I'm lost, wandering, with no idea where I am or how I got here. I find the door hanging loose from the hinges, clear myself a place on the floor in the living room and take up residence among the mice and spiders.

I'm careful. I know that people in this age (whatever age it may be) don't take to strangers. I only go out at night. In the woods, in the dark, in some abandoned ruin, I figure I ought to be safe.

But I get caught. A fat bald guy with a shotgun and a giant flashlight warns me off his land, suggests I get out of town altogether. I'm ready and willing to take his advice. It was a nice place, a relief from wind and waking up with frost on my clothes. But these things are temporary, as are all comforts. I walk on--or I start to.

My dad steps out of the wooded shadows and stops me before I get 20 yards. He points out an even more ramshackle, even more ruinous outbuilding to the dark ruined house--just a shack, really. A single room. Inside, however, is a stairway leading down into a vast, high-ceilinged basement. A gas lamp casts unsteady light across drifts of abandoned crap. My dad shuts the door, leads the way down, and gets back to work.

I find myself helping him to clear space, to clean and organize and forge some kind of living space from the chaos. He has found an old upright vacuum cleaner and is tinkering with it, trying to make it work.

"So what happened here?" I ask him. "Is this supposed to be some kind of post-apocalypse?"

He gives me a look that says "No kidding," and sends me off scavenging for power cord.

It happened on a balmy, overcast summer night in Boston. I was standing on a crowded subway platform under orange halogen lights--the red line, Charles St., the river north, rows of little shops leading south towards the Common--when the eerie keen of collective loss arose all at once from those around me, and I turned to find Erin gone.

I retraced my steps, walking over every inch of ground we'd travelled that night, stopping at every corner, every store window. The whole way I had to fight against everyone else. They were all as distraught as I was, all occupied in the same task. But the people we were looking for weren't there. Finally, again collectively, we all accepted they were gone. People sat on curbs staring into the silent streets, speechless. I got up sooner than the rest, resolved to systematically seek out every person I cared about, in order of shortest distance. Somewhere I found a bike. I rode across the bridge to Medford, but Amy wasn't at her house. Who knew where she might be. So I took my bike and got back on the T, which was still crowded, though quieter now. I went to Brighton.

I found Diana sitting on the floor outside her room. She'd just come from home. My parents were gone. She didn't know where Amy was, or Udi. So we got up and went into her room and just kind of sat there on the bed, listening to mp3s from her computer. We talked about how weird it was that everything still worked even though there was nobody to run it or use it. We could ride the subway and surf the internet, but the quiet and the mass grief had impressed upon us a sense that the world had ended and was empty, that we who were left didn't count.

We decided we'd live together from now on. Exhausted from our search, emotionally drained, we agreed to go to sleep. She got up to take a shower. I lay down on the bed.

My father came in. "Merry Christmas," he said, tossed an envelope into my lap, then headed off to bed. A letter? Who knew I was here? Someone named Okami, apparently. The letter contained a single, typed sheet of notepaper in which Okami invited me to submit to a new magazine he was starting. He wanted something quick and dark, and he wanted it soon.

I had just the thing!

Ecstatic, I turned the envelope over, and realized I knew the return address. It belonged to an anime, comic and gaming store in an underground mall. It closed at midnight. If I hurried, I could make it. I shuffled through papers, found the story, pulled on coat and scarf and took a last look at the address.

Along the bottom of the page, I noticed a line of writing in a thin, feminine hand: a warning. "Don't come after dark." I shrugged it off, tossed the envelope onto the chair and headed out. I was just going to drop of the story and leave.

Danielle was sitting on the kitchen counter in her PJs, playing with her laptop. "Where you going, Boon?" I told her. "Can I come? I'm bored."

"Sure," I said. "Let's go."

#

The mall was a series of angling, claustrophobic corridors connected by stairwell after stairwell leading down, then up, then down again. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were all white, all windowless. Who knew how far we were underground? Every shop window was dark. We hadn't passed a single person.

"Where is everybody?" said Udi. "The mall doesn't close for half an hour. It's Christmas Eve!"

She was right. I was beginning to worry about that warning.

I shoved the story under my arm, fumbled in my pockets for something reassuring.
My fingers found the smooth, textured handle of my scrimshaw penknife. I wrapped an arm around my sister's shoulders. We walked faster.

We were almost to the comic store by the time we noticed the two white cats following behind us.. It wasn't clear how long they'd been there, but all of a sudden they were desperately friendly, pawing at us, rubbing against our ankles as we walked. I stopped to pet one and it jumped up into my arms. Udi tried to ignore hers. It was freaking her out.

At first glance, Okami's was as dark and dead as all the other stores. Ultra-violent, ultra-cute anime girls on comic covers lined the walls from floor to ceiling. A cardboard stand-up of a cartoon dragon. A glass case, where they kept all the really rare and valuable stuff. More magic cards that didn't exist. And behind the glass case, blending in so well with her surroundings I hadn't noticed her until I looked her in the eye, a skinny asian girl in a ponytail, dressed all in black, with an expression of blank astonishment on her face.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"I got your call for submissions letter. I was in town. I just came to drop this off." I slid the story towards her across the glass.

She stopped it, turned it around and slid it back. "I can't take this now."

"What? But your letter said--"

"Look, I'm sorry, but I can't take it. We closed early today. Don't you know you're not supposed to come here at night? You can bring it tomorrow. During the day. Now I think you'd better go. Quickly, all right? Get out of here."

I was confused. I wanted to protest, to ask her to explain. I wanted to give her my story. "The Nine-Tailed Cat". I knew they'd like it. I knew it was right up their alley. But the look on her face made me back away, grab Danielle and rush back the way we came.

Luna (for the cat in my arms was surely Luna, Singing Brook Farm's fuzzy white female demon) yawned and pawed at my chest, claws poking gently through my shirt and into my skin, her unmistakable, eerily humanoid fifth claw sticking out like a thumb. It was like she wanted to reassure me, convince me things would be fine. I wasn't convinced. Udi's cat kept pawing at her, meowing plaintively.

"God," she said finally, after the white mall corridors had blurred past us for who knows how long. "Aren't we at the end yet? Why does this mall have to be so big?"

"We're getting close," I said. "Five more minutes."

"Oh, fine!" Udi gave an exasperated sigh and scooped up the second white cat.

We were almost to the entrance. One more flight of stairs...

She screamed and dropped the cat. It must have clawed her or bit her. It ran into a corner and sat down licking its paws. "Ohmigod, Boon. Something's happening to me! Help!" She held up her arm. It was thinning, elongating before my eyes. White tufts of cat hair sprang up out of her skin. Her hand was shrinking. She was turning into a werecat.

I put Luna down with an accusing look. Her green-white eyes were reproachful.

I fumbled in my pockets for the scrimshaw knife. A sailing scene carved in the handle, a ship and a rocky shore. I'd bought it on a stupid impulse at a tourist trap in Newfoundland. In the real world, it was already many years lost.

I flicked it open, locked it in place. The blade was a warm, clean gleam under the mall's ghastly pale fluorescent lights. Pure silver.

I gave it to Danielle. "Prick your finger with this. It's silver. It might help."

Her hands were shaking. She crouched down, put her hand on the floor, palm facing up, and raised the knife. I was afraid she couldn't do it. She wouldn't press hard enough.

She grimaced and brought the knife down. It pricked her finger. I saw a little smear of blood.

"Did it cure you? Did you feel anything?"

Udi nodded, face pale, lips hanging open. "Bliss. Relief. Understanding. Complete understanding of everything in the universe all at once."

I thought she must have been joking, playing bitter sarcasm for all it was worth. Maybe the catness was already taking over her mind. But the way she said it sure didn't sound like it. And her finger looked better. Pink and healthy.

"Then do it again," I said. "Harder. Cut deeper."

She shook her head. "You do it," she said. She gave me the knife.

Five minutes away from the exit.

I ran my thumb across the blade. There was a catch at the very tip, a tiny, sharp burr I could never get out no matter how many times I tried to burnish it away with file or stone. That burr was what had pricked her. But I needed more than that now. I got a good grip on the handle. I held her wrist tight against the floor, positioned the knife just over the marks of the bite, right along the meat of the palm.

I gritted my teeth and tensed my muscles to slice--

And I woke.

I particularly recommend The House Was a Clockwork Automaton, perhaps my most thematically coherent dream ever.

Fools such as I.

They captured me aimlessly wandering one of the upper-story corridors, peeking in doors at ramshackle drifts of equipment, trying to understand. They brought me down to the water, to an industrial dock where they'd gathered everyone to watch--perhaps two dozen all told, raggedly dressed, lounging, dangling their toes inches above the water, none older than thirty or younger than nineteen, laughing and talking among themselves as though I were no more than another member of their crew. They strapped me to a kind of neuvo-medieval witch-ducking device--a long pole on a pivot they could use to submerge me deep in the fen.

The first time, I plunged down perhaps eight feet. The water was murky, certainly unclean; the deeper one went the thicker it became, to the point that at the nadir of my plunge I felt as though I were swimming in sludge. Then they pulled me back up, spluttering, protesting. "If I go any deeper than that I'm likely to get stuck."

"That's the point," said a red-haired girl, whose job it appeared to be to placate me with her perky cuteness, keep me from getting unruly. Played by Kylee from Firefly.

They adjusted the pole, moving me further from the pivot, and dunked me again. This time I went down twenty feet, plunging into sucking muck that was most reluctant to release me. I was on the point of drowning by the time they decided to hoist me free, covered head to toe in green-brown gack.

Two burly guys escorted me up to one of the labs, where under blue light a skinny guy, without even bothering to clean me off, pronounced me infected with some fine contagion or other. Then they took me up and put me on an Orange Line train and told me I was free to go.

And I went, and likely brought doom to us all.

Two connecting flights and a long walk later I arrived at the Emory campus during a lot of rallies. Perhaps it was homecoming. I was supposed to meet my clandestine contact in the bleachers of an auxiliary gym, but they'd warned me I only had a fifteen minute window. I was early. The gym was empty, though a crowd of marching revelers was making all kinds of noise as they trooped past the door. I waited around a couple minutes, but still no show. The fifteen minutes were up, so I took my book and went home.

For security purposes the trip home involved another plane flight, then a ride on a cruise ship. Sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, however, I started to wonder about this book I was carrying, and to doubt my clandestine contacts' repeated warnings not to open it. Were they playing me? Maybe the answer was right in these pages: the location of the legendary puce jewel. I took out the book and ran a hand across the glossy black cover. Ostensibly it was a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but contained inside was the vivid, sordid legend of the Jewel. It had changed hands many times. Mystery and doom surrounded its owners.

In the middle of this chronicle, however, the narrative shifted gears without warning. Instead of the jewel, it began to follow the history of a certain sarcophagus of ghastly blue teak, more appropriate to a bowling alley lounge than a museum of antiquity. I read the transition over and over, and grew firm in the conviction that its abruptness was deliberate, that this sarcophagus and the puce jewel were somehow one. And the book revealed exactly where this sarcophagus could be found: right where I'd begun, at hte private collection in Boston where I had first encountered the representatives of the clandestine organization.

It was with firm conviction and determination that I boarded a vessel bound for Boston. En route, however, I realized I'd been discovered. The ship swarmed with representatives of the organization. For a time I eluded them, but at last they forced a confrontation. Several of them were drowned; I lost the book, but it made no difference now. I'd already read it--and reading it had apparently supplied me with more advantage than time. Somehow I had attained a new relationship with time--an unnatural capacity to remold the rules of motion, the demands of Newton's Laws. On two occasions I withdrew revolvers from men's hands before they could pull the trigger. I flipped people over guardrails as though they were made of straw.

By the time I had arrived in Massachusetts Bay I had acquired the gait and bearing one most often associates with cultured fiends, with Jack the Ripper, Professor Moriarty.

Outside the private gallery in question a low, wrought-iron fence lined the sidewalk, with a well-kept, if yellowed lawn beyond. I vaulted this fence, but was seen. Three men and two attack dogs met me on the sickened grass. They said nothing, but attacked. The gentleman in the lead carried a long, mahogany staff with a forked head. I wrested this from his grip with minimal effort, and swinging it with preternatural brutality and speed, left all five of my opponents lying unconscious.

I then proceeded upstairs to the sarcophagus. With the staff I smashed apart the face of the tasteless thing, whereupon within, protected by a membrane of transparent mucus, I found a large, periwinkle-blue brain, which I grasped in my hands and ripped apart. The Puce Jewel was buried between the two lobes. It was large enough to fit comfortably in my palm, diamond-cut, its edges bound in delicate silver filigree, somewhat tarnished. I took it and left.

Out on the lawn I paused, studying the jewel in some confusion. Now that I had it, I wasn't sure what I'd expected or planned to do with it. I couldn't very well sell it, given the horrors I knew it had wrought. I didn't want to sell it, come to that. I wanted to keep it. It was so lovely. Just like a giant piece of pink rock-candy. The richest, most expensive piece of rock candy anyone had ever seen.

Overcome by giddy humor, I popped it jokingly into my mouth, sticky though it was with mucus and the slime from the surface of that hideous blue brain. I sucked at it, finding it flavorless, yet somehow satisfying. This is silly, I told myself. Spit it out.

Then the Puce Jewel began to dissolve...

We have been traveling what seems a long time, living out the upper halves of bags, using only what we can reach. An extended vacation, then. A caravan of cars. My sisters, my cousins, my grandfather...the last autumn of his life.

With a kind of exuberant, almost magic realist sadness, a giddy fear, I am climbing trees in no waking, physics-bound fashion, but with a kung-fu aesthete's disregard for gravity. The trunks are rough beneath my half-numb fingers, the branches thin, the clouds of leaves thick as a bamboo jungle. The sun is always just beyond the next tree, lighting everything yet never seen.

Then I am called from below by my sisters, my cousins, my mother. Grandpa is waiting at the foot of the tree, and suddenly I realize I am sixty feet in the air, and gravity exists, though I still can defy it. I make my way down with a thrill in my belly, collect my backpack stuffed with wool socks and warm layers, and rush off after the others towards the cars.

It felt like losing a limb--like an important part of my body had disappeared. I kept trying to flex fingers I didn't have.

I spent hours sitting in an airport lounge with Sawyer from Lost, trying not to let things deteriorate into frustrated shouting. At last we gave up waiting for the schedule monitors to come back online. We bade each other courteous goodbyes and went out to try to figure out what the hell to do withourselves.

I ended up staying with my family in the house of a kindly old lady we didn't know. She tried gamely to fix us meals from canned food and leftovers, while outside the level of panic and desperation rose steadily. We went out one morning (it was still snowing), to find people packing canoes and small rowboats with all their worldly possessions and setting off down the rivers. We asked what they thought they were doing. "Getting away from the tribes," they said.

Tribes?

I ought to note I'd been reading Wizard and Glass. Midworld was caught in the throes of post-apocalyptic power struggles for control of what technology still functioned. So apparently was this world. An absurdly large angry mob was approaching our position from the west. The locals who were left began to organize defense. One rather goofy-looking guy with military training (resembling Joxer from Xena) took the responsibility of planning our defense. He wanted us to keep 80% of our forces in reserve, engage them with skirmishers, make them commit, then hit them full force.

It was a fine idea, but we needed scouts. We needed to know their strength well ahead of time. "Anybody want to volunteer?" asked Joxer.

I did.

Horribly underdressed for winter travel, I set out nonetheless, slagging westward across the suburbs through two-foot drifts. The enemy, as it turned out, numbered in the tens of thousands. Nothing we could do had a chance of stopping them.

The last thing I remember is standing on the front lawn of an abandoned house, looking up at a maple tree, its foliage blazing orange against the snow.

Coming up the hill into the woods, just past what once was Lesley's house, we enter a kind of cathedral of fallen trees, of old snow on bare branches. And the dead trees show us a religious vision: a montage of holographic crosses dripping blood and beams of dust and snow-filtered light and scenes of ruin.

I criticize it.

"It started out well, but that's just over the top."

We walk on.

Something about the whole situation becomes just too absurd. For an instant that elusive stroke of dream-consciousness reaches down and brushes at my dreaming self like the jolt of a lightbulb going on in the void above my head. I am dreaming, and this is not what I want from my dream. I want...something else. What? Peace and quiet! Enlightenment!

I do the first thing that comes into my head to shift the narrative. I heave at the crowd, swinging my arms at them exactly as I would to brush away insects. I turn and run.

I flounce down several flights of stairs into a dormitory basement, turn the first doorknob I see and disappear into a darkened, blue christmas-light lit boudoir. Three girls are getting ready for bed. They are frightened by me at first, but calm down almost immediately to an uncanny degree of familiarity. Every woman I meet in the dream reacts to me this way. Each time, it incites the same knee-jerk series of emotional responses. First, relief. Because they seem to know instinctively I'm not the killer, when in fact my own memory of what immediately precedes is already so muddled I can't be nearly as certain. Relief is overwhelmed by fear--on their behalf, because if they react this way to a total mess of a stranger such as myself, who's to say they won't react exactly the same when the real killer comes? Then this at least somewhat noble, heroic fear is tainted with a twinge of a blacker fear for myself, and of myself--fear that I really am the killer. It ends with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, as it occurs to me just how easy it would be.

The blonde one has tattoos and thin branding welts on her back, and wears a short, ratty nightgown. She is gaunt, drug-wasted, but voluptuous. I compliment her scars. I tell her they are beautiful. She asks if I really mean it. Her voice is earnest, fragile, as if this is a question that has plagued her. I assure her I am sincere. She is sincerely flattered.

The mob that was chasing me runs past the door. I sit waiting, chatting in the same eerily relaxed and familiar manner with the three girls in their pajamas, until the sounds of shouting recede. Then I bid them good night, and slip out, back up the basement stairs into the orange lamplit night.

There are people everywhere, playing frisbee among the pine trees, walking past in little huddled pods, nobody alone, everyone at least peripherally aware that someone else in the dark nearby is a predator. I half-recognize the odd cul-de-sac behind Bush Hall. This is Tufts, more or less.

I think about the three girls. It was like I hypnotized them.

For the first time I notice a knotted plastic bag I am carrying. There is something squishy and sticky inside I am loath to touch, and I know without having to think that it is evidence--evidence that will link me, however erroneously, to the serial rapist. I have to get rid of it. Burning is the first thing that comes to mind. I think of the smell of melting plastic, the musty reek of what's inside frying away. It's the safest way, the most complete. But I haven't got a blow torch. A match isn't going to cut it.

I climb over the green grass up the hill to a pair of dumpsters. My hand is on the lid to lift it, but I hesitate. I know how clumsy this is, how likely it is to be found if any one of the dozens scattered around me in the dark gets even the slightest suspicion. A campus cop strolls past, in conversation with a pair of students. I shrink back into the shadows between the dumpsters, thinking about what it takes to bring kids and cops together, knowing there's a real chance I will be the serial rapist in these people's eyes if the cop so much as looks my way.

He goes by, and I sag.

Fuck it. At least I can avoid getting caught with the thing in my hand. I creak the dumpster open, pitch the plastic bag into it and start across campus to my room as fast as I can walk.

At the end of the long corridor on the second floor of Lewis Hall, Nate and Damian are sitting at their computers. Nate is intent on a paper; Damian is playing.

I sit at my computer. Damian leans over my shoulder. He has built a small custom Warcraft scenario in order to teach me a lesson. It consists of nothing but a seemingly endless passage. Damian is the Tauren Chieftain. He is behind me. I am the Blood Mage; I know I have to flee, not stop for anything, or be destroyed. Damian has provided the Blood Mage with artifact means of ascending the tech tree. I am fumbling to understand them, planning how best to mount a defense against the Minotaur, when the passage comes to an end.

I stand at a window in the stairwell at the end of the corridor in Lewis Hall. Warcraft is gone, back safe in my computer. Below me in the courtyard, waiting on the stoop for someone to open the back door, is a small, soft-featured Indian girl, her black hair glossy in the orange lamplight. She looks up at me and asks to come in. I rush down to hold the door open for her. When she sees me face to face she shrinks back; I know she's wondering if I'm the rapist. "Don't worry," I tell her. "I'm not him. I'm a nice guy." She believes me--completely. She bows her head and submits to my protection, preceding me up the stairs. When a couple of guys I don't know pass us, she sort of sidles into my shadow. I look down at myself, wondering what it is they all seem to see that I don't.

On the third floor the Indian girl joins a crowd of others in the common room. She thanks me. I feel like a dick.

For a change of scene, I go across to the stairs at the other end of the corridor, and emerge onto the second floor from the opposite direction. There's another girl standing there--hair golden brown, tall, athletic and wholesome-looking, with a couple of chemistry books in her arms. She is the first woman I've seen tonight to whom I am completely unattracted.

She looks at me hopefully, opens her mouth to plead perhaps for her life, and the killer, who was standing behind her, hidden by her body, snakes a hand over her mouth and snarls, pulling her backwards in the direction of my room. I follow, warning him to let her go. He flicks open a knife, puts it to her throat and tells me to get lost.

Behind him Damian and Nate turn around, jump out of their chairs and freeze. Neither seems able to act. They don't know what to do. I stare at Nate, willing him to get something pointy out of his desk to cripple this kid with. He doesn't move. So I reach past him, pulling open the drawer. The first thing that comes to hand is a blue, ultra-fine tipped ball point pen. I turn, grab the killer by his bleach blond hair and point the tip of the pen at the tear duct of his right eye. A dot of ink balls on the tip.

"Let her go, or I swear I'll fucking stab you in the eye."

The knife presses into the girl's throat. She barely even yelps. The killer's breathing is louder. I plunge the silver tip of the pen into the bloodshot white mass of his eyeball. The blue plastic disappears into the widening cavity. He doesn't seem to react. It's as if I'm doing nothing to him, though the pen is buried in his skull nearly up to the hilt. It must be pressing into the brain by now!

Then it does, and I jerk awake.

Rand, an angular, dark man in a long gray suit, descended a featureless flight of stairs into a hall made up of long corridors divided by oversized square pillars. The whole setting resembled far too closely a map from Goldeneye. Visibility was terrible. Rand was tense. He held a gleaming silver sword at the ready in two hands, parallel with his body. The film style was strangely two-dimensional, not quite cartoonish, but hovering at that edge.

The villain emerged without warning from a side-passage, decked in ostentatious jewels and a golden robe, in both garb and manner somewhat resembling Zaphod Beeblebrox. "You are finished, Rand Zanningham," he announced. "You cannot defeat me!"

They duelled. Choreography was terrible. The cartoonish edge intensified, blurring the swordstrokes together. A series of impossibly rapid clangs implied they were moving too fast for us to see. At last Zanningham gained the upper hand, and with a powerful stroke sliced Beeblebrox in half diagonally across the midsection. Beeblebrox fell severed, laughing manaically, giving no indication of anything resembling death. Rand hacked at the body again and again until it was fairly well cubed, but still Beeblebrox's head went on laughing. The pieces, none of which had shown any sign of bleeding, began to gravitate back together and reform.

By this point, I was no longer seated in the chair in the empty room, but had taken on the role of Rand Zanningham myself. It became clear to me my strategy must be to remove a vital piece of Beeblebrox sufficiently from the rest that whatever regenerative technology he possessed would be rendered inoperable. I grabbed his severed head by the wild blond hair and sprinted down the side passage into a sort of trophy room decked with gilded suits of armor, helms, weapons, fantastic jewels in glass cases. Bits of his body slithered along the marble tiles behind me. Every few steps I spun and swatted one of them back a few dozen yards with a swordstroke, but it never seemed quite far enough. I was running a losing race.

Beeblebrox was yelling hysterically. "You're the ruler of the castle now, Zanningham! These riches are yours! Take them! Take my crown!"

A particularly overdecorated golden battle helm topped with a trojan comb detached itself from the wall and slammed into the small of Zanningham's back. He stumbled. The head slipped out of his hand and hurtled back the way he had come, collecting cubes of flesh and gold leaf and howling threats as it went. Rand got up, caught a glimpse of blue sky through a passage opening to his right, and beat a strategic retreat.

A scene shift found him entering an uber-fashionable bar, which was doing surprisingly good business for such an early hour. Zanningham took a seat at the bar and ordered whiskey and rocks. Five gorgeous Amazons apporached and surrounded him. "Anything I can do for you ladies?" he asked.

They laughed. The red-head reached into her bodice and withdrew something that looked like a long green vegetarian nigiri sushi strip. She laid it on the bar, and it rapidly began to expand, lashing its serpentine tapering tail until it blotted out the Amazons and the whole rest of the club. It reared back and struck at Rand Zanningham's head.

He recoiled, and I awoke.

I

By then there were only two of us left: Bruce, the weatherbeaten, giant survivor, and me. Why was I still alive? Out of luck, I had to assume, or because Bruce had kept me alive. But it was over now. Our transportation had died. We were scrambling over old rockslides, kicking up dust. Dark was falling; they were after us. We had to split up. Bruce said he would draw them away. I knew he could, but I didn't want him to. I thought foolishly that somehow we both could make it. He didn't deserve me for a burden. What was I worth that he wasn't? Last thing I remember is the lights cutting through the dust-clouds, not touching me, not yet, but startling me up out of my meager hiding like a spooked rabbit. I careened over the side of the hill and down a slope that was far too steep, nothing to arrest my fall, nothing but dry, crumbling earth and weeds. I slipped, tumbled, hit my head and as I faded, thought, "They won't find me."

II

Refugees in knots of three and four moved through shallow canyons in the afternoon. In the shadows it was cold. Nobody had weapons; it seemed that part of war had ended long ago. Instead they had rucksacks and colorless canvas duffels. Everyone was hunched and dusty, and who knew where they were going? While the canyons lasted they stayed together, provided a little protection from sight and stinging sand on the wind. When the land shallowed, they went up over diminishing rises in all directions, the groups growing smaller, overburdened stragglers trailing behind. For the moment we stayed in the canyon: five of us, with a car that couldn't really do us any more good. Bruce flexed his big hands and watched them go by. I could tell by his eyes that he itched to take their heavy, bulky duffels from them, sling them onto his shoulders with the three he already carried and go; the weight meant nothing. With his help they could move faster. They could get away. But they were too many--he had four to protect already. And he couldn't protect us.

I didn't know the three girls that were with us: one blonde, one black-haired, one brown, all three so dusty it didn't make much difference any more. Neither did Bruce. They were pretty, though haggard. If of nothing else I was glad of that.

And there was the dog: a little white terrier, shaggy and quiet. I think he was Bruce's, though I say that only because of his patience, the things he had endured. He'd had a pillow to sleep on in the car. We were leaving that behind.

We leaned against the car as if catching our breath, though compared to those going by we ought to be rested. The dog sat in the dust. We were building up will.

Then the echo came of bullhorns and boots tramping, and we moved.

III

In the morning a long, low barracks of eroded brick where we had lived for weeks almost as if it were home slowly emptied. People took what they could. Cars pulled up and away. Some just walked off into the desert. Sand wore away from the foundations.

It was my car, the Focus. We loaded it up and closed the trunk. Bruce sat in back with our bags. The dog was in the passenger seat on its pillow. I started the car and would have pulled out, but there were voices at the window. Four girls stood on the curb with their burdens: the three that I knew, and another not as pretty. My stomach twisted because I knew it was she who'd be left behind. They wanted to come with us. Bruce argued. We didn't have room. They'd be better off alone. I said nothing. It hurt to listen. I knew Bruce would regret it, too late. Probably regret would be the last thing he'd do before they caught him.

Finally the girls drew back to decide who would stay and who would go. They'd pick straws or something. Thank God. At least it wasn't me who had to choose. I closed my eyes, because I already knew what would happen.

IV

Bruce and I sat in the barracks locker room with the other soldiers, packing our duffels. "I fought at Dry Hill," he said. "I don't want to go back." But we were.

V

I sat in my parents' dining room with my Dad. Dust blew past the windows. "I fought in the last war," he said. "I went to Dry Hill. I'm not going back."

"I have a friend," I said, "Bruce. He fought there too. He doesn't want to go. But he says we have to."

So I sat there in my gloom, brooding and sipping my spiked lemonade, concocting mad schemes of party-supply ship piracy, when a pair of vacationers unaffiliated with the wedding passed by on their way to the pool, chatting about the famous illusionist and magician, Mr. Q, who happened to be in town for a show. Sparklers burst in my head. Mr. Q! The greatest magician of the age, here! Surely such auspicious circumstances couldn't occur merely by chance. I must find this Mr. Q, and beg his aid!

I heard the sound of an engine overhead, and glanced up into the pure blue seashore sky to see a strange silver contraption appearing over the hotel rooftop. It was a pontoon houseboat, like the one the Wagner family uses to putter about their remote South Dakota lake, which had somehow contrived to fly through the air on the power of its tiny inboard propeller alone.

"How the hell is that thing staying up?" I asked, astounded. Before my eyes the houseboat performed several loop-the-loops in the air, and at the tail end of the last landed with a gentle splash in the pool. And lo and behold, who should be sitting at the wheel but Mr. Q himself!

I threw aside my lemonade and dove into the pool. Swimming out to the houseboat, I begged to shake the master's hand. "That was amazing," I told him. "I didn't know you could do really things like that when you weren't on TV." He thanked me, and assured me his powers were more than mere deception. "Please, sir," I entreated him obsequiously, "would you mind if I asked your aid in the tiniest of favors?"

I told him of my predicament. Anyone who could make a houseboat fly would surely have no trouble at all doing the same for a few bits of crepe-paper. He agreed. "But first," he said, "I must complete a greater undertaking." He bade me goodbye for the moment, and the houseboat lifted off and flew away over the sea.

I splashed about in the pool in gleeful relief. My troubles were over -- or so it seemed.

In fact it turned out that Mr. Q was an evil mastermind bent on destruction, and never had any intention of helping with my wedding decorations. Within minutes the sky darkened with clouds. A gale sprang up from seaward, and behind it roared ever-rising waves. The entire bay was flooding. Ships capsized. Wedding guests were dragged out to sea by the dozens. In a panic I ran down onto the beach, and found Stephanie lying on the sand dangerously close to the rising water, her gown covered in sand. Ian in his tuxedo and Erin in her purple bridesmaid's dress were bending over her in a state of great agitation. I ran up to them. "We've got to get her out of here!" I shouted over the wind. "We can't!" said Erin. "Every time we try to move her she starts laughing like a maniac!"

I tried to help them, but they were right. She was utterly hysterical, flailing her arms and howling madly. From what I gathered it appeared she had become convinced she was an SUV, and thus impossible for three mere people to move anywhere. The water kept rising. It lapped at our feet, dragging at the train of her gown. Thunder rumbled over the water.

Then I stood up straight and looked around. Wait a minute, thought I. This isn't TV. It isn't real either. This is a dream. Which means I can do magic just as well as Mr. Q.

I bent my will against the waves, and slowly they fell back. Sandbars and islands appeared beneath the receding flood. Ships righted themselves. Drowning wedding guests washed up on dry land. The sky changed color back to blue. Finally Stephanie sat up normally and gazed across the suddenly calm sea in astonishment. Ian helped her to her feet.

"There. Now we can have the wedding," I said. "And I don't need to go shopping for fireworks either." I turned to look back at the church and the hotel. They looked rather a mess, but my powers could fix that too! The vine-and-streamer-decked colonnade I had envisioned grew up from the steps of the church ten times more elaborate than I'd imagined, now that I wasn't limited by sanity or reality. Pink boxes of roses grew from the windowsills, and the air was filled with confetti. Stephanie and Ian, unfazed, or too shell-shocked from what had already occurred to care, led the procession across the gleaming sand and into the church.

My work was done. I woke.