“It’s very thrilling to see darkness again.”

—Diane Arbus

“You’ll like this,” said Schaeffer as he let Brovnik into the apartment. “She was a photographer.”

Brovnik chuckled unhappily till the smell hit him; it fit right in with the buzzing of flies. The other cops’ hard shoes clapped on the uncarpeted boards of the hall; their voices echoed in the cluttered flat. Brovnik walked slowly, as if in a sweltering museum. Dozens of unmounted photographs were thumbtacked to the walls, curled by the July humidity. Schaeffer went into the bathroom with everyone else. Brovnik wasn’t in any hurry to learn the cause of the splashing he heard. He bent close to a picture of a white girl standing against a canvas tent, her head thrown back, arms spread wide, the hilt of a sword and part of the blade poking out of her gullet. The other pictures were just as freakish. He liked them.

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It was the year 1969. In the van, Jeff was broasting alive, and his tongue had turned to pumice, but he hardly felt the July heat. The freeway shimmered as if it were aflame, and where the illusion was strongest the boy imagined he could see through cement to the surface of Earth’s moon. Somewhere high above Bur­bank’s smoggy gray sky, the lunar excursion module crouched like a spider on stilts. Down here, lanes merged and diverged, cars sped from near to far away in seconds, and two ladies in black changed a tire on a black T-Bird by the side of the road. Up there, astronauts waited to walk.

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“Here,” Daniel said, handing Paula the photograph. “Take a look at this, then tell me you still want to meet my father.”

Paula hefted it in one hand; it was framed in dark wood, covered with a heavy rectangle of glass. A fringe of dust clung to the glass’s edges, under the frame, blurring the borders of the photograph into a spidery haze.

“What is it? Who is it?”

“Us. My family.”

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“Too much ichor,” said red-faced Jack Magnusson, scowling into a playbook. “The whole tragedy is sopping in it. Blood, blood, blood. No, it won’t do for a student pro­duction. We’re not educating little vampires here.”

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As they approached the site of the company picnic, Dewey and his parents saw a crowd of weird-looking people standing along the roadside waving picket signs. Dewey’s father muttered, “God damn” under his breath.

“Roll up your window, Dewey,” said his moth­er.

“Who are they?” Dewey asked, putting up the rear window of the sta­tion wagon.

“Anarchists,” his father said. “They’d like to see us all turned into animals — and worse.”

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Through the light which shines in natural things, one mounts up to the life which presides over them.

-Giordano Bruno

Creaking, the heavy door swung open, and I stepped into the darkened cell. The old gatekeeper waited at my back. Two hundred years ago he would have been a jailer, and this might have been my cell. I straightened up slowly, uncertain of the ceiling height, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. I had an electric lantern with me, but I wanted my first impressions of the cell to match those of its last tenant. What had he felt as the door closed behind him and the key turned in the lock? In the end, had his eyes turned huge and sight­less from staring into shadows? Had he seen the pyre to which they led him after so many years in the dark? Or had that fi­nal dawn burned out his eyes, even before the flames of the auto-da-fe came leaping from below?

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Donny gets to work with the quick-setting cement; it will proba­bly have hardened before most of the blood has congealed in the chest’s cavities. The brass lion’s feet on the antique bathtub gleam from his attentive polishing, as does the porcelain inte­rior, scoured so many times with Bon Ami that the scratch marks of steel-wool pads appear in places. Shiny black plastic-wrapped parcels almost fill the basin.

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Old Rotcod’s cottage rose like a tombstone at the edge of the Merry Meadow, casting its gloomy image over the otherwise cheerful face of Glamorspell Pond. When the fairykids came down to frolic in the mud, they always kept to the stretch of shoreline farthest from the sagging gray house — not that they would ev­er say a word against it. When they saw old Rotcod himself scowling out through a dust-bleared window, they would wave and call for him to strip from his strict black garments and come join them for a naked swim in the crystalline pond. No one was of­fended when he ignored them, or made a face and pulled the blinds. Only the most radical fairies hinted that it was just as well he kept to him­self, that his presence might dim the blue water like a bottle of black ink spilled into a sacred well. And not a fairykid took offense when, coming down to the pool on a hot day with their picnic baskets and water nymphs, they discovered that in the night the pond had been surrounded by a barrier of fairy-proof iron-thorn shrubberies. Instead, they shrugged and giggled at Rotcod’s humor, then wandered away in search of another spot in which to pass the afternoon.

In the dim recesses of his cottage, Rotcod waited until the sounds of merriment had expired in the depths of the forest. It was too much to hope that they had been devoured by carni­vores, or snatched by starving fairy-traps, though the thoughts made him chuckle. “Maybe now I can get some work done.”

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I was disturbed from my leisurely pursuit of Leandro’s The Abstractions and Essence of  Kaufer’s “Basaltic Culture” As Related to Quantum Mathematics, by the irritating jangle of my telephone. Setting that exquisitely rare and absorbing tome aside, I reached for the phone with one hand, while relighting my pipe with the other—not an easy thing to do, I assure you, as I have very often severely singed my moustache and caused the skin of my face great pain in so doing.

I was not at all displeased to discover that the caller was one Miss Avander, a charming young lady who dwelled alone—and vulnera­bly, I might add—in a small house a short dis­tance down the avenue from my own. I was somewhat more than acquainted with Miss Avander, as in the past we had spent the long evenings in fascinating and intellectual­ly stimulating conversations, and as these vis­its had been conducted in both of our homes, I was well familiar with her location.

“Ah, Miss Avander,” I enthused, letting the warmth I felt blend with the fine natural resonance of my voice, “it is indeed enchant­ing to hear your lovely voice—for indeed it remains lovely even through this awful elec­trical convenience: the telephone!”

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What are you dreaming, kid?

Oh, don’t squeeze your eyes, you can’t shut me out. Rolling over won’t help—not that blanket either. It might protect you from monsters but not from me.

Let me show you something. Got it right here. . . .

Well look at that. Is it your mom? Can’t you see her plain as day? Yeah, well try moonlight. Cold and white, not like the sun, all washed out; a five-hundred-thousandth of daylight. It can’t protect you.

She doesn’t look healthy, kid. Her eyes are yellow, soft as cob­webs—touch them and they’ll tear. Her skin is like that too, isn’t it? No, Mom’s not doing so good. Hair all falling out. Her teeth are swollen, black, and charred.

Yeah, something’s wrong.

You don’t look so good yourself, kiddo—

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