Chapter Thirty-Six: Shadowgraphs

Felix left Gametria and headed uptown. It took a little over an hour to get to 110th street. Sometimes he crossed over in the seventies or eighties but now that the weather was better the park could be menacing. He wasn’t in the mood to beat back dogs and he certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone. He skirted the encampment around the pond. It had a foul odor, like sweaty drunks. Ragged tents and shelters were set up here and there. A big fire burned all day and night, fed with lumber they pulled out of the abandoned buildings on 110th Street and whatever wood they could gather off the ground. The sooty, greasy smoke, stinking of tar and burning hair, drifted around the encampment. Sometimes he would sit down by the pond with a few of the children and tell them stories while they tossed in rocks. They were riveted by his tales of angels; half of it lifted from Milton and the rest a blend of his own experiences and strange memories of the garden. Memories of the garden were sometimes more real than being there and yet he knew the memories weren’t real, it was like the only way he could remember what had happened was in a myth. Thus the rivers there always became The Rivers of Paradise, flowing from a jewel in heaven. All of the elements of the garden were resurrected in memory as precious metals and gemstones. The flarings of sunlight were galloping horses of flame trailing manes of molten gold.

The grass was very green and the leaves had just finished opening, pale and vivid when the evening light caught them. He watched the men and women feeding two-by-fours and big green branches to the fire. They were barely dressed. Their hair was long and their skin was filthy. They passed a brown bottle back and forth. A man squatting down rolled a cigarette. They shit wherever they happened to be. The whole encampment stank of excrement and piss. It kept the dogs away.

He walked in a broad circle away from them but a swarm of children assembled around him, forcing him to sit down on a large rock by the pond.

“Tell a story,” one boy in green shorts said.

“Yeah mister, tell us one.”

Felix gazed at them dully. He looked the water of the pond, black and scalloped with light. There were clumps of rushes. Rats rustled in and out, keeping to the shadows. A red winged black bird settled on a stalk of pampas grass and took off. “O.K.,” he said. “Have you ever heard the one about the devil tricking Jesus into baptism? Once upon a time, The Lord gazed down upon the earth from Heaven and felt great remorse at the turn of events. Had He not created the Heavens and the Earth and all the creatures that crept upon it, there would be no evil, no discord, no need for floods, fire and pestilence or war. For eons he had blamed Man and Man had blamed Him or his proxy, Sammael. It was time to bind up the wound, and so he decided to send one of his two begotten sons, Christ or Satan, to preach a message of love, peace, and forgiveness. He would restore the order of the time before the Beginning, when all was null and void and he had never gazed upon any deep.

“Christ and Satan, or Sammael and Jesus, were born twins, though they were conceived of as One, for God cannot reproduce himself except by means of Opposites. He was divided then between these two Sons in equal measure. Christ was kind, generous, naive, trusting, gracious and truthful. Satan was witty, charming, a skeptic, a cynic, false and aggressive.

“God struggled to decide which of the two was better suited to go out on a good news mission in the world. He thought Satan much better suited to the world and yet, once before he had spoiled things when he had disguised himself as Sammael, a snake, and crept into the Garden of Eden, where he seduced Eve and impregnated her with Cain, the Murderer. For that he confined Satan in Hell, of which he soon repented. Since then he had proven useful. But he could not be trusted with the Gospel.

“Satan, who is subtle, divined these plans before his brother Christ did and went to Christ one day and said, ‘Christ, Father is going to send you down to earth to go among men and teach them to live in peace. I’m afraid for your safety. These human beings are a vicious bunch. They will murder you before you’re done, and you’ll be lucky to get out of it without being tortured and humiliated first. Lend me your shepherd’s crook. I will fool Father into thinking I am you and go down among them first. I shall be your herald and proclaim your coming among men.’

“Christ saw the sense in this. “How shall I know you there?” he asked. And Satan said, ‘I will baptize them in the river Jordan. The rite of baptism shall be mine, and by that rite you will know me.’

“So Satan was born first among men, and when he discovered the deception the Lord was much overwrought with anger. He went down and into the ear of a maid and placed his seed there in her womb and Christ was born Jesus, to Mary.

“When Jesus was a man he traveled from place to place, to be among people, and search for his Brother Sammael. He came to the river Jordan and found him there, and he was known as John The Baptist. Together they preached the Gospel of Peace, which spread across the land. And everywhere they went, while Jesus preached, Sammael baptized souls, and sent them all to Hell.

“And that is why to this day every baptized baby born goes straight to hell.” Felix stretched out his legs and stood. Not far off was the Great North Wood. He climbed a steep hill to a ridge and found his camp. He had no valuables. No one could see it from any direction. He had made his own clearing in dense brush and built a shelter out of branches and impervious fabric he found in dumpsters. He never lit a fire. Inside his shelter was nothing but his bag with his books and Veronica’s ashes. There was a water bottle. He created a perimeter some distance off and marked it with urine, going around the circuit each day.

At Gametria a few days earlier he had seen himself for the first time in a week. His hair was all pilled and stuck through with dried bits of leaves and twigs. He had a beard. It was a shock. But he didn’t care. He washed up and swam in the rock pool, picked up some more Paregane and left. He was nearly out of money but still not dead. It was inexplicable. No one took as much as he did and lived. He had become a legend at Gametria. People offered him money to lie down with them and accompany them to the garden. Maybe he’d have to take them up on it, if things continued in this way. But that would mean not seeing Veronica.

He spent all his time with her now. It took a few days of not looking for her to find her. That was a consequence of the shooting he supposed. For days he could think of nothing else and wished to die on their account. It was as if Veronica didn’t exist. Even with the Paregane the last look Promethea had given him would not let him alone. The only reprieve from those images, from his sense of responsibility, was in the garden.

The first night in the park was cold and terrifying. He lay curled up on the damp ground, his joints aching, shivering, till he entered the garden and found himself in an endless field of sunflowers. They stood three, four metres tall, with huge, burning yellow petals and black hearts. Horizon to horizon the golden waves rolled with the breeze. He laughed and ran about till he felt like a bee and danced strange shapes in the air. He awoke feeling fine but it was not long before he began reliving the shoot out. So it went for days. He took pills every time he awoke to escape. The real world vanished into shadow and became non-linear. Things happened, people died. He envied the dead. Promethea and Peter and Moises and Edsel were lucky. But they weren’t calling him. Nothing called to him but the garden. There was light, warmth, definition.

He found Veronica quite by accident, in a part of the garden he had never been to, but which he felt like he knew from his dreams and imaginings, a place whose edges he had sensed but never pierced. It felt archaic, like the beginning. The tree ferns and palms were enormous. There were cycads, strange scrubby looking plants with tiny tufts on top of twenty-foot trunks no wider than his thumb. The land was hilly and the hills were made up of white, honeycombed limestone thickly covered in vegetation. Caves and caverns and grottos opened like mouths into the hills and vines and ferns hung over the lips like hair. Streams poured down in small waterfalls. Solitary men and women stood in the entrances of the caves. Water coursed everywhere yet the land wasn’t swampy. There were streams and pools and channels. The grottos dripped and the leaves overhead were always wet. The size of things was exaggerated too, as if he were looking at everything through a magnifying glass. Roots formed thick banks along the creeks.

She was living in a cave, alone. The ground was covered with smashed bones but she didn’t know where they came from. It was strange that when he finally found her they fell into living together as if nothing had happened. They went down to the stream to bathe. When hungry they plunged into the water and caught turtles with their bare hands, which they smashed against the rocks and ate raw. They picked fruit, durian, jackfruit, breadfruit, mangosteens, and plantains. They dug gigantic tubers and gathered huge nuts off of the trees shaped like fertility figures from Mohenjo Daro. These they pounded to a paste. And they made love. Every night they moved to a new locale which was also always the same.

He spent very little time away from the garden but awakening was like being wrenched out of reality and plunged into cold indifference. It was as if she died four times a day. During his waking hours he thought of nothing else but going back. At Gametria he was surrounded by dozens of people in the same condition. They passed each other like shades. Gametria was a hot, humid place of shadows, midway between the two worlds. Entering Gametria was like entering a mouth too, but it was an animal mouth, not a cool earthen one.

Veronica carefully picked up the amber, green and black turtle, about ten centimeters across. Its head and legs retracted. She raised it up over her head and brought it down on the rock in front of their cave and the shell cracked. Liquid squirted out onto the rock. She did it again.

“Turtle?” he asked.

She nodded and picked the shell fragments away. As she smashed the shell he felt pain and pity for the creature but he couldn’t wait to get at the cold raw meat with his fingers. After their long, sweaty fucking on the grotto floor he was ravenous. She handed him his turtle with a smile. He loved her sharp, pointy teeth, the way the canines poked down into her lower lip, and the thick hair on her legs and arms. Her eyes were so warm beneath the low brow, he wanted to howl and bark just looking at her. He was vaguely aware that things had not always been so, but it was reassuring to know that they had become so, for this was where he belonged.

Excitement had eluded her for months now. Stoically she watched her plan unfold. Destroying transcryptasine from within seemed to be working. She’d never seen Bradlee so distraught. There were small but distinct fluctuations in his unflappable demeanor as he tracked stock prices and reviewed sales data. There were moments when his free-floating suspicions fell on her and then it was a simple matter of going home with him. The trick was to give him just enough to keep him coming back for more. Most nights they retired to The Lounge for burgers and beer but only half the time did she go home with him. She needed it as well but not as badly as he seemed to. There was a new desperation to his clutch when he came, a new intensity to his writhing when she slowly sucked the cum out of him, contraction by contraction. When she said no she could see the small ripple of anger and disappointment go through his indifferent eyes, the deepening pink of the whites, the brightening of the pale blue iris. Then he would brush his mustache with his manicured fingers and smile weakly and say something obscurely trivial.

Bryson’s confidence in her ability to work Bradlee waxed and waned. She, who was usually so well planned, was winging it. From one day to the next she had no idea what she’d do. Her excursions with Boyle felt like theater. It was a pseudoscientific show they were putting on to buy time so that transcryptasine could blow up in their faces. With the rubble of that event for a blind she would find her way out to the GMZ, with a bag full of jewels and her freedom. The money would go a long way there.

The East river swelled and manically lapped against the Manhattan levee, its surface broken into streaks of silver, grey and amber, which skipped across the broad tidal churning. Behind the composite, stone and concrete walls the crystalline buildings looked slick and shiny. The hovercraft swung down towards Midtown and they landed on the roof of the building across the street from Gametria. The decision to go after Felix meant in essence that they were abandoning the larger study; discretion was no longer an issue. Not that their presence had not been noted. The Gametria crowd were both aware of and indifferent to them, but people in the neighborhood were more curious, and, after they started buying the corpses, superstitiously afraid. It got so that when they pulled the Caddy up to the vacant lot to load bodies into the trunk people gathered distantly to watch and mumble prayers of protection. She could feel a shiver go through them, like leaves shaking in a cold wind on a hot day. It spooked her too and the ride back to Queens was a somber one, Boyle silent and scowling. Their cover was more to avoid the hostility and suspicion towards companies and state on the part of Midtowners, especially the young. Police entered on foot only in large groups. Hovercraft, suits, anything that didn’t fit, fired rumors and paranoia and at any minute someone might take a potshot. Yet Boyle assured her it was only by asserting a right to be there that they would be safe. The unofficial mayors, bar and restaurant owners, gang leaders realized a move against them might end a fragile truce and bring military action. So things had gone on for months.

It was a windy, hot April day, 30-C and rising. Below, on the street, people wore shorts and no shirts. Loud music clashed. Junkies in headphones danced in place. Gangs paced impatiently about. Men called after women, asking them if they wanted to fuck, an offer they mostly declined. Boyle hauled a case of gear out of the StowFast compartment behind the seats, sweating heavily and breathing through his mouth.

The apartment was stifling. She looked out the window. Someone had scrawled across the curled pink entrance way the words BOWER OF BLISS. Boyle put down the case and joined her. She wiped the sweat off of her forehead and lit a cigarette.

They checked the monitor. Two people had died. Five new ones had arrived. She inventoried the rooms. No man.

“He’s not there,” she said.

“So, what else is new. What’s wrong with that guy?”

“He lays in a large supply I guess.”

Boyle shook his head. “Who can afford it? Is he made of money?”

The room was bare save for their equipment and two folding chairs. The sweet, unpleasant odor of cockroaches, intensified by the heat, pervaded it. She sat back in the chair and looked at Boyle. “Sit down,” she said. He did as she told him. “Boyle, we have to get him in the park. It’s been too long. Bradlee wants us to do it and I can’t put him off anymore.”

“You was with him last night then?” There was an edge of jealousy in his voice. She smiled. “We ain’t even sure where he is.”

She clacked at the keypad and showed him the screen. There was a blinking star over a grid of Central Park. “Of course we do.”

Boyle stood and walked back and forth, licking his lips. “I hate the fucking woods, doc. No good can come of it. And up there, we don’t know what’s going on, who, or what lives there. I ain’t fightin’ dogs, understand? With all that cover,” he wiped his mouth nervously, “I mean no disrespect or nothin’, but it ain’t you and Bradlee goin’ in. And my experience is, you gotta overwhelm ’em with force.”

“Now look, it can’t be as bad as all that. It’s in the middle of the city.”

He turned and stared at her, nostrils palpitating. “I don’t care what the fuck it’s in the middle of. When I was a narc cop we went into places you wouldn’t believe. Buildings that were, well it was like they were alive. The shit that goes down, the people. You add a bunch of fuckin’ trees, and no sight lines, and a superhuman freak who, let’s face it, what’s he got to lose? They’re lookin’ to die, right? Now what happens when you and me come between him and that? I see these angles and say, no, we wait, till he comes here and we can take him on the street. He’s gotta run out one a thesedays.” Boyle nodded, satisfied by his defense.

Patiently Bryson smoked her cigarette, never taking her eyes off of him. “He wants to use transcryptasine. We have an unlimited supply. That’s the carrot. You suit up in that silver armor and we have the stick.” He looked at her skeptically. For the first time she felt frustrated. He could be so stubborn. “Look Boyle, I’m sick of this, sick of coming here and sitting in this shit hole watching these people every day. I’m sick of transcryptasine and Bradlee and the whole business. Aren’t you?”

His face fell. “I thought you liked me.”

Bryson groaned and put out the cigarette, resting her head in her hands. “Fucking christ. Of course I like you. But we’re getting nowhere here, Boyle. He’s our only hope and we’re going to lose him.”

He nodded slowly and sat down, scrutinizing the screen. They looked at maps of the park, schematics, photographs, street maps. “See this?” he said, pointing a blunt index finger to a clearing near the blinking star. “There’s a pond there. This here is 110th Street.”

She went to grid. “We could land on the street, here.”

Boyle laughed. “Get off the map and go to an aerial view. See?” The street was actually a dense transitional wood. “The only good place to land is in this clearing. There’s the pond. See these structures? Those are shacks. People. We got no idea how many or what kinda people. And see here? It’s a steep grade up to where he is. Plus we don’t know what he’s doing.”

“He’ll be in range the whole time. He can’t go anywhere. And we’ll know if he’s asleep or not.” Boyle swallowed and lit up a cigarette. He looked sad, almost afraid. He was so easy to read. “Come on now Boyle, I’ve seen you handle yourself. You can do it. I have the tranquilizer. You suit up, carry a good weapon. And I have jewels. If need be, we can buy our way in.”

“I hate fuckin’ woods is all. You don’t know about what happens in the woods.”

She laughed. “My husband lives in the woods. I’ve been camping.”

“Were there insurgents there? Huh?” He snapped the cigarette out of his mouth angrily and it dropped ash across his fingers. The coal glowed as he drew deeply. “Fuck it, doc, O.K.” He stood and stamped out the cigarette. “Let’s go, get it over with.”

Bryson smiled. “Thanks Boyle. You won’t regret it.”

“You better hang onto those jewels, doc. They weren’t easy to get and if people catch on to it you might find yourself in some shit.”

“You’ll protect me, won’t you?” As she said it she laughed at herself. Flirting again.

“That’s my job.”

“Job only?” She wanted to ingratiate herself.

He scowled. “Nah doc, you’re in deeper’n that with me. I’m fucked is all.”

“You’re a good man, Boyle.” She sort of socked his shoulder and cocked her head as if she were teen-age girl.

“So you say.” He turned to the box of gear and opened it. He took out a black box and opened that. Ensconced in blue velvet lay the pieces of a small, powerful weapon. He screwed the pieces together and while he unpacked the silver suit ran the calibration routine. He jacked implosion rounds into his two handguns, checked the charge on his ParalyPistol. He zipped into the silver armour, put on the close fitting helmet and lowered the EverBeam BioWatch visor. “I hate these things as much as the woods,” he said. “Maybe more.”

The flight up to the park did not take long. The hovercraft went straight to Felix’s coordinates. They were over a dense canopy of trees, mixed hard wood, oak and maple. The new leaves were pale but they could not see down to the ground. They then flew out over the pond and field, not far from the edge of the woods. People ran out of the huts to point and stare. They stood up from around the pond.

“Where should we go down?” she asked. She was hovering about a hundred meters off the ground. The people were small but it was easy to see that they were mostly men in filthy rags, unshaved, stooped and decrepit.

Boyle’s voice, cracked and electronic, came out of the helmet. “Get as close to the woods as you can. This crew is nothing.”

They set down on the uneven ground. It was a small meadow, hilly, with outcrops of rock and thick stands of woods and shrubs. The grass had started to grow and was a deep, bright green. They were in shadow. A short walk away was the border of the woods, saplings mostly and undergrowth. They got out and Boyle assumed a defensive posture facing the approaching people. They looked mostly curious, not threatening. Bryson kept her back to the hovercraft and didn’t venture forward at all. Boyle, crouched down, swept his gun from left to right and the men, a group of about a dozen, slowed. There was a childish shriek and Boyle stiffened. Bryson whirled about to see what the commotion was. It was a bunch of kids running out of the woods and howling, shooting at them with sticks and laughing. “It’s just kids,” Bryson said.

“Yeah,” Boyle said. “Got it.” Then, loudly, over his helmet PA he said, “Stay where you are. Do not approach the vehicle. We mean you no harm. We are here to pick up a man living in these woods.”

The men stopped. The kids dropped their sticks and stopped. They stared at Bryson and Boyle. She couldn’t see the kids but she felt a sort of awe in the air.

“The man in the woods?” asked one bearded, muddy man, in a loincloth. “The Man Who Can’t Die?”

Boyle stood up and lowered his gun. “Approach,” he barked.

The man looked around and lowered his head. He approached and stood a little off, humbly, afraid. “You ain’t here for us?” he asked.

“No,” Boyle said.

“That man in the woods. Up there.” He pointed to the trees. “You ain’t gone catch no man up in them woods Mister. No.”

The kids came closer and closer till she could feel them just feet away.

“Is you a ghost, lady?” asked one. She turned to look at them and they ran off again.

“Booze!” yelled one. “Asshole. That lady not a ghost. She cops.”

That made them laugh even more.

“You know where up in them woods he’s at?” Boyle asked.

A few of the other men gathered closer to the one who had come forward. Their arms were scabbed and tattooed. They smelled of wood smoke and alcohol and sweat. Bryson looked at their bare feet. They were like tree roots. Their cheeks were sunken and their eyes unhealthy, haunted. Long, densely matted hair fell to their shoulders, of a uniform color, black and greasy. They mumbled together. She couldn’t really make out what they were saying. Their accent was strange, one she had never heard before. Finally another spoke up. “No sir. We never been up there, not since he move in. Man sleep a lot.”

“He talk to them children though,” said one. “Tellin’ ’em stories about angels and that he married a dead woman. Sometime he sit up there–” he pointed with his lips to the pond. “Watchin’ them birds go by. You know the one I mean? The blue one with the big head. He sure can talk when he want to.”

They all laughed.

“That bullshit he tell the kids–”

“That go like from here,” said another, indicating a certain height off the ground, “To here,” indicating a height higher than he was. They all laughed some more.

The first man to speak looked at Boyle. “It bad to take that man.” He shook his head. “You be careful in them woods. Come,” he said and the others followed him a short distance. The kids circled around and joined them.

“Well,” Bryson said. “He’s up there. I’ve got him.”

“I don’t like this.” Boyle turned around and headed slowly for the trees.

“What about the hovercraft?” she asked.

“Don’t worry. They won’t touch it.” He turned around and said, “Don’t touch a fucking thing!”

Bryson followed the silver suit up the incline and into the woods. They climbed a steep, trackless hill. Boyle moved slowly, each step deliberate and measured. She did as he did and divided her attention between the bracken underfoot and the data feed in her hand. They paused. The trunks of the trees were close and wide now and the ground was level. It was dark, and cool, as if the old air had been vented out by wind and rain and the earth was sighing. There was no discernible path and the woods looked the same in all directions, wrinkled bark, rotting litter, vivid saplings. In the soggy hollows the huge leaves of skunk cabbage grew. A swarm of mosquitoes descended on her head and she hit at them in muffled panic. “Shsh,” Boyle said.

“Easy for you to say,” she mumbled, spitting out the bugs.

“Which way?” he asked.

They looked at the screen. “He should be just up there,” she said, nodding in the direction of the star.

‘Up there’ was no different than anywhere else but they headed in that direction and soon came to what from a distance appeared to be a thicket, but which proved to be a wall of branches and leaves, heaped up to appear natural. Boyle turned to look at her. His face was an illegible greenish black window and yet it looked at her with what she was sure was irritation. He pushed and stomped through and they came to another barrier of brush beyond which lay a space hollowed out of the woods. Their blinking star was coincident with his. They were there. It was a nest of leaves and sticks covering a

shack made of cloth. Boyle cleared his throat and whispered, “What now doc?”

“Is he in there?” It was too quiet. They heard no breathing. There was nothing but the shelter and clearing. No evidence even of a fire. She sniffed the air. It smelled like urine.

Boyle bent down and tried to look into the shelter. It was closed up. “Look doc, we can’t kill him, right? What if he comes at me with a gun?”

Bryson handed him a dart gun. “Shoot him with this. In the ass, preferably.”

She could hear him sigh over the intercom. “So you say. What if it don’t work?”

“Then give it to me. You grab him and I’ll shoot him.”

Beasts howled. Enormous wings flapped against the canopy, rising in circles upward, over jungled chasms. Nocturnal birds squawked. It was dawn. They were walking through the valley. They shivered in fear as the sky blackened. At the first crack of thunder his bowels shook. The thunder was like a gunshot in a flock of birds. He couldn’t speak or think but ran and fell to his knees silently praying for his life.

While chewing the raw gelatinous insides of a turtle he asked her, “With thee conversing I forget all time, all seasons and their change. Sweet is the breath of morn. Are you alive?”

The meat was attached to membranes, translucent, a little fishy, a little sweet. They were squatting on their haunches before the entrance of their cave. Her hair was thick and black and fell disheveled over her naked shoulders and across her breasts. She turned to him and smiled. “Do I look alive?” She raised the shell to her lips and searched the crevices with her pointed red tongue, sucking out the meat.

“Yes, of course.”

Then she asked, “Are you alive?”

“Absolutely,” he said, having no idea of death.

“Well, I don’t know what not alive could be.”

Felix thought about this. It was a puzzle how alive could not be. But the self-evident fact was a little disappointing. He felt a twinge or an urge towards working it out. There was something he didn’t know; he was unfinished and his knowledge of the world was incomplete. But the drive to answer this question was almost more uncomfortable than the nescience. They were enclosed by a boundary that begged to be crossed but what lay beyond was a menace. If he pushed past it he felt himself evaporate. Slowly the thought formed. He said, finally, “But back there, you’re dead.”

“Back where?” “Back where I’m from.” “You mean the lake with the black sand? I didn’t like leaving the lake. I think I only came to find you. I’m only with you now.” They tossed the empty turtle shells onto a heap and headed down the steep, narrow path to the stream below. They waded out into the cool water and washed their bodies then walked out on the other side.

“Do you think in words?” he asked.

She paused. They were on a path in the forest. “Berries,” she said. They picked and ate fat black berries off of a low growing bush. A green tree snake stretched down the ashen trunk of a palm and moved slowly across the ground, its red eyes still. “When I’m with you I think in words but other times I don’t think in anything at all, I work.”

He felt himself falling out of it. Then the longing began, before he was even done. Time crept up on them. He was going to fade. He reached out and touched her skin and hair. He smelled her, he touched the skin and felt a current of electricity flow from her wrist into his heart and back. Her breast met his beneath her falling hair. He placed his lips on her ear and whispered, “Just please tell me you’re alive here and I’ll come and live with you forever.” Tears rolled slowly down his cheeks.

“Sad?” she asked, taking him into her arms. “In this place?”

“What if I paid a man to kill me in my sleep, as the others do?” he asked.

She stood back abruptly. “Felix, you mustn’t be impatient. One day you’ll come here and just stay, I promise. Felix, wake up!”

“But I live without purpose. All my days are spent in longing.”

The sky darkened and a cold wind ruffled the leaves. Felix was so afraid he peed against his legs. They heard a noise and Sammael walked towards them. As he approach he grew in stature till he towered over the trees and his eyes were like a mob at night with burning torches. Felix fell face first on the ground, digging at the dirt with his toes and fingers, mashing his nose into the ground.

“Felix,” she said gently, “darling, love, wake up. You’re in no danger now.”

He felt a nut of reason form and peeked over his gripped fingers at the gigantic angel and laughed. As he did so Sammael stood at his normal height, smiling. Then his hairy chest grew into breasts, his huge prick contracted like a turtle’s head and in its place a thick red patch of pubic hair grew over a fleshy, protuberant female pudenda. He approached Felix and put his lips on his. Sammael shuddered and stood back, pink and hairy. Then he turned away and crawled off on all fours, his tail a little pink corkscrew, tusks growing up out of his lower jaw and into the top of his head.

“And yet,” he said, turning back towards Veronica, “I have this longing. And then, I’m not here with you anymore.” He sat down on the ground and stared at his feet, puzzled.

“My love, listen. One day everything will change. There’ll be an end of wandering, of chasing after things.”

He looked up at her and smiled but it wasn’t Veronica anymore. He was having a nightmare. This was beginning to happen more and more. Instead of awakening slowly into the fuzzy, ill-defined space of morning or afternoon, where the garden shaded off into his bodily existence, he found himself facing Promethea, just before she pulled the trigger, lips trembling against the barrel of the gun, eyes begging him for some reassurance he couldn’t give. Only now he knew what he should have said, could have said, to save her life.

Transitions were never clear. What he saw now wasn’t Promethea. And to complicate matters he had started to sleep with Veronica in the garden and there he had dreams of earth and these dreams disturbed his sleep, such that she had to awaken him and they would go to the edge of the cave and look up at the comet streaked sky. Or he would feel suffused with warmth and light and slowly realize that rain was drumming his forehead.

This was different. What he saw now was a knife stabbing him in the solar plexus. The image wasn’t clear but the meaning was. He gasped and tried to shut his eyes but the silver helmeted figure reaching in wouldn’t disappear and as his mind cleared he saw exactly what was happening. There was a man in armour grabbing his foot and dragging him out of his home. Holy fucking shit! He kicked the figure. What good is armour against that? Ha! Now he was fully engaged. Light flooded his head. He tasted the air. He stood up and burst through his shelter and grabbed the man by the helmet, then realized he had weapons. Shit. The man reached for a gun and he wrenched it from his grip. He took a few punches to the stomach but that only sent the fire surging through him and he let out a roar that paralyzed the silver suited man just long enough for Felix to punch and kick him across the little clearing. The man broke free and tried to run away but Felix pounced on him from behind, searching for his throat.

“Arghgh!” Boyle yelled, making for the perimeter. “Bryson!”

Bryson couldn’t get a shot. She didn’t want to hit Boyle, it would waste a shot and she only had two. She was sure Boyle would take the man but she could see the man was pursuing him with an unanticipated ferocity. There was something wild about the way he fought. Boyle couldn’t get a hand on him, and he couldn’t shoot him. Then the man disarmed him. Bryson in a strange calm followed the brawling couple into the woods. The man was on top of Boyle. She had a clear shot at his naked torso. She chose the left cheek of his ass, took careful aim and fired. The tranquilizer dart sank into what she now realized was a beautiful, coppery buttock, and the flexed muscles went slack. Boyle stood up panting and ripped the helmet off. Seething, he patted himself down. “I hate the fucking woods,” he said. “Wahuh.” He shook his head and spit.