AUGUST 17, 1991

I told Bill about Candy offering me drugs, and he warned me about it when I go to school in two weeks. Everyone here uses them, he says, and it's hard not to. He talked about "peer pressure," which seems to mean letting other people run your life for you. I had enough of that at Westfaire!

AUGUST 20, 1991

Candy's brother told me her boyfriend really goes after girls with long hair, and Candy's afraid he'll take to me. I've seen Candy's boyfriend and, believe me, she hasn't anything to worry about. His hair stands up in spikes and he has pimples. I look at him and I think of Giles. I look at all the boys here and I think of Giles. I wonder if they're all like this!

AUGUST 21, 1991

Everything here in the twentieth seems very temporary. Nothing lasts. Friendships don't last. Love affairs don't last. Marriages don't last. I've seen men here who people tell me have been married four or five times, and their old wives aren't dead, either. People even change what sex they are, and there are people coming to the door all the time trying to get me to change my religion and be born again, though I haven't gotten used to being born the first time yet. Wouldn't being born again imply I didn't trust God to have done it right the first time?

Even though I was mad at him, I wish Father Raymond were here! Janice did get born again, last week, and there's no living with her. I finally had to tell her I am a Catholic and please leave me alone. She got very angry. She doesn't approve of me and she doesn't approve of Bill. She says he's being sinful to dress up like he does. I can't see why. He isn't hurting anyone, but Janice says God intended men to wear trousers and women to wear dresses. I look at pictures of Greeks and Scots and aborigines and Jesus, and I can't figure out how she knows that!

SEPTEMBER 6, 1991

Well, I've been to school. I know who sells crack and who fucks who and which teachers are gay and who has AIDS. Nobody has asked me to do any arithmetic or geography at all, so that was a waste of time. I am taking classes in literature and biology and Spanish. Bill and Janice decided these were the safest subjects for me.

Bill took one whole hour to tell me about sexual diseases, and maybe it's a good thing he did. I do not want any of their diseases, though, after eavesdropping on a table of boys at lunch, I don't think I'd be tempted anyhow. They were talking about this girl they got drunk or stoned and then they all did it, watching each other. They were laughing at the way different ones had done it, making comments about how long it took this one or that one, like the stableboys used to hang over the paddock, watching the stallion serve the mares, giggling and pointing. I wonder if that has anything to do with male bonding?

In the fourteenth, we dreamed of chivalry and courtly love. I remember the oaths of fidelity the young men-at-arms used to offer their ladies, and they were no older than these high school boys. These guys don't offer anything. It's like the women they hit on are sacrifices to some kind of god that only boys worship. Most of the boys here remind me of Jaybee', though I'm not sure why.

The twentieth makes me feel very lonely. This isn't my place. When I remember how beautiful Westfaire is, was, when I remember Giles, I want to cry. I choke, my chest burns, I get the hiccups and have to lie down. The worst part of living here is that nothing is beautiful. There must be something beautiful in the twentieth, and maybe I just haven't seen it yet, but the way everyone acts, this is all there is. Magic doesn't work. There is no other way. Some days all I want to do is cry.

 

[Some days all I want to do is cry! We keep trying to lure her, and she keeps ignoring us. I have thought of sending Puck. He says he can get there. The problem is, his doing so might draw attention to her. The Dark Lord may be watching the Bogles. We don't know who he's watching! Puck's going there might show up like a meteorite, burning across the night. Israfel keep saying, "Patience, Carabosse. " Patience! I don't think he sees the irony of that.]

OCTOBER 4, 1991

Today I think I figured out Fidipur. In social studies class the teacher commented that the recent famines in Africa are only the beginning of what may turn out to be worldwide famines of varying degrees of severity. Then he showed us a film of black people in Africa dying in large numbers and another one about the hole in the Van Allen belts. (Father Raymond would be fascinated!) The teacher explained that very soon the world would warm up and get dryer, that food would be harder to produce, and "We won' be able to fidipur, 'cause there'll be millyuns and millyuns of 'em."

Fidipur! Feed the poor. The way he said it was exactly the way the beggars in the twenty-first had said it. I asked Bill to explain it to me, and he told me about population growth and the Catholic church and acid rain and cutting down the rain forests to grow more food. Everyone argues about it, he said. Economists and businessmen say nothing is going wrong. Ecologists and population experts say the end is coming. While they argue, things keep changing until we get to the point of no return, sometime during the next hundred years. After that, there'll be no more out-of-doors because every square inch of land will be needed to produce food, and that's why, in the twenty-first, all the people had to be shut up in great tall, half-buried towers where they couldn't move around and interfere with Fidipur's farms.

I said, sensibly I thought, that God gave man the duty to take care of the world, not a contract to wreck the place, and Bill laughed the way he does, ha, ha, ha.

The comebacks say everything starts breaking down sometime late in the twenty-first, with Fidipur's farms playing out and people getting pushed down the chutes a hundred thousand at a time and all the machines breaking down. Elaine may have been the last person who came back, and she came in about 2114.

Bill says the handwriting is already on the wall, we're already doomed. Janice says he shouldn't say "doomed" when so many people will be alive and being fed, so he asked her why she left the twenty-first if it was so great, and she got mad at him. There are tear spots all over this page, and I can't stop.

OCTOBER 7, 1991

I've stopped thinking about Fidipur. You can't think about things like that all the time. Your body won't let you. Everytime I started to cry about it, my chest would burn like a bonfire. It got so I was afraid to think about it at all. So, I'm trying to think about other things, about trying out for cheerleader-which seems kind of dumb, but all the good-looking girls do it-and going to football games and things like that. I am trying to do as Father Raymond used to suggest and seek the good. Things wouldn't be too bad if Janice would just stop talking about religion and let me alone. I wish I could be nicer to her about it, but her religion is so ugly! So mean!

 

[We go on transmitting these urgencies, but they have not the volume of the constant music where she is; they cannot be heard above the traffic noises. There are so many distractions in the twentieth, she doesn 't hear us. If she would only decide to be a nun! I think possibly we could get through to a nun.]

NOVEMBER 15, 1991

Yesterday we had a special kind of event at school. The event was called "Career Days," and they had people from all kinds of jobs and professions come speak to us about their jobs. One of the men was our teacher's brother, an author, Barrymore Gryme, only he told us all to call him Barry. I've seen his books in the school library, but I've never read one. After the session, when the students were leaving the room, he asked me what my name was. I told him, Dorothy, because that's the name Bill and Janice and I had decided on, after my old friend Doll. We knew enough to realize I couldn't call myself Beauty, not in the twentieth.

"You don't belong in Kansas, do you?" he asked me with a funny smile.

I didn't know what to say, so I just smiled back.

"No, you're the Emerald City all over," he said. Then I knew he was talking about that movie with the singing girl and the straw man. The Yellow Brick Road one. I'd seen that in the twenty-first, about fifteen times.

"Not that Dorothy," I explained. "I was named after an old friend."

"Where do you live, old friend Dorothy?" he asked me. I didn't want to be rude, so I told him. When I got home that night, there were flowers for me in the living room, from him. Bill was puzzled, but Janice was furious.

"What have you been doing when you're supposed to be at school," she shouted at me. "What have you been up to?"

I guess my mouth dropped open, because Bill told her not to yell. When I saw his name on the tag with the flowers, I was just as puzzled as Bill was.

"I only said about six words to him," I said. "And there were lots of other people around."

"Where, around?" Janice demanded.

I told her, at Career Day, at school, that he was our teacher's brother, and after a while she believed it. When I told her his full name, then she was as puzzled as Bill.

Bill nodded, his mouth pursed up. Then he sat me down at the desk and made me write the man a nice note, saying thank you for the flowers but I'd sent them to a hospital, because I wasn't allowed to accept gifts from older men. Bill thought it was "appropriate."

NOVEMBER 17, 1991

I told Candy about the flowers I got from Barrymore Gryme. I said I couldn't understand why he'd do that, and she got bright red in the face and said, "Honestly, Dor, you're so dumb it's just unbelievable." And when I asked her why, she said look in the mirror for crysakes.

Well, I've known for a long time I'm beautiful, but that doesn't explain anything! He's too old for me, and I'm sure too young for him. Candy thinks I ought to have an affair with Barry Gryme.

I told her she was crazy.

She says just wait. Her aunt told her virginity gets to be more and more of a burden the older you get. She told Candy you get to the point where you don't decide whether you like someone enough to make love to them or not, you only get to the point of wondering whether they're good enough to give it up for. "Aunt Becky says you quit wondering when and start wondering if," Candy said.

Should I have an affair because of Candy's aunt?

 

[As if Israfel and I did not have enough to worry about already!

We were standing at the Pool, trying our best to get through to the twentieth, when Israfel remarked that, as our magic weakens, the power of the Dark Lord strengthens. I had known that, of course, though I had not let myself consider it deeply. Our departed brother took terror and pain as his portion. It was always a part of what we did. Magic is a perilous thing, and it has its horrifying aspects, but we have always worked with and around these aspects, not making them the focus of our art. The Dark Lord has taken these to the exclusion of all else. He works in pain and prurience, lust and death, ramifying these until they fill his whole canvas. Discontent with his own efforts, he selects minions among men to develop these themes further. Is Jaybee one of these? Is Barrymore Gryme?

Has this man been set upon her, like a hound set upon a hare? We have been so careful. We have done nothing to draw attention to her, letting it seem that she has done everything out of her own motivation, out of her own desires. She has left no magical trail behind, like the slime of a snail, for some inimical creature to follow. Surely, he can t know?

So I say to Israfel, and he to me, trying to convince ourselves.]

NOVEMBER 20, 1991

I got a Barry Gryme out of the school library and tried to read it. I read two hundred pages, then I had to quit because it scared me to death. Everything in it was hopeless and terrible. People kept being mutilated or eaten or destroyed. It was full of sex, too, but there was no pleasure in it. It was ... it was a lot like the horro-porn films in the twenty-first. If lots of people read things like this, there's something terribly, terribly wrong ...

CHRISTMAS MORNING 1991

Bill and Janice are still asleep. If I were home, I'd be in church, watching Father Raymond moving around at the altar, smelling the incense, hearing his voice with the Latin rolling out, seeing the candles flicker. I'm homesick. There's nothing to do about it, so I'm watching one of Bill's documentaries.

Water, gray and cold, with lights in it as bubbles, rising, bright shadows in the water and vast distances, with everything moving and shifting, so there is no up or down. Singing in the water. Deep, organ tones, one, then two together, then a third. Soft, hurting sounds.

Bill's voice, his deep voice, the one he uses when he does the narrations. "These are the last whales, and this is their last song. Though they are unaware of it, this pod of whales is the last of the great sea creatures to swim the seas of earth. Cells have been saved in the hope that some future time will allow their regeneration, though as things stand today such hope seems dim and distant."

The organ voices again. Incredibly sad. Jaybee's camera focuses on an eye set in a great wrinkled socket. The eye looks at me. Oh, there's knowing there. They know. They know they are the last. All these seas are their tears, they have wept them all. All the oceans of earth are made up of tears. Whale tears, elephant tears, the tears of forests, the tears of flowers, the tears of everything beautiful cried out to make oceans.

We come up. We fly up through the water, we rip through the surface scattering droplets in all directions, we skim over the waves like a flung spear, toward the farms, skeletons on the horizon, with huge blades rotating, with solar collectors like blinding sheets of white fire.

"Fidipur's farms," says Bill's voice. "Here, suspended over the deep, are the mighty wind- and sun-powered pumps that bring the cold harvest of the sea to the surface, where it is dried, powdered, and shipped to the great landside factories of Fidipur."

Ships going and coming, being loaded and leaving, zipping into the loading docks empty, one after the other, by the hundreds. Like beetles. Like wood beetles. Eating everything, all, until nothing is left.

Back across the water, down to the whales again, this time slowly, letting us see them. Their bones show through their flesh. Their eyes are deeply sunk. The thin calf nuzzles its mother hopelessly. There is no milk. They are starving. Fidipur has taken it all.

I'm crying. Janice is calling me to breakfast. I'm not hungry. It's Christmas, but beauty is dying. We're gobbling up the world. I don't ever want to be hungry again.

JUNE 1992

Graduation. At first I didn't think I'd go, but I did. Bill and Janice came, too. We all wore those silly hats and the rented gowns and paraded up to get a piece of paper which isn't even really our diploma. We'll get that later in the mail, after the office checks to see we don't owe any money or library fines or anything. So, big deal, I thought, that's over, so now what will I do?

I got a phone call from Barry Gryme. He wanted to know if I was old enough yet, and I told him no, I am only seventeen, and I don't go out with married men anyhow (Janice found out he was married), and he said he was divorced.

JULY 1992

I bought another one of Barry's books, to see if I could read it all the way through. I got about a hundred pages into it and then I had to stop.

I've seen people die. I saw the goldsmith Papa put in the dungeon, when he was almost dead. He had been my friend, and I saw him when they took him out, saw his bones showing through his skin, and the sores on him, and the places the rats had chewed him. I saw a thief whipped to death once. I've seen men hanged. It's horrible, seeing that, but not as horrible as this book, because in this book, you're supposed to like seeing it, like reading what happens to the people. You can tell the way it's written you're supposed to kind of lick it up, like something juicy.

 

[We tried again. She was in such a downcast mood, we thought she might hear us, but she didn't. I'm considering sending Puck through to her. She knows him, and possibly she could accept him without headlines resulting: CALIFORNIA GIRL SEES CREATURE FROM OUTER SPACE.

Israfel says be patient just a little longer. I have just about had it with Israfel!]

CHRISTMAS 1992

A letter came for me, from Jaybee. I'd almost succeeded in forgetting Jaybee. The letter was gibberish, but frightening gibberish, and it was illustrated with photographs.

At first I couldn't tell what the photographs were. They looked like abstract art, fascinating compositions, dark, light, black, white, with ribbons of red. Then I saw that the dark was shadow, the light a woman's breast, the ribbon of red ... well, it was blood, wasn't it? You could see the knife, the edge of it, making a design against the nipple. I began to make out what all of the photographs were, flesh, manacled flesh, cut flesh, an eye, half open, staring unbelievingly into the lens, lips which looked swollen with desire until you saw they were bitten half through.

If you turned them upside down, they were fascinating abstracts. Only when you looked at them closely could you see what was really happening. They were mostly pictures of one woman. Sometimes pictures of several. Well, I knew about that kind of thing. I'd taken a psychology course at school. Knowing about it didn't make it less sick, less hateful. I burned them. I didn't know what else to do!

The pictures somehow reminded me of Barry Gryme. Last month he called me to ask if now that I'd started college I was old enough to go out with him. I told him I didn't think I'd ever be old enough, and he laughed. He said he needed to know what I meant, would I just have coffee or a beer with him, so I said yes, I'd have a beer with him between classes the next day.

He showed up, which kind of surprised me. Seeing him sitting there, I tried to switch gears, tried not to be just a college girl, tried to be me, Beauty, someone who knew things he would never really know. He's not bad-looking. He is a charming, funny man. He's full of little jokes and amusing stories. Finally, he asked me what I've got against horror writers.

I said there was real horror in the world. Disease and starvation and torture. I said we needed to feel revulsion for these things, needed to be galvanized into action against them and against all poverty and pain and injustice, but that his books merely made us accustomed to horror, as a recreation.

He wasn't listening. He was looking at my face, at my shape, smiling a little smile to himself, his head cocked. He was thinking about going to bed with me.

I stopped talking. After a moment, he said, well, his books were popular; they made a lot of money, which bought a lot of nice things; people liked being scared to death, so why not?

One of the teachers came by just then and greeted him by name. Barry got up to go speak with him about some seminar he was doing.

I sat there, wondering why not. I knew there had to be a reason, but I couldn't say what it was. Maybe it was that I knew the world was going to end fairly soon and he didn't. All his horror was going to come true. Here people were, bustling around, speaking of the dangers, creating committees and movements to Save the Whales, Save the Forests, Save the Rain Forests, Save the Condor. How could these people become what I had seen? But they would.

They would become habituated to horror. They would read it, see films of it. They would soak it up. It would deaden the sense of terror they needed to stay alive. They would catch a kind of leprosy of the spirit, an inability to feel. I mean, I've seen some of that already. They had a terror they call the Holocaust, and because people are so determined it mustn't happen again, they keep banging on it and banging on it until people have stopped paying attention. The more you talk about it, the oftener you see it, the more it loses its power to shock, its power to disgust.

And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland.

"Thank you very much for the drink," I said to him, when he returned to the table. "I'm sorry I couldn't explain better what I meant, but I don't believe you know what horror is."

He got a teasing smile on his face and reached for my hand. I whipped it back, as I would have whipped it from the hand of Death himself. He looked in my face and whitened at what he saw there. I was surprised that he, writing what he does, seemed not to have seen real terror before.

 

[Jaybee Veolante. Barrymore Gryme. Israfel reads and peers as I do and turns away, sickened. We have already sent Puck, telling him to stay out of sight. We tell ourselves not to panic, that these men may be merely men, not creatures of the Dark Lord, that they may be attracted to her for her physical beauty alone. Israfel has stopped telling me to be patient.]

NEW YEAR'S, JANUARY 1, 1993

Outside the window I hear singing in the street. A drunk, I think, on his way home from a twenty-four-hour celebration. I am not going to the window to see. I am afraid to go to the window. Instead, I sit here in the Wisdom Street house with Father Raymond's book resting on the table, one bloody hand holding it in place while the other plies the pen and mops at my nose, trying to make it stop bleeding. I think it may be broken.

I am writing to keep from screaming.

Bill is dead. I don't know exactly where Janice is; she said she was going to visit friends somewhere over the holiday and won't be home until day after tomorrow.

Bill has ... had a gun somewhere. I went looking for it and came upon my cloak and boots and this book instead. It was too late for the gun anyhow.

 

Short recess there to wash off some of the blood. This is all so stupid and terrible.

Bill and I were having a quiet New Year's Eve. Almost midnight, someone knocked on the door, and Bill went to open it. Jaybee came in, looked at me, and said, "I've come for you, sweetie."

"I could tell he was drunk. Bill got in front of me and said, "Here, now, Jaybee. Let's talk about this." That's all he had time to say.

Jaybee reached out and snapped ... Just that. Bill's body was there on the floor. Jaybee didn't even change expression. Then Jaybee knocked me down and pulled off my clothes and hit me and raped me. He kept turning me over, coming at me from the front, then from the back, over and over. I fainted, finally. At least, I don't remember anything for a while. Then he went away. He took Bill's body with him, wrapped up in a blanket, like laundry. The last thing he said when he left was, "Thank me nicely for cleaning up the place, sweetie. I'll be back in the morning."

 

[Puck has to have arrived by now! Oh, why did we wait so long? He must be there. He must!]

 

Sweet, kind Bill. Dear little man. Oh, he loved it here where he could dress in lace and silk and satin and velvet. He would put on a recording and dance, all dressed up in his heels and stockings and smooth, slick underwear. I gave him teddies for Christmas gifts. Teddies and lace panties and garter belts. He was so kind to me. When I cried because I was lonely, he told me stories to make me laugh. When I cried out at the future of the world, he told me nothing was certain, not even death, and I should never give up hope.

He was the size of a child. He had delicate little wrists and ankles, a thin little neck, like a tiny woman. He was strong for his size, but he was tiny! Jaybee broke his neck with one blow of a great ham hand, broke it and laughed, and then kicked him where he lay.

I don't remember very well what I did right after Jaybee left. I hunted for the gun; I've said that. I found the book, and Mama's box, and my cloak. The warrant on the usurer was there, and the emeralds. The box and the cloak almost pushed themselves into my hands, as though someone were actually handing them to me.

Then anger came, out of nowhere, like a fever. I shook with it, burned with it, bathed in it, soaked it up, wanting nothing else. All I want to do is kill him!

I came to myself crouched over the book here. Anger will have to wait. I'm too sick and weak to plan vengeance, let alone execute it. My nose is battered. There are great bruises on my face. I think one or two ribs are cracked. And the pain in my groin feels as though he pushed a knife up me. I'm bleeding two places down there, too.

I have to get myself together. I have to calm down. To calm down I have to go home, really home. I need quiet to think in.

Something made me start thinking of home, like someone whispering memories in my ear. Maybe it's because I need to escape. Jaybee said he would come back, and I know he will. If stay here, he'll find me. He's inescapable.

So I can't stay here.

LATER:

The boots were in my hand. I couldn't remember picking them up, but there they were. They hadn't worked before, but now? Only it wasn't before, was it? It was future, not past. Now? I didn't know. I thought, maybe they will work. I put them on. I put on the cloak. I put the book in the pocket, and Mama's box.

I went to the window and pressed my eye to the slit in the curtain. There were some people out there, milling around, singing drunkenly. Jaybee was standing on the corner watching my windows, an expression of amusement on his face. I could read that face. He intended to do it again. As soon as the people moved away, he planned to come back in here.

I ran to find Grumpkin. On the shelf of my closet were the boy clothes I had arrived in. They went in one pocket and Grumpkin in the other. He hung there, paws and head protruding, wondering what was happening, growling a little as he caught my mood. As we had arrived together, so we would depart together.

I had just fastened the cloak when the knocking started: a soft, insistent, teasing knock on the door. I stood in a corner, paralyzed. He called me. "Beauty?" Softly, sweetly. "Beauty."

Sickness and terror rose in my throat and Grumpkin moaned in his throat, almost a snarl. "Shh," I told him. "Be still Grumpkin, my cat."

"Beauty?" Jaybee called again. "Let me in or I'll break down the door." He laughed, a liquid, bubbling laugh, like molten lava, molten lead, searing in its vile heat. "I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down!"

He would. I knew he would, but I couldn't move. He would huff, he would puff, he would blow my house down. All my safety he would rip away. He liked to do that. I leaned down and touched the boots, but still waited, as though I had to see him do it. No. It was because I was so afraid the boots wouldn't work. Until I had tried and failed, I could hope. Once I had tried and failed, there would be no hope.

He kicked in the panel of the door with a splintering crash. His hand came through the hole, releasing the latch. Then he was in, grinning, whispering, "Beauty? Beauty?"

"Go!" a voice said in my ear.

He didn't see me! He went past me and didn't see me! He went through the living room into my bedroom. I heard the closet door slam against the wall. He was calling, "Beauty, Beauty, Beauty," as though he was calling a dog or cat. "Don't make Jaybee mad," he sang, like a spell, like an enchantment. But he didn't find me so he became angry, angrier still as he searched everywhere.

"Go!" said the voice again.

I tiptoed toward the broken door. Behind me I heard crashing and breaking. Anything I might have treasured, he would wreck. I heard the shattering, the bellows of rampaging fury.

I got out, onto the sidewalk, onto the lawn. Someone had heard the noise and called for help, for there were sirens at the end of the street.

"Boots," I whispered softly, praying I had not miscalculated, "take me home."

I took a step. A whirlwind bent down to take me, and I heard Jaybee running past me on the walk. The world spun and dizzied. I was standing on a street corner I recognized, not a block from the house. There was a newsstand beside me and the papers in it were dated August 13, 1981. Only ten years. I trembled. It was probable Jaybee could not find me here, but it was a long way from where I wanted to be. Grumpkin meowed in the pocket of my cloak. Someone coming along the street looked at me, then away, then back again, as though they saw me but not quite. Jaybee hadn't seen me because of the dark, the shadows. In the daylight, he would have.

"Go," whispered the voice, gently.

"Boots," I whispered again, taking another step.

I was on another street corner, in the midst of a huge crowd. Soldiers were marching in the street. People were screaming and throwing paper. "What year is it?" I asked a man from behind him, hoping he would not turn to answer. He gave me the answer over his shoulder.

"Nineteen forty-five," he cried. "Nineteen forty-five."

"Boots," I sighed.

The next stop was in the early years of the century, then the century before. Each time the boots surged more strongly upon my feet, and I knew that as I went back, the power grew stronger and stronger. There had been none of it in the twenty-first, and little enough in the twentieth. By the time I reached the sixteen hundreds it was strong enough to carry me the rest of the way home. When I said "Boots," there was only wild wind and bent time and the shriek of ghosts sucking all the air away. I gasped. There was nothing to breathe. Everything was dark and bloody red inside my eyes, and then only dark.

 

[And then only dark, thank God. We stood looking down at her, only now beginning to breathe again.

"Is she all right?" asked Israfel, leaning down to put his hand on her breast. Can he feel what is there, inside? "She looks ... she looks drawn very fine."

"We need to get her to Chinanga, " I told him. "To the place of safety we planned for her! Now she 'II go to find her mother, and all will be well. If her mother is still there!"

"Oh, Elladine's still in Chinanga, " said Israfel. "So far as she's concerned, no time has passed at all. I wish Beauty didn't look so tired. "

"She's been through hell," I snapped at him. I leaned down and smoothed the hair back from her brow. Beauty. My beauty. Poor child.]