Chapter One: Time and tides give way to the phone.

Alec lay twitching in his sleep,

clutching his favorite antique pay phone.

He dreamed of mauve coffee and pink donuts,

drag races and drag queens,

toboggans and shamans,

chihuahuas and shitzhus,

all in the same van, riding to a Queen tribute concert on a frozen night on an unpaved road in the middle of Switzerland during the horn carving season just before Nixon died and the cactus bloomed over his kitchen sink. He remembered fragments of conversation:

"I told the plumber it went in the other...."

"White on blue, not green on black! The client wants it to fit your average teenager's dental health...."

"If you sit on it for about five minutes, it will be warm enough to..."

As he was sliding in his dream, warm with the colors and the sounds of old garbage disposals grinding to a stop on potato skins, the phone rang!

Time, space and y-fronts folded into a knot.
The bushes by the front porch shook in the evil wind and the mail was damp in the slot box.

Three old gods playing pinochle groused about the lack of fermented ambrosia because their corner of Olympus had just been voted dry.

Alec answered the phone but failed to pick up the receiver.
The golden receiver lay in its cradle, cold and untouched. The phone continued to ring and the rhythm of the noise inserted itself into Alec's dream and his dream self began to sing:

Kneesocks, kneesocks,

kneesocks and Mary Janes,

I love to step in the pot holes

except when it rains.

I've had a lovely summer,

but I dread the onset of fall,

but it will give me an excuse

to buy new kneesocks,

my very most favorite thing

of all.

Kneesocks, kneesocks,

kneesocks and Mary Janes,

I love them in the package,

on the floor and on a bod,

I love them in a photo,

a movie or a blog,

I love them when they're new,

freshly unwrapped and pulled

into view,

I love them when they're just

plain worn out,

and really starting to pe-uw!

The phone stopped ringing. The answering machine picked up with a surround-sound KERCHUNK and the message began to unwind on a stretched tape:

"This is a recording.

If you put a message after the beep at the end of this message,
you will be a recording, too.

Thus, I am not real, and you will not be real, and neither of us is really here, so whatever you have to say can obviously wait.

So there will be no beep, no matter how long you wait.
Because you like waiting, don't you?"

A strained pea-stained voice bellowed through the speaker of the answerer,"Alec! Up! Answer! I've got a job for you! Get UP Right
NOW! Work! MOney! MOOLAH!"

Alec twitched, said,"Moo," and knocked the golden receiver off its rest.

"Alec! Talk to me!"

"Who?"

"Tarilla Sibumarker, down at the Temp Agency. I've got a position for you!"

"Oh. When?"

"TODAYRIGHTNOW"

"Oh. Okay. Where do I go? What do I wear?"

"Come down to the office, first. Wear jeans and sandals and that Versace t-shirt with the spangles."

"Pink or green?"

"The blue ones, silly. To match the jeans."

"Oh. You want me to wear the blue jeans."

"Sigh. Yes. You do remember where we are?"

"Yes. I still do. Right next to the ceramic donut shop on Klinghoffer Street."

"Good. That's close enough. Get here in forty minutes, please."

Click.

At the word 'please', Alec sat up and recradled the golden receiver.
His steel clothespin mind began to function at its full potential.

He took a shower.

He dried.

He got dressed.

He put on his shoes.

He locked the garret and went down fourteen flights of solid marble steps to find his old Beetle.

Cahpter Twaa: The Last Time I Saw Paris, he was peeling a plaster.

Epiphany Smith was tooling a bit of leather with a potato peeler while the fan above her head sang old Beatle's tunes in Coptic.

Time, space and love had taken its toll on Epiphany, weighing in on her dewlaps, crowsfeet, pigeontoes and libido.

She chewed her gum speculatively, trying to guess which bit of capping material would separate from an old cavity first. Speaking of old cavities, she thought she would call her mother.

Pushing aside a roll of old psychedelic denim, she found the cigar box she kept her cell phone in. Bleeping it to life, she hit the autodial and waited while it rang'd.

While she waited for her mother to answer, she picked up a long stick with a rag on it and chased the dust bunnies off her life-size statue of William Wallace dressed as Tarzan.

The ringing stopped. There was a clunk and a gasp and the sound of old chiffon being dragged across a driveway,"Yessss? Whose isss ittt?"

"Mum, put yer teeth in, ya sound like a snake!"

"Ummmm. Oh."

A sound of rattling. A glass hitting the floor. "Oth! Damn! Ach, deres da uvver wun."

A loud sliver of wetness fell out of the earspeaker into Epiphany's ear. "Yuck, Mum!"

A louder cough, then,"I'm sorry. I've been busy chasing the cat. He's got the Beano and he won't give it back!"

"I bought you a BB pistol for just such a thing. Use it!"

"You'll hate me. He got it yesterday and hid it under the fridge. I tried to get it out with a broomstick, but now the fan's bent and whines when it comes on. It own't play a proper note and I'm so tired of it. You'll take care of it, won't you? Pleeeassee?"

Epiphany swatted irritably at the loincloth with her stick. No good, the statue was life-size, not life-like.
"Oh, piffle, piffle, poo, oh, all right. I'll be there in a bit. Just keep your teeth in and give that cat a swift kick if you happen to see him!"

"Ahhh, he's such a nice cat and I don't like to hurt him."

"Mum. He weighed twenty kilos the last time I dragged him to the Vet's. If you're able to get his attention, that would be enough. Now, behave and don't blow the place up. I'll be along."

Epiphany bleeped off and put her phone and her stick away.

It wouldn't be so much to ask if it weren't for the fact that her mum had adopted her. So, she owed her a bit more than most kids, she guessed.

She got up on her feet, clutching the ruffle to help her, spit out her gum in an antique spittoon made from an artillery chamber, and got dressed.

She enjoyed dressing in front of an old dance studio mirror. It made her think of a metamorphosis in reverse...her wrinkled self entering into a cocoon of notable fashion, easing her looseness into sleek elegance and style, unremarkable to the untrained eye from a woman ten years her younger.
And that was before she hit the make-up table for a fix of foundation, rouge, liner, lash thickener and lip paint.

Eventually she was ready to leave. She picked a purse to match her outfit and dumped the contents of a compote dish into it. Keys, ammunition, tools, spare fuses, gum, a small silver flask of medicinal vodka, some plasters, and a small folding knife with a wicked blade.

She locked the door behind her and enabled the booby trap. Then she went outside and up the stairs to the car park to find her Volvo saloon.

Captor Thorp: With Time, Even Puppies Learn Where To Go...

It was a street corner like many in the city. A formed curb of concrete and expansion joint. A newspaper vending machine. A vital but tiny tree squared by intermittent grass and sidewalk.

The walk/don't walk light had seen better days, it's chipped municipally green painted housing bent from a vigorous cornering by a long-gone truck and it's bulbs not quite the right color behind the faded lens.

The enameled and white-lettered street sign had been bent double so that you could only read one street's name by walking around the leaning standard. '2300 Poultice Blvd', it read.

A former deacon in the Ethiopian Methodist Church sat upon a stoop, contemplating the wheeze in his lungs while he clutched a small bottle of Four Roses.
Time and talent had sped through him, leaving holes that let out some of his spirit in rationed spurts. His glasses had one lens left and it was held in with surgical tape.

His name had been long and filled with consonants. He had stood with pride when the Bishop had asked him to pray.

His mouth soured at the memory of his prayers....well, prayer. With subtle and memory-challenged variations, he had said the same prayer for thirty-odd years. Well-parodied by his sons and the other children in the church, he'd once upon a time felt even more pride when he saw the young mouthing his words. He had thought he had made an impression on those young minds.

Dear Lord, he had said, the repetitions echoing mockingly,

we stand before you,

humbled.

We stand before you,

ashamed of what we once were.

We stand before you,

blessed with your love,

hoping to share it

early and often.

Dear Lord,

accept our thanks

for what you have done

for us

for what we never

asked for

but found,

freely given.

Dear Lord,

let us go away from here,

taking your love

with us,

going forward,

always forward,

into your light,

amen.

A tear rolled down his face as he whispered,"Amen."

Thinking of that suit he used to wear. The shoes he shined before he went to each service. The car he drove. The family he'd driven.

Gone.

All of it gone.

He had gone way from there. Into the darkness. Taking fear and confusion. For reasons that escaped him. He had done not a thing.

A cloud slid over the corner. The sun filtered through a thin patch here and there, but the mottled light made the corner look like a sepia photo, frozen in time.

A car snorkeled close, with one of it's exhaust valves half-heartedly adding to the calliope of the engine. One of it's brakes dragged, leaving sparks in the half-light.

He thought of his car. A funereal Buick Electra 225, sedate but powerful, tuned within an inch of it's life. New shocks and brake linings every year. Spare set of spark plugs in the glove box.
Fingertip steering. The alignment adjusted every six months. A parade float, one of his sons had called it. A one man parade.

Another car flounced into hearing, bad muffler a hoarse solo of a dying bagpipe down a well, fan belt whining in unison. He could hear the gearbox trying to eat itself, sounding dry.

Duet of bad brakes screeching in harmony.
He lifted his head.

SWUNKRIK

He stood and walked toward the wreck.

The Volvo had hit the Beetle just behind the left front wheel well and had pivoted at that contact. The Volvo had rounded the nose of the Beetle and the driver's side door was now tight against the passenger side of the Beetle.

He'd never seen anything like it. He had been an insurance adjuster somewhere in the past and he'd examined many a collision. This one was something special.

Two white heads were bobbing behind webbed windshields. The radio played in the Beetle. The Volvo's engine was sizzling quietly. The Beetle's engine revved way too high and stayed impatient.

He walked closer. He heard doors opening and slamming in the houses and businesses around him. Voices.

The man in the Beetle's legs were pinned. His head moved slowly in circles and he sang with the radio.

The woman in the Volvo was crying. She laid her head on the head rest, but her neck wasn't right. Her seat harness had pushed one of her breasts out of her blouse and bisected it where the seat had moved awkwardly off it's mounts and pushed her shoulder forward.
She tried to push it back in.

He stood there, helpless. He didn't know what to do.

The Beetle's gas tank had been pushed up sideways from under the bonnet and it's seams were twisted.

The street was strewn with impact patterned plastic and headlamp glass. One sideview mirror, too, laying, shattered but showing the undercarriage of the Beetle.

Then the man in the Beetle turned his head and looked at the woman.
He reached out with his hand and rolled down the passenger side window as far as it would go in it's bent pillars. He uncrewed the shift shaft and tapped on her window with the knob.

She had blood running out her ear. It took a moment for her to respond. She turned her head as far as she could, cocking a bloodshot eye at the man in the Beetle. He motioned for her to roll down her window. She managed it, the fractaled glass crunking against the frame and the internals. He held out his hand.

Awkwardly, she finally realized she could unfasten her shoulder harness, flopping forward and almost clocking her head on the bent steering wheel, she extended her hand and clasped his as best she could.

He could see their chests moving in unison, their eyes locked.

The radio was still playing.

He realized he knew something about Beetles. He went around the rear and raised the engine cover and reached in and snagged the return spring on the carburetor. The engine protested, whocked a few times, and died. The electronic fuel pump continued to whine. He pulled the wire off it.

When he walked slowly away from the car, he saw the man's head slumped. He walked further until he could see her's. It was the same.
Their chests were still.

He couldn't help himself. He prayed.

The EMS came. They peeled the cars apart with the help of some boys from the fish market. They had to wait for the Jaws for the man, but the woman's door opened and they pulled her out and onto a gurney.
They had her breathing before they drove away.

He saw that. He did not think he had done it. But he thought he couldn't have hurt.

When the fire truck arrived and they began to pull the man out, they cut the door pins to pull that off, then they cut the shredded tire off the wheel and then they tore the bent wheel off to pull the shock out of the interior through the tire well.
Despite their best, 3/4s of one leg stayed when they pulled him out, and the foot of the other.

They tied him off and threw him in the ambulance and sped off. It took another half an hour to get the foot and the leg out and then they were sped away, too, in an ice chest.

The police asked him what he saw. He said he heard the song of the brakes and then he lifted his head and saw the ballet of the collision. Who hit who, they asked. They intersected, he said.

They wrote it down, but they didn't like it.

A fireman, a woman, actually, offered him coffee and a sandwich.

He thanked her and took them. He asked which hospital they had taken them to. She went and asked and told him. He thanked her.

Copter Forp: In which many things are revealed, but your death is indicated as the price of the knowledge.

Alec pulled into the Temp Agency car park
with a flourish of his gears. He found a slot next to an aging Citroen with Greenpeace stickers all over the rear window.
He trooped into the office, the fringe on his dungarees swinging provocatively.

The receptionist saw him coming and picked up the interoffice phone to warn the person on the other end.

Then she stood and ushered him into Tarilla Sibumarker's well-appointed cubicle. He stood there, watching her finish the Guardian's Children's Page's Wordsearch, pencil rubber clenched tight in her opalescent teeth, her matched earrings dangling perilously close to her carefully chosen cleavage in a chartreuse velvet garageman's coverall. Music wafted from a small cd player at her elbow. Manilow. The Muzak version. "Mandy".

He itched for an Export A. He knew she didn't smoke.

She pounced on the last word with a vicious oval that almost tore through the paper,"Ah! That's done it!" She consulted a stopwatch in front of her, leaning against a photostat of her sonogram as a fetus.
"Thirty-two minutes! A new record!"

He resisted the urge to sigh.

She looked at him,"Ah, there you are! You're just in time. Have a seat!"
Alec looked around then stole a rolling chair from the next cubicle. When he flounced into it, a puff of scent pooted out of the fabic.
Patchouli. Yuck. Yick. And Yeeks!

Tarilla waved her hand in the air,"Awful, isn't it? But he's got an asthma. He used to fly, y'know? Disability. He was allergic to the oxygen masks."

Alec sat patiently.

She picked up a manila folder from the bottom of a stack of ladies magazines. She flipped it open and with a crimson claw began to seek a significant phrase. "Ah. Do you mind work that is unpleasant?"

Alec sat patiently.

She glanced at him over her gold-rimmed pink reading glasses. "Ah. No, I guess not."

She turned back to the file. More seeking. "Ah. Do you mind handling tools of a dangerous sort? Um, and using them?"

Alec sat patiently.

She smothered a dainty cough with her free hand, getting a nail caught in her coif as she pulled it away. Her wig shifted a bit.
"Ah, hmm. Excuse me, please. Would you, um, mind, um, killing someone?"

Alec sat forward. "Say what?"

She kept her eyes focussed on the page. "Killing someone. Would you mind? Terribly?"

Alec sat back carefully. "Is this by the hour or for the job?"

She looked up at him with a shock in her brown eye and her blue one.
"Ah! I honestly forgot to ask. You would do it, then?"

"When?"

She checked her mood Swatch,"Today, if you can."

"Okay. Why the clothes?"

"You're going to a be-in. In Samsung Park."

"To kill someone."

"Ah."

Clipter Feeve: Sometimes, the horse does not want to win.

Epiphany woke in the hospital. Soggy with medication.

She wondered about her mother.

She forgot about the Volvo.

She blinked and there was a man standing there. A man with old clothes, and one-lensed glasses, standing with a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

As he looked at her, he winced. She looked far worse than he had ever felt. He was angry at himself for wasting his time on self-pity when others needed his emotions far more than he did. Then he reined in, aware that self-loathing was the other side of the coin.

"Do I know you?"

"No. I saw the accident."

"What happened to the other guy?"

"They haven't told you?"

"I haven't asked."

"I think they better answer those questions."

"Oh. That bad. How'd you find me?"

"Firelady told me."

"So you saw it, what happened. What happened?"

"Both went in the intersection at the same time. One of you hit the brakes, but I'm not sure who. Your car hit his and swung all over the front and ended up with your driver's door against his passengers."

"Whoa! I do remember being dizzy....and he holding my hand...somehow."


"That happened. I saw it."

"Who are you? You seem, um, official, somehow."

"Oh, I used to be somebody. Now I sit on stoops...drinking."

"What happened?"

"What?"

"What happened to you?"

"I went to help the Bishop with what was supposed to be a troubled teen and it turned out to be much worse. I lost my religion that day."


"But I heard someone praying at the....the what happened."

"Oh! I didn't know I did it out loud!"

"Maybe you didn't. I'm a bit of a sensitive when under stress...'

"Second sight?"

"Yep. Sometimes. I try not to look too hard."

"Umm. Then you might understand what I saw that day. Have you ever seen something that made you wanna go blind?"

"Oh, you mean, with the sight?"

"That, too."

"Yeah. I did a year of volunteer work with crack babies."

"Me, too. Know what you mean. You saw in there?"

"Yeah. Their little brains were buzzing. With stuff they never should have held. Ever."

"Well. I hope you don't think I'm crazy."

"Nah. Right now, you're all I've got."

He blushed. He took out his bottle.

"Hey. Where did you get the flowers?"

"Oh," he handed them to her. "My son, one of them is a florist and a jeweler. The other is a cater...they do wedding set-ups together and wakes and Bar Mitzvahs...and that one for girls."

"Wow. They still talk to you?"

"Um. When I let them. They would give me anything. I put them through college."

"Okay. Until?"

He uncapped his bottle and took a swig. Put the bottle back.

He stared at a print of a lighthouse on the wall. Blue skys.
Seagulls. White house.

"The Bishop woke me up. It was the middle of the night. Imogene, my wife, told me to take my sweater. Then she went right back to sleep.
Last time I saw her..."

"She died?"

"No. Just the last time I stepped in that house, either. She's still there."

"Oh. Wow. Go on."

"I went out into the night, to my Buick. The sky seemed turned inside out and the moon seemed reddish and distorted. I didn't feel good.
I'd had a recurring cold for weeks and it just seemed to drain me.

"But the Bishop had called. I drove over to the parsonage and picked him up. He had his bag and an old-fashioned lunchbox. He said you never know how long these things are gonna take. I was not too happy about that. He filled me in a little about the boy. Not too much in trouble but not a saint. The mother had found him two days ago, naked, sweating in his bed, eyes bloodshot and almost unconscious.

"She took him to the doctor and the doctor thought it almost but not quite looked like an OD. But there was no residue in his sweat or his urine, so they sent him home with a coupla drugs to make him rest easier. That night, he started to talk in his sleep and he wasn't talking English. Or Spanish. His eyes were open but he wasn't reacting to light. The mother called the emergency room but the intern said that it might be a reaction to the drugs. Did he have the flu? So she called the Bishop and he said do some prayin' and he'd be right over.

"I found the house on the second try. It was an old house, but it had been moved. You could still see the beams and the stack bricks underneath and the steps were new. Concrete. That sandy sort. I don't like it. It won't last more than five years before the sun and the ice salt eats it.
When we knocked, she was at the door real quick, dressed to go. She said he was upstairs, she just had to get out for a bit. It was too close in there. The Bishop patted her on the shoulder and said sure. Take your time. Off she went. I never saw her again, either.

"We went up quietly. Pictures on the walls. Dogs and kids and grandads.

We found the room easily enough. There was music playing. One of those metal bands. Not too loud. But it was nasty. The words. When we went in, I turned it off.
The Bishop set his bag on the dresser and took his coat off and hung it on a hook next to a hockey stick.
I took my coat and hat off and lay them across a chair and I sat.

"The kid lay with his head propped up by a couple of pillows. He had on yellow pyjamas with smiley face dots. His feet were bare and reddened. His lips looked purple. There were a couple of low lights on in the room and when the Bishop turned to look him in the eyes, the lights seemed to dim and the room seemed smaller."

"Oh, no!"

"Yep. You know what's coming. I sat up straight and clutched my Bible in my coat pocket. The Bishop almost took a step back. He looked at me with concern. Then he stepped toward the bed. The kid's eyes focussed immediately and they seemed to see everything. His mouth twisted.
'You seen the movie?,'he asked. I didn't know what he was talking about. But the Bishop did. 'I don't work that way,'he said.

The kid sat up and crossed his legs and held out his turned up palms to the Bishop,'Pray with me?' The Bishop gasped. I got my Bible out and held it tight. I really didn't want to be there. But I hoped it was a joke of some kind.
The Bishop went to the bag on the dresser and took out his prayer book and a small box. I had to stare, but I soon recognized the box. It was from the Holy Land. One of the founders of our church had brought it back from Africa back in the twenties. A bone. A finger bone. I knew it was real. Or the Bishop would not have had it. He was no fool.
The kid saw the box and turned a hand toward it,'I know what that is. I saw him die.'
Whoops! That took all the wind out of me and I could barely stay in that chair. I knew I couldn't stand.

"The Bishop was sweating and it was cold in that room. I thought I could hear his heart. His face became like iron. He stretched out his arms and he prayed mightily, with authority, and the kid sat there and watched, grinning. 'I said pray with me.' The Bishop ignored him and prayed some more. I was doing a little praying of my own.
"Then the kid turned toward me and outstretched his hands. 'You pray with me, then?'
"I shook my head but I felt words in my mouth that weren't mine. I clamped my mouth shut. I heard words in my head. I closed my eyes and covered my ears and I heard still and I began to see.
"I opened my eyes in fright and I could still see burning bricks and three-legged lambs and blood and children eating mud and trains carrying people into dark tunnels that seemed to chew the trains and then I heard the Bishop's voice and felt his hands on my shoulders.

'You must not go with him,'he shouted.
"I tried to see his face right in front of me, but I saw gaps in walls and holes in the ground and little girls with the teeth falling out of their mouths and bridges falling and grass growing where eyes should be and I felt the Bishop slap me and then I heard the teeth.
"I heard the teeth of the boy on the Bishop's neck. I opened my eyes wide and through the visions I saw the boy on the Bishop's back and he was raking his eyes with his hands and he was biting through the collar and blood, blood, blood...

"I reached up to pluck him off, but the Bishop was batting at him and he hit me and I fell off the chair. The box was on the floor, half open. I took it. I opened it. The kid leaped back off the Bishop and onto the bed. I heard the frame creak.

"The Bishop saw me with half an eye and outstretched his hand,'No. Not yet!'
"I touched the bone in there and it was like lightning going up my arm. The Bishop collapsed and the kid pulled him out of the way like a doll.
"The kid's face was twisted, like the sky, almost inside out. His eyes seemed too close together and his ears seemed way bigger than they had been. He spit at me.
"I picked up the bone and showed it to him. The lightning spread through my entire body. I stood and I glowed blue. Light blue. Pure Blue. I stepped near the bed. I said,'Be gone from this boy. Be gone from this house.'
"I felt like I could tear two phone booths apart with my bare hands.
I felt mean.
I felt glorious.
I felt like I was born to do this.
"I stepped closer and I clutched the bone with both hands and I thrust it at him and he screamed and the room spun and the bone shattered and shards went into my hands and my face and I blinked and I screamed,
too, blood on my hands and in my eyes and I felt this bubble build inside me and I felt it come up in my throat and I belched and power came out and a whole half of the room tore off that house and fell into a hole in the air, a jagged yellow-edged darkness that closed too soon and left bits of board and brick falling to the ground, two storeys below...
"And I stood there, breathing the cold night in, my throat sore and my Bishop gone with the boy...
Standing there, the edge of the room ragged just inches beyond my feet...
"I waved my hand like I could erase it all and make everything come back and another rip in the air opened up
and slid over me like warm Jello and
I gagged and
tripped and
"found myself miles away, standing in a graveyard, staring at the Bishop's grave.
Stunned, I remembered the boy's name and I went looking for it. I found it.
"The stones had the same date, but it was two months beyond what I thought the day was.
I touched my face and it was bearded for the first time in my life.
"I looked at my clothes and they were torn and dirty and spotted.
I looked at my hands and the wounds were healed but still tender. One of my glasses lenses was cracked and my shoes were worn.

"I had a bottle in my pocket. I drank from it and it tasted familiar, though I've never been a drinking man.

That was two years ago."

He got out his bottle and took another dose.

She was staring at him. "October 12th. 'Round 1:30 AM"

He stared at her,"You felt it?"

She nodded. "It came over me like a wave of nausea. I saw black sparks and had trouble breathing. It happened to a lot of others, that night, too. I've talked to them."

"Why didn't anybody do nothing?"

"We didn't know where. We just knew when and that it was close. And then it was over. Just like that."

She clutched the bouquet and she looked at him with her mind.

She could see the auras ringing his body and the trace glows where the bone fragments had pierced him. She couldn't feel any power, though. Just potential. A lot of it.
Maybe he was being smart staying soused. She wished she could be frightened by what he said. It would do her good to be naive again.

To feel.
Her mother had known about her at an early age and encouraged her to take writing classes and art classes so people would think she was legitimately 'odd'.
Her mother had a 'truth sense' that rarely failed her, but she didn't try to understand the 'sight'. She had done a little research on it in her chosen field of choreography, trying to learn how some physically active people just happened to be able to anticipate another person's movements the first time they worked with them.
She had taught Epiphany about control. You can't react to everything you see.
Sometimes what you focus on can make the difference between sanity and death.

She took the man's hand. "What shall I call you?"

"Hmm?"

"I need something to call you."

"Mmm. Thomas will do. I've been doing a lot of doubting."

"Why? The bone? The boy?"

"The Bishop. He'd been my mentor and my spiritual guide for years.
Why did I survive and he didn't?"

"You believe in Heaven?"

"I guess I still do."

"Then why can't he be there?"

"I dunno."

Captain Sox: The Compleat Guide to Self-Induced Hypnosis.

Alec stood on the edge of Samsung park, making bad Neil Diamond jokes in his head.
He had no idea how to feel. He'd gotten half in advance. He had his Export As. He was smoking two of them at once.

The pistol was in a snug holster in his waistband under his shirt.
He had a laminated ID card in his back pocket.

After Tarilla had given him the weapon, he'd driven away to a small public range and paid his twenty dollars and run twenty rounds through it, getting pretty good with it. One hand, two hands, either hand. Now, he knew that he wouldn't be able to wear the ear muffs at the park when he shot it. He knew that it would probably be a lot louder, but it would also be outside.

There was music and children and little carts selling food and balloons and t-shirts. There were brightly coloured cars and dogs and people on stilts.
Why had she called it a 'Be-in'?
That was such an antiquated....and there, by the swimminng pool, strung between two light poles, was a large vinyl banner spelling out 'Uncle Borscht's Thirty-second Annual Be-in!'
Oh. Hmm. Wondered where the brown tofu was.

He had a name and he had a picture and he had been shown a video tape. He had been given a time and a place. He had been given an escape route. The ID card supposedly had some immunity built into it.
He could smell everything. He was hungry. And lonely.

He went to the corndog stand and was smitten by the young lady running it. She was magnificently plain. Nothing special about her. She was female, sighted, hearing, awake and there. Covered in a faded denim dress that revealed nothing and hid little. Marvelous.
Her glasses were a couple of years out of date. Her cosmetics were either so lightly or so skillfully applied that you couldn't tell they were there. She smelled like the food she was serving and a little human sweat. Her nails were short, top and bottom, unpainted and slightly soiled. Her Birkies had seen better days but her feet looked healthy and uncorned. When she spoke,"Hi, can I help you?", it was the voice of a person. Not a vixen or a slut or a backwoods idiot or a sophisticate or a college drone. Just a person.

He could have been in love. He ordered and she prepared and they chatted and once he'd paid and thanked her and tasted the food and told her it was better than most, there was no more to say. She waved as he walked and then she turned to other customers.

Wow.

As he ate and looked around, he tried not to think. He'd done a lot of things for that agency. Factory work. Fieldwork. Washed semis with a high pressure wand, getting soaked. Painted.
Cleared ditches by hand. Passed out fliers. Answered the phone. Babysat animals and houses. Driven vehicles across country. Picked fruits and vegetables.
Loaded trucks. Unloaded trucks. Laid carpet. Laid tile flooring.
Now he was going to do something easy.

Why, he started to wonder, had they picked him?
Well, they hadn't.
The agency had.
Tarilla had.
But out of how many? How many who hadn't qualified?

He went back to his Beetle and changed his shirt. He put a brown corduroy baseball cap on and tucked the holstered pistol in the engine compartment, behind the fan shroud.

Then he went and took a look around.

He walked the whole perimeter of the park, counting cop cars and noting private security kiosks and uniforms. He spotted his target, walking a small spaniel with a neckerchief. He walked through his supposed escape route and found a tour bus blocking the way. Its engine idled, but it was empty.

He didn't see any really good reason why he couldn't move the Beetle to a place of his own choosing and make his own escaped route...ah, and the cops were pulling bindles of that yellow stretchy plastic festival fencing out of a panel truck and workers with reflective vests were setting them up.
One way in, one way out. Hmm.

He went back to the vehicle and changed again. Got the pistol out and hid it in his pants again.

Headed for his destination. Half hour to go.

Chapped Her Sliven: Scanning the horizon for a mast, seeing only a bird.

Thomas sought out the fellow who'd been in the other car.
He asked at the emergency room. They looked at him and through him and shrugged and it went through him like a nail.
They didn't care or couldn't. And he didn't look like someone who needed them, so he was a non.

It occurred to him that he had better get cleaned up. If he was going to do real person stuff then he had better start looking like one.
He might have to go home.
He went out the emergency room door and he saw one of the EMS people from the accident. He gently approached them and asked about the fellow.
They hung their head and shook it sorrowfully. "DOA"
Thomas asked what the fellow's name had been.
They never found out.
He'd have to look in the paper. Which reminded him. He had a spare pair of glasses at the house. His house.

DOA.
He wondered if he should tell Epiphany.
He suddenly felt a tickle run round his brain. He knew he wouldn't have to tell her. She was reading him.
He wasn't sure he liked that. But what could he do?
He liked her.
As he hadn't liked anyone in a long time.

She received the message loud and clear. She wondered if she was to blame for the other fellow's death.

Anyway, she thought it was important that Thomas was thinking about going home.
She wondered where he had been during those two months between the incident and his arrival in the grave yard. He had the mark of the seventy tzaddikim on him, a phenomenon where you have been chosen to perform a specific task at a particular point in time and once you've done that, the mark goes away and so does your importance to the scheme of things. Well, he'd already done one thing, but apparently that was not the thing that he was destined to do.

She pushed a little with her mind. Pushed him in the direction of home.

He went home.
He walked, long and hard. He knew where the buses ran and he had a little money, but he thought that he should feel it out as he went.
He'd thought about home before. He'd thought about his wife and sons and all he'd left behind.
The face of the Bishop kept rearing up in his mind's eye. The teeth of the 'boy' in his neck.

Then the visions would replay, brighter and darker than they had been even on that night.

The faces and the visions wouldn't come. He thought of warmth and comfort and skin and cushions and newer clothes. The streets were hot and cold and windy and dry as he turned onto each one. He saw children and cars and steps and windows and plants and his heart became swollen with a love of what could have been, could be, should be his.
He threw his bottle away somewhere, in a can.
He was within a whole city block of his house.
His stride lengthened. He thought of shoes without holes in them.
He looked toward the house, squinting.

The door was open.

Epiphany followed him in her mind. She felt and saw and held his wishes close. She reached out ahead of him, too. Casting, feeling.

She vaguely heard a thumping sound but she didn't think about it.
It was a hospital. Hospitals make noise.

As Thomas rounded the corner to approach his block, she felt something woolen in the air ahead of him. Woolen and damp and moldy.
She pulled away from him to sharpen her focus in the direction of his gaze. She could hear what he was thinking but she thought something else. There was a bloom around the area. A swell of power.

She reached back to him as he was seeing the open door in the house.
But he wasn't seeing that the whole block was empty of trees and cars and children...

The legless man flopped into her bed and covered her ears with his filthy hands and her mouth with his...

In her mind and Thomas's, she screamed,"NO!"

The dead man crushed her skull.

Thomas felt the clap of removed consciousness and he stumbled, drained.
He'd caught an outline of an image as she withdrew, frightened beyond belief, of the man from the car...He blinked. The houses around him wavered.

In the door was a woman. A thin woman. His wife had been overweight in a noticeable way, but pleasantly so. Could this be?

The sidewalk was cracked and he stumbled on it, looking in a amazement at the grass growing out of the concrete...His neighbors never would have allowed that...They were good neighbors, proud of...

"I've drawn a bath. You need to get cleaned up."

He looked up at her and there was an intensity that tugged at him.
He stepped closer and for a second, it looked like she was standing in thin air, but the house and the steps flicked back insistently.
His wounds began to throb. She beckoned frantically,"C'mon. It's been a long time. Come on home."

He smelled dirt. Cracked brick. Trash.

He looked up the street and there was nothing.

He looked back at his house and...there had been a handmade by one of the boys cross of matchsticks, varnished and hanging in the front window when he left those years ago...in that window, where there was only curtain and..cracked glass?

She screamed,"Come on, what are you waiting for? I welcome you with open arms!"
He saw the arms, but the body, the chest, the face seemed sunken between them...he felt thick of head.

Without thinking, he balled his fist and waved his arm at the confusing visions...he thought he was going off the deep...until the blue light erupted from his arm and burned off the canvas...the wife vision shrieked to tear ear drums for a hundred miles and shriveled into the suddenly tearing doorway...and the house and the block sucked in and dotted to a close.

He was standing on a cracked and smashed sidewalk, surrounded by vacant lots filled with the debris of demolition.
A rusting bulldozer sat on the foundation of what had once been a store.

Suddenly, a hand smacked through the concrete he was standing on and clutched him by the ankle.

"Don't worry," it said. "I'm a friend of Epiphany's. She's dead, but she took some with her and her spirit is happily busy right now. She can't reach you, but she sent me. You've done good. You've fought the Bete Noir twice and survived. You have one more task. Today. Soon. I don't know if you'll survive, but I will tell you this. That was not your wife. She is still alive. If you live, you may find her. But know this. In Eternity, you will eventually find each other. Don't worry."

Thomas wet himself. "Where do I go?"

"Feel. It is your task. It will call to you. You must be very important for them to spend so much time and energy on an illusion this big. So you are more powerful than you can imagine. But try to imagine. Be six years old. Be big and strong and powerful and sense your moment. It is very soon. Today. Feel. Reach out. Sense. Open up and receive. But not too much. Or they will get you."

The clutch at his ankle was relieved and he barely saw the hand pull the concrete piece back over.

He was missing that bottle something bad!

Corp. Ted. Errt: Thirty pieces of silver and I get hung up by a tree!

Alec had the feeling that someone was watching. Specifically.
Intently.

He looked around slowly, using his peripheral vision. Everybody was busy doing something. A small boy with a striped shirt and Pokemon shorts with Snoopy Keds was about to cross his path. He was staring at a ragged homemade hand puppet with yarn for hair and a green pom for a nose. Alec stopped short to avoid walking into him. The boy looked up and stopped right next to him. There was a tear in his eye.
"Are you lost?"

"No. My Mommy's over there."

Alec looked and there was an unanxious mother-looking type in a dotted dirndl and riding boots looking at him and the boy. She turned back to the pie she was slicing.

Alec felt his hand tugged. "Mister."

He looked down at the boy and tears were pouring.
"What is the matter?"

The boy held up the puppet,"Pimmy says you better talk to him or you're gonna die."

Alec took the puppet and the boy ran away. Away from his mother.
"Hey!"

"Hey, yourself."

He looked at the puppet. It had vibrated in his hand and it's googly eyes were focused. The mouth moved. The voice was silly but vicious.
He tried to drop it but it's cloth hands clutched him. "You must listen."

"Why?" Alec looked around. Nobody was watching. The boy was gone and the mother was serving.

"You will try to kill a man in the next five minutes."

"Okay, where is the radio control box? Who's running this expensive gag?"

"Feel inside me. There is nothing."

Alec was not going to put his hand inside the thing. He felt around with his free hand. Cloth. "So, what are you?"

"A warning."

"From who? How do I know this is not a trick?"

"You have chosen a course of action. I am to make sure it is not in vain. You will encounter a man with one eye and you will encounter a man who can see with one eye. You must make a choice. One or the other. Or both. Or neither. But a choice you must make."

The puppet went limp.

"Mister. Can I have Pimmy back, now? Is he done?"

The boy. Hand out.

"Are you sure you should be playing with this? Isn't it weird?"

"Not as weird as the wind. It talks to me and Mommy says I can believe only half what I hear. But that's not as bad as when I can't hear it."
He snatched the puppet and ran to his mother. The woman smiled at the boy and then looked at Alec. She made a shooing motion to Alec and then the finger shooting gesture.

He shuddered.

He was very unhappy.

He walked slowly toward where he was supposed to be at the appointed time.

Thomas got another bottle. He paid twice what it was worth to a man he used to know who was sitting in a burned out car. Peppermint. Yuck.
But it burned down just right once it got past the tongue.

He was tired. He didn't like being messed with. The wounds still stung.
He looked carefully where he walked, then looked carefully at his surroundings. He wanted to stand still or sit, but he was afraid he would sink.
Movement was safety. Unless he was moving away from what he was supposed to do. Or moved toward it. He hated destiny and he missed Epiphany. He wanted his life back. Where ever it was.

A jet passed overhead and he thought about it.
A cigar tube full of four-limbed ants. An infested metal bird. An enema in the sky.
A car passed and he thought about it. Travel.
A few short blocks or all the way across the country, the passenger's useless limbs tucked in out of each other's way, dog's nose in the slipstream. He would like to be a dog, with his nose in the slipstream. Everything an adventure or a disappointment...
He wondered if Jesus had a dog. He hadn't. His parents wouldn't let him and one of his sons was allergic...the one that became a florist...Life, liberty and the pursuit of squirrels...He was tired.
He wanted it over with.

Epiphany was worried about her mother, but she would wait. An opportunity would present itself.

The spirit inside the dead body had not fully comprehended who she was. It would spend eternity at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, being eaten and reincarnated and eaten and...

She slid through slick toughness, making her own light, feeling, feeling, feeling, pushing onward and sideways and spreading herself so thin she was sure the edges would fray and part. She had to help Thomas.
There was a nexus, a spindle around which destiny spun, somewhere close by, if she was 'in' time.
If she was 'out of' time, then she was in trouble. Well, Thomas was in trouble.
Very little was likely to trouble her again unless she let it. She was in her element and she could rule until she ran into someone more powerful.
She sensed a purpleness. A cluster of entities doing nothing, just hovering over a....nexus... She could not get too close. She knew they could sense her, too. But they were minor, separately. Together, they could confuse her long enough to stop her.

She curled up and pointed herself and dove sideways at the barrier, passed between the molecules and was spit out fifty feet above Samsung Park, a smear in the smoke from the barbecue wagon.
Here.
She felt a tendril from the watchers reach out to her, protesting her intervention. She burned it back with ease.
She floated, watching below and above. There was a tension in the air and she saw the auras. They were everywhere.

A tiny bird flew up to her and swooped around. "I did like you said. He has the message. It almost got him."

"What do you mean, 'almost'? It's all or nothing. Like hand grenades.
He made it. Do you know what is going on?"

"No. But it feels old and heavy. Lot of interested parties down there. Oops!" It zipped off, chased by a bigger bird that carried an odd aura of it's own. There was a definite thought in it's head,"Three minutes! Three minutes!"

Epiphany floated lower. Not much time. She reached out to Thomas somewhere. She tugged at him. She pulled. She yanked.

Alec wanted to touch the pistol, but he daren't. Too many, too close. He felt something akin to stagefright. But that wasn't it. It was like he was the spectator. He didn't know what he was supposed to be watching. His hand tingled where the puppet had been. He wiped his hand on his pants and his leg tingled. Whatever it was, he'd spread it across his palm, because his entire hand began to throb with the spot on his leg.

The density of people and something else became greater. There was a rough path before him, through them.
No one actually looked at him.

He surreptitiously hitched his hip forward, trying to shift the holster to a more comfortable place. He tried to see if there were any cops or security personnel close by. No good.

He looked at his watch. Two minutes. He could see the stage from where he was standing. He could see the stool, the microphone. He saw rustling behind the makeshift curtain at the back of the stage.

He walked within ten feet of the edge of the stage, just behind some senior citizens sitting in folding chairs and talking loudly.

Thomas stumbled again, stubbing his toe through the worn patent leather. His brain suddenly tingled and was tickled with the touch of Epiphany.

She was bugging him. He was almost glad to feel her. He touched back.
She tugged. He didn't know where.
He felt his arm raised against his will. He fought back. His wounds swole and he felt the blue rising.

She yanked at him. He blazed with fear and anger and the concrete splintered around his feet and the air refused to go near him.
He gasped and shoved back and swung his arm against the tension and the world gaped and he was sucked...Jello...warm...through...

FLUHBOOOOM!

Everybody was flat but Alec.
He swayed, but remained. He put his hand on the pistol grip under his shirt.
The curtain frame fell sideways and an arm swayed, pushing the cloth aside. An old man with a ventriloquist's puppet stood up and stepped onto the stage. He had an eye patch. It was the fellow from the pictures and the videos, but he had not had the patch when they were taken.
The one-eyed man...

Alec pulled the pistol, held it with both hands. Some of the people moved or moaned, but none rose. The air was thick.

The puppet in the man's arms moved.
It sat upright, but he could see both the man's hands!
It swiveled its silly head and it looked right at him.

A man with shabby clothes, a bottle in his hand, and glasses with one lens in the frames emerged from behind a tree.
He looked wildly from Alec to the man on the stage. The man who could only see with one eye!

The puppet raised an arm and pointed to the new man.
The new man raised his free hand and pointed it at the puppet.
The puppet's eyes blazed.
A big light blue bubble formed around the new man and he quivered.
The old man with the puppet dropped it and it fell on it's feet, it's short legs trembling. The old man stepped away. He looked at Alec and nodded. Alec shot him.
"No! Not me, you idiot! The dummy!,"said the old man with the hole in his chest, falling to the stage.
The puppet turned its gaze to Alec and shot a bolt of something orange at the new man. The bolt glanced off the blue bubble and singed two old women in the back row of the chairs.
Alec fired at the puppet.
It caught it and threw it back at him. Something jerked at his hand and he shot the incoming bullet out of the air.
The puppet's mouth fell open.
The man in the bubble walked over the bodies toward the puppet. He was saying something. It sounded like a prayer.
The puppet began to talk back. It sounded like a reversed recording of what the man was saying.
Alec had three rounds left. He didn't know what to do with them.
"Finish off the man on the stage,"a voice said.
He looked down. Pimmy was tugging at his pants fringe.
He stomped Pimmy and felt a burning in his leg. He lifted his foot and shot Pimmy.
Then he shot the old man again. In the head. No blood. Just a puff of dust. The head collapsed like an old pumpkin.
The puppet looked behind him.
The man in the bubble raised his other arm, dropping the bottle. It bounced inside the bubble and barked him on the shin. He swore.
The puppet looked at him and grinned impossibly wide. It repeated the swear word. Louder.
The man in the bubble stopped moving. The bubble's blueness faded and the bubble rippled.

Alec had a thought,"Hey!"
The man in the bubble looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Alec threw the pistol at him. It slid through the bubble and the man deftly but suprisedly caught it.
Alec nodded at him, smiling.
The man rubbed the pistol with his hands until it turned bright blue. The bubble faded and popped and the man shot the puppet with massive force and blast and blue, blue, blue. The whole stage split with the puppet. The ground split.

Alec and the man seemed to stand on inviolate islands.
All the people and bodies on the ground slid toward the rift and some moved and screamed but went...a piece of the fabric of the sky screeched like a rusted hinge as it was sucked toward the rift.

Alec suddenly felt like he had better places to be and he turned, but his feet weren't touching anything.
He was hovering. He felt a feather touch on each shoulder. A voice in his head told him to be calm.
Once the ground was clear and the rift began to chew and close, the man in the shabby clothes waved his arms, threw the pistol in and snapped his fingers. The rift was no more. The stage was gone. Only the smashed pieces of the ventriloquist's puppet lay there, smoking.
Alec felt a benediction in his head and his feet were on the ground again. He looked around.
Everything was gone but the trees. He looked at the other fellow with curiosity. Suddenly, he was hungry.

Thomas felt her come near. He pursed his lips and kissed at the smear in the air and he heard a giggle in his head.
Then she was gone.

He looked at the strangely dressed young man,"You got any money?"

"A little. You?"

"A little. I'm hungry."

"Ok. Where you wanna go?"

"Where do you like to go? I haven't been anywhere in a long while."

"I dunno. I've got some Kielbasa at the house."

"Okay. You have a car?"

"I should, still."

"I'll come home with you, but we have to stop and see somebody's mother first. Might take her some donuts."

"Okay."

For some reason, when they came close, they linked arms and walked to the parking lot that way.

Pimmy groaned.