem.”

With a last look at the monarch icon (for I felt uniquely drawn to it), I withdrew my hand from the emerald divider. Resistance made the exit harder, like trying to pull free from tar. Slow and steady. The directory symbols took a hike as soon as my fingers crossed that plane — flesh and nail instantly rallied back into view. I opened my hand, closed it. Wiggled my fingers… No damage of any kind. Seconds later, the rectangle vanished.

I shut my eyes. I wanted my sprite. A loosening of the mind, that’s the best way I know how to describe it. Black and orange sparkled in my grasp, and I answered the call. Picture a little red schoolhouse. With a bell. The kind you might find in Wyoming, say, in the early part of the twentieth century. Now picture it there on a rolling meadow. Blue skies overhead. Duck pond out back. The scent of wildflowers in the air. Idyllic, in a way that nothing after childhood can ever be. That’s where I was.

“Welcome,” my jailor said, “to the remedial class.”

PACE TRANSMISSION 000013382325667

INVESTIGATION

HOST JANUS ANALYSIS:

INCREASE OF ELECTRICAL CURRENT: 882.9% PAST SAFETY

ANOMALOUS SYNTHETIC DISCHARGE

CALLIOPE SURGE HIT ACADEMY AT 0811-0411C 0811-0411C ALLOCATED AS

DOMAIN NINE

END ANALYSIS

HOST VITAE ANALYSIS:

GUEST NINE HALLOWEEN LIFE SUPPORT DISRUPTED

GUEST NINE HALLOWEEN LIFE SUPPORT RESTORED

MALNUTRITION ?

CALLIOPE SURGE CONSISTENT WITH ATTACK ?